I want my students to succeed. I want to see myself succeed, especially as a tenure-track faculty member. But when undergrads can’t get microtomes to cut, or reactions to work, or pendulums to swing, it can be a pain. I recall these experiences were quite embarrassing as a GTA, but, with time, I’ve learned to shake off experimental failure, personally realizing that it’s all part of the scientific process. These days, the consequences of a bad experiment leave me deciding how best to proceed with the pedagogical outcome (admittedly, this could be a whole other blog post). However, after reading Teaching Failure in the Laboratory (by Glagovich and Swierczynski), I may alter my outlook a bit.
The authors discuss the importance of failure in teaching laboratories. I know this is a prudent lesson to consider, but I hadn’t truthfully evaluated the concept of dealing with failure until I was in graduate school. In fact, my PI had a saying about laboratory life (granted he was primarily talking about synthetic organic chemistry): “You have to be prepared to fail 95% of the time,” which broadly translate to, “despite your best efforts, sometimes experiments fail.” I kept his advice in mind throughout my training, chalking up failure to stats while capitalizing on my successes. In retrospect, I wonder how learning this lesson as an undergrad would’ve affected my outcome as a scientist.
Although the crux of the Glagovich article lies with organic chemistry, I wonder if these lessons are common to other scientific disciplines. Certainly, my analytical students had their expectations blown to pieces when we attempted to isolate iron(II) from egg yolk. Ginormous fail. Although some students considered the outcome (or lack thereof) “typical” relative to their high school courses, others echoed the same experience that Glagovich and Swierczynski reported in their article—they couldn’t believe a published experiment wouldn’t work right. Still, others couldn’t care less one way or another, and felt Mexican food was more interesting (lab gets out at 10 pm).
In light of the Glagovich article, I’m wrestling with the concept of teaching experimental failure. Why does every undergraduate experiment have to be perfect? Should students learn about failure? Should we protect students from the ugly truth? Why can’t we teach failure?
