Sunday, March 27, 2011

To Err is Human

I love mistakes. I always told my students that mistakes are good; we always learn more from our errors, faults, and slip-ups than from being right. I tried not to come down hard on anyone who gave a wrong answer. Any confusion, mix-up, misinterpretation or inaccuracy was just another teaching tool. Better to make a goof now than on the test. Don’t we all learn best from our blunders, gaffes and misinterpretations? Remember that embarrassing moment? That time you were humiliated? I’ll bet you learned not to repeat that faux pas.

There’s a reason we have so many words for being wrong, words like imprecision, inexactness, erroneousness, incorrectness, oversight, slip, misunderstanding, misconstruction, fallacy, misapprehension, and miscalculation, not to mention the thirteen synonyms I used before I got to this sentence. The reason is . . . we’re not perfect. You’ll find far fewer synonyms for right.

But wait, there’s more. I particularly like blunder, bungle and boo-boo. But my new favorite word for stupid mistake is “howler”.

(Please let me know if you found anything that I messed up in this post. I really didn’t want to botch it up.)

2 comments:

  1. If you don't "fail" from time to time you can't succeed!

    We learn from out mistakes and hopefully we change what lead us to fail and thus we do it right the next time and the next etc.!

    http://tawnasplan.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi, thanks for stopping by my site - now following back! (sorry it took a couple of days)

    Love this post. It's a hard lesson to learn but failure can be such a rewarding experience. Hard at the time tho!

    And if you have a moment to help a blogger out, could you vote for Henry Happened for blog of the month here? Tx!!
    For the Love of Blogs

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.