Key to Success: Optimism

The news is bad -  mass murder in Norway, US financial crisis, one of our leaders with cancer, and no sun in Vancouver!  Have you noticed how you feel when you hear all this bad news?  It doesn’t feel good does it?  It puts a damper on your life, on what you want to do, what you think you can do. It stops you doing things that you feel like doing.

When you lose your sense of optimism, the feeling that things will get batter, that here are good things around the next corner, you don’t have the energy to do anything.

It is the same with children when they lose their optimism about their ability to learn.  They do not have the energy they need to be able to learn, they have no reason to learn, so they don’t, they give up, they don’t even try.

It happens gradually, this loss of an optimistic attitude about the future and their place in it.  It is like a slow growing disease that gradually takes over someone’s life.

Children are naturally optimistic but over time this optimism can be knocked out of them.  When that happens they stop learning, they stop trying to make a future for themselves.

And it is teachers, parents, and the school system that do this.

School systems provide children with a series of hurdles that they must get over in order to move on.  Children have to pass exams, make the grade, win a scholarship.

Teachers have to emphasize the skills students need to pass these exams, to make the grade, even when a child’s abilities do not fit the system.

Parents have to try, despite all they know and understand about their child, to help their child finish homework, study for tests, make the grade.

There are always hurdles for a student to get over, and consequences when he does not get over them.

Every time a child fails to get over a hurdle, despite having worked hard, something happens to that child’s attitude.  He begins to lose his optimistic outlook on life.  He stops trying to learn.

Let’s get real.  School systems aren’t going to change, schools aren’t going to change either.  So it is up to you to make sure that your child does not lose his optimism, his belief that things will get better, that he can beat the system and come out on top.

The next post will show you how.