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Mistake or Error

Hi teachers!



Have you ever stopped to think that many times what we see as a mistake can just be a lack of adequacy? What someone told you was wrong may not actually be a mistake.


Huh? What do you mean?!


Let me try to explain myself.


Imagine the following situation: An American child, who has just moved to Portugal and is studying at an international school. He's in a math class and he says, "May I have the eraser, please?" The teacher immediately says: “Eraser no, rubber”.


When I saw this scene, I confess that it gave me a knot in the head. The teacher considered the student's speech as an error. He felt the need to correct him and he did. For those who don't know, eraser and rubber mean the same thing in this context, but eraser is the term used in the United States and rubber is the term used in England. So, it is not wrong, but rather inappropriate. This is because at this school, they follow the British curriculum.


Now I ask you. How would you have handled the situation?


I would have broached the subject by pointing out differences in vocabulary and nomenclature, perhaps asking if he knows how to say eraser in the UK or something.


Another situation I would like to use as an example: You are a music teacher and you give a task to your 3rd grade students - compose a song that they can play on the xylophone. One of your students makes a melody that exceeds an octave. Is it wrong? No, but it's not adequate.


I could give a bunch more examples here, but let me tell you why I brought this up for discussion today?!


In one of the classes of my Songs for You Course we talked about models of bilingual schools and how to know whether or not a school is bilingual.


Whenever these issues come up, I like to talk about coherence, consistency and honesty. But what does this have to do with errors? Everything. Connect the dots. A school that thinks about language in a compartmentalized way, teaching grammar separated from real situations or disconnected vocabularies and claims to be bilingual, is not wrong, it is just not adequate. It is not adequate to what is understood by bilingual education.


A school that adopts didactic material designed for ELT, that has daily English classes and that claims to be bilingual, is not wrong, but it is not adequate. 


A teacher who does not have a background in pedagogy, but teaches in early childhood education as a classroom teacher, he is not wrong, he is inadequate according to the legislation. So before you say it's wrong, reconsider. It may just be inappropriate.


Which situation caught your attention the most? And have you ever been through a situation where they told you it was wrong but it was actually just inadequate?


To empower ourselves, share how you reacted to the situation, so we have more repertoire to deal with it if needed in the future.


See you soon!

Comments

  1. Érica17 July 2023 at 20:31

    Great content!

    Your post made me think not only about early childhood education, but in our daily lives even. And how we tend to view / behave towards error in our relationships in general, you know?

    (I also remembered an article that might interest you: From the concept of error as failure to the idea of error as a possibility of overcoming difficulties (SOUZA, SIBILA, CORREIA), have you read it?)

    ReplyDelete

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