After years of teachers asking for the right answers, students aren’t used to someone asking for the wrong ones. Students’ failure tends to create mental burden that negatively affects learning. Lifting the burden requires us to face failure bravely and encourage students to accept it as a natural part of getting educated. While educators have to make sure that students have the right content and support to avoid long-term failure, it is just as important to accept mistakes as a normal part of education.

Sadly, our culture is so focused on success or perfection that students generally aren’t taught about failure. To fill the gap, I share with students a Samuel Beckett quote “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. It suggests one becomes better after each failure. I also play a video on game designed by Extra Credits, which shows people can quickly declare their ways as a failure if they don’t work out and then learn from them to move on. Both the quote and the video can help students get a more positive attitude towards failure.

Teachers can help students accept failure better. In her piece “5-Minute Film Festival: Freedom to Fail Forward”, Edutopia author Amy Erin Borovoy had a set of videos and articles on the subject of failure. Borovoy reminds readers that “a true thinker learns as much from failure as from success.” Taking these short videos as monthly or weekly reminders can be a great way to start “how have we failed and what have we learned” discussions with students.

Teachers can actually use a technique called “Effective Failure” to teach about failure at any time. In my writing class, I often have students volunteer to pick out the worst writing of their own. This lets writers deepen their understanding of why a sentence, word choice, or paragraph construction has failed, and it inspires a sincere interest in better writing. This makes failure work well in class.

Also, remember that students are not the only ones who can learn from their mistakes. As those who teach students, we should do that too.

According to a recent study, most people hold the strong belief that much imagination has gone away. 【小题1】 Everyone has imagination, but most of us forget how to make use of it once we become older and older. Creativity isn’t always concerned with great works of art or ideas. People at work and in their free time typically think of creative ways to solve problems. 【小题2】

Make connections. It involves taking unrelated ideas and trying to find connections between them. 【小题3】 Then find an image, for example, a candle. Write down all the ideas associated with candles and then connect the ideas with the job you have to do. So imagine you want to buy a friend a unique gift. You could buy him tickets to a match or take him out for the night.

Set no limits. Imagine that normal limitations do not exist. You have as much imagination as you want. 【小题4】 If your aim is to learn to ski, for instance, you can now practice skiing every day. Now apply this to reality. Maybe you can practice skiing every day in December, or every Monday in January.

【小题5】 Look at the situation from a different point of view. Good writers always use this technique. Fiction writers often imagine they are the characters in their books. If your goal involves other people, put yourself in their positions. As an old saying goes, the best fishermen think like fish!

Waking up at the crack of dawn and going for a run might feel awful when you start trying to make it a habit. Weaving a significant new activity such as this into your regular routine obviously takes determination and time. 【小题1】

One popular idea suggests that it takes 21 days to solidify a habit. People tend to feel extra motivated to start a new habit or kick an old one. 【小题2】 Yet every January 21 very few people can boast that they have kept their resolutions.

Everyone has a unique habit-building timeline. 【小题3】 Experts suggest various individualized ways to practice frequently, which eventually turn a task into an unconscious habit.

【小题4】 Teaching yourself a completely new skill or process obviously takes longer than remembering to drink more water in the morning. A 2015 study found that new gym-goers had to exercise at least four times a week for six weeks in order to develop an exercise habit. The results showed that creating a handwashing habit took a few weeks. 【小题5】 Anyway, handwashing is less complex and offers more opportunities to practice.

The researchers also suggested that habit formation depends on the effort that a person puts into practicing an activity and on the presence of environmental cues that would remind them to carry out the behavior.