Learning By Disaster
Moving from panic to gratitude
At the top of my email was a note from a student, “What happened to my grade? Yesterday I had a 96 for the quarter and now it’s 55.” I scanned the digital gradebook and saw that she was indeed missing a few assignments. I jotted those down and went back to my email. There was another email, from another student with a similar complaint.
“Oh, brother,” I said to myself and went back to my gradebook where I saw that all of the 22 students in class now had failing grades. I’d spent the morning cleaning up my modules for this class, transferring assignments from Winter quarter to spring quarter, or so I thought.
As a new teacher, I’ve been on the struggle bus getting up to speed on curriculum design and effective teaching strategies. With great relief, as I eagerly finished my second quarter, I was excited to introduce all my new and improved assignments to next term’s course shells. I worked fast all morning, adding improved rubrics and creating better questions in the quizzes, and stating clearer objectives for the essays. I even added a self-reflection entry at the end of each week. I was doing it. I was getting better at teaching!
But then the emails came and I understood that I had done something terribly wrong. I frantically sent Peter, a wise resource from the instructional design team, a DM on teams, “Are you free? I’m freaking out. I did something horrible and my students are losing it,” I typed as quickly as I could.
Peter video called me right away. I was near tears, both palms cupping my face as I explained what happened. He looked at the pages of my course, examined my gradebook and made an initial assessment of what I’d done. Somehow, I’d copied all of my assignments into the same course multiple times so that my students’ grades showed that they’d only completed a third of their work. The result was that, in the final grades column they were all failing. Peter said he needed to talk to someone else on the team about how to fix it, but would get back to me in a few hours.
I did my best to trust that all would be well. I went for a walk. I did some sun salutations. I ate a snack. But mostly, as I waited, I self-flagellated. What was wrong with me? How could I have been so stupid? Maybe I’m too old to become a professor. What was I thinking, embarking on this new career? My brain is too slow and clunky.
I’d made a disastrous error recently with knitting (twice) and I had the same feeling then. My dear, generous friend had offered to teach me how to make a sweater. I went into the process fired up and ready to win. The first day was good. I remembered skills from my college days and it all felt manageable. Let’s do this thing! I was on the path to becoming a master knitter. But in my eagerness and excitement to make a sweater, I’d overshot my skills.
After working on my knitting project for several days, I realized that my sweater was twisted on the circular needles. I sent photos to my friend thinking she’d know what to do. She couldn’t tell what I’d done from the photo so I brought my sweater to her house. When we looked at it together at her dining room table, the proof was in the pudding. The sweater was twisted. I’d have to take out all eight inches and start from scratch. It took me a week to get back to where I’d been when I messed up. The second sweater disaster wasn’t quite as bad, but I still needed my friend’s help to reverse my error. She showed me how to carefully take out stitches to preserve the rest of the sweater.
When Peter from Instructional Design called me back, he gave me three options to fix my disaster. I could have the Instructional Design team reverse all my digital actions from the last few days; I could have the software company do something similar; or I could manually go in and delete every extra assignment that was skewing my students’ grades. The third one, Peter said, was the safest because it would not impact any student work done in the last few days. Because it was the last week of the quarter, I had no choice but to do the third option.
To repair my error, I spent most of the day doing tedious clicking, carefully looking at two screens to make sure I deleted the assignments that shouldn’t be in the gradebook and kept the ones that had already been graded.
In both teaching and knitting, I’d created disasters. In both situations, I needed help to salvage things. And thankfully, I got it. In the moment, the disasters felt devastating. Starting over would take so much time and I’d lose all my hard work.
But now that I’m through both calamities, I can see the value in the experience. I want to say that both situations taught me to slow down and be more careful so that I’d prevent future disasters. And I did learn this. I’m humbled by my hubris with both knitting and digital learning platforms. In the future, I will take a little more time with new tasks.But I’m also grateful for what repairing the disasters taught me. I did the hard work twice. And the second time, I learned something different from my first go round.
With knitting, I have a much clearer understanding of the yarn. As strange as that sounds, all the time I spent “fixing” my sweater gave me more practice and a greater understanding of the craft. The same thing happened with cleaning up my gradebook. All the back and forth in this elusive online platform helped me understand how it all works. I will never update future courses during finals week and I know how to navigate the system for future fixes.
In two of the classes I teach I have the students write weekly Growth Mindset Journals where they share a moment that they failed and were able to reframe the failure to get back on track. My goal for this exercise is to help my students keep an open mind to learning new things and to keep trying even when things are hard. I’ve loved seeing how my students are able to reframe hurdles in their lives. On days when I struggle with teaching, I’ve often felt like it would be useful for me to keep a Growth Mindset Journal of my own.
If I were to write a Growth Mindset entry about these two recent disasters, I’d say something about how much I learned from starting from scratch. I’d write about how failing was actually helpful because now I’m better at both knitting and navigating an online learning platform. So, at the risk of being a complete Pollyanna, in the moment my disasters sent me into an unsettled panic, in the end, they were a gift.
