And then you come 4th at the Olympics
While I am writing this the Paris Olympics are in full swing. Gold, silver and bronze medals are what the athletes are after. It is a dream to win one of those, but there are only a few that will. Now imagine that you have done everything you can to get there. Just prior you managed to win a big game. You are ready to take on the world. And then you are 4th at the Olympics. No medal, no mention, no celebration. A wonderful accomplishment, but not what you wanted and yet you need to go to the next competition. What you need is to bounce back from disappointment.
The people who bounce back have resilience and resilience is something you learn when you’re young. You want to be invited to a birthday party, but you are not. You wanted to have a Nintendo switch, but you got a Playstation. You thought of a great toy, but you do not know how to make it. In each of these cases you are disappointed. How you handle that disappointment is what is called coping. And the better you cope, the more resilience you have. At Make + Meld we believe that we help build this resilience.
How would woodworking help with this?
In the projects we do at Make + Meld there is an element of design and discovery. Children come up with their own plans to build, for example, a toy. Sometimes they come up with something that’s too elaborate or too difficult. Or once they start building, the project does not quite work the way they would have liked it, or it does not look the way they imagined it. In our hands-on incursions, we try to help them think of a solution. We help them to adapt their idea to something that does work. To something that does look good. And that makes these incursions special. Here is just one of the anecdotes that shows what I mean.
I went to a school where we were guiding Year 3 students to build their own clocks. The project follows instructions with measuring and dividing, and once the wooden part of the clock is assembled, the kids are allowed to decorate them whichever way they want. One of the children had started decorating his clock and then decided that he didn’t like what he had done. He came up to me and asked if he could make a different clock. I asked if something was broken, as we replace the parts so that the child has a product by the end of the incursion, but if decorations go wrong, we don’t replace this. We will tell them to continue working and help them think of different ideas to correct their decorating “mistake”. In this case the child didn’t like the fact that I had said no and got really upset. I tried to talk to him, but there was at that point no reasoning, so I told his teacher what happened. She was busy with somebody else and could not attend to him at that specific time. I took away the tools from him so he would not hurt himself. He first had to calm down. Once he had calmed down, he went back to the table and solved his problem. I was busy with other children putting in clock mechanisms and batteries for working clocks. I had seen him work on his clock, but he needed no more help. After they had tidied and just before they had to return to class, he came up to me and he said; “look at my beautiful clock”. He was so proud. Yes, he had gone through a tantrum, and he was angry and disappointed, but by the end the smile on his face was so big and he was so proud! He had made something so beautiful and fixed his problem by himself.
It had been all worth it, even the tantrum. Hopefully the next time he will remember that experience and know that he can work through the disappointment that he felt.
Renate (workshop facilitator)
