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A few days ago I had the pleasure of watching the girls JCDS basketball team play a game.
And you might have thought it was pleasurable because they came out with a victory, but actually,
they did not. They played hard, they played with their hearts, they had a great team spirit,
and in the end, they lost the game. I also recently had the pleasure of being one of
the "judges" for a 5th grade debate about whether the Trojan War was myth or history.
Aside from the kids learning so much about this period in history, what was amazing to
me was listening to the teacher actually talk about what it was going to be like to be on
the losing team. And really, those two events, the girls basketball team and the 5th grade
debate, made me start thinking about the power of losing. How much losing something actually
contributes to our life. How it builds resiliency, how it compels us to learn and to improve.
Last week, we had a professional development day at JCDS, and we hired a bus and took our
whole JCDS faculty to go and learn from Harvard education professor Tony Wagner, who talks
about what it means to be creating innovators and educating kids for the world that they
are going to enter, which we don't know exactly what it's going to be. And one of the things
he was talking about was the power of perseverance, and creativity, and motivation. It started
me thinking about the engineering process that we use at JCDS, where kids design things,
where things don't work out, where they have to work on them again, or reflective practice,
and their drafts, and how they have to write things, and then keep working on them, and how
amazing it is that we honor iterations, and that we don't say you just do something and
it's done. We don't think about things as mistakes, or losing, but we think about them
as opportunities to learn and grow. I really so believe that this is what is going to help
our kids in the 21st century - being resilient, being able to persevere, working on things
that they care about. And I was so proud when we gave the results of the debate, that the
kids just took it in stride, because they knew that they had learned a tremendous amount,
whether they won the debate or lost the debate, and the girls - the last thing that they heard
from their coach as they left the basketball game was, "tomorrow we are going to play another
game, and we're going to play hard." And I was like, "Yes!" That is the spirit that we're
going for. We are a learning organization and we are all about continuous growth.