On learning from failures

And now for a refreshing change of pace...

I took the GACE for middle grades Social Studies a month ago. Yeah, they make you wait a month for your scores. Anyway, for the past four weeks I have been mentally planning how to approach posting the results of the almost certain failure of a test I had taken. Because my confidence was that high. I settled on a story about how once in my life I turned a massive failure into a learning experience that ultimately helped get me into college, as a way to show that I was staying optimistic about this score and that I would keep trying for my dream job because one day it would really happen...... and then today I got my score back. I passed. I did more than pass -- I actually did very well. But I'm going to tell the story anyway.

I started playing the flute in 7th grade, and since I was switching over from the saxophone I thought I needed to be really good right at the beginning or my parents wouldn't let me play. I had always wanted to be like Lisa Simpson, but the sax was heavy and my flute friends looked so cute with their little instruments that you could pack in your bookbag at a whim and hurry to catch up to someone. I, on the other hand, needed a skateboard to transport my instrument. Sadly nobody gave me one. I turned to my friend Heather, so that she may impart her flutey wisdom unto me. And she did. She just... didn't actually know a whole lot about it either. I'm not saying this to rag on Heather, I'm saying this to paint a picture of me as an entering freshman flute player (side note: Freshmen, as we all know, are notoriously annoying. Flute players, as we might know, are notoriously annoying as well. Imagine, will you, what kind of unholy combination you get from the two. Mr Schnettler, if you're reading this -- I apologize). We're talking notes written in, no knowledge of tuning... I didn't even know that the higher register notes were fingered differently. I thought you just blew harder to go up an octave (Allison, my section leader from 2002, if you're reading this I apologize).

But I learned. I practiced. I stopped writing in my notes and started paying attention to things like tone quality and dynamics, and I learned how to finger the higher octaves. On one of my chair tests that year, I scored higher than most upper-classmen. Of course at this point in time, we all thought it had been a fluke, and I was placed a little lower in the order, but what can you do. In preparation for the All-District Band audition, I learned my major scales and took private lessons with the resident first chair (Well, she was actually second chair, but the first chair was one of those unbeatable "always first chair" types, so we just counted the first after her as "First"). I was one of the only people in my grade who could say I knew my major scales and my 3-octave chromatic scale, even if the lowest note rarely came out (still doesn't).

But I didn't make All-District Band. I wasn't too broken up about it; I knew my sight-reading was dreadful and that the people I had heard warming up in the holding tank for auditioners deserved to be there much more than I did. I had failed, yes. I couldn't change my score. But you know what else I couldn't change? I couldn't un-learn my major scales. I couldn't un-learn my 3-octave chromatic scale. I couldn't take away the knowledge I had gained in my practicing, and I knew that I would only continue to build on that foundation. That was the only year that I didn't make All-District Band.

You may know that I entered college as a music major. While that was clearly not the course my life took in the end...of my college career, that one failed audition set in motion events that led to lifelong friendships and a college where I found my true academic love: creative writing. Side note: Freshman year of high school I wrote a "personal essay" about my audition experience. "Personal essay" is just a public school way of saying "creative nonfiction piece" -- so it could be argued that music led to my end major in more ways than one.

So, while I did not actually fail my GACE, I'm sure I have many more failures ahead of me in life. I don't mean that as negatively as it sounded. There will be more. And I am okay with that, because our failures are valuable learning experiences. And, like the nerd I am, I will never ever stop learning.

There are no words for this.