Finding Success in Failure

For this years MPOL, I have been thinking a lot about failure and success. More specifically, how I can find success in failure. I have failed many times in my learning, but that has only brought me more success.

The first example that I want to share is our “crazy” unit. At the start of the unit, I was a little lost about what exactly we were learning. In my Pablo Picasso Pecha Kucha, I definitely could have done a better job answering the driving question than I did. I ended up making the presentation focused on his life instead of his legacy. When we were starting to research people for our Seattle trip, I put more effort into finding out the important parts of their impact instead of biographical facts about them. In our Seattle video, I feel that we were able to show the most important parts of our crazy people’s work. Then, when it was time to start working on our exhibition Pecha Kucha, I was able to highlight the key parts of each place we went and person we reasearched in order to connect it back to my thesis. Even though it felt as if we had the rug pulled out from under us when we were told that we couldn’t use notes, it ended up making it easier to connect with the audience.

A piece of learning that I feel was a failure on my part was the Student Blogging Challenge. I didn’t put my all into the work for these, and they turned out to be very mediocre pieces of work that I wasn’t proud of. This however has inspired me to start working harder and putting more effort into my blog posts. I feel that I exhibited this well in my Pecha Kucha blog post, which I put a lot of effort into.

The next project that I found success in was my algebra tiles project. I put a lot of thought into learning how algebra tiles worked, and although I didn’t find them helpful for solving equations, I think that I was still able to integrate them into a game very well. Although a lot of our classe’s games were similar, I know that we put a lot of effort and thought into our project. In the future, I would make the game more intricate and creative, but our game did have the proper core math concepts that were fairly advanced. I felt that it would have been better to learn more about how to simplify expressions without algebra tiles though because it would be more effective in the future than tiles would. Still, overall I am proud of my work and think of it as a learning success.

One of my goals for this term is to really work hard and take charge in my Destination Imagination group. I have been trying my best to start by organizing what little ideas and information we have now so that we will be able to create a strong presentation that I am proud and confident of. I finish all of the planning forms as soon as possible to allow for plenty of time to plan and rehearse our presentation. In the past, we have had issues with elements going wrong in the weeks leading up the competitions, and have had us scramble to fix everything on time.

I am working to see the success in my failures, and will continue to do so through the rest of the year. Finding success in failure is important to me in order to see past discouragement to future opportunities.  My question for you is, how can I better use my failures to show success?