What now?: So what if I'm wrong?

posted October 10, 2005

by Jonathan Steinman of Campanile

The symptoms of this disease are immediately recognizable: arms go limp, faces sag and look away, vocal chords constrict, the mind shuts down.

Students with these symptoms suffer from incorrectitis – the clinical fear of being wrong, especially in front of a teacher and a classroom full of peers.

Incorrectitis is a dangerous disease that afflicts nearly every student at some point in their educational career and can, in severe cases, stunt academic growth.

Forget about AIDS, cancer, the avian flu and all other health threats that we are assured every day are ruining the world. If we cure incorrectitis – and we can, especially at Palo Alto High School – all the other problems in the world will fall in short order.

Incorrectitis is the largest impediment to learning at Paly. I can't speak for America, but I wager that the condition is prevalent everywhere students are taught. Infected students have all the resources that money can buy them, have phenomenally qualified teachers and often even have a tremendous drive to learn. But all these things are negated by the terrible fear they experience.

We students are brought up to gauge our learning by test scores, participation points and high-marking essays. We feel we have failed when we are marked down, and this fear stops us from forging our own educational trails.

But these self-blazed trails – which often lead to dead ends – are the epitome of what our education should teach us to create. The jobs of the future will demand that we not only have a solid academic foundation, but also that we know how to implement our knowledge in creative and insightful ways.

How do I know this? The writing is in the journals. I recently interviewed Eva Chmielnicki, the Assistant Editor of Nature Medicine, part of the most prestigious family of scientific journals. If you're looking for big ideas in science, you'll look in Nature Medicine first. Chmielnicki is leading an effort by the journal to scour the best minds in science for their predictions of where their field will go in the coming years. Her journal is leading the movement toward interconnected progress that has been catalyzed by the recent explosion in such interactive tools as blogs and open-source software.The interconnected world of work and learning will move so fast that only those who are comfortable riding the leading edge of each new wave will survive. To keep up, we have to keep on plugging away at every (reasonable) new idea we get.

As Chmielnicki puts it, the public must learn that "a failed experiment is not a waste of time and resources; it simply informs the way the next experiment will be done." So what does this mean we should do at Paly? Obviously, we have to keep learning the fundamentals, for a poorly run experiment yields no valuable information, failure or not.

But teachers should also help us fight our incorrectitis. Each and every class is amenable to a trial-and error learning experience for every student, not just the lab sciences. That means, for example, that we should be asked to synthesize our learning in history to predict tomorrow's news. Our English teachers should encourage us to read the work of contemporaries – not just the classics – and connect their writings meaningfully to today's trends and tomorrow's possibilities. And, of course, our science classes must give us the opportunity to create our own experiments in search of confirmation of our own personal hypotheses.

"You have to take chances –learn and experience as much as you can while in school," Chmielnicki said.

To cure incorrectitis, we had better listen up now.