Week 3 - Response to Brian Cobb

Wk 3 Reading - Beware of Ice


I just read the story about skiing and trying to avoid ice. I couldn’t help but relate completely. I have learned to ski in on the East coast and there is definitely ice at times. I have mentioned in an earlier post about my experiences when learning to snowboard, and how taking hard falls affected my snowboarding from a mental perspective. Some of those hard falls were from trying to slow down on ice. We all know that ice is slippery and can make us fall. With this knowledge, our first reaction is so slow down; we try to fight the ice. Only after a few relentless struggles, do you realize that simply gliding over the ice is WAY easier than trying to stop or slow down on it. Zander (2000) says, “Mistakes can be like ice. If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat.” I think this is great advice. It’s so easy to let failure keep us from achieving our goals. The important lesson is to learn that mistakes and failure is a natural part of the learning process. When I lived with my parents I was in charge of cutting the grass. When I would use the weed eater, our dog, T-rex, would try and bite at the rotating wire on the end of the tool. This frustrated me to great lengths because I kept stopping the weed eater knowing it would hurt the dog if he got close enough. T-rex was persistent, though. Every time I started it back up, the dog would attack again. My dad saw the predicament and said, “Let him bite it; he’ll only do it once.” This time I let him bite it. T-rex let out a yelp, realized his mistake, and found something else to occupy his time. My dad is a man of few words, but those words are usually nuggets of wisdom.


image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinbaeder/177984894/

source: Source: Zander, R. S., & Zander, B. (2000). The art of possibility (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Posted by Brian Cobb at 7:06 PM
1 comments:

rebbiej said...

Brian,
Your Dad was indeed a man of wisdom! Fighting ice is a losing battle as I found out a couple of years ago when I slipped at school, which resulted in surgery on my knee. But, I also think that sometimes we need to stop BEFORE we get to the ice and see if there is better way to handle things before they get out of control. Mistakes are only beneficial if lessons are learned. A famous Edison quote when referring to the light-bulb after over a thousand attempts, "I did not fail, I found 1000 ways it will not work". We need more of that mentality when dealing with students... to change the idea of failing, to a way not doing something, but to keep on trying until success is met. So many of my young learners do not know what it means to every succeed, unfortunately :(
March 17, 2010 5:55 PM