A friend posted a New York Times Magazine article the other day called, “What if the secret to success is failure?” One of the points of the article, among many, is the pithy line that it ends with:  in order for students to succeed, they first need to learn how to fail. This is not an unfamiliar concept; after all, there has been talk recently in education about how in the United States, we need to teach students to perservere through frustrations (in math, for example).  Linguistically speaking, I like thinking about  the concept of perserverance rather than overcoming failure. I think it’s because  the word failure has such a strong, all-encompassing, negative association when the real point is that you need to learn to perservere through your problems.  At any rate, you’re probably wondering why I’m even talking about failure or perserverance.

Well, today, we had a Literacy Lab event at an optometrist’s office in Littleton, Colorado. (Have I mentioned yet how we have this awesome sponsorship from Hoya, an eyeglass manufacturer? The importance of being able to see is an obvious connection to be able to read, so we’re really excited about this relationship.) Hoya has connected us to optometrist offices and this was our first optometrist visit. Instead of doing stories in the office and disturbing other patients, we were out in the large parking lot. Unfortunately, no kids came. Which got me thinking about failure (or perserverance, as I prefer to think about it). Why I like to think of perserverance is that every thing that doesn’t work means that we learned something to try different for next time. In this case, what I learned is that if we’re going to be out in a big huge parking lot, our van is not so big that it is really that visible, so there needs to be something to make it visible. I thought it would suffice to be wearing a costume to attract kids to come over, so I had dressed up in my water costume wearing a fish hat with yellow fishermen’s overalls. (I didn’t put on my pirate outfit because it was 82 degrees and I was standing in the sun, sweating as it was). However, the costume was not enough. Someone asked if I was selling something; another person asked if my van was okay. While I did see some kids in cars, it was not super apparent what I was doing there. In the future, I might recommend doing a quieter storytime in the office while kids are waiting. Or, if we were to do it outside in a big parking lot with very little foot traffice, I think we’ll be on the lookout for a big easel so that we can post a sign announcing the storytime.  On the plus side, the optometrist’s office (Mountain Vista EyeCare) had collected a number of books for us to give away. At any rate, my point is that even if this was not exactly the most successful event, it was not a wash because we keep learning how to make this even better.

I’m really excited for our next event on Monday at a Head Start preschool in Arvada, CO. More toddlers and preschoolers! Stay tuned on Monday or Tuesday for those details. Have a good weekend, everyone.