Member-only story
In the past 6 years (since starting my athletic training program) I’ve learned a lot about learning, though I’ve probably barely scraped the surface. This isn’t meant to knock myself down, but for humility’s sake, because the science on cognition/learning goes so unbelievably deep, and I know people with up to 6x my years of experience. But I want to talk about learning — as a student in the classroom, since I will be one again. As an athletic training student in the clinic — gaining experience for your future as a clinician. As a TA — I will be learning how to do this for the first time! And I will probably fail and struggle! But that means I’ll come out better on the other side. Hopefully I’ll apply these lessons to my own process…and to how I view my own students.
- You don’t know what you don’t know. Even if other people don’t understand this concept, it’s really helpful for yourself. It can be easy to get mad at yourself when you do something wrong, but stop and think — was I taught how to do this? Or, even if you were taught — did I simply fail because it was my first time trying it, and I’ll get it next time? Most likely. But I love this phrase because it’s allowed me to be much more gracious towards myself with my failures.
- It’s okay to fail [caveat: do better the next time]. Will Smith once said something about “fail early, fail often, fail forward”. I love this bit because it took me until after graduating my AT program to understand that failure is okay because it’s how you learn. But you definitely don’t want that failure to go to waste…
