A couple times a year I toe the line of a marathon. I got hooked on them in college. I suppose in the grand scheme of things the are worse thigns to be addicted to.
My kids know I race. They see me leaving for and coming back from training runs after school. If I get hurt (earlier in the year I spent some time in an air cast) I share that with my students. It’s part of my identity at school: I teach third grade; if people have tech questions they come to me; I run marathons.
Last week I ran the Chicago Marathon. I took a day off to extend the trip and visit family and I shared with the class why I wouldn’t be in school that Friday. The afternoon before I left, I gave them a chance to ask questions. My kids are just outside of Boston, which is like Mecca for modern marathoning, so I believe they should know something about the race.
A funny thing happened. The same question/answer exchange occurred that occurs every time I tell a class I am going to run a marathon. The conversation goes like this:
Student: Are you going to win?
Me: No.
Student: Are you going to come in second?
Me: No
Student: Are you going to try to win?
Me. No.
Student: Mr. Schersten, you have a bad attitude. You should at least try to win.
Me: No, you don’t understand. Some of these guys don’t have a job. ALL they do is run. I train a lot and I’m pretty fast, but they’re way faster than me. There’s NO way I’m going to win.
Student: Yea, but you’re always supposed to try.
Somewhere my students got the idea that trying to win and trying your best are the same thing. If I try to stick with the lead pack of the Chicago Marathon, I’ll last (maybe) a mile. The winner this year averaged 4:46 per mile (take a moment to let that soak in, 4:46 per mile for 26.2 miles). In Chicago trying my best meant trying not to win. It meant examining my current level of fitness, my strengths and weaknesses, and trying to cover the 26.2 miles as fast as I could (not as fast as the leaders could).
When students (or student-athletes) fail, we often try to console them by saying something like, “it’s okay, you tried your best.” But that seldom works because our students don’t define success that way. They want to win, not just do their best. In fact, one of my students asked me (she was being completely serious), “would you rather cheat and win, or not cheat and come in second?”
Apparently we need to do a better job of defining success for our students. Success is, or should be, about trying your best. It should be about improving. It should be about analyzing a situation and trying to make the best out of it. Of course, in today’s climate of high-stakes testing where scores are scaled; and students, teachers, and schools compete against each other, I guess it’s easy to see where this idea comes from.
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I ended finishing 207th in a field of 34,500. My students’ reaction: “we’ll that’s not too bad” and “that’s pretty good.” Sure it wasn’t my fastest race, but I wrestled with some injury this training cycle and that’s still the 99.4th percentile. But I didn’t win, so it’s somehow just “pretty good.”