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(London) The word "fail" should be banned from use in classrooms and replaced with the phrase "deferred success" to avoid demoralising pupils, a group of teachers has proposed.

Members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) argue that telling pupils they have failed can put them off learning for life.

A spokesman for the group said it wanted to avoid labelling children. "We recognise that children do not necessarily achieve success first time," he said.

"But I recognise that we can't just strike a word from the dictionary," he said.

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Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

This constant mushifying of language to serve psychological ends is a distressing thing, even when the intentions behind word changes are benevolent.

To disguise the nature of an act or thing because it's psychologically unpleasant is a human thing to do, but it also robs us of our ability to describe it for what it is.

As an instructor, my thinking is that if the sight of red pen causes you to hyperventilate and have a panic attack, perhaps you're just not ready for the world of adults.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
This constant mushifying of language to serve psychological ends is a distressing thing, even when the intentions behind word changes are benevolent.

To disguise the nature of an act or thing because it's psychologically unpleasant is a human thing to do, but it also robs us of our ability to describe it for what it is.

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Orwell perhaps described this phenomena about 60 years ago.

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Originally posted by Betray My Secrets:
Why is it that whenever I read the words "deferred success", the first name that came to my mind was George W. Bush?

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Interesting that there's no mention of extending this to school sporting activities, which inevitably have "winners" and "losers".

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If they'd had that sort of atmosphere in elementary school, I wouldn't have been so terrified of taking gym class in high school - I didn't take it until grade 11, and only took it because you had to have one phys-ed credit to graduate. Once I took it, I was sorry I hadn't taken it every year.

Actually, at one public school I attended for grades 2-4 (we moved around a lot when I was a kid), they DID do a good job of getting non-athletic kids involved in intramural sports. I remember being on a lunch-hour volleyball team/club. It was a lot of fun. I'm convinced that it's all in the way sports are taught to kids. You don't have to take the competition out of games in order to make them palatable to non-athletic kids. You just have to make it a friendly competition and make kids feel good about the effort they're putting forth and the skills they're developing.

The other thing I think schools should do, since I'm on my soapbox now, is put as much time and effort into physical fitness/intramural sports for extracurriculars as they do competitive leagues. All that stuff I did in grade 11 gym class like the "usual" sports (baseball, basketball, volleyball, track, etc.) as well as the non-competitive stuff like yoga, weight-lifting, hiking, aerobics, dancing and other stuff like that, should all have the same kind of extracurricular funding that competitive sports teams get. Only an elite few get in the competitive teams, and more power to them - everyone excels at some things, and I think it's great to encourage those who are really good at sports to excel. But if people are wondering why a dwindling percentage of kids are physically fit, then maybe they should look at what percentage of kids are encouraged at school to take part in extracurriculars that promote physical fitness.

[ 21 July 2005: Message edited by: Michelle ]

In University we had a professor who made a point on a few occasions of noting who got the best and who got the worst mark on an assignment. I always felt that was a great unkindness.

I don't grasp whether or not it matters if you use a red or a blue pen personally. I've also had POSITIVE and NEGATIVE comments both in red so I don't see that red is an indication of stupidity or anything.

Another trick would be identifying what within a given sport a particular kid can do well and fostering that. I'm learning to play cricket right now. I can't bowl at all, my batting is only marginal, but I'm a demon fielder because I identified that as something the team needed badly, and as something I could improve quickly. That sort of thing could easily be ported over to a lot of sports: if some kid is a really slow runner, make him the baseball catcher or the pitcher or the soccer goaltender...

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Originally posted by EFA:

'Cause if you google "colossal failure," W's name is the first entry?

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...she had deliberately made the motion provocative to spark a good debate, but said it reflected the way the education system was developing.

"We have made so much development in recent years in making examinations more flexible, doing them in modules so you can concentrate on different parts of them at different times," she said.

"What happens when an exam is failed but, for example, three-quarters of it is perfectly satisfactorily done? It should be possible to do the other bits as add-ons afterwards and to defer the success of the exam."

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Here is a more detailed BBC story on this subject. When it comes to younger children, pre-teens, we have to ask ourselves who has really failed if a child can't read or write or do basic arithmetic. Why slap an F on them at such a young and impressionable age? If yes, do teachers and parents deserve an F too?

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When it comes to younger children, pre-teens, we have to ask ourselves who has really failed if a child can't read or write or do basic arithmetic. Why slap an F on them at such a young and impressionable age? If yes, do teachers and parents deserve an F too?

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If everyone in a teacher's class fails, consider slapping them with an F. But if only one kid fails and the others don't, how can you blame that on the teacher?

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
If everyone in a teacher's class fails, consider slapping them with an F. But if only one kid fails and the others don't, how can you blame that on the teacher?

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At the very least, teacher and principal should show that they did everything possible and within their power to prevent an F.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
I'd rather see that burden on the student and their parents. Teachers are in the unenviable position of leading 30 horses to water.

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Though it is often clumsy (as in the case described above), the teachers are trying to find ways to develop the potential of children, and move beyond the nonsensical sorting of children into winners and losers.

Look, a 7 year old has a lot ahead of him/her. Designating the child as a loser because of a spelling mistake or math error is hardly going to encourage that.

I don't expect Magoo to support that perspective - he's also the guy who thinks the poor deserve what they get - but I am personally of the opinion that we need to rethink school to ensure that we don't filter out and lose kids who don't fit the precise mold that school rewards.

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Originally posted by Privateer:

They chose to teach; they chose that profession for good and bad.

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Sure, and it doesn't matter how many students they are saddled with, or how much of their evenings and weekends they are expected to give up, if a single kid fails, it's their fault.

The school system, and parents, have to ensure teachers get the support needed to provide a quality education. There's a reason expensive private schools have a very low teacher to student ratio, while public school classes just keep getting bigger. A teacher with 4 students can work wonders that cannot be done with 40.

I used to be a teacher. The problem isn't failure, the problem is how we adults handle failure in children. We have our kids tied up in knots thinking that their self-esteem should come from external sources like grades and praise. The dark side of this is that a bad grade affects the kid's sense of self-worth. It sends him into a tailspin more often than not.

We need to get away from the attitude that failure on a test = failure as a person. Or that an F is a sign of stupidity.

Failure on a test simply means that the student did not master the material, or did not demonstrate that mastery effectively. This is a fixable problem. You can fix it by re-teaching, or re-learning, the material.

Whenever I hear these objections to F's, I think that adults have simply given up on kids. An F is hurtful to a child is if he thinks that F is a fixed marker of his ability and worth, and that he is not teachable. Unfortunately you do find this lesson taught in school, with alarming frequency.

If you believe that all kids are capable of learning and of improvement, wouldn't you see an F differently? Wouldn't you see it as a challenge to be met, rather than a shameful mark?

To teach effectively, you need to assess students' learning. I can't teach worth a hill of beans if I don't know what my students know already, and if I can't measure what they are learning from me. There's just no way around that one. And since no one is perfect and we all have a) bad days, b) gaps in our knoweldge, and c) concepts we struggle with, some kids will fail some tests some of the time.

We could do a better job of confronting failure head on and teaching kids healthy ways to deal with it, rather than acting like an F is the end of the world.