Another fascinating thing that's been discovered about success is that the relative optimism of a given person correlates strongly with their success. Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania is one of the researchers who's done work on the importance of optimist and emotional intelligence. In his work, he discovered that someone who has cultivated optimism can more easily improve because they attribute failure to something they did or did not do; in other words, they see failure as something that's possible for them to correct. Just working on my own intuition, I imagine that this tendency has almost as much to do with the success of a genius as does their dedication. A scientist like Albert Einstein would have encountered numerous instances where a hypothesis didn't pan out on his way to formulating the General and Special Theories of Relativity; this is part-and-parcel of the scientific method after all. That he successfully formulated the two theories is a sort of prima facie evidence that he could correct the
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Failure is merely an opportunity to improve. When asking questions in class I emphasize to my pupils that I do not want them to guess. A wild guess has no value because it is not based on any previous knowledge and its methodology cannot be transferred to other problems, even if that guess was, by chance, correct. However, a well reasoned and thought out error is of immense value because it can reveal exactly where we went wrong, either through a fault of logic or through a lack of information, which will allow us to seek that error out and correct it. It is an accurate description of the Scientific Method to say that it essentially consists of finding and eradicating errors. ^_^ That might sound somewhat depressing, but as we know, it is a highly efficient way of improving something. I would much rather have my pupils make well reasoned mistakes than correct guesses any day of the week. ;)
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When asking questions in class I emphasize to my pupils that I do not want them to guess. A wild guess has no value because it is not based on any previous knowledge and its methodology cannot be transferred to other problems, even if that guess was, by chance, correct.
However, a well reasoned and thought out error is of immense value because it can reveal exactly where we went wrong, either through a fault of logic or through a lack of information, which will allow us to seek that error out and correct it.
It is an accurate description of the Scientific Method to say that it essentially consists of finding and eradicating errors. ^_^
That might sound somewhat depressing, but as we know, it is a highly efficient way of improving something.
I would much rather have my pupils make well reasoned mistakes than correct guesses any day of the week. ;)
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