As a child of three, I could not jump. It was almost impossible for me to lift both feet simultaneously off the ground, knowing fully well that they would touch down in a matter of seconds. This was my version of ‘failure to launch’. Perhaps it was a subconscious need to feel safe and secure at all times.
My grandmother, not one to accept anything less than perfect, decided that it was time to intervene.
She placed a thin carpet on the floor in front of me. My target was to jump from the ground onto it, a mere two centimetres above the floor.
I did it; one foot at a time.
She persisted.
I did it; one and a half feet at a time.
She did not give up.
I jumped off the ground onto the carpet with both feet together!
One carpet became two. As she kept increasing the difficulty, I kept increasing my abilities. (Sounds a lot like scaffolding in a classroom for differentiation, doesn’t it?)
Fast forward to thirty odd years later — I found myself in a similar situation. I was part of a team given a seemingly impossible task of developing a curriculum featuring AI in education. I didn’t know the ‘I’ of Internet of Things or the ‘A’ of Artificial Intelligence. I wasn’t even sure I liked the feeling of AI existing in a classroom.
The idea sounded so absurd at the time that I remember not knowing where to start. Indecisiveness and inability led to frozen feet. Once again, I found myself unable to take off!
This time however, there was no carpet in front of me, no patient grandmother. There were, instead, challenging goals and looming deadlines.
I had no choice but to jump into the world of Artificial Intelligence and teach myself how to land safely. It took time, but I succeeded to an acceptable extent.
In both cases, the learning happened eventually. Even if it took longer than expected.
In both cases however, the approach was different. In the first case, through scaffolding technique and in the second, diving into the challenge head first, led to success.
As parents and teachers, we tend to take the first route more often than not. We provide a scaffold, break the challenge into doable chunks. We focus on the individual steps, sometimes to the detrimental effect of children missing out on grasping the bigger picture.
There is merit in allowing them to dive in, without arm floats and tyres around their waist sometimes. There is an advantage in teaching them to move into the unknown so long as they know that you have their back.
We talk a lot about risk taking and the ability to take risks. Not everyone is inclined to do so. Some of us feel the need to know the outcome before actually going ahead with the task. Call it a fear of failure or whatever else you will. But considering the way the world is evolving, we may never have all the answers or know exactly how life is going to pan out.
So should we be scaffolding life lessons for them or should we allow them to embrace the pain of growth in all spheres?
Should we chunk development into stages or appreciate its continuum, no matter how non-linear it may be?
Should we support in the now or provide supporting skills for the future?
What a ‘haven’-ly world it would be if we could always place a carpet in front of our children, protect them, keep them safe. But then, would we be curbing their ability to let go, jump and fly?
In life and education, how ‘safe’ is too ‘sorry’?
