How many mistakes did you make today? I made quite a few. I forgot to take the books back to the library (fines building up!), I turned a street too early, I threw away something I needed, I left my dayplanner on the floor and the cat peed on it. And those are the ones I’ll admit to. So where did we get the idea that our students’ work needs to be perfect? When did we give them the idea that we expect perfection from them? Was it when we made a child copy a paper over numerous times until she “got it right”? Was it when a B wasn’t good enough? Was it when we lowered the grade on a paper by a letter grade for every mistake in it? Was it when we corrected him in front of the whole class or called on him to read out loud? No wonder so many children suffer from anxiety!
I’ll ask a child to tell me about an event and his story will be full of detail and rich, descriptive vocabulary. Then I’ll ask him to write it down. “How many sentences?” he groans. And the product is a sometimes perfectly written, incredibly boring narrative with three or four word sentences, full of easy words he is sure he can spell. Wilson Anderson calls this “dumbing down”. It takes a long time before I can convince him that I’d rather have a vibrant story full of errors than a snore-inducing paragraph with perfect spelling. I tell him about Oriental carpet makers who always include one mistake in their carpets because only God is perfect, and to produce a perfect carpet would be trying to be like God. I encourage him to make sure there is always at least one mistake for the same reason. I’ll have him use Anderson’s technique of underlining words he thinks are wrong and continuing on. And on every student’s notebook is a sticker that says, “Every mistake is another opportunity to learn.” As I pointed out an error to a child, she said, “I know, there’s one of those opportunities!”
Seeing the mistakes a child makes is a large part of diagnostic teaching. I may think she knows those consonant digraphs, but if she writes about a mother hen and her chiks, I know we need to do more work on -ck. It’s a lot easier to spell a word in isolation than it is when you are thinking of content. And just because I encourage mistakes, it doesn’t mean we don’t correct them. But we may not correct all of them at one time. Also, while invented spelling is great for kindergartners, we move children away from that by teaching the rules and structure of the language. Making the same mistake continuously hinders our ability to move on and means I need to find a different way to teach whatever is causing the problem. We’re always moving toward improvement, but not perfection.
Thomas Edison had many failures before inventing the things he did. He did not see this as a problem: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Henry Ford said, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.” “If you can’t make a mistake,” Marva Collins teaches, “you can’t make anything.” But my favorite is this: “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” (Elbert Hubbard) We have so many opportunities to learn and try new things. Don’t let the fear of mistakes keep us and our students from trying them.