Today's guest blogger is Andrew Hollinger. Andrew has spent four years teaching high school English and creative writing at Sharyland High School in Mission, TX, before beginning his current position as lecturer in the English department at the University of Texas-Pan American. He will begin teaching rhetoric and composition at UTPA in August. Follow him on twitter (@ashollinger) and visit his blog for more about his experiences in education.
There’s no real secret to becoming a high school valedictorian.
Many people think all one has to do is get better grades than everyone else, but this is not entirely true. Here’s the strategy, for anyone who wants to know: get better grades and take more classes that offer extra points on GPA calculations (in many schools, Pre-AP receives something like +5, dual enrollment or other honors courses +10, and AP courses can get, I’ve seen, up to +13 points on a student’s actual semester grade). I know this is how to become valedictorian because I was one.
Does anybody still remember John Nance Garner? He was one of FDR’s vice presidents and he famously said that the vice presidency wasn’t worth “a bucket of warm spit.” That’s a bit like being valedictorian. The thing I remember most about being named valedictorian was that I was going to sit on stage and give a speech. Otherwise, being valedictorian did not do much else for me. Nobody has ever asked me what my high school ranking was, and so I must cleverly bring it up myself—like using it as the opening gambit for a guest blog post. Even though I did not particularly profit from becoming valedictorian, I do wonder if it actually hurt me.
Being wonderfully and gloriously wrong
In June, I participated in Laying the Foundation’s Train the Trainer (TTT) week, trying to slip into the ranks of their trainer corps. What I heard, watching other trainer hopefuls conduct their audition lessons, were teachers encouraging and urging each other to be wrong, and to take that attitude into their own classrooms. This jives with my own first-week teaching philosophy: I recite for my students that great philosopher Albus Dumbledore who said to Harry Potter, “In fact, being—forgive me—cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” I ask my students to be wonderfully and gloriously wrong all year long.
Of course, asking our students to be wrong makes a kind of professional sense. We’re teachers and it’s hard to teach someone who never appears to be incorrect or unknowledgeable. Perhaps, then, we are only asking our students to help us identify their own gaps in knowledge.
I watched teachers from Arkansas, Virginia, Connecticut, and Texas use variations on a theme (go on, be wrong) solely for diagnostic utility? I suppose it is possible, but I don’t buy it. I think we all intuitively know what Kathryn Schulz (the world’s leading “wrongologist”) has discovered through her own research and writing, that stepping “outside of that feeling [of being wrong]…is the single greatest moral, intellectual, and creative leap you can make.”
Being wrong, itself, is harmless. It is the situation and feelings that accompany being wrong that are so difficult to handle. In a 2011 lecture from the TED stage, Schulz asked her audience to remember what it was like, say in 3rd grade, to get quiz papers returned (or, like when I was in elementary: call out your grades so the teacher can record them). Some students have clean papers and smiley faces and others are all marked over. Quizzes turn out to be a teaching tool, and not just for assessment, because “by the time you are nine years old, you’ve already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits—and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes.”
It is easy to put this into the pedagogy of self-esteem and self-actualization. We don’t want students to feel bad and so we should try to take the sting out of error by saying, “No worries. It’s OK.” But, whatever your feelings are on self-esteem, that’s not what I’m talking about at all, and it’s not what Schulz was talking about, either. For her, the stigma behind being wrong isn’t merely academic. When we’re right, “it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.” The social corollary is that we insist we are right, write off those who disagree with us, all in the name of feeling “smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.”
Being right makes us feel safe and secure. That’s important. I suppose, then, that being wrong makes us feel vulnerable and uncertain. Maybe we can conduct a hypothetical cost-benefit analysis between being right and being wrong: which has more value?
Playing it safe does not lead to wild innovation.
Let’s follow this backward. Innovation, creativity, breakthrough is often the result of thinking, well, outside the box. Thinking like this probably means being wrong. A lot. Anybody remember how many times Thomas Edison didn’t successfully make a lightbulb? About 1000. Did you know both Henry Ford and Walt Disney bankrupted themselves before becoming financial successes? That both Lincoln and Churchill were politically defeated many times before becoming president and prime minister? Did you know that homerun kings Babe Ruth and Mark McGwire also hold the records for strikeouts? The list could (and does) go on. Success and failure, it turns out, are not antithetical to each other. They are, in fact, complementary. Or look at it like this: being right does not teach you anything. Being wrong, at least, shows you what you don’t know—yet.
The trick to becoming valedictorian, for anyone who wants to know, is to take more AP classes and get more A’s than everyone else. The trick to getting A’s is to seldom be wrong.* Follow this formula, and anyone can become valedictorian. But, then what?
I wish I had been wrong more often in high school. I often wonder if I might not be today a smarter and more successful person.
As a teacher, my goal is to help students push against the boundaries of their wit. To do that, they need to be wrong. A lot. Wonderfully and gloriously wrong. The price, after all, of being cleverer than most is that our errors will be correspondingly huger.
To err is human, but it’s also the path to success.
*(I readily admit that someone can succeed academically and also maintain their creativity and ingenuity. The path is made easier, however, if we, as teachers, embrace being wrong as an integral part of a student’s education.)
REFERENCES
But They Did Not Give Up. N.p., Aug. 2008. Web. 5 July 2012. <http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/efficacynotgiveup.html>.
Schulz, Kathryn. "On Being Wrong." TED. Apr. 2011. Web. 5 July 2012. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html>