Nigel 
October 22nd, 2009
Uses for a Maths teacher # 4 : to enable deep and restful sleep
I used to have a poster on the wall of my teaching room. In the cartoon above Miriam shortened it to just three words. We’ll leave circles don’t exist for another time and place. How about make more mistakes?
Think of something you’d like to get better at. Maybe its one of these: playing guitar, acting, running, oil painting, writing, chatting in French, using Maths, feeling relaxed socially….
Let’s use writing as an example. Writers write. To get better at writing you have to write. That’s one reason for this blog. Some articles are good (I hope), some okay, and some pathetic. Working at something will always produce mistakes. Some of the output will be poor, perhaps embarrassingly bad. And that’s not just inevitable, it’s fine. Provided you can handle failure as part of the scenery on the route to success. I look back at some of the newspaper articles I wrote in the 70s and cringe. How did they ever get published?
You want to paint. Actually you want to be a great painter. You want people to gaze at your latest work in awe and offer you incredible sums of money for it. To be honest you want your very first painting to be like that, but it won’t be. You just don’t have the knowledge or skill yet. And as you progress there will always be new things to learn, and they need to be learned by doing. To learn how to paint well you have to produce imperfect paintings.
As well as music by The Kaiser Chiefs, Ian Hunter and Jaco Pastorius I also listen to Beethoven. He’s considered to be one of the greatest composers of all time. Some of his work is incredible, some fairly run-of-the- mill. Sometimes he would put off composing anything new for ages, and only finally get down to work because he’d already received and spent what he was being paid to write it. And the person paying was getting kinda naggy. My guess is he was scared his next attempt would be a failure. What he needed was to stop fussing and just get started. Some of what he first wrote down will have been bad. It will have been junked and rewritten. If he hadn’t written the bad version first he’d never have got to the great stuff we know today.
I aim to publish something new here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This week Monday became Tuesday for the previous post, and I’m struggling with this Wednesday article on Thursday. I’ve been putting off writing it. What’s in my head doesn’t feel right. I can’t decide how much – or how little – to say. Do I split stuff across several posts? Which examples do I use? What order should it all be in? As I write this I’m solving the problem by just writing. Then I’ll print out this first draft, take a break, review and edit it, maybe throw the whole thing away and start again from scratch. (Actually I’ve kept most of it on the basis that I’m tired and second best is often good enough.)
In the previous post we looked at Thomas Edison’s attitude to failure, and how it brought success. When inventing the light bulb he figured out an approach that might work and tried it. Thousands of times he identified unhelpful approaches. Most people would say he failed repeatedly, but he kept going till he had the result he wanted.
One reason so many people think they can’t do Maths is that when the first approach they try using to solve a problem fails turns out to be unproductive they give up.
Most of us never get the level of success we could achieve because we are too easily discouraged by what we call ‘failure’. If only we could see this kind of failure as necessary. To succeed we have to fail often.
Of course there are provisos. Watch this space. In the meantime, provided you’re not my Doctor, make more mistakes.
This article is # 5 in the effective goal-setting series. The cartoon is copyright (c) Miriam Slechta 2009.
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