'Mistakes are good!'

'We've missed the boat...'

'When it rains, it pours...'

And

'To add insult to injury...'

And with those three idioms...my day has been perfectly summed up. 

In education we often talk about it being good to make mistakes. We learn from them right? But how do we truly get children to believe in that notion? Afterall, we aim for the higher marks; we love a piece of work beautifully presented and largely speaking, we work in a culture which does not tolerate a *mess* up. 

It's something I've grappled with myself and I've had this discussion plenty of times with other members of SLT. I don't have the complete answer but I think I have a good starting point.

Last Friday during the LBQ training for Jop and Khraw we modelled how the teacher can use LBQ to show common misconception errors. Firstly, the children love it. A teacher with a weakness? FANTASTIC! Secondly, the children begin to pre-empt what the misconception in class will be, this heightens their focus on their own work. So, simply put... It starts with the teacher. The culture within class. Not making any old error but carefully selected *mess* ups. 

This is where LBQ is a breeze. Each question has a teacher guide as it were. The misconceptions which children are likely to have are already built in and this informs what feedback the child gets. It also means that the teacher doesn't have to think of common misconceptions, they are already there. So with 45 children in a classroom, we can use the live data from LBQ to address all kinds of misconceptions. It's feedback which smacks you in the face.

So, mistakes. They are good.

Until they make your living day somewhere inbetween a laughable inconvenience and deep frustration / misery. 

So, my wife will tell you, laundry isn't one of my strengths. I will do it. But it's a once in a blue moon kind of affair and the moon has to be proper blue. So when the guest house offered to wash our clothes using the laundry service, we gladly agreed. The laundry is taken to a nearby stream and scrubbed with soap, rinsed in the stream and then laid out on a rock to dry. We took our laundry bags down to the reception and were told to leave them in the corner of the room. 

"They will be ready for you tomorrow evening."

"Perfect."

Leaving the guest house for the village is always a bit of a faff. The payment never seems to work, the bags are mega heavy and there's always the thought of the mental car journey ahead. Upon reaching reception we paid for the room (the card worked first time), asked if there was somewhere to leave our duffel bags (there was) and asked what time we could collect our laundry? (We were in the city school until the afternoon).

"Laundry?"

"Yep."

Hands over mouth agast, "Oh no, oh no. Garbage!"

Mistakes, they're good. We learn from them. But when two weeks worth of your clothing has been tossed in the garbage and the local garbage has been collected that very morning, it makes you question if getting things right first time is actually just better afterall.

Anyway, after politely getting a statement for insurance purposes we headed to school and thereafter to a souless version of Next, which is saying something. T-shirts, shorts, dodgy underwear and socks filling the bag, we got a taxi back to the village.

It's an adventure. It's all just part of it. 

And when you think the adventure is just about to complete itself for the day - it releases just one more twist...

"I'm glad we managed to replace the stuff today anyway Tom."

"Yup."

...

"Where's the bag?"

...

"Shit. It's in the taxi."