This-essay is a8005211.htm which is available at the web-site www.essayz.com. See more notes at the bottom. Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay By-Months By-Years By-Words Webs of Like-&-Un-Like ESSAYS <==> Like-&-UN-Like This-One ========================================================== %UNDERSTANDING MISTAKES 800521 Emotionally immature people are made ill-at-ease by others' mistakes, and often tend towards punishment as a way of inhibiting other people from making mistakes--- assuming that mistakes are of a nature which permits them to be inhibited. Such punitive behavior demonstrates a lack of understanding of the mistakes which are made. Often mistakes are made for very logical reasons, or as the expression of emotions of great personal integrity. Our responses to people's mistakes are themselves likely to be mistakes---unless we understand the logic and/or affective motivations which lead to the behavior which we regard as mistaken. It is not helpful to attempt to impose our own values, logic, and affective orientation upon another person on the grounds that their values, logic, and affective orientations are "mistaken". Mutual dialogue about our respective values, logic, and affective orientations---and the consequences which flow from them --- is likely to be more helpful. Students are not aided by teachers who do not understand the students' mistakes. For a teacher to help a student who has made mistakes, the teacher must first come to an understanding of the student's mistakes, by becoming informed of the values, logic, and affective orientation which lead to the student's presumably mistaken behavior. A judgmental approach by the teacher towards the student will block the dialogue which is a prerequisite to becoming informed and being helpful, even in the absence of formal punishment. The teacher who participates in formal punitive behavior is thereby cut off from the information which is essential to being qualified to help the student. Part of being cut off from the students is being kept unaware of being cut off. Students conspire to keep punitive teachers unaware of their alienation, and punitive teachers collude to remain unaware of their alienation. Any student or teacher who reveals the alienation is subject to punishment. This is, of course, a mistake; but it is a mistake which very few people understand, and even fewer people respond to helpfully and with integrity. Those who understand the mistake are prone to reveal the mistake, and that is considered a mistake by those who are alienated and do not want to know that they are alienated. The mistakes stand in the way of responding wisely to them. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================Lines beginning with a percent sign are KEYWORDS for use in ESSAY-System Searches. Their terminal digits are dates of writing in the format @yymmdd#, where @ = a means 99, @ = b means 20, and # = is a within-date essay-count. Links to date-adjacent essays are near page top & bottom.
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