Learning by experimenting and making mistakes even when you know the right answer

[jack]

This is perhaps obvious but something I've only slowly put into words.

Learning typically isn't about ONLY doing something right. It's by trying different ways and SEEING which work and if not, how they fail. I think my brain naturally gravitates towards topics like maths where there IS a right answer, and knowing the right answer is valuable.

But even then, you understand a problem much better if you've seen simple examples of it, if you try various ways of proving it and see where they prove insufficient, then if you just start with someone giving you a proof.

I think because I have a great tendency to feel bad about making mistakes. I often need to make an effort to give something a go, if I know not immediately succeeding will seem like a failure -- even though I find experimenting and playing with something without pressure to succeed fun like most people.

I have as many examples from fictional protagonist-and-mentor relationships as from real life, but I'll try to be specific.

This is why children need both good/safe behaviour modelled, but also, to have times when they can (within reasonable limits) experiment with making decisions for themselves. Both in how to interact with the physical world and how to interact with other humans.

I naturally found code switching difficult, because I naturally felt there should be a "right way" that would just always be ok (I know, I know :)). But it makes sense to have space to say, "ok, go and do whatever and adults won't police it much unless it goes too far". But that doesn't HAVE to be, the adults saying "don't do this" and then ignoring infractions provided they meet the unstated scope, which is what I find hardest. That's merely a common way the situation arises naturally, when adults (or people's bosses, or citizens' law-makers) make good-in=abstract rules and then compromise when it seems to make sense, it could happen deliberately instead (except that more of the exceptions would be people who assume you can always go 30% beyond what the rules allow learning that you can't, instead of people who assume you always need to keep the rules never learning anything).

Comments

[mtbc]

Absolutely. I often try unusual approaches in Chess to find out why they're not more standard. (They always fail miserably unless against a weak computer program relying on a library of expected openings.) In cookery or whatever I often do something differently to how somebody told me to because I believe they suggested a good way and I also want to know if some different way suffices. Mistakes typically yield useful, reusable information that I am eager to acquire.

[jack]

Yeah, excellent example