A Little Bit of Struggle
I popped in to see how my daughter was getting on with some maths home learning this week.
She was stooped over her laptop, hands up against her head, and she was clearly struggling. She looked up at me, grimacing, and I immediately wanted to go over and help her out. I hate seeing my kids struggle.
However, on this occasion, I held my ground at the door, smiled and told her to watch her posture. As I left her to it, I heard her “humph” as she straightened up in her chair.
Half an hour later, she emerged from her room, satisfied (I sensed) that she had completed her work.
Cohelo’s Butterfly
The best story I have ever come across regarding struggles is this 5 paragraph classic from Paulo Coelho:
A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still.
The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon, thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled.
The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened; in fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shrivelled wings, incapable of flight.
What the man – out of kindness and his eagerness to help – had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were Nature’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.
Sometimes, a little extra effort is precisely what prepares us for the next obstacle to be faced. Anyone who refuses to make that effort, or gets the wrong sort of help, is left unprepared to fight the next battle and never manages to fly off to their destiny.
Nothing We Truly Value Was Ever Easy
I love Paulo’s writing, and I think this parable speaks for itself on many levels. However, I do have a few thoughts I wanted to share:
- We sometimes think that struggling is the same as suffering. It can be, of course. But often, it’s not. I have previously discussed this in the context of “academic rigour”, which can be delivered as either “rigour as challenge” (which sounds like good struggling), or “rigour as suffering” (which is how academic rigour manifests most of the time).
- Struggles are an inevitable part of life. The question is not whether we will face struggle but how we will face it when it unexpectedly comes. We need to stop seeing them as struggles and see them as opportunities to grow. Easier said than done, I know.
- Overcoming our struggles often forces us to tap into our creativity. We have heard that “necessity is the mother of invention”, and in some ways, this could be refashioned as “struggle is the mother of learning”. During COVID, we were forced into new ways of working…and AI is doing the same now as it disrupts the status quo in how we can learn (and teach…and assess…and…).
- Struggles keep us humble. They remind us that we are human, that we do not know everything, that we have weaknesses, that we make mistakes, and that we have limitations. Struggling can, therefore, give some protection from hubris and entitlement.
- Struggles can amplify our achievements. Is it true that nothing we truly value is easy to obtain? Reaching a summit and overcoming many struggles is what gives certain goals their lustre.
- We spend much time contemplating how to save young people, students, and our kids from struggling. Even when kids struggle to find things to do (it’s called boredom), we feel obliged to try to fill that time for them.
Final Flutter
In the case of leaving my daughter to her maths struggles, this is not to say that I never help her. More often than not, this story ends up with me sitting beside her, trying to coax and coach her through whatever it is she has been working through.
The issue (for me) is that I need to remember one of the first lessons of teacher training – drawn from the great Vygotsky – that learning (and life) almost always involves at least a little struggle.
I’m slowly coming to terms with that.
Serendipities 