JH & HS Principal - Cherokee ISD By Rebecca Sharkey
Kara Lawson, coach of Duke’s women’s basketball team, in speaking with her players once challenged them to quit waiting for things to get easy. Rather, she challenged them to learn to do “the hard things better.”
When I heard Coach’s words, they hit me at my core. Too often, we swoop in and rescue a student struggling to find an answer or wrestle through a concept. I get it. But, we do a disservice to those students. Oh, they won’t think that at the time, but students need to be challenged and sometimes need to fail a little bit in order to learn. That is a part of the process. The adage first attempt in learn-ing (FAIL) does express a truth.
The fact is we have made things too easy, and our students do not know how to handle hard. They simply give in and give up. The problem with not teaching our young people how to handle hard things better according to Lawson is “any meaningful pursuit in life will never be easy.” It is our job as adults and as educators to facilitate the opportunity for our students to learn to navigate through struggles while they have us as a support system, so that when they leave our halls in the pursuit of what is meaningful to them, they will know how to handle the hard things better.