Think back to your experiences in middle and high school. How many opportunities were you given to experiment and “fail” in solving a problem? How could a school work today where students were regularly offered such opportunities?
When thinking about middle and high school there was never an opportunity for me to fail. In my high school passing was 75 and my mother always told be that I had to have above a 90 average or else I would lose certain luxuries. Shirky refers to the effect of failure being the likelihood times the cost. Students will try harder if they know they only have one opportunity. Even though learning through trial and error is important in specified class settings, it is not the way to effectively teach young students (or old ones for that matter). When students realize the effect their failure could have upon them and the likelihood that they could fail they will strive harder when they see the ultimate effects.
When thinking about middle and high school there was never an opportunity for me to fail. In my high school passing was 75 and my mother always told be that I had to have above a 90 average or else I would lose certain luxuries. Shirky refers to the effect of failure being the likelihood times the cost. Students will try harder if they know they only have one opportunity. Even though learning through trial and error is important in specified class settings, it is not the way to effectively teach young students (or old ones for that matter). When students realize the effect their failure could have upon them and the likelihood that they could fail they will strive harder when they see the ultimate effects.
Perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by failure... don't think of it as Fs on a report card.
ReplyDeleteShirky's point is that sometimes you need to fail at trials before you meet success.
In fact, a fear of failure can also have the opposite effect: instead of being a motivation, it can stifle one's ability to try something new, consider a new viewpoint, or try again.
In terms of information we find online, many people are "failing" all the time... take the opinions we saw on AskMeFi. Not all those answers are "winners." Yet, to make use of the endless stream of information today, we need to sift through the good and the bad.