school year is about to start here in the US and this is the time of year I frequently get the question what's one finding from psychology you wish every student knew I'm Dan Willingham I'm a professor who studies human learning how we respond to setbacks is very difficult to control but I think it's very important because everybody has things go wrong you fail a test or you've got a weekend when it's really important that you be productive and you get nothing done the students who struggle in school tend to respond to these kinds of setbacks
in one of two ways one thing they'll do is they'll respond with a lot of emotion they get very angry at themselves lots of self-recrimination lots of regret and they're basically pouring energy into something that's already in the past the second thing they'll do is they'll interpret setbacks as evidence that they don't really belong in school so they let things go from I have the task and I didn't perform it very well to I just generally suck obviously you don't want to do either one of those things but you also don't want to just brush
this off either so instead when something goes wrong ask yourself what happened okay I'm I'm really angry because I needed to be productive and I wasn't well was I in the wrong place did I go about my task the wrong way was I with the wrong people what so one thing I really want students to remember this year is that things are going to go wrong this year when they do try to remember to ask yourself what is something different that I can try next time because if you can do that often enough that's how
you're going to have fewer setbacks
