Failure is a normal part of life. It is something that we have all experienced before in many different ways and to many different extents. Lots of Stevens students, as well as those who attend other elite universities, spend the majority of their lives at the top of their classes, receiving accolades for their achievements starting at a young age. Because of this, students who attend elite universities go in believing that failure in school or in the workforce is the worst thing that can happen, and it must be avoided at all costs. Having aspirations to make grand contributions to their fields of study, these students often ignore their past teachings that failure is a great teacher and a natural part of life. Instead, experiencing failure brings about anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and depression for those who are ill-equipped to handle it. These feelings can permeate other areas of their lives and limit their potential for growth. Seeing this firsthand, Dr. Theresa MacPahail, a Stevens Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society and medical anthropologist, created a course called Failure 101 to teach students about failure management.
HST 140, otherwise known as Failure 101, is a course that offers the chance to examine the concept of failure through various lenses including, “historical, philosophical, cultural, economic, scientific, political, and psychological”, according to the course description. The curriculum offers an analysis of how failure is defined as well as how it affects different social groups in different settings and times. The aim of this course is to normalize failure and provide tools for coping with failure in a healthy way. This builds resilience that will carry well into students’ personal and professional lives. Dr. MacPhail wanted the structure of this class to provide a unique way of analyzing failure that gets students, “familiar with the concept of failure, and introduce it as a necessary and natural part of life and as a crucial component of a well-lived life”, she told Freakonomics.
Dr. MacPhail starts her class off by examining the ultimate example of failure: death. The philosophy behind this reason stems from the philosophy of anthropologist Ernest Becker. His take on society as a whole was that it is a, “ living myth of the significance of human life, [and] that we defiantly create meaning where none exists because we do not want to deal with the terror that the ultimate mistake is one that’s going to get us killed.” The fear of the unknown and uncontrollable leads us to create constructs and try desperately to fill in the blanks and provide meaning to the meaningless as a way of escaping our fear of failure. Or it causes us to seek distractions wherever possible that keep us comfortable and keep us from confronting our fear of failure. Becker’s theory was that “ if we distract ourselves and we try to push down our fears of failing, ultimately that’s about our fear of dying”, said MacPhail. The irony is that distracting ourselves from failure instead of being open and honest about it creates more harm to us than the failure itself. For this reason, MacPhail starts the beginning of this class by demanding that her students get comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty. Embracing the idea that they are going to fail is something she believes is, “the antidote to that anxiety.”
Failure 101 offers students the chance to examine failure through many different scopes and assess some of the reasons why some failures are feared more than others. With a unique curriculum meant to give students experience with failure themselves, as well as unorthodox class conversations, this class is aimed at teaching students to embrace failure as a necessary part of a successful life rather than run from it. Dr. MacPhail made note of testimonials from past students, who have started the class thinking that they fail in their lives way more often than the average person and leave realizing that everyone fails all the time and it doesn’t take away from the value of their lives in any way. That is the lesson Dr. MacPhail hopes to give all students who take her class.
