This week’s RIE win comes courtesy of my husband, who is a woodworker, computer programmer, musician, and all-around tinkerer…someone who gets excited about random bits of electronics he finds in the dumpster, so he can take them apart. He is in his element if he is creating.
The other night, he pulled up a video of a TED Talk Mark Rober did…you know the guy…he’s the one who made the squirrel obstacle course that had squirrels (safely) flinging their way across our computer screens last year. My husband once built a motion activated sprinkler to deter frisky cats from anointing our front door, so Rober holds a special place in his heart. But you might be surprised to hear how much I enjoyed the video, called The Super Mario Brothers Effect, considering how I tend to discourage screen time for children…but the video was less about video games and more about learning…specifically, how creativity and exploration vastly increase when you don’t put value on it and when you let go of the fear of failure…kind of like how babies and toddlers learn to walk. And actually, kind of like how young children are built to learn about the world.
Rober says: “What if you just framed the learning process in such a way that you didn’t concern yourself with failure? How much more successful could you be? How much more could you learn?”
Magda said: You have to try and fail, and that’s what babies are ready to do, happy to do, can do, and do do…and this is one of the things we so often, with the best of intention, do not let them do.
And that’s why we practice the Educaring Approach…to practice letting children try and fail…and learn.