Please Make Mistakes

Fall Semester 2012 is winding down. We have just one more day of regular classes; Final Exams come next week.

As is my habit during this time of the semester, I'm reflecting upon my students and how well they have--or haven't--learned the material. And as I've observed for the past few semesters, there seems to be a growing trend toward fear of doing something wrong. As a teacher, this distresses me.

It goes something like this: I assign a chapter that includes tutorial exercises, hands-on assessments, and a couple of short exams. Students get three shots at each exam, so the pressure should not be huge. For the hands-on parts, pretty much every software application has an Undo command. When Undo isn't available, we have other ways to recover from whatever went wrong. In the worst case scenario, a student might have to start an assignment over. No one (except, perhaps, the student) will be mad about the error. No corporate downtime will be suffered. No clients will be inconvenienced. No jobs will be lost.

Yet increasingly, as I attend to a students with raised hands, they're sitting and staring at their screens, a task not yet complete, hesitant to commit to the last keystroke or mouse click until I look at what they've done so far and assure them that they aren't about to make a mistake. 

   Student: "Is this correct?"

   Me: "I don't know. Looks pretty good to me. Let's see what happens when you click OK"

   Student: "But is it correct?"

   Me: "Well, it could be. Or it might not be. Worst case scenario, it'll be wrong and you'll have to go back and figure out why. Let's just click OK and see what happens."

   Student: "OK. But please don't go anywhere until I know if it's right or not."
 
No matter how I urge my students to loosen up a bit, to experiment, and to risk making mistakes, the phenomenon continues. People so fearful of doing something wrong, they're not approaching their learning in the best way. In striving to do something correctly, and to always do all parts of all assignments correctly, they become blinded to all of the other nifty tricks and tools and features we don't have time to cover in class, but can be nonetheless useful. I believe this can also prevent students from grasping the bigger picture: why are we doing what we're doing? How might this be useful in a business setting? What other approaches might one take to meet the same objective? No, in the highly detailed, nervous world of "no mistakes allowed," these thoughts don't usually get much mental space to work with. The noggin becomes so concerned about getting it done, getting it right, there just isn't much room for anything else.

Mistakes can be tremendous teachers, particularly in the realm of computer software. Click the wrong button and "Oh, my, that's a surprise! Not what I wanted at all. So that's what that button does..." At which point we either Undo, or sometimes, when feeling particularly adventurous in our studies, we might set on the quest of fixing the mistake without Undo. A lot of good learning can come from digging around, experimenting, and just playing around with the software.

Alternately, those who are so fearful of doing something wrong hobble their own mental processes. They generally don't learn as well, the material doesn't settle in as deeply as it does for those who courageously dive in and take a chance that they might be doing something totally wrong.

College is, by definition, an institution of learning. Learning comes in all sorts of forms, including mistakes. College is the best place to make those mistakes. This is the place to stumble, where assignments are purely academic and where there is someone standing right beside you to help you get back on your feet. Better to take those stumbles here than on the job, where the quality of your assignments will impact other employees, your supervisor, and perhaps the entire organization.  

This is college. We're all about the learning. Please, make some mistakes. You'll thank yourself for it in the years to come.