Reflection 9

Learning is a life process that can occur through failure and success, which was described in The Practicing Mind. Failure has the ability to teach a lesson, perhaps better, than learning through success, as offered through this article. It's certainly relatable for some of our greatest life lessons; it taught us how to balance on a bike and what you shouldn't say in a relationship, and it can be applied to academic settings.

Calculus can integrate itself into this rule; through struggle we can learn in a way that'd get these lessons to stick. But, as the article mentions, the real goal is to propose a challenge that is reasonably achievable through the student's ability. The article used a bit of "clickbait" in proposing an idea that seems outlandish and leads the reader to believe that letting students learn on their own in difficulty leads to a more efficient lesson. Obviously, it ends in saying that with the ability to fail followed by success afterward, learning is perhaps more efficient, which is much more plausible.

This follows some basic ideas of learning and psychology; aversive results (failures and struggling) are avoided, and pleasurable results are seeked out (success, rewards). However, in the spirit of using science to discuss learning, it is determined that using rewards is twice as effective as resulting in a learned behavior than punishment; this is because one simply learns what to avoid and not what to seek when facing punishment. Some people fall into a cyclic-punishment where they simply are faced with so much challenge that they become frustrated, and oftentimes don't find solutions (or at least the right ones). Eventually, they just associate the whole practice of calculus with punishment-like results, and the present-day hate for math is born.

The ability to fail correctly comes with a lot of weight; it needs to be done in such a Goldilocks fashion. The challenge needs to be reasonably within the student's grasp (if they can't reach it, then it just becomes failure punishment), guidance needs to be available, and the failure shouldn't be something too devastating (because why would you try it again if there's a huge risk?). The sensitive nature of it is just why some people head down a path of hating certain subjects when at one point they were on the verge of unlocking its secrets, but due to the fault of a crappy failure setup, it went awry.

This is something I have seen in this class (as I've mentioned in other blogs) in homework problems that have kept me thinking for hours to no success, or in classes like Chemistry where equilibrium problems are now my least favorite when I used to be extremely efficient with the concept in high school.

Sometimes, I feel like this concept of letting students fail can be used as an excuse for a highly inefficient learning system at the hands of the wrong teacher where students just perish, and other times it can be orchestrated perfectly in unexpected scenarios.

Sometimes, it takes just getting back on the bike, because we know that in the end, it will be worth it. Salvaging that intrinsic worth can be what pulls us back into action when we feel that all we are capable of doing is falling off the bike.