- We read Bain’s chapter “Learning how to embrace failure.” Let’s begin by emphasizing the learning part: as you look back over the past 8 weeks, what would you say you’ve been learning about yourself? Make a connection from Bain to yourself (text-self) or to your Project 1 Goals (text-text) or to your work on Project 2, or even to your work in other classes.
Over the course of the semester so far, I have begun to notice my habits within my mindset, my learning, and my belief in myself. I have discovered areas in which I succumb to the fixed mindset, which is pretty much any situation where an understanding of something does not come relatively easy to me. In statistics, I will occasionally get an answer wrong over and over, and I only reluctantly will attempt to improve whatever strategy I am implementing. In this class, when I am getting writer’s block or can’t think of a certain word, I will often just stop and give up or procrastinate. I have discovered similar patterns across all of my courses, and am working to combat them with an attempt at Bain’s “self-efficacy”. As I made my goal to declare a major, I knew what I had to do was explore and research my major options as well as examine myself to discover a future that would fit me and satisfy me. I have been able to do research due to the requirements of Project 2, but I’ve also been able to discuss the Pre-Law focus with my friend who is a part of it right now. Everytime she has talked about her classes and the content she is learning about, I think to myself “Man, I would love to be in that class”. This fact is what is truly convincing me that Political Science and Law are the route I want to take within the next four years.
- Review your early posts on Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset.” How might you connect Dweck’s description of growth mindset to Bain’s emphasis on the value of failure?
In my earlier posts on Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset”, I reviewed Dweck’s emphasis on her phrase “not yet” and the significant impact it can have on a student’s learning mindset. As Dweck offered, this type of praise from educators teaches students that learning and growth are a process and we should value progress just as much as we value success, as it can make students hardy and resilient learners. Similarly, Bain’s emphasis on the value of failure advocates for failure being a part of the learning process, “people who become highly creative and productive learn to acknowledge their failures, even to embrace them, and to explore and learn from them” (Bain 100). Failing means that you were unsuccessful in doing something the way it was meant to be done, understanding something the way it was meant to be understood, or seeing something the way it was meant to be seen. Therefore, overcoming failure forces you to try harder or use a different strategy or look at the problem with a different perspective
