Along with many other
people, one of my favorite activities during winter break is to make a fire and
settle in with a good book, and this recent vacation offered quite a few
opportunities to do so. Among the several excellent books I read was To
Forgive Design: Understanding Failure by Henry Petroski.
Petroski serves as the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil
Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University. To be completely
candid, his book on engineering and design was outside of my typical reading
genres—usually history tomes or dark Scandinavian mysteries—but it looked
interesting enough to give it a shot.
Petroski’s book examines
the endeavors of engineers to make improvements in design that will produce
things that are more aesthetically pleasing and/or more functional.
Although his anecdotes of some engineering mistakes might frighten you,
Petroski argues that it is from our failures, rather than our successes, that
we truly learn and grow. At one point, he says, “In all cases of surprise
or failure, the greater technological tragedy is not having failures but not
learning the correct lessons from them. Every failure is a revelation of
ignorance, an accidental experiment, a found set of data that contains clues
that point back to causes and further back to mistakes that might have been
made in design, manufacture, and use....every new failure—no matter how
seemingly benign—presents a further means toward a fuller understanding of how
to achieve a fuller success.”
As I read this passage,
I thought, “What a great statement for life in general, and what a valuable
lesson for our students.” My New Year’s wish for our Bosque Bobcats is that
they start the second half of the year with the desire to learn from any
mistakes they might have made during the first semester, whether it be in their
academic classes, arts electives, athletics, or even regarding their
friendships. Instead of berating themselves for the things they wished
they had done differently, they can and should reflect on what didn’t go well
and how they can turn things around in a positive direction. (This also has an
academically pragmatic component for students in the upper school since the
only grades to go on their transcripts are the end-of-year grades; there is
plenty of time to improve.)
In addition, I hope that they approach every “failure” as an opportunity to grow and develop. As a friend once said to me, “It’s not experience that is the best teacher, it’s bad experience, since it’s from those bad experiences that we really learn how to do things better the next time around.” I don’t wish for our students to have bad experiences, but I hope that if they do, they see them as opportunities to better themselves.
