The Greatest Teacher Failure Is…Not
I was nineteen years old and medically discharged from the military when I first started college. After the winter semester, I was academically suspended for maintaining a low GPA—I didn’t want to be there. I had enlisted thinking that I had the next four to forty years of my life planned out already. Getting discharged so soon having accomplished precious little didn’t do much for my mental health. My parents told me (or at least I think they did, it could just have been me putting words in their mouths as a defense mechanism) that if I did not go to school then I would be kicked out. I had no place else to go, so I chose Grand Rapids Community College.
Now I didn’t even have that.
Thankfully, I didn’t wind up getting kicked out. In fact, I ended up staying with Mom and Dad far longer than I originally intended to, but it worked out for the best. I drove them up the wall quite a bit, but I grew up quite a bit as time went on. And what a LONG time it was that went on! I was able to successfully appeal my suspension and get back into GRCC the next Fall. Somehow or another I managed to have my first successful college semester (probably out of fear of getting shut out of the college again) and, even more surprisingly, came back again in Winter 2011 for a less-successful (yet nevertheless successful) semester, proving to myself that I had it in me to continue with my education.
For whatever reason, I seemed to forget that lesson relatively quickly once summer ended. While I did return to GRCC that fall for my second year, I did not finish it. I was accepted into the Disney College Program at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, and since I knew I would not be in Michigan in January gave me all the excuses I needed to stop going to class.
Coming off the very first good year of school I had ever had, I was back to being a failure. I half- assed my way through my campus job, but since I would not be returning next semester that ended. There was no point in finding a job for four or five weeks, so I was back to being both unemployed and out of school (though I didn’t tell my parents that at the time). Very long story short, my internship down south ended up not lasting as long as I thought it would and lack of financial aid due to my grades meant that I could not afford to go back to school full-time in the fall. In fact, I was unable to scrounge up enough money to even go part-time. I was almost twenty-two years old and did not have a single thing going for me.
This was how it was for me for years after I was done at Disney World. There was no excuse for any of it, and even now looking back I can’t really say what it was that was going on in my head for so long. I would find myself back at GRCC EIGHT further semesters, and I ended up dropping out of every one of them. I found myself hired for a variety of different jobs in a variety of different industries; none of them lasted over a year for me. Despite earning thousands upon thousands of dollars and getting money back every year from my taxes, it all burned a hole in my pocket and my savings were nonexistent. I was what my fiancé liked to call “a mess”. By the time I had made the decision to move to California to be with her, I was unable to do so without asking for assistance. It was the absolute lowest point in my entire life and my biggest reminder that I was a failure.
In Rian Johnson’s epic failure of a masterpiece, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the lovechild of Kermit the Frog and George Lucas tells the Joker, “The greatest teacher failure is.” Being the wise old sage that Yoda is, one cannot expect him to simply give away all the answers up front.
When Luke Skywalker starts to ponder his dead mentor’s wisdom, he is almost certainly going down the path of knowledge that Yoda had put him on; he is not staring wisdom directly in the face the way he would a Force ghost. For Yoda to say what he said about failure being a teacher, then, means that this is yet another steppingstone towards the truth. If there is one thing that I learned during my own adult life, it is that one has to live in order to succeed—or fail. If one isn’t trying, they aren’t living. There certainly were several points in my life where I felt that my life had come to a standstill, but that was because I had stopped living. I had stopped caring. It did not take long for me to start feeling all the negative emotions that come with such a life, and it led to me being as determined as possible to change. In order to change, though, I needed to start living.
I had reached a point in my life where I got tired of failure, plain and simple. That is all it took. I knew deep down that I had the potential for great things to happen to me, and while I don’t believe that there was any singular moment that finally knocked me off the laziness rocker and got me moving in high gear towards my goals and dreams, I do know that I had long been tired of living the life that I lived. It dawned on me that I wasn’t getting any younger, but I was still at the exact same place I was at when I was nineteen living at home with Mom and Dad.
Only now, I was nearing thirty and a father myself! Life certainly was not going to get any easier as my daughter grew up, so it was either start getting to work now or it might never happen. I therefore enrolled at MiraCosta College and enrolled full-time. It was time to see if my new grown-up mentality was worth anything to me.
As it turned out, it was worth far more than I had ever valued it at. When I was a month shy of turning thirty-one, I earned my first 4.0. Four months later, I earned straight As in another round of courses. I was elected Executive Vice President of MiraCosta College’s Associated Student Government (essentially the number two executive position, below President) and was appointed President of our campus chapter of Phi Theta Kappa, which is reserved for students with a GPA of 3.5 or above. This was quite a step up from academic suspension ten years before. As of this writing, I have also put together and am leading a new student organization for creative writers at MiraCosta College and am also making regular appearances at various planning committees throughout the college. On top of all of this, I have five classes. On top of all that I have a toddler at home. Kenway Dawn Siebelink for the win!
Sometimes, a person just needs to live life in order to get to a spot mentally where they are finally set up for success. There are certain lessons that need to be learned—sometimes the hard way—before others are able to stick. Time does not have to be a detriment to one’s dreams; it might be the one critical factor that will ensure success. It was for me. Taking a look back at everything that I have been through over the last eleven or so years and seeing how far I have come, I am exactly where I have always wanted to be and therefore do not have a single solitary regret. There are times where I wished I had gotten to this point sooner, but then I remember how unprepared I was back then and how everything that had happened was setting me up to become the dedicated, mature individual that I am today. I could not have done what I have done without all the prep work that came with living life in my twenties. And while I have become quite the Star Wars fan over the years, I find myself respectfully disagreeing with the wise Jedi Master Yoda on just one point.
Failure is not the greatest teacher. That honor belongs to a life well-lived.