He isn’t accustomed to failure. School work (to date) comes too easy to him. We could force him to participate in sports so that he knows what it feels like to lose, but that doesn’t seem right. Although, come to think of it, he does play soccer in the fall, and last year’s team lost nearly every game without it bothering him, I think. So maybe it wasn’t the losing/failing that bothered him so much … maybe it was that he lost while competing in something he genuinely cared about. Or maybe it was the hit to an ego that expected to win something, but didn’t.
Austin has spent the better part of this school year reading a series of books with his closest friends. The books weren’t chosen by them, but instead by a committee somewhere in the area (I don’t know who, specifically). The books were to be read by participants in the Battle of the Books competition. Battle of the Books is a quiz game, where school-aged participants are asked challenging questions about the content of books that they have read. The strongest team in the school is invited to compete in the regional competition.
2 weeks ago, Austin and his four closest sixth-grade friends – they called their team “The Geek Gang”* – narrowly lost to a team of four fifth-graders in the initial round of the tourney, and he was sour. The kid had been in a better mood when suffering through 3 days of high-grade fever only 2 weeks earlier than when he came home that day. You see: he had answered all of his questions accurately, but his team had failed to answer 2 questions correctly; each question was from a book that his teammates were supposed to have reviewed before the competition, but they ran out of time prior to the event.
“If only we had another week to prepare, we could have gotten those questions right,” he fumed.
“True,” I said, “but then the other team would have another week to prepare, and they probably would have been more prepared for the question that they answered wrong too.” He looked at me with scorn through the bottom of his eyelids – apparently he was none-to-pleased with my more-nuanced perspective.
So, while he harbored a little bit of resentment towards his friends who hadn’t had enough time to study for the competition to correctly answer the few questions they missed (and bear in mind, they lost by 2 points while third and fourth place finishers were 30-40 points behind – there was no shame in their loss), he eventually forgave them when he discovered that there was going to be a second competition: a written test, answering questions about the same books. The participants with the best scores are going to fill the last 2 positions (team of 6) on the team that will represent the school in the regional 5-6th grade competition; 2 others will serve as alternates.
Austin tested for the final 2 slots on Friday; he scored better than most of his friends, but they don’t know how their scores rank just yet. After talking with his friends, he seems assured of a position as an alternate on the team, at minimum. Perhaps he’ll make the team after all, clutching victory from the hands of defeat. Maybe he’ll play an integral role in Chittenango’s 5th and 6th grade triumph at the regional level. Or maybe – and more likely – he’ll taste the bitterness of defeat a second time.
Sure – it’d be nice if he were to win, but he might learn an even more important lesson if he lost. Of course, I’ll cheer for his victory – life will offer him his share of meaningful defeats soon enough.
* The team-name was dripping with irony, because when Austin was asked what a ‘geek’ is, he replied, “Someone who is intelligent.” He may be a geek, but he still doesn’t know why yet.