Importance of failure.. sports and artistic endeavors are a great place to start!

As a teacher I often shake my head when students in middle or high school tell me that they received a B for the first time ever in their educational careers. How can that be? I know that many students are brilliant, study hard, and take their testing very seriously. All of that is great. But really? You've never gotten below a 90% ever? That's a bit crazy. The student probably isn't lying and therefore it's probably true. It probably happens more frequently than we would like to believe. But in the real world, when was the last time anyone of us ever received a 90% on anything? Getting 60-70% of things correct would probably place most of us in the top of our respective careers, wouldn't it?

As a father of two children who chose gymnastics as their sport of choice, I have had a first row seat to something remarkable. Gymnastics by its very nature has an arbitrary component. Of course those at the top of the game are physical freaks who can do things with their bodies that us mere mortals couldn't ever dream of doing. However at the end of the day, there are a set of judges who dole out scores and that determines who finishes on the podium and who is an also ran. I cannot tell you how many gut wrenching moments I have had looking at the judges scores. Most of us. including me, have probably been brought up in a world where the person/team with the most goals/points/sets wins the match. Sports like gymnastics combine the quantifiable element of athleticism, with the more nuanced and inherently subjective nature of an artistic judgement call.

Forget about all of the AP classes, all of the learning targets that are mastered during one's academic career, and any standardized test one chooses to take, the single most important skill that an high school graduate can take with him/her as they prepare for college and beyond are those experiences on the sporting field (or for those that choose to go out on a limb and expose themselves in an artistic endeavor such as the school play/musical). Why do I say this? These are the key reasons:

• learning to function in a team (even applies to more individual sports, because at the high school and college level most of the single person sports still operates within a team environment);
• discipline, because during training one works on the same skills over and over again until the movements/fluidity becomes automatic;
• measuring yourself against total strangers, people you have never met, and in some cases on an international stage (for some this could be their first such experience); and
• the acceptance of failure and building upon those experiences. Unless you are a Lebron James or some freak of a high school athlete, you will win some, lose some and possibly even be cut from a team (as Michael Jordan about that). Those experiences should serve as powerful motivators to take the next step and reach levels you may not have thought possible just a few short months before.

As you can see, most of these things apply to other domains as well (such as the school musical/plays mentioned earlier) and certainly help balance out the academic experience at school. You may have noticed I didn't even mention the health benefits of vigorous exercise which can help in other areas as well, such as with those mental ups and downs that inevitably come up during high school (and possibly even more so after the year and change we have just gone through). That goes without saying.

So for parents out there, please consider enrolling your loved one in a sport or two at an early age. Maybe one will stick (pun intended), and if so encourage them to pursue it as long as possible. This doesn't come cheap unfortunately. This takes a lot of time as well. But the rewards are immense and the lessons learned are invaluable.