#MediaMonday: How to Fail Horribly and Painfully

I hope this email finds each of you well and ready to take on another school year. So far, what I have noticed is students and staff are both ready to embark on a "normal" year. My district wants us to compete and travel, the students want to push their work in new directions and for the first time in a long while, I feel a genuine excitement for the year.

So much of our recent past has been fraught with complications and setbacks. This year, I have decided that, come Hades or hurricanes, that I am going to make this year something special and I recommend that you do the same.

For today's very first lesson, I wanted to share an activity that I do with my Grip and Lighting course on the first week of the year. Today's lesson is called "How to Fail Horribly and Painfully".

In Grip and Lighting, you use a lot of dangerous tools to rig and hang lights for film sets. What I would consider to be the most powerful and infamous of them all is called a C-Stand or a century stand. The C-Stand can perform countless tasks on set and is incredibly useful for more than just lighting. However, like any large metal object, they can be dangerous when used incorrectly. So naturally the first thing I show my Grip and Lighting kids is how to break their finger (or remove it entirely) with an incorrectly supported C-Stand.

This may seem a little Darwinistic and no, I do not use a real finger (I use a pencil). However, what I have noticed is students start to roll their eyes and tune me out instantly when I start talking about the dreaded horrors inherent to this new, shiny, seemingly benign fancy tripod thing. So, as I am explaining the wrong way to set up the stand, I casually pull out the pencil and say, "and here is why you don't do this", flip a handle and carnage ensues. Oddly, in all the years of using C-stands on student sets, we are still 100% injury-free.

You see, I start that class by showing them how to fail painfully and what failure looks like. I show them how similar failure looks to success and how the tiniest details can produce the most crucial results. This extends to more than just a casual comparison between a #2 Ticonderoga and your index finger. It shows students that failure is normal and that it is part of what learning looks like. It also allows students to see how to deal with failure when it happens so they can move beyond it quickly and develop a growth mindset for the year. It also shows the pain that failure can carry if failure was avoidable with preparation and attention.

Failure is a part of learning and when we fail, we often have the potential to learn more about ourselves than when we succeed. I recommend that you try to teach your students how to fail a few times this year (while keeping all of their fingers intact, of course).

Talk to you soon and good luck with the 2022-23 school year!

Josh Cantrell