“The path to smart goes through dumb.” A colleague of mine, Dr. Dan Dill, says this. I really like the sentiment. Students don’t realize that most of what they will learn in college won’t come easy and it will take hard work, but they really can do it. They just need to fail faster and better.
The path to smart goes through dumb. ~Dr. Dan Dill (Boston University)
Chronicles of Higher Education recently published “Next Time, Fail Better“, which argued that humanities majors need to learn the lesson of failure much as computer science students are forced to. And Inside Higher Ed published the importance of letting students fail. No one likes failure. Worse many students come to college never having really experienced it. Most come in believing what worked in high school will work in college, and when it doesn’t they don’t know how to adapt.
Recently, I had a student in my office at the end of the semester who had done poorly on every exam. I asked her how she studied at the start of the semester and she described reading the book and looking over the solutions to problems done in class. I asked her after she did poorly on her first exam what did she change. She said she just tried to study hard (i.e. more of the same). I asked her after her second bad exam what did she do? Study harder! She had no idea how to deal with failure. She had no concept of alternative ways to study. Even worse she didn’t even think to ask a staff member. I kept thinking that was exactly what I’m here for, to help you find new ways to learn. This student falls perfectly into Einstein’s definition of insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”
I’m not at all shocked students don’t have the metacognition to realize in advance what they are doing isn’t working. I’m not shocked they don’t know alternatives to the study/work habits they learned empirically in high school. How could they when no one has shown them how? I am shocked that they just keep going. To take this a bit further, I need the students to fail for me. That is how I learn what they don’t know and can help them fix it. I often tell students,
“I have not yet become a good enough teacher to look deep in your eyes and see the problem. I need you to try and make a mistake (i.e. fail) so I can help you.”
College is a great time to make mistakes. You don’t get fired, you get help. As long as you try and fail early enough to get it fixed, you are on your way to smart.