[Paleopsych] NYT: To Err Is Human; It's Also a Teaching Tool

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To Err Is Human; It's Also a Teaching Tool
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.7.22
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i46/46b00901.htm

    By DAVID D. PERLMUTTER

    Some years ago, after I had filed the grades for a large lecture
    course, one student -- a loyal attendee and diligent note taker
    -- dropped by my office to thank me for a great semester. After some
    pleasantries, she produced a typed note and said, "Oh, by the way,
    professor, here is a point I caught where you were wrong."

    I blinked, thanked her, and promised I would check on the matter.
    After she left, I consulted some media-history texts and discovered to
    my horror that, contrary to what I had informed 250 undergraduates,
    Thomas Edison's first sound-recording device, his phonograph,
    consisted of tinfoil wrapped around not a wax disk but a metal
    cylinder.

    I considered what my response should be. Obviously I should contact
    the student and tell her that she was indeed correct. But what about
    the rest of the class? Did admitting my error matter when the fact
    involved was, after all, trivial? The textbook did have the facts
    right. And what about the belatedness of any correction I might make?

    After some internal debate, I decided that a higher principle was at
    stake: Even though the semester was over, I had one more lesson to
    teach my students. Admitting that you goofed is the right thing to do,
    no matter who you are. The incident, and others like it, drove me to
    reconsider the ways that I was teaching students to respect the truth.

    In the past, when I announced that it's vital to get facts correct
    through checking with multiple reliable sources, I sensed that
    students were automatically recording my words but not taking them to
    heart. So I have tried other strategies to explain the importance of
    verifying facts. Those include citing examples of badly fumbled facts
    from the worlds of politics and the news media, and dissecting the
    cognitive pitfalls that lead us to get facts wrong or lure us into
    thinking that inaccuracy is an acceptable practice. I have found,
    however, that the single best teaching tool is for a professor to
    expose his own blunders.

    My general argument to students is that if you make a mistake about an
    obvious fact -- that is, one not subject to controversy -- someone,
    somewhere and somehow, will out you. I provide major and minor
    examples. Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the 2000 Republican National
    Convention, recounted how he decided that he would embrace the
    philosophy of the Grand Old Party after he saw the presidential
    candidates Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey debate in 1968. Problem:
    Nixon and Humphrey never debated in 1968.

    Then there's Rudolph Giuliani in the days after September 11, 2001,
    brandishing a copy of John Lukacs's Five Days in London: May 1940 and
    claiming that its description of World War II Londoners holding up
    under the blitz gave him strength in the trying time after the attack
    on America. Problem: As the author of the book himself pointed out in
    an essay in The Chronicle Review ([3]"A Final Chapter on Churchill,"
    October 24, 2003), "there is not one word about the blitz in Five
    Days."

    Although I devote substantial class time to talking about lies, or
    deliberate misinformation, I pay particular attention to errors like
    Schwarzenegger's and Giuliani's -- and mine about Edison -- cases in
    which the communicator probably did not intend to get anything wrong.
    I have an ideological agenda behind such instruction.

    It is no great insight to say that today's youth are cynical. I do not
    know whether they are more cynical than any previous generation in
    history -- men and women who reached maturity at the end of the
    so-called Great War must be rivals for that position -- but my
    students do have a general perception that they are being lied to by
    those in authority, perhaps including their professors. Certainly the
    popular culture they ingest frequently sends the message that
    government, business, academe, and almost all institutions are engaged
    in innumerable conspiracies to cover up the truth.

    In fact, Americans are lied to often. But democracies perish when
    faith and trust in the institutions of a civil society -- like
    government and the press -- collapse. So I want to make a case to my
    students that many of the misstatements they see are the result not of
    evil cabals but rather of plain boneheadedness.

    My undergraduates seem to get excited about participating in a
    Sherlockian quest for error. Taking an example from blogs, which are
    responsible for publicizing a number of goofs committed or repeated by
    the mainstream media, I have students scour certain op-ed essays from
    newspapers and do some fact checking. But here's the twist: In most of
    the cases, I wrote the op-eds. I think when the students see my
    eagerness to hear about my own errors, they learn a valuable lesson:
    We all need to ponder why we make mistakes. And, of course, trying to
    prove their professor wrong is an added attraction.

    Once the students turn in their results, I offer them a typology of
    the kinds of errors that I find myself making -- and usually catching,
    I hope, before publication. (For graduate students, recommended
    reading on this subject is David Hackett Fischer's Historians'
    Fallacies.)

    In my case, the sins that lead to error are all too glaring, foremost
    among them laziness. Thanks to the familiar fallacy, I repeat without
    checking "facts" that I have cited numerous times and assumed must be
    true because of repetition (my own and that of others), and about
    which no one has ever challenged me. Edison's disk is a case in point:
    At some point in the past, when creating my lecture notes and slides,
    I made the error and then repeated it often enough, with no one
    correcting me, that it became an assumed verity. You must review
    claims of fact, even those that you have been repeating for a long
    time.

    I also suffer from the fitting fallacy, an error committed because it
    seems to make complete sense -- that is, to fit into a set of other
    facts. I've written a number of essays, and recently a book chapter,
    on the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in China. As a visual
    historian, I focused on pictures of the event, including the famous
    one of the lone man standing in front of the oncoming tank. I know
    that, contrary to popular misconception, the man did not confront the
    tank in the square, but blocks away. But when interviewed by a New
    York Times reporter on the subject of famous news icons, I referred to
    "the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square." I made
    the same error that I had detected in others because it just seemed to
    fit.

    I'm also dogged by the transpositional fallacy, an error that occurs
    when I inadvertently modify a fact and make it incorrect. I study
    images of war and the military. I know, as a piece of trivia, that
    Gen. George S. Patton owned pearl-handled guns. In an essay about
    today's media coverage of Iraq, I wrote that Patton would have pulled
    "his pearl-handed revolvers" on reporters. Seeing the sentence in
    print, I had to reconsider: Patton, I recalled, possessed
    pearl-handled .45 automatics. Had I made an error? It turns out that
    the general had owned pearl-handled revolvers as well, but I should
    have checked before submitting the essay.

    Such are but a few of the reasons I make errors of fact, not regularly
    but often enough to provoke eternal vigilance. What I hope my students
    get out of analyzing their professor's foibles is that everyone
    -- they, I, the authors of textbooks, the president, Nobel Prize
    winners, and so on -- makes mistakes. The crucial questions are why
    the mistakes are made, and what is to be done about them. Our duty as
    teachers is not to produce students who will always get their facts
    right, but to foster young thinkers who appreciate that facts are
    indeed worth getting right, and who then take the most important step
    of candid self-analysis when they get them wrong.

    Which is what I did when my student notified me of my error about
    Edison's phonograph: I sent the whole class an e-mail message
    admitting my mistake, congratulating their astute classmate, and
    wishing them a good summer. Not a few wrote back telling me that was
    the first time they had ever had a teacher admit that he was wrong
    about anything.

    I hope it's not the last.

    David D. Perlmutter is a senior fellow at Louisiana State University's
    Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs and an associate professor of
    mass communication on the Baton Rouge campus.