100 Repetitions

Teachers of troubled students need to know that the road to success is paved with many useful failures.

Al is a drug addict, a substance abuser. When I knew him, his drug of choice was marijuana, but Carlos, the drug counselor who consulted with the school, said Al was a "garbage can" abuser: "He'll take anything available, like his body is a garbage can." I would talk to Carlos about Al's years of struggling with dyslexia and attention difficulties. I would suggest that his drug use was a form of self-medication to ease the humiliation he felt from years of struggling in school every day. Carlos said I had to first deal with Al as an addict. He'd chide me, "I don't think you've been trained to teach reading to someone who's stoned, have you?"

I didn't like labeling students. "Isn't it better to say he has an addiction," I asked, "rather than say he's an addict? Isn't that defining him by his problem?"

"Until he defines himself as an addict," Carlos replied, "you'll never teach him to read. It's not like when you have a cold and then get better or break an arm and it heals. If you're an addict, you're an addict. This will be with Al his whole life. It's just a fact."

"So what do I do?" I asked. "Al's starting to come to school. He's starting to make a connection to me. You're right that he isn't actually doing anything to read better. Most likely he'll fail the class. That can't be good for him, to have another failure—and this one coming from a teacher whom he seems to like."

"You can't stop him from failing." Carlos said this with a mixture of resignation and compassion. "It's his right to fail. Al is going to have to fail many times to change his life. Your job is to help him have a useful repetition of his failure. Many addicts have to have 100 repetitions of getting fired from jobs, getting sick, losing girlfriends and boyfriends, and failing a class before they know what they have to do. Your job is to let Al know you'll hang in through his failures."

What It Takes

One hundred repetitions—100 useful repetitions. This notion has ...

Click here to continue reading.