homeschooling for failure

 "Life is trying things to see if they work." Ray Bradbury
  Not long ago, I realized that one of the most important things I share with my kids is how to fail. Alot. To even look forward to failure. What? That sounds so counter-intuitive to many current models of education, where mastery is the goal. While I am not against knowing something inside and out, I do think there might be a better way of getting there than by drilling and memorization.  I tell my kids, if you are not failing at least some of the time, you are not trying anything new or pushing to grow. While failing because of carelessness is not championed around here, failing because of bold experimentation and creative play is.

A recent interest in knights and medieval fighting led us to trying to make our own bit of chain mail. We read how to make it, watched a video on how to make it and eventually tried many of our own methods. None of them worked. Or I should say, none of them produced a final piece that we were happy with.

What I was happy with, was that we were not attached to a perfect final product as the goal. Perfectionist tendencies melted away because there was real and deep engagement with the materials and the idea of how to join them into a pattern. We worked for an hour joining, rejoining, questioning and experimenting and in the end moved on to some new ideas that were inspired by the tools and materials.

I guess you could say we failed at making chain mail. But it is exactly the kind of failure I encourage! The kind that opens your mind and leads you in new directions.

What have you failed at recently?