Learn From Your Mistakes
In elementary classrooms, it’s a best practice to have your class rules posted somewhere visible for students to see. I always had my students help me come up with our 4–5 class rules on our first day of school. Not only did this make the rules easier to remember but it also gave my students a stronger sense of ownership of their behaviors and the consequences that followed.
The rules the kids came up with were usually about the same each year: Be Responsible, Be Respectful, etc., but I always added one more rule that wasn’t quite like the others: Learn from your mistakes. I often pointed to our class rules poster whenever one of my students would get frustrated after making mistakes on their classwork. I would also remind them that making mistakes can be the most effective way to learn since it helps us know how NOT to do something. Making mistakes and LEARNING FROM THEM makes a strong impression in our minds for how to perform a task correctly.
As a student again myself in boot camp, I’m having to constantly remind myself of my class rules poster. Learn from your mistakes! “That bit of code needs a colon, not an equal sign… you need a hash tag there, not a period… you have to use an @ symbol for instance variables.” Learn from your mistakes!
Needless to say, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes as I’ve been going through web development boot camp. It’s been really hard not to get discouraged and down on myself but as I keep remembering my “class rules”, I’m able to pull myself back up and go at it all again the next day. After all, as long as you commit to learning from them, mistakes aren’t the end, they’re really just the beginning.
