Failures & How to Overcome Them

By the end of the previous semester I began to realize, with the dim-witted expression of a horror movie's stock character, that I had let my students down.

Let me be clear: This is according to my personal standards and not to those of the department's. My students had learned to write. They knew dramatic structure, the tenets of fiction theory, the basic vocabulary. Most of all they wrote some fantastic stories. By anyone else's standards (including their own, if my glowing evaluations are to be trusted) I had done a wonderful, even exceptional, job of teaching them. Three of my students even switched their majors to creative writing.

But whose evaluation matters most to me? My own. And I received only passing marks in my own gradebook, not outstanding ones. I earned from my own hard conscience a C+.

I failed to return substantive comments on each of my student's stories. In addition to my students, I am constantly sent manuscripts by friends and acquaintances, more than you might think, and so I commented where and when I had time, but the praise and criticism was uneven. I tried to succeed as a commenter, but did not. I promised I would send them comments over the summer. I have not done this to any significant end. Some stories I did, but most have been lost in the digital tide of files ebbing and flowing over my desktop.

Now the new semester is na-nasu, which translates as "on the nose" in Russian, and figuratively means "upon us." My desk is filled with work and I don't have time to make it up to those students who deserve it.

This backward-looking approach to regret and self-pity won't do, and since I've taken the time to air my feelings -- and, I hope, to apologize -- I have a new strategy. It is, I am confident, the best approach to all mistakes, failures, missteps, and catastrophes.

It's secret can be found in three places.

The first is a creed from Thich Nhat Hahn's Living Buddha, Living Christ, where to calm an emotion, Hahn suggests mindful breathing. The exercise is in the thought behind it: "Breathing in, I recognize and accept my emotion. Breathing out, I calm my emotion."

Scholars may not often hear an echo of Jimmy Buffett in Buddhist/Christian meditation, but his songs have a calming effect on me, especially Track 13 on his album Take the Weather with You, "Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On." The message is remarkably similar to Thich Nhat Hahn's suggestion...

I bought a cheap watch from the crazy man /
Floating down canal /
It doesn't use numbers or moving hands /
It always just says NOW /
Now you may be thinking that I was had /
But this watch is never wrong /
And if I had trouble the warranty said /
"Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On"

The final piece of the puzzle is in my evaluations themselves. While positive, a clue had been left in the free comments, and, as evaluations should, the advice will benefit my future students. "Be more organized," one student said. "That's the only thing."

And I am confident I will be more organized.