The Secret to Never Failing in School | Frances LeDuke | TEDxWarrenTech

foreign Harvard Law neuroscience at Columbia University or engineering at Colorado School of Mines that a single instance of failure you'd likely tell me I've lost it but let me offer you this what if we could redefine failure and use that definition to achieve goals we could have only dreamed of I want you to think of an instance of failure that you experienced at any point in your learning at any point through your life I want you to hold on to that we're going to come back to that in this talk failure lack of success the inability to meet expectations what if we could re-look at failure altogether a new outlook in academics we can only Define failure as completely giving up students you can understand this stress academic and social pressures and other factors such as these can weigh on high school and University students decreasing motivation and self-esteem and most of the time it's our view of ourselves and our own work ethic that can hold us back from achieving our goals stay with me here let's think about this example you're working on a particularly tricky math problem we can imagine the eventual and guaranteed solution to this math problem as the destination let's say we're traveling to that destination now there are a few ways this can play out the student could solve the problem on the first try become stuck and spend more time figuring out the solution have to ask for help or could give up altogether deciding that they cannot find the solution that is again completely definite and waiting to be reached just like the destination we could see an immediate solving as a completely straight and clear Road point A to point B we could see getting stuck and needing more help as a roadblock you need to find or figure out alternate routes we could see needing to ask for help as pulling out a map calling Roadside Assistance or plugging our destination into a GPS but what's the result of all these alternatives reaching our destination one way or another you see the only way we do not reach our destination is by turning that car around and going right back where we came from the answer or a version of the desired outcome is always there right it's just out of sight if I hold an object in your view and then I move the object out of sight tell me is the object gone no it'll stay right in the spot where it landed until you search and ultimately find the object right we can imagine set object as the solution to a math problem the perfect formula or style of writing an essay or the correct procedure for a science experiment the answers are waiting to be found the reality of higher education is that everyone is on their own Journey in turn everyone is capable of understanding academics no matter how difficult or complicated this subject may be now after thinking of this idea I wanted to see what some other students in my position thought of failure in their respective Fields let's see what some of them had to say if you fail you're simply a failure I'm most afraid of failing classes I don't deserve to have fun failure can mean bombing a test but it normally labels my fear of being wrong or looking too nervous I decided to put all these interview responses into a word cloud and I'd like to share that word cloud with you today so the largest words on this word cloud are the most frequently used words throughout the student interview responses let's take a look at some of them classes means enough try fear wrong scared what do all these words have in common what are these students trying to tell us that students grow up with a common social construct if you fail a test if you're grade plummets if you can't immediately understand a concept your scene is not smart enough and this is not your thing as a student I have felt the social stigma in every grade and every stage of schooling I can remember we take small failures slip ups and rough patches a sign of our intellectual capacity that we can't possibly advance we're a certain amount of smart and that's that I want to take you back to my junior year of high school I studied for the sat in the first few weeks of spring as the weather began to fluctuate in the heart of Golden Colorado I kept busy when I wasn't studying I was lining up my prospective schools lined up what I would say to my friends and family once they found out about my killer SAT score I worked hard for that exam I knew that an above average score would be my one-way first class ticket into any school I wanted to attend but most importantly to me I wanted people to know I was smart this felt like the ultimate test to prove myself so I took the exam and I anxiously awaited my score I checked the College Board website almost every single day finally scores were released I want you to go back to that experience they asked you to hold on to was it similar to mine what negative things were you telling yourself see I didn't get the score I wanted I was disappointed I was self-critical it was a textbook reaction to failure and learning however I soon realized that something like the SAT didn't Define My Success I did if we take our new definition of failure that the only way to fail is to completely give up we can Atop The mindset of failure is not an option and with those two tools in hand there is nothing we cannot learn accomplish understand present or teach there's a saying there's only one way down our one way it's turning around thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 758

Keywords: Education, English, Failure, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:52363]

Id: V_iBQ2ZORLg

Length: 6min 45sec (405 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023