by Stephen Daughton, Assistant Head, Pupil Data Teaching and Learning

Resilience is one of our Queenswood qualities, but I’m not sure we all know what it means.

Imagine moving to London at the start of your career and spending two years writing an epic History book in three volumes. You take your completed manuscript to a friend to read and he accidently burns it to dust on the fire one evening. Two years of research, with no spare copy….literally up in smoke. What on earth do you do now?

Or imagine writing a book, whilst bringing up a child on your own, with no income, and being rejected by publishers again, and again and again.

Imagine trying to make a change in the law and being outvoted. You try for over a decade and you lose every time you try.

Imagine being a basketball player who missed 9,000 shots, lost 300 games and on 26 occasions you were trusted with the winning shot…and you missed. The worst player ever…

No. That was Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time.

The rejected author? J K Rowling...her first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times by publishers. Until one took it on.

Thomas Carlyle saw a friend’s maid burn his book…he spent another two years re-writing it and went on to become one of the foremost mathematicians, historians and social commentators of the 19^th Century.

And it was William Wilberforce who tried to introduce a law, losing and being voted down for 18 consecutive years…until, in 1807 his bill eventually passed. A bill that ended the Slave Trade in Britain.

These people showed resilience, the capacity to recover from difficulties and carry on.

Do not mistake this for the pig-headedness of simply doing the same thing again. It isn’t. Resilience is what successful people do when faced with failure and we would all do well to copy them.

Nearly all pupils think the same unspoken thing in the classroom. You look at those around you and ask, ‘Where do I fit in? Smarter than them, not as bright as them.’ Some even use this as an excuse when you get something wrong in class. ‘Oh well I’m not very good at languages, or maths or (god forbid) history.’ Or ‘Of course they did it right, they’re better than me at…’.

I hate hearing this…because it isn’t true.

When you learnt how to ride a bike, you fell off a lot, maybe hurt yourself in doing so, but you got back on and in a panic had another go and tried very hard to change something you thought caused you to fall off last time. Each time you fell, you changed something else and held onto the things that worked until you gradually got better and soon you could ride a bike. You had to show resilience to learn that. It hurt and it was frightening.

Learning is like that, especially when it doesn’t go well. But those are the most important moments. Your greatest chance of learning is when you fail. And you must pay very close attention in those moments. Try to figure out what you need to do to improve. Then have another go and try to be better.

Your place in science, in geography or English is not fixed. The response to failure should not be to give up, stop trying, declare yourself not good at this or that. It should be to try and overcome.

If you accept failure and give up then there you shall remain, fixed and stationary. If you are resilient then life becomes about looking forward, trying again…like Thomas Carlyle, or J K Rowling or William Wilberforce.

Your place in life is not fixed. You are not your last mark…that does not define you. What does define you is what you do about it.

Life is only ever about what you do next. What you did cannot be changed…it is done. What you do next is not yet written. You can pick up the pen and write a different result, or leave the last judgement standing.

I want you always to choose to be resilient.