Keep Picking It Up: Why Students Need to Fail to Learn

Last July, my daughter caught a double illusion for the first time.

If you’re unfamiliar with baton twirling, it’s an art and a sport that combines agility, coordination, balance, and choreography, all while spinning a metal baton through the air with sometimes razor-thin margins of success. A double illusion is an advanced trick. It requires not just skill, but trust in the process and your body. It's the kind of trick that doesn’t happen by chance. It takes work.

Most people didn’t see the years of preparation that led up to that first successful attempt. The years of breaking the skill into pieces, body alignment, grip strength, foot placement, and timing. The attempts that ended with the baton clattering to the floor. The slow progress, the visible frustration, and the decision every single time to pick the baton back up and try again.

Since that day in July, she’s practiced that one trick 10 times or more a day, 6 to 7 days a week. For a long time, she missed every time. Then, slowly, she started catching one out of ten. Then two. Now she’s at three out of ten. Soon, it will be five. Then eight. Then nine.

Eventually, it will be muscle memory. And then, she’ll raise the bar again.

This is what learning looks like. It’s uncomfortable. It’s frustrating. It’s painstakingly slow. It requires repetition, risk, reflection, and perseverance. And most of all, it requires failure. Not once or twice. But again and again and again.

We live in a world that often prizes the product over the process. Straight A’s, perfect scores, instant results. But the truth is, learning that lasts doesn’t come from getting everything right the first time. It comes from struggling through what we can’t do, yet.

This is the message we must send to our students, especially now. Learning isn’t about perfection. It’s about showing up. It’s about failing in a safe environment, reflecting, making micro-adjustments, and going again. It’s about not letting the baton on the floor be the end of the story.

Too often, we unintentionally remove failure from learning. We soften feedback, pad rubrics, allow do-overs without reflection, or move the goalposts to avoid discomfort. But discomfort is where the real learning begins. When students feel safe to fail, they start to internalize that failure isn’t a verdict—it’s a teacher. It offers information, not condemnation.

What would our classrooms look like if we celebrated effort as loudly as outcomes?

What if we normalized the idea that mastery takes time, and that the best learners aren’t always the ones who succeed right away, but the ones who return, again and again, to the work?

The heart of what we need to teach students isn’t how to succeed the first time. It’s how to keep trying. How to build resilience. How to manage frustration, self-correct, and keep going when it’s hard and progress feels invisible.

Pick it up. Try again.

And when you’ve caught it 9 out of 10 times, set your next overlapping goal. That’s where growth lives, between what you can do now and what you dare to try next. Because authentic learning isn’t a straight line, it’s a spiral. And every turn begins with picking the baton up one more time.