Jason Thompson |
1. Curiosity
2. Courage
3. Investigation
4. Experimentation
5. Imagination
6. Reasoning
7. Sociability
8. Reflection
Jason then posed the question "Why are our students not more engaged in school?"
Maybe school should be more like this |
Jason went on to apply this to education, arguing that students need to feel the thrill of a "Level Up!" in the classroom.
He then cited a book by Jesper Juul titled The Art of failure. Juul argues that successful video games give us “a fair chance” to get past the monster, and that it is this that makes them work. In order to succeed, we have to fail first. Coming back to education, Jason argued that in school today both educators and students are now too afraid of failure. Hence, "Girl Guides all get badges", and everyone passes the test. Educators have become "afraid of failure". Students ask "what if I fail?", and educators respond by passing everyone.
According to Jason, the author Seth Godin says that we should ask a better question: "After I fail, what then?" After all, successful people don't necessarily succeed initially. Many fail, "and then overcome their failure". Success in life is less about succeeding first time and much more about failing, trying again, and succeeding he next time, or the time after that.
After all, Disney failed – he lost Oswald The Rabbit, and then created the famous mouse which made his name. Steven Spieflberg was rejected by film school three times. Jason quoted Winston Churchill as saying that : “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”.
Spielberg - a failure? |
In fact, here at Animation Apprentice, we don't give grades. This is deliberate. We think that grades are simply a distraction from the business of doing a piece of work as well as you can, and then improving it. This is not to say we are not honest with our feedback. If a student's work sucks - we say so. But the important thing is to focus not on a grade as a symbol of success, but on an improving body of work that can eventually be turned into a killer demo reel. A great demo reel helps our students find work - which grades, no matter how stellar, do not.
----Alex
Great post Alex! (Though the pic isn't off my best side…. ;)
ReplyDeleteJust back from being overseas for a couple of weeks so just came across this. Hope all is well!
jason
I loved your talk...it made me smile. You raise a lot of the problems that academics have to deal with in real life....
ReplyDelete