Day 79 - Making Mistakes - Deliberately

Image by elycefeliz, via Flickr

From as early an age as I can remember, I didn't have much tolerance for making mistakes. It isn't that I expected others not to make mistakes; I just didn't want to make mistakes myself. I would bring home my test papers, crying the whole way, if the grades on them weren't 100%.  Frankly, 99% didn't feel any better to me than 70%. Anything less than 100% was unacceptable.

The thing about making mistakes is that making them is necessary to learn how to recover from them. I wish I had learned that much earlier.

The first time I made what I knew to be a deliberate mistake, to learn something, was in my first semester of studying German. The approach of the teacher was unusual for the time. Instead of being handed text books on the first day in class, we received no books for the first six weeks. Instead, we listened to our teacher and repeated after her, memorizing conversations which we repeated in pairs around the room. I can still recall some of those sentences, including Ich kann nicht meine Gummischuhe finden. Ach, hier sind sie, hinter der Tür. Translation: I can't find my overshoes. Oh, here there are, behind the door. After six weeks, we received our books. And that's when I discovered I had been using three different words in German, er, sie, and es, for the English word it, but the glossary at the back of the book said er meant he, sie meant she, and only es meant it. I didn't understand how this could be, so on the test where I knew which words to use because I had memorized the conversation, I used es for it in every sentence instead. I knew my chances for getting an explanation were greater if I chose the wrong answers. And it worked.

But I settled back into my old ways pretty quickly, again striving for perfect grades. The rewards were  largely symbolic, the honor role, the dean's list, National Honor Society. I'll never know how my life would have turned out without them, so I don't know what advantages came my way as a result.

While at San Francisco State University, my roommate Annie introduced me to the power of deliberate mistakes again. She had completed her Bachelor's degree in elementary education where she met some elementary school teachers in an art class. She told of one of the experienced teachers using a trick she learned from her students when she couldn't get the instructor's attention. She deliberately set out to do something wrong, knowing the instructor would run over to stop her, thus getting her the attention she wanted. Not all the teachers in schools are the ones getting paid to be there.

After graduate school, my next school experience was at Brown Institute in Minneapolis where I spent nine months in a vocational training course in computer programming. Now that was an experience where making deliberate makes really paid off. I watched all my colleagues trying to complete their programming projects without a mistake - the first time.  Not me, not this time. I realized that I would learn more about how to correct mistakes by controlling when I made them. I didn't know going in that I would end up working in a software engineering office in the continuation engineering section - that's the engineering euphemism for the group responsible for fixing bugs. I wanted to be a developer, not a bug fixer. I wanted to write programs that had no bugs in them when I started getting paid to write programs, and that's why I wanted to learn everything I could about how to fix bugs while I was paying to learn.

No one told me I was expected to get top grades. I imposed that on myself. It took a long time for me to figure out just why I might have set those goals for myself. Here is what I think happened.

When I was five years old, my sister was born.  Until then, my brother and I had pretty much all Mom and Dad's spare time. Mom read to us. She helped me write letters to my cousin Lois. Dad took me to baseball and basketball games. Dad took both of us both fishing. We had it pretty good. But when Joan was born, there were too many of us for Dad to take with him. He stopped taking any of us. I was jealous of my sister because she took Dad's attention away from me.

Then there were all the comments about Joan being so cute. I didn't remember anyone saying how cute I was. So if Joan was the cute one, I had to be something else. I had to be the smart one. At least, that's what I think happened.