On Failure

On SportsCenter, the quarterback of the losing team explains the problem.  “There were plays that were ours for the taking and were not made.  This is not acceptable and we will certainly be working on making sure that it does not happen again.”  In sports – games that by nature produce losers - failure is unacceptable.  Progress reports, transcripts, consumer ratings, user reviews.  We moderns are accountable for performance and results, and the possibility of success is a given.  The world, it would seem, has exorcised its devils.  Success is expected, despite a pesky fifty-percent failure rate among all quarterbacks.

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During college, in a fit of youthful daring and idealism, I interned as a prison chaplain in a youth detention center.  Sitting in classrooms learning about all the systematic injustices of the country made me yearn to do something that felt real.  I wanted to know if I had what it took to work at the emotional heart of these problems, to jump into the messy middle rather than join the administrators and policymakers a safe distance away.

I learned quickly that I did not.  My heart thumped with anxiety each day as I walked in, and I flinched visibly around the inmates.  I was a nervous journalist, asking lots of questions, observing scenes and recording facts.  But the more questions I asked, the more tangled the problems seemed, and none of my analytical resources seemed of any use.  And so the days passed. I became tenser and more hopeless about the world’s problems.  Everyday, I felt more inferior compared to the social crusaders I so admired whose lives had led me here. 

Then, one day, through the alchemy of thought, a message materialized.  As I punched in my access code to the center’s inner gate, I heard,  “These problems were here before you came, and they will be here after you leave.”  It played like a mantra inside my head until the end of the day.  After that I knew I was not there to fix things; I was a witness.

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At every stage of our life, we learn that the world will disappoint us.  Teenagers feel it acutely. 

My friend told me when he got a bad 8^th grade report card, he went home to his room and cried.  He did not know who had let him down, he only knew he felt a gap between what should be and what was.  Whether he, family, teachers, or life itself were to blame remained indistinct and impossible to know.  But the sadness of non-fulfillment was real. 

Adults are often no better at understanding why we disappoint ourselves and one another than teenagers.  Nevertheless, we try to explain it.

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My students are hot-tempered, low-skilled, world-weary, untrusting and emotionally fragile.  They each contain a corner of the city and carry its stresses.  About half of them graduate.

One student has stubbornly and consistently refused to do any work since the beginning of September.  We have sweet-talked him, punished him, called his parents, given him counseling, suspended him, encouraged him, ignored him.  So far, nothing has worked.  Once, after he had cursed at a teacher who pushed him to do work, I found him sitting in the teacher’s office with his head down.  His legs were shaking underneath the table.  “Luis,” I told him, “I don’t know much about your life, but I bet there is a good reason you make the choices you do.  I hope someday you find someone you trust enough to tell.”  He lifted his head up at me and said with more conviction than I’d seen before: “I don’t trust anyone.”

He is still not doing any work, and I feel like a failure.  I imagine he feels like a failure too.

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Some problems can and should be solved.  But while charity salves our conscious, it is not a salve for the world’s pain.  The quarterback was right – losing is unacceptable.  Yet, educators need the strength to live in a world where it is also inevitable.