Complete Coverage

Should I Let Them Fail?

By Laura Reasoner Jones

I’ve spent the last week agonizing over my after-school advanced robotics program. How can I prevent what is turning out to be a train wreck in progress?

At least two of my five teams of 5th and 6th graders are not going to be able to present anything at our final parent demonstration event, and I need to decide what I am going to do about it. Am I going to let them experience the natural consequences of inaction, or am I going to intervene and fix things? In the heat of the moment, I feel like everything I have ever believed in as a teacher or parent is at stake.

Let me set the stage: I have 11 kids in the advanced robotics program—an after-school club with the goal of exposing kids to Lego Robotics using my grant-funded NXT kits . I did this last year for the first time, and had 18 kids, but only eight of them came back (our school is cursed with extremely high mobility). So I recruited three girls from last year’s Pico Cricket programming class and hoped they would catch up. As a result, my current group consists of eight 6th grade boys from last year and three...