Abject Failure Makes Success Sweeter

I had never done it before in a class—spun a film on DVD out of a computer, through a projector, and onto a screen; but I had the procedure down. I swear, I had it down, all my fancy bookmarks in place. I like technology, but I've suffered more than my share of mortifying miscues.

So I get things set up before the class starts. I plug in the cords and hit all the right buttons.

Nothing works. Nothing works.

I tell a student to run to the tech people down the hall and fetch someone, anyone, as I keep fiddling. We're five minutes into the class period and still nothing’s working, so I start lecturing, shooting from the hip. I hadn't planned on talking about Native American history, but I tell myself the topic is roughly connected.

A techie savior rushes in, but the blasted machine keeps refusing to show the video. For fifteen minutes, I keep looking back at her while yakking away about the Dawes Act, the whole blame lecture coming from the seat of my pants. The students are looking at me as if they want their money back. The clock is ticking.

Finally, she says she's got the video running in some other software, not in the program where I'd so deftly tucked all my bookmarks. Okay. Deal. Just press the fast forward button until we get relatively close to the scene I want to show. I do, it crawls along, and finally I hit "play." No sound. I’m not kidding—no sound.

Suddenly, my techie discovers an obscure wire pulled out of the back of the projector or boom box or whatever—hence, no sound. But now it's also 1:45, and the class is officially a train wreck.

I tell my students to leave. They do, mercifully.

Failure—a real blowout failure. I walk back to my office licking wounds and muttering words I can’t print.

After 35 years of teaching, such abject failure still makes me think I should have been a roofer. But then, as the poet Emily Dickinson says, “Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed.” Technology laid a whipping on me in class that day. It accomplished this much at least: I tell myself I am not walking back into that room without having the whole gig down. Abject failure can be cod liver oil for the soul, hustling me along toward success—or at least away from even the faintest possibility of any sorry repetition.

I’m a believer, born and reared a Calvinist. I’d be the last to say that my salvation is dependent on my own sweat and tears. No way.

But down here wandering in the vale of tears, I’ve come to understand that when utter devastation is all that lies behind me in a classroom, the only way to go on is to pick up the pieces, jut the jaw, gird the loins.

Oh, and never, ever use that same blasted video projector.

That too.