pencil, eraser, mistakes, failure etc
My friend Bhuvana shared this via email with me:
Hi, I liked this and wanted to share with you all
Pencil: I'm sorry....
Eraser: For what? You didn't do anything wrong.
Pencil: I'm sorry cos you get hurt bcos of me. Whenever I made a mistake, you're always there to erase it. But as you make my mistakes vanish, you lose a part of yourself. You get smaller and smaller each time.
Eraser: That's true. But I don't really mind. You see, I was made to do this. I was made to help you whenever you do something wrong. Even though one day, I know I'll be gone and you'll replace me with a new one, I'm actually happy with my job. So please, stop worrying. I hate seeing you sad. :)
I found this conversation between the pencil and the eraser very inspirational. Parents are like the eraser whereas their children are the pencil. They're always there for their children, cleaning up their mistakes. Sometimes along the way... they get hurt, and become smaller (older, and eventually pass on). Though their children will eventually find someone new (spouse), but parents are still happy with what they do for their children, and will always hate seeing their precious ones worrying, or sad.
This is for all parents out there.....
Here is my reply to Bhuvana:
Bhuvana - i am going to very harsh on this email - just to make sure my point is heard above all the sugary sentimentality the story creates. I am also marking this to the emails from where you got it.
The reason i want to react so is because i think this kind of sentimentality or beliefs is what is constraining our generation's lower-than-potential-
According to me:
As parents WE are NOT Erasers - we are NOT here to erase our children mistakes. The child has both the ability to write as well as the ability to erase (read "correct") and also rewrite and so on. The child has the ability to be resilient, to be persistent, to be not afraid of pencil getting shorter or eraser getting shorter.
The child (or anybody else for that matter) does not become less neither by writing (as a pencil does) nor by erasing (as a eraser does).
We as human beings are designed to write and erase and we should not be afraid to do so.
To me more importantly the parents role is not to shield, erase or protect the child from doing mistakes - we should in fact encourage children to doing mistakes.
Current view of majority parents, - and you know I interact with thousands of middle and upper middle class parents every year -
is that of protection (from mistakes and failures),
is of being scared (of performance),
is of having little belief in their children (and hence all the time seeking external ways to make it easy for the child).
to me parents role is to empower children to write more and to keep on writing - though at many times what we do is not "right".
In fact i will even go back one step and claim that in reality we do not have nor we need erasers. There is no real need to "erase" what we did wrong. We can just leave what we did wrong and start fresh. In fact if we leave the mistake in-perspective, we can be reminded of the learning from them - else we may forget it.
I had an (Australian) English teacher (in my fifth standard) who said - "When you write, if you make an error - say a spelling - don't erase - simply cut it and write ahead of it or above it or below it etc.
She said this showed to you what is wrong and what is right.
What she didn't say was that it also showed that mistakes are just to be corrected, that its alright to do mistakes, that mistakes are the sources of learning and that if someone is doing more mistakes and then correcting them - it is a sign of growth and learning.
Rather than focus on mistakes parents need to develop the ability - in children - to sit back and look at their work and see what they need to learn from it and how to do it better - not erase it just because it seems not to be right.
The story below ends with ......(parents) will always hate seeing their precious ones worrying, or sad.
Why should parents "hate" seeing their wards worrying or sad? Worrying or sadness are merely two emotions - that we all come across in our life. Are we here to protect or shoo away (so called) negative feelings from our child's life? Is it even possible to do so? Emotions are not positive or negative - they are just emotions - what we need to learn is to be aware of them, to listen to our emotions and learn how to effectively respond to them.
Instead of empowering our children to deal with emotions (all kinds) we seem to be under an illusion that we can (and should) proptect them from experiencing them.
Our job is not to wipe their tears; our job - as parents and educators - is to show them that they have the ability to manage their tears!
I will yell at the top of my voice - lets empower children, lets make them resourceful from inside.
Lets not wish for a lighter load for them, lets prepare their back to be stronger.
