Just Like Riding A Bike

In my role as a high school science teacher at a college preparatory school, I spend a lot of time imagining the challenges that my students will face in the future, as well as what I can do on a regular basis to help ready them for those challenges. I also spend a lot of time pondering the eternal student refrain: “When am I ever going to need to know this?” and its equally popular variation “Why do we have to do this?” 

Rather than trying to come up with scenarios in which the specific topic may appear in a student’s future, I have begun to answer the former question directly, “You probably won’t.” In doing so, rather than diminishing the importance of content, I am attempting to reframe the way my students view the things they learn in my class. I am encouraging students to widen their focus, to see the bigger picture of the skills they should carry with them when they leave my classroom, rather than thinking about constants and equations. Right now, the skill I care most about is the ability to struggle.

Author Will Durant, summarizing some of Aristotle’s thoughts in his 1926 work, The Story of Philosophy, wrote “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” One of the most prominent difficulties that I have encountered since I first began teaching chemistry is that at times, students just don’t seem capable of accepting the fact that struggling to understand something is a necessary part of learning. It’s almost as though they feel that not understanding something immediately upon first glance is somehow indicative of inadequacy. In fact, I would argue that understanding something the first time one sees it means losing the opportunity to practice one of the most important skills for success while studying science. I’ve remarked that many of my past students seemed to have a malfunctioning “effort-feedback reward loop,” i.e. they do not take much, if any, satisfaction from the process of initially failing at something, working to improve, and eventually finding success in a future attempt. On a daily basis, this means I push back on negative self-talk whenever I am able, and I remind students of the agency that they have with regard to their own learning.

In a sense I am lucky to be a multi-sport coach, as it allows me to draw parallels between two seemingly unrelated settings. In the same way that an athlete may require dozens of (sometimes unsuccessful) repetitions to perfect a movement pattern and feel confident doing it in a competitive setting, students need opportunities to recognize and adjust their thinking patterns, so that they can build confidence in their “intellectual resilience” and their ability to succeed if they are willing to keep trying.

One of my favorite comic strips that a colleague has shared with me is Grant Snider’s “how to ride a bike." While students for the most part are focused on getting to the “breakthrough” and “mastery” panels, it is the “failure-frustration-recovery” cycle that I think is most valuable. Not understanding something the first time around may be disappointing, but it provides an opportunity to think differently about the solution or to consider another angle of approach to the problem at hand – essential skills for most any profession, but arguably fundamental for one choosing to explore and question the world around us.

On the whiteboard in my classroom, a single sheet of paper is held in place by a magnetic clip. This paper stays on the board at all times, with a message that I hope my students will remember, regardless of how much or how little science they study in the future. The paper reads “WE CAN DO HARD THINGS” and while it may not be the most eloquent or profound, it does sum up a skill that will serve my students wherever they go. My hope is that no matter what problems they face, my students will carry those experiences of failure and frustration with them, knowing that it is the willingness to dust yourself off and get back on the bike (no matter how many tries it takes) that leads to true learning and growth.