Li traveled to Ecuador & the Galápagos in the summer of 2019 on one of Putney’s Spanish language immersion programs. For her college admissions essay, she wrote about a particular experience on her trip, and what it made her realize about the value of failure. This fall she’ll be attending Barnard College and Columbia University.
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The little girl slipped off the chair. It was nearly double her size and she’d fallen for the third time. This time, she hit her nose on her desk and soon blood was gushing all over the floor. I rushed to her side.
“¿Qué pasó?” I managed to ask, through a rising feeling of panic.
She sobbed in response and stared at the puddle of blood forming in front of her. I was astounded that a nosebleed could be so severe.
I wracked my brain for the right words to say. “Por favor,” I begged, “levanta la cabeza.”
She didn’t listen, or more likely, didn’t understand me, because she continued to look at the floor, the growing pool of blood upsetting her more. I desperately wished I could tell her that it would be okay and that it was just a nosebleed. But I had struggled to tell her to lift her head. Luckily, the teacher came and the situation was soon resolved.
I was in a small village in Ecuador for a month with ten other students, speaking Spanish the entire time. The learning curve was steep. We slept in a classroom in sleeping bags, washed our dishes in buckets of boiled water, and showered with a hose. However, these complications were nothing compared to the challenge of the language barrier. I struggled to form sentences and I got frustrated when my words wouldn’t come out fast enough. Other students in the group were better at conversing in Spanish than I was, which only made me more hesitant to speak.
What challenged my Spanish skills the most was teaching English to a class of preschoolers. This was already a near-impossible task; they hardly knew the Spanish alphabet, let alone the English one. My laughable Spanish was just an added challenge, as the things I did happen to know were not very useful when it came to teaching little kids: “¿Puedo ir al baño?” wouldn’t get me very far. This situation was only made worse by the nosebleed incident, and I left the classroom that day feeling disappointed in myself for being unable to help the girl.
But progress came. I showed up at the school, I made sure to put the girl in a chair her size, and I taught numbers and letters until the day was over. I pushed myself to converse with the villagers, who were understanding when I made mistakes. By the end of the month, I had control of the classroom and my students could recite the alphabet. I was particularly proud that I no longer hesitated before I spoke.
This wasn’t because I became fluent in Spanish or because I learned new vocabulary. This was because I let myself fail. In speaking to the people around me, I constantly made errors, and they graciously tried to help. When I said the wrong thing in front of my students, I don’t even think they noticed. I realized that not only was it okay to say the wrong thing, but it was necessary if I wanted to improve.
I had grown up hearing the proverbs about accepting failure as a path to success, but I had never experienced any situations where I could see my failures translate into progress. This was a situation where it was impossible to avoid failure, and therefore, impossible to “avoid” success. I realized that the reason why I hadn’t faced situations like this wasn’t that I couldn’t fail, but that I didn’t allow myself to. Knowing this, I hope to gather my confidence and make many more mistakes. I just wish I could have told the little girl with the nosebleed not to worry so much, that this was just one setback. Even if at the moment things were really scary or embarrassing, it was going to be okay.
