It's going to be okay.

The other day I was reminded of making a mistake when I was publishing on social media. I quickly was embarrassed and disappointed in the fact that I made such a silly mistake. After a moment of feeling this way, I moved on realizing that I can't go back to fix it. Instead,I focused on learning from my error and trying not to make the same mistakes in the future.

If I look back on my life, I can recall many mistakes and failures. In fact, if you were to ask my girls they could share my many famous mistakes. Because we discuss our mistakes in our family, my girls often ask me to retell some of their favorites, and then we laugh. Here are a couple of the highlights, or maybe I should call them low lights.

• Driving over a parking curb. I was with a few of my high school buddies and we just finished hitting some balls at a driving range. We pilled into a Volkswagen Rabbit that I shared with my sister. There wasn't a car in the parking space in front of us so I put the car into first gear, let the clutch out, and much to my surprise up and over we went over the parking curb. Then we got stuck. That was so embarrassing, and man did my friends laugh! After several minutes of enduring their laughter they helped me and luckily we were able to get the car unstuck.

•  Breaking my wrist sledding down the stairs. When I was in middle school my younger sister and I used to take a small board and ride it down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase was an orange buffet cabinet. To avoid crashing into the buffet cabinet, we would grab onto the railing at the last second. After dozens of successful attempts I was at the top of the stairs ready to go again. My sister gave me a push and about halfway down the stairs I fell off of the board and tumbled down. I braced myself to avoid hitting the buffet cabinet and heard a pop in my wrist. 

I probably could go on and on about the thousands of mistakes I have made in my life and I am pretty sure many of them were avoidable (like riding over my principal's dog and crashing into a lady coming out of the beauty parlor when I was on  my bike). One thing I learned is that it may seem pretty bleak in the moment, but it does get better and you can move forward.

I was recently listening to a podcast and I was struck with what I heard. We can have a tremendous impact on our students based on what we say and how we respond to them when they mess up or make frequent mistakes. The following quote comes from In the Loop Podcast Episode 248. In the podcast Andy Andrews is talking about his son. 

If you want to pick out things (your ADD child does) that aren’t like everybody else, you could talk to him about it all day long. And you could turn this happy, awesome, sensitive kid into a quivering mass of jelly. You could take this kid and destroy his belief in himself, destroy his imagination.

What I took away from this statement is the fact that students will learn how to respond to their own mistakes or shortcomings by the way we respond to them. If we are quick to point out their errors or mistakes, students will stop trying. They will stop taking risks. If we show grace and understanding while assisting students to learn from their mistakes, students will grow into the person they are meant to be. 

Todd Nesloney and Adam Welcome, in their book Kids Deserve It, write about the influence teachers have and explain, "We have the power to tear down or build up children who walk into our lives every day." 

What you say matters! How you respond matters! As you think about the students in your room who make those mistakes, what will you do to build them up? How will you support them as they struggle to learn? What will you do so students believe in themselves? How will you foster students imagination instead of destroying it? How will students know it is going to be okay?

Not one of us is perfect. We will mess up.and mistakes happen. It is not about making every effort to avoid  a mistake, rather it is how respond when we make a mistake that matters.