In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s success

Re:In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s su... by tokenadult on Sunday February 03, 2013 @08:58AM (#5159665)

Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students, "Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php

designed to prevent exactly the kind of problem mentioned in the article kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States (and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the article is from Canada?) are designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either

a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time

b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.

As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is overcoming failure.

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Re:In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s su... by kolektiv on Sunday February 03, 2013 @01:37PM (#5160578)

I'm partially only writing this reply as a slightly more "+1" than a simple upvote, but from my experience employing and leading people (programmers, generally) this certainly applies in the UK as well. Not only at elementary school age either, but right the way through education. More and more in the past few years I've come across people who've achieved degrees in subjects without ever really coming across a problem without a potential solution discussed in the near vicinity - perhaps an adjacent chapter.

When presented with just a problem, and no hint of where to find a solution, the end result has often been a mix of horror/terror/anger/paralysis. They have all of the knowledge required in the toolbox, but no practice at applying it in non-directed ways or of having to try (many) failing ideas before one works.

Very good luck with your teaching - I wish we had a lot of teachers over here who thought the same way.

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Re:In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s su... by Total_Meltdown on Sunday February 03, 2013 @02:17PM (#5160707)

Your part "b" reminded me of a robotics program I did in High School, FIRST robotics - http://www.usfirst.org/ . It's not an exaggeration to say that my success and passion as a developer comes almost entirely from this program. They give these teams of high school kids a real, unsolved, damn hard robotics problem, and you have six weeks to come up with something. It's far more educational than sitting slack-jawed in a classroom, and fun as hell.

And no, there's no cushion for failure. One year I was in this program we had a robot with a drive system that was completely non-functional (we used a worm gear on the drive motors, so the robot basically couldn't coast at all), and as the programmer, it frustrated me almost to the point of tears to not be able to do anything about it. I tried to write code that would simulate coasting by spooling down the wheels slowly, but I wasn't that good at writing code yet, and it didn't work at all. In the end we lost horribly, and our consolation was to do better the next year, the end.

This is the kind of learning I would like to see more of: Work on real problems with no clear solutions, and learn old problems with clear solutions incidentally as the need arises.

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Re:In praise of failure: the key ingredient to children’s su... by Retric on Sunday February 03, 2013 @02:15PM (#5160697)

One of the most useful parts of school for me was "failing" a science fair project. I reolized I did not want to be juded subjectively so perusing science was a terrible idea.

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