Several years ago, in my essay "Fearless Learning," I wrote that, while making mistakes is a necessary part of learning, many students and teachers do all they can to avoid the possibility of being wrong. (While I was referring to learning mathematics, I think that the idea applies to all subject areas.) Students see avoiding mistakes as crucial, even when studying or learning new material; they would prefer to skip a problem rather than do it incorrectly. Many students believe that copying down the "right" way to solve a problem in class is more beneficial than struggling at home, by themselves, making false starts, trying different strategies, and either getting the wrong answer or not coming up with any answer at all. In that article I stressed the importance of one's making mistakes, sometimes many mistakes, before one truly understands a concept, an idea, or a method.
In his essay "Writing, Reading, and the Study of Literature," Gabriel Josipovici reveals that much great literature, (e.g. Tolstoy, Stendhal, and George Eliot) was not "real" to him. Reading Marcel Proust, however, Josipovici realized that literature could include within it the possibility of failure. About Proust's writing, Josipovici says, "[I]t dared to talk about failure. Not simply talk about it either, but demonstrate it occurring in the very writing of the book I was reading. …Instead of feeling that the failure I was experiencing daily [in his own writing] was a purely personal one, I now saw that it had to do with the nature of the project itself."
The "nature of the project" of education also includes failure (and, I might add, frustration), but we teachers don't do nearly enough to convey this to our students. Consider mathematics, my subject, for a minute. Textbook examples never begin with a false start; their solutions are perfect from start to finish. When explaining how to solve a certain kind of problem, teachers don't usually itemize all the ways one might go wrong; instead, they show their students the "correct way" to do the problem. Students, of course, rarely learn much by simply watching problems being worked out at the board. They must sit down with paper and pencil and struggle, make wrong decisions, erase, and begin again before the light of clarity shines. And this process must occur over and over as new topics come along. In another essay Josipovici quotes a portion of a T. S. Eliot poem that perfectly captures the frustration and difficulty of learning: "Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure / Because one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture/Is a new beginning…"
We would do our students a great service by teaching them more about the process of learning. A mistake is not always the sign of an unprepared or an inept student; often the converse is true. Errors frequently indicate an inexperienced mind attempting to stretch itself in a new, difficult area. Educators need to make it clear that learning is a messy business and always includes mistakes and false starts. How liberating and supportive would it be to our students for them to know that we expect them to struggle and make mistakes when tackling new work? We want our students to have the confidence and curiosity to try new things and not let fear of failure confine them to the known and the understood. Avoiding failure is the safe route that leads to limited success.
This is a special issue of Independent Teacher. Middle and Upper School teachers tend to focus primarily on their own area of expertise but when we are pressed we admit to the many areas of overlap between subjects and the numerous threads that connect even the most disparate topics. While all the articles discuss interdisciplinary teaching, each does it in a very different way. David Liebmann's neatly crafted essay explains how bird watching can make poetry more meaningful and vice versa, Stephen Valentine persuasively discusses the power of language in all its many manifestations, and Lisa Wells talks about how first graders are natural interdisciplinary learners. Other topics include common ground between art and mathematics, collaboration between foreign language and fine arts, and pottery as the vehicle for learning Greek mythology.
Of course, these are just a handful of the countless cooperative courses being taught in independent schools. All of our schools are rich in cross-currents and creative connections, and we are fortunate to have the support and encouragement of administrators who understand the value of interdisciplinary learning. Here's hoping that you will reach out to a colleague, if you are not already doing so, and design a course, a project, or an activity of some sort that helps your students appreciate how so many different subjects have so much in common.
S. I.