Why Wrong Is Not Always Bad: I thought this was an excellent article about issues surrounding our society when it comes to teaching kids about results. It really hit the nail on the head. The quote "victims of excellence" really stands out to me because its so hard to imagine anyone being a victim when they are associated with excellence. I definitely feel like a victim of excellence sometimes. The times in this program where we are doing nothing but sharing our feelings and sharing the "process" of our learning experiences, I experience boredom because there isn't any product involved. I came directly from Undergraduate school where so much of the focus is product oriented so there are times in my mind where I don't care too much for the process and am much more interested in the product. Even more interesting is the study (which I think I have heard before, not sure where, maybe it was something that was associated with the Alfie Cone stuff we have listened to) in which the super-majority of students who were praised for being smart chose not to take the harder test that may lead to a lower score. This is a perfect example of "victims of excellence" because once those students have been associated with being smart, they don't want to let it go. Staying "smart" becomes more important than learning. Getting the good grade isn't the means to an end in which the end is learning and understanding the material, instead the good grade becomes the end and learning and understanding be damned.
Another portion of this commentary that I found interesting was the use of the example in comparing American and Japanese (and some Chinese) cultures. I was just talking with Ian Mansfield in class recently and he described a situation in which a student incorrectly working out a math problem would never happen here because he said that teachers want to immediately "correct" a wrong way thought because the sooner it is gotten rid of and fixed the sooner a student or the classroom will be able to learn how to do it the correct way. However, I don't agree at all with the teacher the writer referenced at the end of the article who said they would rather hire a B or C student than an A student because the B or C student is willing to take risks and be wrong. This seems like a very silly thing to determine because who says that that was the reason they got Bs and Cs? Couldn't it just be the case that they were just lazy and didn't want to work hard enough for the A? It just seems way too much of a jump to assume that they got a B or C because they were not afraid to make mistakes.
Interesting discussion of the process-product dimension. You are entering a field where the "product" is a person, the results of which will not be seen (if at all) many years in the future and the very idea of a person as a product borders on the dehumanizing, and the process of evaluating your work shifts towards more fundamental self-awareness than empirical data.
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