As a history tutor, I often think of ways to make history exciting. Not just interesting, funny. Not just informative, outrageous. And so, I love to tell the story of Henry VIII. Scandal! Divorce. Execution. Betrayal.
"And then, imagine, he finally gets the son he has moved mountains for, his heir, his dream, and the kid is sickly from birth, and dies shortly after taking the throne, before going through puberty!"
"Karma," one of my students said.
Gotcha!
And they're with me. Involved in the story, engaged.
Because I think about history so much, and ways of telling these stories, I also often try to relate tales from hundreds of years ago to today. If I'm really lucky, I can weave in lessons that kids need to learn in general, like overcoming failure.
Christopher Columbus is my favorite story in terms of failure. The man was an ambitious sailor who was anxious to find a path, by sea, around the horn of Africa, over to India, so as to avoid the drama involved in crossing through the Ottoman empire.
At this point, I pull out the map, reveal to my students what the land journey would involve, and point out what he was trying to do by sea, when, whoops, (their eyes follow my finger as I slide it across the vast blue Atlantic) he lands in the Caribbean, ahem, excuse me, "West Indies."
The most successful failure of all time.
He failed to find India. Vasco da Gama did that a few years later.
But what a success for Europe, his "discovery" of the New World. (Obviously not so much for the Native Americans.)
Riches beyond riches piled upon riches. (Not to mention death, destruction, and dysentery.)
In any event, I get to turn this piece of history into a lesson on both revisionist history and the incredible success to be found in failure. And they get it. We have wonderful conversations about evil and good, about learning from mistakes or forging on blind with cognitive dissonance.
And this last week, I got served my own healthy portion of successful failure.
My toddler potty trained by accident.
Yes, you read that right. By accident.
I had very few supplies: a potty we bought months ago that has been used as a stool and a storage container by my daughter, and a half dozen pull ups and two pairs of training underwear handed down by my niece.
Horribly armed thusly last week, I watched as Celaya was running around naked and rushed to me, urgently, "mama, put a diaper on me!"
Ding! I thought. Serendipity!
"Go on your potty, honey, it's right there."
She did. Well, she sat on her potty. And played. For thirty minutes.
"Honey, if you don't have to go, you don't have to sit there. You can run around. Just let me know when you have to go."
What followed was three hours of this exact scenario repeated. Her asking for a diaper, me urging her to sit on her potty, her playing on it, eventually getting up, and repeating it all over again. Finally, she broke down in tears (I had been filling her up with water the entire time, so I'm sure her bladder was quite full). She sat and cried for a good ten minutes before she couldn't hold it any longer.
"Oh! Oh look!" She said, sincerely pleased with herself. And truly as if she had done this all on her own with none of the preceding drama. That was a week ago. With the exception of one really bad day because of some too embarrassing to repeat parenting mistakes, she has taken to potty training like a pro. In public, outside, at home, with me, my husband, and my brother, my not even three year old behaves incredibly maturely about a process that to me has seemed highly charged emotionally.
A successful failure. I do feel like I failed her in so many ways this last week. I should have been prepared. I should have just let her put a diaper on that day. I shouldn't have threatened to kill my husband when he handled it differently than I would have. (Yea, that really happened.) But we rode the waves, we battened down the hatches, and we, for the most part, let the ocean guide us in the direction she chose, toward her success.
And she is turning out to be one of the most intuitive little oceans I've ever heard of.
And I'm a history tutor.
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