One of the most famous quotes in the history of spaceflight is “Failure is not an Option,” by Gene Kranz, Lead Flight Director during Apollo 13.  OF course, he was correct - NASA couldn’t afford to fail when lives were on the line.  This quote also shows up as the title of an education book. Over the years, I have seen the quote in many science classrooms across the country. Is this really the message that we want to send our students?  As former Packer quarterback Jim McMahn said, “…risk taking is inherently failure prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking.  Would NASA ever have gotten off the ground if tens of thousands of people, from politicians to engineers to astronauts were not willing to take risks?

In order to learn, we need to take risks.  We need to push beyond our comfort zone.  Too many of our students are so worried about counting points that they are afraid to do anything original - they are afraid to take risks because they are afraid to fail.

Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University said, “The core skill of an innovator is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”  We could easily re-write this quote to say, “The core skill of a learner is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”

What would have happened to the people in this video if they would have avoided future failures instead of recovering?