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| Teachers.Net Gazette Vol.6 No.1 | January 2009 |
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 Thoughts on the Use of Failure as a Teaching Technique |
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| by Bill Page Continued from Thoughts on the Use of Failure as a Teaching Technique page 2 January 1, 2009 |
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 Children learn how to deceive. They are experts on themselves. They learn quickly what they can get away with and how to fool authority. With practice they become proficient. Many students have experience and training in confrontation ranging from passive aggression and hostility, to belligerent, in-your-face power-struggles. Disengagement from school expectation is relatively easy. Turned-off, tuned-out kids are everywhere. The most schools can do is make students act like they are paying attention. A life of crime does not begin in adulthood; it starts in middle school by defying authority, and is no doubt incubated in thoughts and attitude long before that. How do school officials explain the fact that two-thirds of all African-Americans will spend time within the criminal justice system, and its correlation with school failure? While most adolescents do not become criminals, the difference in those who succeed in life and those who don’t is having one caring adult who can help him/her navigate. Parents of troubled kids are troubled parents. When kids get in trouble in school and life, parents suffer too and frequently add to their trouble by punishing and rejecting their kids also. Our prison system is notoriously ineffective. It is proven to be useless in rehabilitation. But many school failures - our most troubled and uneducated students - will wind up there. Blaming victims, punishment, intimidation, and imprisonment are the most common ways of dealing with kids in trouble; techniques that haven’t worked and won’t work. Reporting how far behind the kids are and how deficient they are does not in any way help them to be successful. Flunking does not and cannot help troubled kids. In relationships, it’s the little things that count. Brief friendly encounters, personal interest, appreciative looks, and friendly looks, smiles, and pats do more than advice. When children in pain are accepted, respected, and valued through a relationship with the teachers in their lives, they learn, prosper and succeed. With joy in sharing, Bill Page  | ||
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Bill Page, a farm boy, graduated from a one-room school. He forged a career in the classroom teaching middle school “troublemakers.” For the past 26 years, in addition to his classroom duties, he has taught teachers across the nation to teach the lowest achieving students successfully with his proven premise, “Failure is the choice and fault of schools, not the students.”