This is the nadir of the Age of Aquarius

“Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.”~ John Keats


I read recently of a high school in Saskatchewan of which the principal has decided that the institution will no longer hand out Fs for failing a course, but will substitute Is for Incomplete.

How sweet.

Yet, I didn’t even need to go to second glance to realize that there is a flaw in this metaphorical ointment, in that a letter is just a letter (and a kiss is just a kiss, but that’s another matter) and whether your slacker boy or girl out there on the bald prairie has an I or F on that report card, they will still need to repeat the course. This, of course, means that your kid FAILED!

The very caring principal (as opposed to the very 'I don’t give a shit' principal that I had) felt that the symbolic power of that F stood in good stead of utterly ruining your spawn, and possibly turning him or her to a life of depravity and/or crime.

To this I say ‘meadowmuffins.’

It is not uncommon for the more sensitive of pedants to have a very skewed view of life’s realities. I should know because I once worked with a few examples. When you through in an overweening political correctness, not to mention a desire to never offend a parent, you have a recipe for disaster. You have also shovelled a good dollop of coal onto the fire of an adolescent sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement that is bound to get mighty short shrift in the more pressing financial and employment times we will be facing.

“Hey, dude, I didn’t flunk because I’m the best. My Mom said.”

What I don’t understand is how this prissy headmaster thinks what he is doing is a favor to a kid. You are, my pedagogical friend, denying the young slacker a specific right, which is the right to fail. I think that is written into the constitution. If not, it should be. Of all of life’s lessons, abject failure brings forth survival skills so that we have ammunition against ultimate failure.

Hey, here’s a thought, Mr. principal-man, we ‘learn’ from our hardest lessons and failure happens to be one of the pivotal ones.

Look at John McCain, he just failed. You don’t see him whining or feeling that he now must hang his head in disgrace. Look at Richard Nixon. Naah, maybe not. OK, Sarah Palin., Oh, right, her failure was 10th grade geography, the Africa chapter. Well, OK, maybe we don’t all learn, but you get my drift.

I failed senior math in high school. I failed senior math because I literally never cracked a book on the subject from September to June. I think it was something to do with the angora sweater person sitting across from me. So, I flunked. There it was. Great big F. No semi-neutral I on the card my folks had to sign. So, I didn’t officially graduate high school because of that one intercoursing course.

I had to repeat it. Fortunately in BC in those days they had such a thing called senior matric, or Grade 13. It was really freshman college in terms of credits, but a body could take it and make up for a failure. Well I, grudgingly, yet having no choice, took grade 13 and repeated my math course. The failure, and the mortification made me want to apply myself. I did. I ended up with the highest grade in the school in senior math.

From that point there was no looking back. Academically, at least. There was a certain amount of looking back in other realms. But, at least I’d learned how to handle failure and truly, despite what the principal believes, no stigma of failure has followed me in my assorted professional callings.

Flunk the little bastards, I say! It’ll do ‘em a world of good.