Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

matter when someone’s wrong, which is why a teacher won’t just leave mistakes hanging in the air. The teacher will instead pick up on the error, explore and develop what’s been said, and then help everyone learn more from it. If, for example, a student says that a billion is ten times as big as a million, the teacher won’t simply say “ Well, that’s wrong, but it doesn’t matter ”. It does, of course, matter that the students understand why this is wrong, and that a billion is, in fact, a thousand times as big as a million. It’s okay to be wrong sometimes – as we all are – provided we take the opportunity to learn from our mistake . Yes, it is okay to make mistakes, but we should try to make eachmistake less and less often. Next time round, we want to get that thing right. Because being right does matter. Post-truth At the moment, it feels as though we’re in something of a post-truth climate. Who and what can young people trust today? Social media lets them very quickly and easily find communities of people with strange, and often disturbing views about things. If those communities have hundreds of followers, then it can seem like lots of other people think the same way once you’re inside them – even if that’s just a partial view of what’s actually a tiny minority of the population. Before the online era, people with strange and fringe views would often find it very difficult to find fellow travellers who shared those views, and have little hope of persuading others to join them. In the present day, anyone can now find any view on virtually any topic, theme or event well-represented somewhere. Under this system, everything that some individuals see will be true for them. The logical endpoint of this is that we can never really knowwhat’s right or wrong. Young people today could thus be forgiven for despairing that it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because we can’t knowwho’s wrong and who’s right, anyway. Who knows, maybe everybody’s wrong? It’s because of this that I think now is the time for teachers to reassure students that facts very much are a thing; that some things are true and some simply aren’t, no matter who might be saying them. We want young people to grow up with the confidence to care about what’s correct and what isn’t. We want them to be empowered to talk back to online videos and podcasts that make false claims. It isn’t okay to repeatedly propagate misinformation or ‘alternative facts’ while insisting that doing so doesn’t matter. At the same time, it’s perfectly normal and fine to get things wrong – just so long as it’s part of a journey towards trying to understand things better. Howmuch you know is one thing. Whether you’re correctable, and therefore getting more things right more of the time as you go on, is far more important. Being on an upwards curve towards a greater truth is what education is all about. We won’t be right all of the time, but if we take our mistakes seriously, we’ll be more right tomorrow than we were today. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colin Foster (@colinfoster77) is a Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Mathematics Education at Loughborough University and has written many books and articles for teachers; find out more at foster77.co.uk 35 teachwire.net/secondary P E D A G O G Y