Overcoming the Stigma of Failure

  The sense of failure often hangs over me as I am planning lessons for my upcoming classes. I have to admit that there is a sense of excitement there as well--the sense of something new that is about to happen each time I encounter a student or a group of students. However, there is also a sense of trepidation, something close to the experience of a centipede whose steps fall out of line when it starts to consider which foot to put first. In planning the lessons for my first couple of classes, I have learned what a balance indeed it is between having a necessary structure and organization, and being able to experiment within that structure to achieve positive connection with the students.
   I begin to wonder: how do teachers in general cope with the occasional feelings that they disappointed themselves or their students? Such a question as this could potentially be a research topic for a thesis, but it is also pause for personal reflection as well. For me, I think that I can only cope with failure by seeing it as a stepping stone among many, as well as to keep failure in mind as I try out different tools and strategies depending on the child's style of learning. Failure is never an absolute, but sometimes what seems to fail is only a timing issue: I might tweak the assignment a bit and it might start to evolve into something that genuinely fosters and attracts learning.
    Full time teachers (unlike myself) not only bear the brunt of a personal sense of failure from time to time. In fact, they also bear the demands of politically contested learning spaces. There are so many stakeholders that surround the teacher's role and function--too much to keep track of, at times. Can teacher failures be attributed not to the teaching itself but to the opinions of surrounding others regarding how education is framed? The point of all this is that a teacher may have to cultivate that rare and heroic inner ability to bear tensions of the diverse stakeholders, while carving a place for her or himself to teach what is heartfelt and nurturing to them and their students.