Your Japanese word of the week is...

"machigai" 間違い which means "mistake" or "error" which is a funny thing to think about.  I mean, there are mistakes like these:

which is clearly just a case of not having checked with someone knowledgeable about what the answer it.  My dad went to explain that the Chinese actually said "Yogurt Bar" but they just translated it word for word and ended up with "Lactic Acid Bar".

But it brings up an interesting point- Is making errors always so bad?  Obviously in terms of marketing, selling something called a "Lactic Acid Bar" is probably a bad thing since the number of people interested in giving themselves flavoured-muscle-cramps-on-a-stick are relatively few.  But what about other cases?

For example, in karate there is a lot of focus on "doing the move right".  But that interpretation changes depending on who you talk to.  Before I left, a lot of "correctness" came from exact positioning.  My knowledge of the inner workings was pretty limited so I was left with basically imitating what I saw.  This meant that "bring right" was simply that I was able to reproduce a specific stance or arm positioning.

As I trained in Japan however, I began to see that while there is still a ballpark range for a move to be right (a high block is different from a low block), it's more important to be understanding the principles behind the movement and the positioning.  In fact, often times focusing too much on positioning inhibits people's ability to do the move properly because they become overwhelmed with details.  Sometimes it's just step back, point out one or two critical things they should work on, and simply let them get on with it.  It's quite difficult to do because it's many people's first reaction to simply fix everything right away but the reason we practice is to give us many opportunities to fix things over a long period of time.

Then again, making mistakes is sometimes crucial to development.  I lost tournaments for nearly a year straight before finally placed somewhere I could be proud of.  And for many, the failure is quite a deterrent and while it can be a bit rough at times, I made mistakes in the ring that I probably never could've predicted.

This also ties into education since there's always talk about steering students away from testing and performance based assessment towards experiential learning opportunities.  Again analogous to "doing it right" vs "trying it out", it's something I've had a few chances to try out, particularly at Science World.  Now I'm not here to say that all testing is bad, I really do think that it's necessary.  But I would never judge a student purely on achievement either.  Take the following picture:

We were given materials (a few sheets of paper, some tape, scissors, and a paper clip) and told to make a house.  Our group built a motorhome.  By all intents and purposes we didn't exactly build a typical "house" but by no means are we wrong.

The difficult part then is separating mistakes that occuring along the path of progress and mistakes veer off in a different direction.  And then it's deciding of those "different direction" mistakes have merit of their own, which many argue they do.

With PSWK's grading coming up in a few weeks, this is something I'll be thinking quite a bit about...

In the meantime, one final mistake which is quite clearly a mistake.  But at least they learned something... maybe...