There are mistakes and errors that it is, from an educational perspective, wrong to dismiss as such, wrong to regard merely as matters for correction. “Sean numbers” constitute one example—a particularly striking one from an intellectual, and even a moral, point of view, in that Sean’s observation is a novel one for others, not only for him. He sees number freshly—perhaps we can too. He makes a discovery or, indeed, according to Ball’s reflection at the time, an “invention.” He adds value to the common store.
Though Sean’s move is unusual, this general phenomenon—the mistake or error containing an accurate, sometimes profound, observation or insight—is a familiar one to teachers of, for example, literacy. Errors and Expectations, Mina Shaughnessy’s influential account of the work of and pedagogy appropriate for “basic writers” (students arriving in college essentially unschooled in writing), analyzed with great power the logic and, as she insisted and demonstrated, the “intelligence” of students’ mistakes. Likewise, scholars of early literacy coined the term “miscue” to underscore the sense and logic of a vast number of beginners’ mistakes, and to avoid the pejorative connotations of that designation. (An example of a miscue is the beginning reader’s substitution of “house” for “home,” when the latter is what actually appears in the text. In a case like this, the teacher is much better able to serve the learner when he recognizes that in reading “house,” the beginner has made semantic sense, has gotten the initial phoneme right, and is syllabically and rhythmically accurate as well.)
A form of the general phenomenon is also recognizable in the domain of what’s generally called “classroom management.” Although Winnicott’s interpretation was not made in a classroom context, instances of stealing and analogs of it occur often enough in classrooms, and readings akin to his reading of theft are often productive. Readings, for example, that take the form of asking of a child’s misbehavior in school, “what need might this action be expressing?”—or, to continue the theme of mistakes and errors, “mis– or mal– expressing?” Children who habitually careen into others, grab onto them, appropriate their coats or hats, and so on, may sometimes be usefully read as seeking human connection in the school (and, following Winnicott, believing they might find it, while yet being unskilled or ambivalent about finding it). It can make sense to understand children who “tattle” as expressing a need for clarity about the moral order, or the power structure, or both, of the classroom. And so forth. Any teacher with a little experience will be able to supply dozens of examples. (At this point, I suppose I am obliged to stipulate that to interpret children’s actions in these ways—which in any case can only be begun, but not concluded, in the absence of specific and contextual information—does not require one to condone or excuse the particular behaviors.)
In all these sorts of occurrences, these human events that are comfortably enough, but not so helpfully, called mistakes, errors, errors in judgment, mis-steps, and so forth, it is possible to see meaning not nonsense and, more than that, logic, a kind of forward movement, an application of the mind or will to a puzzle or problem.
This returns me to Green’s “Building a Better Teacher” article, and to its central concern, whether or not good teaching can be learned. Green writes of one of her two key subjects—teacher educators who differ in numerous interesting and significant ways—that “all (of Doug) Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining.” In one of several very satisfying symmetries in the article, the second of Green’s central characters, Deborah Ball—once Sean’s teacher, now Dean of the University of Michigan School of Education—is quoted, several paragraphs later, as saying “Teaching depends on what other people think, not (on) what you think.” That’s a lovely thought and a true statement. It, and the fine characterization of Doug Lemov endeavoring to imagine the students’ points of view, directs us squarely to one of the major tasks of learning to teach: Learning to perceive what others think, learning to imagine what and how others see, learning how to make fruitful contact with other minds. Mistakes, errors, and their kin—taken up with interest, curiosity, a serving or two of patience; taken up as likely manifestations of the mind in search mode—can be powerful material for such learning.
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