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At times it has been deeply admonished and hidden from view. Individuals who failed were to be shunned or punished. At other times failure was to be avoided by setting the bar for success so low that failure was impossible. The result of this movement was that success became meaningless, achievable by all without risk and through little effort.

When approaching any learning goal, experienced teachers typically know the misunderstandings students are likely to have and the kinds of errors they are likely to make. The key is not to wait for these problems to be verified through an assessment but to build lessons around them.

So you will take risks, and you will have failures. But it’s what happens afterward that is defining. A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.

The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride.

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time.

Perhaps of all the humanities, the creative arts come closest to valuing failure. Poets and painters don't expect to get it right the first time. That's the idea of workshopping as a pedagogy, right? Still, there's a real difference. I'd be willing to bet that most creative writers bring a piece of work into a workshop secretly hoping it's a success. Sure, they know they need help on aspects of their story or poem, but that's not the same as failing. A computer program that doesn't run is a failure. A program that produces no usable data about the text it was set up to analyze is a failure. Why don't those failures devastate the developers? Because each time their efforts fail, the developers learn something they can use to get closer to success the next time.

How do we understand our gifts without the certificate, the diploma?   That's the challenge.  

And, sadly, much of our formal education is about standardizing exactly

that shift, in teaching that kindergarten child who believes she can do absolutely anything that, no, she's a poor reader, or bad in math, or a poor speller, or a poor artist or has no musical talent (as my husband was once told when he was a child: