Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginger Power
I have been thinking to myself (and debating with others) the value of failure vs. the value of success. I don't think that anybody will question that both hold great value in the learning process for students and mentors alike. What I've been asking is how do we as mentors balance these methods of learning? Mentors generally have the power to intervene in students' struggles and take away the lessons that can be learned from failure, but at the same time, save the student from frustration and give them a new skill with which they can create bigger and more exciting problems to be solved. Obviously there is no "correct", one-size-fits-all answer, but there are surely more successful, and less successful methods. ....
On the other hand:
The strategy team is debating what direction the team should go for the year and has hit a major road block. They can't figure out what to do and the argument is getting heated. Mentor William Beatty has this great game-breaking idea that he proposes to the students. They can all now move on and begin implementing the idea: value in success.
Meanwhile many other teams who resent mentor-built-robots allow the students to debate until their voices are hoarse. After a week or two they finally agree and have a student crafted strategy. They end the year as an average team and all agree the students need to be quicker in deciding the strategy next year: value in failure.
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This example illustrates a different lesson: the value of institutional knowledge and wisdom. It's the real reason why we have mentors. Students can have great ideas, but with a 6-week deadline, we all need to pare branches of decisions. A mentor's role at least in part is to say "we tried that before you were here and it didn't work." And what do students learn from that? A lesson often lost in this Internet age when everyone thinks they can become an instant expert thanks to Google--that an older individual with wisdom can have an important role. What a mentor has to do is watch for overstepping the bounds on original creativity.