How Many Second Chances Does One Person Get?

At the end of my final year of high school, I failed my Matriculation examinations.

There was no convenient way around it. If I wanted another chance, I had to repeat the entire year.

So, I did.

I went back to school, studied the subjects again, sat the examinations again and this time passed.

At that age, repeating a year seemed enormous. When you are young, a single year represents a significant proportion of your entire life. Watching your friends move on while you remain behind can easily feel as though everyone else has started their future while yours has been postponed.

I didn’t know it at the time, but repeating that year would establish something of a pattern in my life.

I was going to become quite experienced at second chances.

Perhaps the Public Service Would Have Me

After completing high school, I had to decide what to do next.

One possibility was the Government Public Service. I applied for an administrative position and attended an interview.

I failed.

There was no second interview. Nobody telephoned a week later to say that they had reconsidered and discovered qualities in me that had somehow escaped them the first time.

I simply didn’t get the job.

At the time, of course, it was disappointing.

Looking back many years later, I find these moments interesting because we tend to regard the opportunity immediately in front of us as much more important than it may actually be.

When I attended that interview, the question was:

Will I get this job?

The question I couldn’t possibly ask was:

What will happen to my life if I don’t?

Failure closed one door.

So I tried another.

University Wasn’t Exactly a Triumph Either

I commenced a science and mathematics course at university.

You might imagine that, having already experienced failure at school, I would now become the model student: diligent, organised and determined never to repeat the experience.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t always follow the structure of an inspirational movie.

In my second year, my academic performance was poor.

Poor enough that I was dropped from the university.

This wasn’t an administrative error. The university had looked at my results and acted on the evidence in front of it.

I had already failed my Matriculation examinations.

I had failed to obtain the Public Service position.

Now I had managed to get into university and then failed to stay there.

If somebody had been keeping a scorecard, things weren’t looking particularly promising.

But once again, there was somewhere else to go.

I enrolled at another institution and commenced another course.

Then something unexpected happened.

The following year, the university that had dropped me accepted me back to complete my original studies.

I had been given another chance.

There was one complication.

By then, I had started the new course.

I could have abandoned it and simply returned to my original studies.

Instead, I continued with both.

For a period, I was studying simultaneously at two institutions, and eventually I completed both courses.

A student whose academic performance had once been poor enough for a university to ask him to leave eventually found himself completing two courses at the same time.

And education didn’t stop there.

Over the years, I went on to complete a science degree, a mathematics degree, a teaching diploma, a Bachelor of Education and eventually a Master of Education.

My career followed a similar path.

The student who had once failed Matriculation and been dropped from university eventually became a mathematics teacher and later a Head of Mathematics. I also served on a government panel involved in the assessment and development of official mathematics examinations.

Along the way, I co-authored a considerable number of mathematics textbooks and edited others.

There is a certain irony in all this that I appreciate much more now.

Someone who had once failed his own final school examinations eventually helped write the mathematics books used by other students, edited the work of other authors, and became involved in developing and assessing final school mathematics examinations.

It would be tempting to present all this as evidence that the people who rejected me earlier had been wrong.

But they weren’t.

My performance at the time had been poor. They could only judge the person and the results in front of them.

What changed was not the past.

What changed was what came afterwards.

A second chance doesn’t erase what happened the first time.

It simply gives you an opportunity to write another result beside it.

Somewhere around this period came another, rather more practical test of my abilities: getting my driver’s licence.

I failed the driving test the first time.

On my second attempt, I passed — although “passed” may give an exaggerated impression of my performance. I scraped through.

Still, a pass is a pass. The licence made no distinction between those who passed brilliantly and those of us who had merely persuaded the examiner that we were safe enough to be let loose on the roads.

Another second chance successfully negotiated.

Apparently I Had No Aptitude

My difficulties with selection tests didn’t end there.

My father worked for the Ford Motor Company and, through a contact there, arranged for me to have an interview for a position in one of Ford’s technology departments involving computer programming.

It sounded promising.

As part of the selection process, however, I had to sit an aptitude test.

I failed it.

Later, I applied for a position with Kodak, the once-famous camera company. Once again, the selection process included a test, this time involving problem-solving.

I failed that one too.

By this stage, aptitude tests and I were developing a rather consistent relationship.

There is something slightly humbling about repeatedly failing tests designed to determine whether you have an aptitude for the very sort of logical and mathematical thinking you believe you possess.

Neither company gave me another chance.

But perhaps that illustrates another meaning of a second chance.

Ford didn’t reconsider. Kodak didn’t reconsider.

I simply went somewhere else.

Years later, after degrees in science and mathematics, a career teaching mathematics, writing textbooks and helping develop mathematics examinations, I could have looked back and concluded that those aptitude tests had been wrong.

But that would miss the point.

They recorded how I performed on a particular test on a particular day. They didn’t get to write the rest of the story.

Then My Job Disappeared

Teaching became my career.

After all the earlier failures and changes of direction, I had found a profession in which I was happy and in which I would eventually take on positions of responsibility.

But success doesn’t make you immune from circumstances beyond your control.

After I had been teaching for a few years, government economies led to staff reductions in schools.

I was declared in excess at my school.

This time the setback was different.

I hadn’t failed an examination.

I hadn’t performed poorly.

I hadn’t failed an interview or an assessment.

My position had simply become surplus to the school’s staffing requirements.

Nevertheless, the practical effect felt familiar.

I had to leave and apply for a position at another school.

Once again, something that had seemed settled suddenly wasn’t.

And once again, I had to start somewhere else.

By then perhaps I should have been accustomed to it.

Life, however, has an interesting way of making every new setback feel surprisingly original.

Not Every Second Chance Is About Work

There was another second chance in my life that had nothing to do with examinations, universities or employment.

It was also the one in which I couldn’t blame an examination paper, an interviewer, a university or government cutbacks.

My wife and I had dated for a couple of years when we were younger.

Then the relationship ended.

Mea culpa.

Years passed.

Eventually, our paths crossed again.

This time there was no examination I could resit. There was no application form on which I could explain that I had matured since my previous attempt.

There was simply something I needed to do.

I apologised.

And she forgave me.

Of all the second chances I have received, this was one that depended entirely upon another person being willing to give it.

We reconnected.

Within a year, we were married.

I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if she had decided that the first ending was also going to be the final one.

She would have been perfectly entitled to do so.

Fortunately for me, she didn’t.

Failure Has a Way of Looking Permanent

There is something peculiar about failure.

While we are experiencing it, it tends to look permanent.

When I failed Matriculation, I didn’t have the advantage of seeing the decades that would follow.

When I failed the Public Service interview, I couldn’t see a future career in teaching.

When I was dropped from university, I couldn’t look ahead and see myself earning several qualifications and eventually becoming a Head of Mathematics.

I certainly couldn’t imagine that one day I would be writing mathematics textbooks or helping develop and assess the very sort of examinations I had once failed.

When I failed Kodak’s assessment, I didn’t know which opportunities would come later.

When I was declared in excess at my school, I couldn’t know exactly where the next position would lead.

And when my earlier relationship ended, I certainly couldn’t know that years later the same woman would become my wife.

We live our lives looking forwards.

We understand them looking backwards.

That makes an enormous difference.

A Second Chance Isn’t Always Offered

I have also realised that the expression “second chance” can be misleading.

Sometimes somebody gives you one.

My university allowed me to return.

My future wife forgave me.

But nobody at the Public Service called me back for another interview.

Kodak didn’t invite me to sit its assessment again.

In those cases, the second chance wasn’t another attempt at the same thing.

It was another opportunity somewhere else.

Perhaps that’s an important distinction.

We sometimes wait for the door that has just closed to reopen.

Often it doesn’t.

The second chance may be another door entirely.

And sometimes, as I discovered at university, the old door unexpectedly opens again after you have already walked through another one.

Then you must decide what to do.

In my case, apparently, the answer was to walk through both.

I Don’t Believe Every Failure Was Meant to Happen

It would be tempting to look back over all these events and say that everything happened for a reason.

I’m not sure I believe that.

I failed some things because I didn’t perform well enough.

I made some poor decisions.

Other events were outside my control.

Nor do I believe that if we simply keep trying, everything will inevitably work out exactly as we want.

Life offers no such guarantee.

What I do believe, because I have experienced it repeatedly, is that a failure is not necessarily a final judgement.

Sometimes it means:

Try again.

Sometimes it means:

Try somewhere else.

And occasionally it means:

Admit that you were wrong, apologise and hope someone is generous enough to let you try again.

Looking back, I have been given more second chances than I probably realised at the time.

I repeated a school year.

I found another direction after a failed interview.

I started again after being dropped from university.

I returned to the university that had once asked me to leave and, at the same time, continued the course I had begun elsewhere.

I eventually accumulated qualifications that the schoolboy who failed Matriculation could scarcely have imagined.

I became a mathematics teacher, a Head of Mathematics, a textbook author and editor, and was involved in developing and assessing mathematics examinations.

I found another school when my position disappeared.

But the second chance for which I am most grateful wasn’t academic or professional.

Years after I had ended a relationship with a young woman, I was given another opportunity.

This time I didn’t waste it.

Of all the examinations I failed in my life, that may have been the resit that mattered most.

Sometimes the second chance led to degrees and a career.

Sometimes it led to a driver’s licence.

Both counted.