While I don't consider Elbow's personal trials and tribulations failures (teaching at MIT after dropping out of Oxford is not like ending up working at a canning factory on the New England coast) I'll suspend my disbelief and allow that he saw it as a failure.
That said, I do think we learn more from "failures" than we do from "successes." I'm using quotes because (as we can see in Elbow's case) one person's failure is another person's success and vice-versa. It is how we deal with those failures that is crucial to our learning. Hopefully, the critical comments we receive or give to our students will be constructive and delivered with good humor so they will be well-received and learning can take place.
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I totally agree with your wonderfully expressed look at failure - it is all relative, to be sure. Failure can be a powerful experience and mold us to be better people. Unfortunately, I don't think we give kids enough permission or room to fail. We don't philosophically approach failure as a learning experience but as a reflection of them as people, which can be be counter productive. We somehow need to fix this in our culture, I believe.
Your discussion of failures and successes causes me to think. It's amazing how some people handle failure. For some it acts as a spur to continue a journey, and for others it causes them to freeze up in fear and not take another step. It takes a discerning teacher to distinguish and help children succeed. Peter Elbow refused to write, but eventually returns to academia to write. He then uses this experience to transform how we teach writing.
I want to bridge the subject of humor since you have mentioned it. What ever teachers teach and no matter which level, it always goes a long way to maintain a sense of humor. My favorite teachers were the ones who did not act as though they took themselves too seriously!
I still have reservations about Elbow's sincerity or should we say sarcasm.
Yes, we do learn from failure. I like your insight.
I think failure is in the eye of the beholder though. If I'd been at Oxford and had tanked out, I would be pretty darned traumatized by it. Actually, I'm not sure I know anyone who wouldn't. Is failure magnified when you're used to succeeding and having a place of privilege...? Maybe.
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