There is a building with a sign that I pass on my way home each day. The name on the sign reads “William M.W. Mong.” I must have passed it a gadzillion times since moving to Cyberport more than a year ago, but I only just realized the sign reads William Mong (as in staunch supporter of social welfare and higher education development, not William Wong (my husband’s basketball buddy). I’d never checked out who William Mong was before, but I knew a William Wong, and so that’s what my brain told my eyes to see.
Eminent piano teacher and sight reader Boris Goldovsky (no, I’m not making this up) discovered an error in a widely-used edition of a Brahms capriccio only after a relatively poor student played the misprinted G-natural, where all “superior” pianists had inferred a G-sharp. In his subsequent experiment detailed in Errornomics: Why We Make Mistakes And What We Can Do To Avoid Them, even when skilled sight readers were told of an error and invited to play the piece as many times as needed to find it, no other musician ever found it. This experiment was used to illustrate how much we see what we expect, rather than what is really there, especially if we are well, “superior” users, who have learned to please test graders or other performance evaluators.
I just wonder how many children who have learnt to please examiners also learned the broader concept of real life application. Meet over-reacting me again, as I go around getting Rockstar to remember his numbers by pushing elevator buttons and examining bus stops. And yes, working the ATM for me – I rue the day he suddenly belts out my six-digit pin to all and sundry.
Here’s another one – researchers at NYU’s Stern School of Business found test takers who change their answers usually improve their scoring 2 out of 3 times. Yet in terms of second guessing, people (including professors aware of the bias) in related studies regret far more if they change a right answer to a wrong one than if they failed to correct an initial wrong answer. Fear of this regret makes people much less likely to change their initial answer despite the odds. Which goes to show not all wrong answers are created equal – there are mistakes we deem more acceptable than others.
Yet a mistake is still a mistake. Knowing we have a tendency to make mistakes based on our own nature should mean we as parents grit our teeth and get over ourselves long enough to give parenting our real best shot.
A young mind depends on us to nurture it. Knowing our tendencies, weaknesses, where we are most likely to go wrong gives us a chance to run far away from said tendencies et al. Be bitter, bring our hang-ups into our parenting, and it colors all our responses to the inquisitive young mind. It’s not our child’s fault we had a shitty day in the office. Would you like to give Jane The Backstabber a chance to affect how you respond to your child? Nuh-uh.
We owe it to those who love us to keep it together. Go on. We know we can. Don’t we just love our children so.
