In 1998, I taught at a high school in the Chicago Public Schools, and as the summer of the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa turned to fall, many of my students were giddy as their Cubs made the playoffs for the first time in a decade. That giddiness soon faded when the Cubs were quickly eliminated by the Braves in the first round. Then in 2003, while in graduate school, I worked at a school directly across the street from Fenway Park. Excitement built over the Red Sox that season with hopes that this was going to the year the Sox ended their World Series drought. Well, I’ll never forget the red, tired eyes on students faces the morning after game 7 of that year’s playoff series between the Red Sox and the Yankees, the game in which Aaron Boone lofted a home run into the Bronx night to end the Red Sox season with yet another heartbreak.
Yesterday morning presented a scene like these yet again. Many students (and adults), fired up about the Falcons first Super Bowl appearance in nearly 20 years and guided by the NFL MVP, trudged into morning meeting, worn out both from staying up past their bedtimes and from witnessing an unbelievable loss in the big game.
As hard as we take these kinds of losses as fans, I can only imagine how difficult it is to take for players on the losing team. You put all of your focus and energy on getting to near the peak of your sport only to stumble before reaching it—and you do so with the whole world watching. And yet these players, by and large, soon bounce back, recommitting themselves again physically and mentally to pursuing the same goal and trying to take what they’ve learned from a tough loss to better themselves.
In the wake of these kinds of losses, I think we have an opportunity to emphasize this lesson for our students and explicitly teach them ways to be resilient in the face of “defeat”. Learning from mistakes and persevering through challenges are crucial skills for young people to acquire and schools can provide the structure and safety to practice them in a supportive environment.
A few years ago the author and journalist Paul Tough wrote an article titled “What if the secret to success is failure?” that brought the work of Angela Duckworth to the mainstream. Duckworth, an educator and research, explored the ways in which schools could help students develop “grit” and how schools could measure its impact. It’s now become so cliche to talk about “grit” in education that Duckworth and Tough’s original points have gotten muddled, but it’s worth returning to one central idea—students, when guided to reflect upon their failures, gain skills that help them to succeed in school and also to become thriving adults.
So when the next NFL season begins and we hear Matt Ryan and Julio Jones and Dan Quinn talk about how the Super Bowl loss has helped motivate them and made them a better player or coach, we should keep in mind how we can give students the tools to be as reflective and determined. And, of course, we should also be hoping that the Falcons, like the Cubs and the Red Sox, will ultimately follow up this year’s difficult loss with a title of their own soon!