This is certainly a good time to stumble on Renny Gleeson’s TED Talk. In four minutes (and 8 seconds!) Gleeson makes an unusual conclusion make perfect sense:

” A simple mistake can tell me what you aren’t, or remind me why I love you”

See the talk here: Renny Gleeson: 404: the story of a page not found

Wow!  Can this  work in  the educational system?

At this time of year, at both my jobs, intolerance of mistakes is all around me.

At the high-school my students have one very clear goal, to graduate with a full diploma which includes English. Those national exams we just had (and students are still taking, but in other subjects) are all about getting as many answers as possible right in a limited time.

As a counselor, one of my jobs is collecting data needed to feed the computer information regarding our deaf and hard of hearing students on the national level (for the exams). About 250 teachers must pass on the data to their coordinators, then to district representatives who pass it on to me. I create the final list and send it on to THE COMPUTER.

There are a lot of people, human people along that chain of data. And there is always at least one human error, every time.

THE COMPUTER does not suffer mistakes. VERY complicated to get things corrected.

Perhaps we can feed into it one of Gleeson’s examples of error notices? Love us – we are humans?!