Everyone makes mistakes

"Havisham [as in Miss Havisham from Great Expectations] beckoned me [Thursday Next] over to her desk and indicated for me to sit.

'Firstly, congratulations on becoming a full Jurisfiction agent.'

'I'm not ready for this!' I hissed. 'I'm probably going to fall flat on my face!'

'Probably has nothing to do with it; you shall. Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough.'" 

                                        -- From The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde (p. 255), the third book in the Thursday Next series. To help put the quote in context, Thursday Next is able to enter the Book World where Jurisfiction agents of the equivalent of police officers. Miss Havisham, when not playing her part in Great Expectations is a senior Jurisfiction agent who also happens to adore very fast cars. 

Next week is the beginning of August which means that I will need to buckle down and start planning our next school year. I am already doing some thinking about what that will look like though I haven't started to collect books and make notes. Be prepared because once I do my thoughts about school and homeschooling and education will go back to being a part of the regular line up. Think of this as an introductory post to get all of us back into the swing of things. 

"If you don't make mistakes, you're not trying hard enough." I'm not sure I can communicate how much I love this quote. In one fell swoop Miss Havisham is able to both normalize making mistakes and at the same time create a positive expectation for them. I find it refreshing in a world where the goal, especially in learning, is to do things as perfectly as possible at all times. If a student doesn't do this then that is reflected in the student's grade which goes on that student's permanent record.

Yet, if there is one thing I've learned while tackling new learning challenges as an adult is that I will make a lot of mistakes. A lot of them. It is also through those mistakes that I learn the most. Learning cannot be separated from mistake making... not if you are really trying. As I've learned things as an adult I've come to embrace my mistakes even if I don't actually enjoy making them. I joked to my riding instructor last week that this past summer has felt as though at every lesson we uncover yet one more bad riding habit (mistakes) that I've acquired over the years and then I figure out how to change that. It's not fun to repeatedly come face to face with things that need to change but I'll also say that I feel my riding has improved over the past couple of months in significant ways as a result. 

I often wonder what the process would be like if there was a grade involved at the end. Would it be easier or more difficult to embrace all the mistakes that happen during the learning process or would I focus mainly on what I needed to do for the grade I wanted? My younger self didn't "do" mistakes and would avoid them at all costs. (I was also a grade hound making the focus of anything I did the letter that resulted at the end of a class.) My current self probably wouldn't care mainly because I've lost the ability to care about the grade because I am focused on the learning. I can think that way because I'm old, have a lot of life experience, have thought long and hard about what I believe about education, and have a pretty decent sense of self worth. None of these things do children have. 

Learning something new requires a level of vulnerability in the learner... they need to be willing to make mistakes, to admit they don't know something, to look clueless, to feel foolish in different moments. While children are natural learners there is a difference between self-directed learning and outside directed learning. Children's natural learning instincts kick in when they are finding out about something they have a need to know, something they are interested in. In those moments children are learning for the sake of learning because there is some inner drive in them which causes the investigation. Anyone who has watched a child deeply engrossed in learning something they are keenly interested in understands how all consuming this can be. 

This is very different from learning that is externally directed. For a child that type of learning... which is the vast majority of the learning that occurs in school... is done because they are supposed to; someone else is telling them to learn these things whether the child is interested or not. And there are things that children need to learn. They do need to learn about numbers and how they work and letters and words and reading because these are things they will need throughout their lives. Ideally these things can be taught to the child in a way that is enjoyable and supportive. There are some very good teachers out there who are able to do this. But this is not guaranteed. All too often a child can find learning these things to be difficult if they are not ready or life at home is hard or they missed key things in their early childhood or they don't feel safe in their classroom. Then learning becomes a battle with surviving being the only goal.... not being made fun of, not feeling stupid, not making mistakes. When so much energy is spent on survival there is little room for actual learning. Mistakes become the enemy. And without mistakes and their close friends experimentation, play, and trial and error no real learning can actually take place. Add in to that grades which seem to indicate the worth of the child and you have a recipe for underachievement, lack of engagement, and giving up. 

I don't think it can be said enough. Children do the best with what they have. Sometimes what they have is so little that their best can seem very little as well. But let's also remember that children doing their best can often mean that they are making mistakes. We need to remember that and allow for it and normalize it. Because worse than mistakes is ceasing to try at all.