Page 2 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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Down . . . and up again
You saw it when
you looked inside
the front cover of
this magazine –
determination in
the attitude of our
girls ice hockey team
when they played
in Boston’s Fenway
Park in January.
These kids are tough. Have you seen them on
the ice? They stay at it all the time.
What they have, in the contemporary educa-
tional parlance, is grit .
It’s not just our athletes who fall down only
to get up again, fall and get up. It’s all of our
students – all of us, really – in a never-ending
process of figuring out what went wrong, and
trying again, and, if necessary, again.
At St. Paul’s we have always emphasized the
abiding importance of failure, and the necessity
to learn from mistakes. This, of course, happens
most obviously when students don’t meet our
expectations regarding behavior and they en-
counter our disciplinary process. Thankfully,
our students experience failure in less dramatic
fashion daily – what I call micro-failure, failure
that is essential to learning in any setting.
I recently observed an introduction to ballet
class. In this class the teacher was helping the
class understand a new movement – a move-
ment that involved both fine and gross motor
control. Most students executed one of the
elements of the movement well but struggled
with the other parts of it. The teacher guided,
instructed, and provided direct, real-time feed-
back for the students but she never stopped
them – she let them dance. Failure was built
into the lesson, and the students were not only
comfortable with it, but they clearly under-
stood it as a part of their learning.
Micro-failure happens in our other classrooms
as well. A lab experiment doesn’t yield good data
– you try it again. Maybe you get it right this time,
maybe the next. You’re looking at an HP on a
humanities paper. Next rewrite you get an H.
Still not what you’re used to, but you try again.
You persevere.
You show grit.
It’s a word popularized by influential educators
such as Tony Wagner and the appropriately named
Paul Tough to describe one of the qualities nec-
essary for success – along with others, such as
curiosity, creativity, flexibility, and optimism. Re-
cent years have seen numerous reports on the
necessity of teaching toughness, of letting our
children fail. The rise in the number of “character
development” programs at schools like ours is
striking and telling in a culture that is quick to
cushion its children (Liesbeth’s and mine included).
I’d like to think that St. Paul’s isn’t just follow-
ing a trend when we allow our students to learn
through failure. I’d like to think it is part of our
DNA. Our challenge actually might be in making
sure micro-failure doesn’t grow into more de-
structive failure, a child’s questioning of his or
her worth. This challenge necessitates our con-
stant re-calibration of how the idea of freedom
with responsibility is lived here. It also requires
perpetual vigilance in creating an environment
that maximizes relationships between adults and
students – relationships upon which the success
of our School depends.
Ever mindful of its distinctive culture, the School
itself is open to taking appropriate risks to learn,
to grow, and to strengthen its program to prepare
our students for meaningful lives beyond Millville.
This is one of the great joys of our work.
PETER FINGER
RECTOR