To Really Fail And Fail Then Fail Again By Susan Moranson

Can failing be counted as an accomplishment? Thomas Edison the inventor of the light bulb and many other inventions would say yes. One of Edison’s co- workers said that it was a shame that he spent so much time on the new battery and had produced no results. Edison thought of his failures in a different and optimistic way and replied with ‘“Results? Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”’ Edison’s good attitude and will to keep going brought along the idea of student- centered learning. “To Really Learn, Fail—Then Fail Again!” by Susan Moran uses the idea of learning from your errors, “New Math: Fail + Try Again = Real Learning” by Susan Moran is about risking failure to learn from their
Teachers are challenging their students to think outside the box and learn from their failures. For example, “Instead of explaining things to kids from the front of a classroom, teachers are beginning to instead “guide from the side.” They are nudging kids to become Edisons—tinkerers who learn by doing.” You can see from this that teachers are taking a step back and letting the kids be free thinkers and to learn from their mistakes. Failure is a part of life and sometimes making mistakes is the only way to reach your goal. Kids taking the initiative to be creative and fail will learn a lot more than those who don’t. For instance, “Along the way, many students will fail. Often, they’ll fail many times. . . But along the way they may just find out that by analyzing why something went horribly wrong, they’ve learned a lot. And they can take ownership of that learning, knowing that they earned it from hard-won experience.” This demonstrates how the failure that happens when students try something will be knowledge gained. Moran shows that failure is just a way to learn something
Students are being encouraged to find things out on their own then make mistakes and learn from them. To put it differently, “. . . a teaching approach that embraces this style of learning has been gaining traction in K–12 and university curricula. It’s called inquiry-based learning, which basically means that students uncover knowledge by themselves.” This shows that when students look for the answers to problems they learn from the mistakes that are made. Students that attempt to figure things out and fail from them learn the solutions that don’t work. Some teachers are letting the students’ creativity roam therefore letting them make mistakes along the way. An example of this is, “Teachers should not just explain how something works. Their students must instead attempt to think critically, guided by a teacher’s careful questioning. An added bonus: Students seem to take pride in figuring things out by themselves.” This refutes that students need to be able to creatively think about the solution to their problem. Overall “New Math: Fail + Try Again = Real Learning” focuses on making mistakes on their own and learning from those