Recently a parent asked for some reading material as his daughter had been cheating & lying and he

was wanting to find out more to help work his way through this situation. I sent him some ideas and then started pondering my own indiscretions in this area.

Coming from a successful school background, with successful parents and being the first person in my entire extended family ever to go to University (a huge deal), my journey was not the plain sailing I imagined it would be.

I loved student life – the freedom, friendships, and the learning. I was living my childhood dream to become a teacher. However half way through my first year, I suddenly faced a very unfamiliar situation – I had failed an Education 101 paper! I felt alone, humiliated and shamed; I didn’t tell anyone from embarrassment and fear of what they might think of me.

Everyone around me seemed to have it easy – they were passing with far less effort than me. I didn’t know what to do. My major thought and concern was what if my parents find out? They would be so disappointed in me. Maybe they would love me less. I knew they had worked hard to ensure I could follow my dreams, and I had let them down.

What could I do? At this point some people turn to alcohol, drugs, fast cars, self harming, and sex – anything for some escapism. I choose a different route… cheating. The next assignment happened to be the same topic that had been set the previous year. I found a student a year ahead of me and asked to borrow her assignment to ‘check I was on the right track’. It happened she has received an ‘A’ for her work. Basically I copied this assignment word for word. I was duly given an ‘A’ which brought my total mark

for the year to a passing grade – and no-one knew, especially my parents.

I lived in fear that I would be ‘found out’ for weeks while it was being marked, months before I got the final grade for the year, and 3 years before I was given my degree. What if I was expelled from Teachers College and University? What if I was paraded in front of my peers as an example of ‘what not to do or be’? What if my parents found out? The truth is I have spoken about this, over the past 10 years, in many workshops, keynote speeches, webinars and seminars – and still my parents do not know.

The feeling of shame is linked with low self worth. What I lacked were strategies for dealing with failure. I had a mindset that thought I should be as good as everyone else, and believed failing was a bad thing. So what can you do as an educator and/or a parent to prepare your child for feeling like they are not enough and to increase their self worth? Below is a quick list of ideas and, of course, there is an obvious overlap. I have written about some of these before, and they are still relevant.

Ideas for the classroom:

• Teach students the brain can always keep learning and growing. Learning is a process. Making mistakes and failure is part of this process.
• Celebrate making mistakes as it means learning can now occur. My goal is to normalise mistakes.
• Value the process more than the finished result. Ask students to show their working and thinking in ALL subjects, not only Maths. For example, when writing an essay, story, history recount, have students put their draft into a word cloud programme such as ‘wordle’.