Guessing and Verification

We have already noted in passing the intuitive confidence required of the poet and the literary critic in practicing their crafts: the need to proceed in the absence of agreed-upon criteria for the choice of an image or the formulation of the critique. It is difficult for a teacher, a textbook, a demonstration film, to make explicit provision for the cultivation of courage in taste. As likely as not, courageous taste rests upon confidence in one’s intuitions about what is moving, what is beautiful, what is tawdry. In a culture such as ours, where there is so much toward uniformity in taste in our mass media of communication, so much fear of idiosyncratic style, indeed a certain suspicion of the idea of style altogether, it becomes the more important to nurture confident intuition in the realm of literature and the arts. Yet one finds a virtual vacuum of research on this topic in the educational literature.

The Process of Education, by Jerome Bruner, p. 67

For my eighth birthday in January 1963 my parents gave me and my friends a real treat. They took us to see How the West Was Won, one of the early movies to use the then new technology, Cinerama, three projectors synchronized to produce a single image, widescreen before there was widescreen. We couldn’t see the movie at the local theater; the screen wasn’t big enough and didn’t curve at all; we had to go way out to Syosset to see the movie. That made it even more special. I really didn’t remember the movie at all but a few years back it started to show up on the TCM channel, so I watched much of it again. I’ve done likewise with Journey to the Center of the Earth and a few other adventure classics from childhood. The sense of awe is no longer there, the wonder created by the technology completely lost, but the storyline is still interesting and some of the characters and style of narration make it fun to view.

The Jimmy Stewart character, Linus Rawlings, is emblematic of the “rugged individualist,” the myth of whom survives till this day. Rawlings is essentially nomadic, with the canoe the preferred mode of transportation, the clothes on his back and the packs he totes in the canoe the totality of his belongings, earning a living as a trapper. He’s a boy’s model of a hero, able to fend for himself, amiable in the company of good people, ready for a snort of whiskey when the opportunity avails, and good with his fists in a fight. I would not have focused on this character but for recently watching the old (1978) TV miniseries, Centennial. I purchased the boxed set on DVD so I could watch while riding the stationary bike. I’m now a little more than halfway through it. Like How the West Was Won, it chronicles multiple generations, taking an essentially historical approach to the town in Colorado that bears the name of the series title.

The film begins with the French Canadian trader Pasquinel, played by Robert Conrad, paddling his canoe into Indian Territory in the latter part of the 18^th century. While in his tent seemingly asleep, an Arapaho Indian quietly enters, to see what is going on. Pasquinel opens his eyes and they are eyeball to eyeball. Pasquinel shows no fear, thus they do not fight but instead emerge from the situation as friends. Lame Beaver, the Indian, learns to trust Pasquinel. Their friendship goes beyond the honest trading they do. Ultimately Pasuqinel weds Lame Beaver’s daughter because Lame Beaver promises to her that Pasquinel, rather than some other Arapaho, will take good care of her.

It occurred to me almost immediately in the watching that Pasquinel is essentially the same character as Linus Rawlings, courageous and strong, seemingly without fear and encouraging the trust of others, beyond that willing to keep his own counsel and see the situation as it is, and willing to endure hardship if necessary. In fighting with other Indians, Pasquinel took an arrow in the back. Painful as it was, he continued on with the arrowhead remaining in a hard to remove place in his lower back for many years, until his friend McKeag had to cut it out because the injury was emitting poisons and if not removal Pasquinel would die.

This is the image of the hero that my generation grew up with. The image changed as we matured. Our personal experience and the times in which we lived demanded a somewhat different idea. What we read and saw in the movies encouraged us to reconsider. I can’t remember what class it was where we read Giants in the Earth, but it must have been English not Social Studies; circa 1970-71 the High Schools were not yet progressive enough to have us learn history from a novel rather than a textbook. Per Hansa, Rolvaag’s protagonist, is a protector in a way that Pasquinel definitely is not. Per Hansa, his family, and his neighbors are not adventure seekers. They endure hardship, the first winter on the Great Plains is especially brutal, but they only seek the good life, not glory and redemption.

Then, too, we learned that some of the most important life decisions are not about survival per se but about which cause to serve. With that, courage could coexist with fear and self-loathing. Hemingway’s notion, grace under pressure, reflected behavior during the moment of truth. Feelings before or after could be far from noble. Monsieur Rick, Humphrey Bogart in his starring role in Casablanca, makes a conscious choice at the pivotal time in the story. He is a hero. He could survive either way, but only one path led to self-respect, and honor. That path entails sacrifice. He does not get the girl. He sees that he cannot, but he is blind to this at first. He must go through a drunken rage where he feels entitled and bitter. What he feels should be his has been taken away through what seems a betrayal. This is followed by a confrontation with Ilsa, the Ingrid Bergman character, the betrayer who nonetheless embodies beauty and grace, who it turns out was not disloyal at all, just caught up in impossible circumstances that couldn’t be explained at the time. The ugliness and misunderstanding Rick goes through only then to see what actually happened produces a new resolve and a strong sense of what is right.

Other stories suggested either that the original image no longer made sense in the twentieth century or that it could be overdone resulting in the most pernicious of consequences. John Hersey’s The War Lover is a morality play in the guise of a story about American aviators based in Britain during World War II. It’s a variant of the tortoise and the hare, with the Per Hansa character as the tortoise and the Linus Rawlings or Pasquinel character as the hare. The co-pilot, Bo Boman, plays the role of Per Hansa but he doesn’t realize he is doing so till well into the story. The pilot, Buzz Marrow, is a larger than life character like Rawlings and Pasquinel. It is he to whom the book title refers. War is not meant to be loved. War horrifies. At best it can be survived. In such an endurance contest, slow and steady does indeed win. Marrow goes over the deep end, rejected by Daphne who favors Boman. Marrow literally cracks up after their plane has been hit. The hero from centuries past is the villain in this story. It is Boman who flies the plane to safety, rescuing the crew.

We’ve seen the Marrow character or variants thereof in real life. Think of G. Gordon Liddy or of Oliver North. There was bravado in their style. They openly exhibited numbness to the pernicious consequences of their actions. In their testimony and public appearances they were matter of fact in their descriptions of what happened where the rest of us would be unsettled because of the evil in the behavior. They aligned themselves with causes initially hidden from public view, the dirty work for a government that couldn’t achieve its ends out in the open because doing so violated the law and public trust. In the War Lover Daphne says near the end of the book that war itself is a consequence of the attitudes of such men, that they like the fight. Perhaps that is true with Liddy and North as well, the covert nature of what they did something they sought irrespective of mission goals. What else would a Rawlings or Pasquinel do when following a path to fame and fortune no longer placed their personal safety in jeopardy?

I suppose for this reason that as I was maturing from adolescence to adulthood most of the memorable characters from film or fiction – Yossarian from Catch 22, Hawkeye Pierce from Mash, J.J. Gittes from Chinatown – were of the antihero variety and all the stories had a double edged quality to them. That matched the tenor of the times and seemed to give the stories more depth. I’m less observant of the mass culture nowadays, but I’ve got the feeling that only recently have we been able to publicly champion the hero in an unbridled way – NYC’s finest in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the pilot and crew of flight 1549 after the emergency landing in the Hudson river – and that seems first and foremost because survival was at issue in those cases and the actions of these true life heroes saved lives.

* * * * *

As an educator, I love the Jerome Bruner passage that leads off this chapter. Courageous taste is a wonderful notion, grounded after a long cultivation, producing an intuitive sense of what is pleasing and what is not, and with that a willingness to be completely open about it. A critic with courageous taste can articulate a strong point of view about some other work, where other opinion of the work is not yet present to serve as a basis for that point of view. An artist with courageous taste can produce a fundamentally new work, referencing prior art to be sure but producing something that is far from a replica of a previous creation.

Yet I think it not a simple matter to tie Bruner’s idea to the more common images of courage and heroism that I sketched in the previous section. We might be able to identify the grace in the work produced by an exercise of courageous taste. There is the potential for that, although it seems possible, even likely, that if as viewers we don’t understand the issues with which the critic or artist is grappling then we’ll miss the elegance and insight of the contribution. Implicit in Hemingway’s terse definition of courage is that the primitives are readily recognizable. What happens when they aren’t? It’s even harder with pressure. Voicing an opinion, writing poetry, creating a piece of artwork may be important activities, but none are matters of life and death. If raw survival is not at stake, where is the pressure? Bruner ultimately wants to ask whether we can teach courageous taste to children. In that context, of course, there is peer pressure. Understanding how much children are vexed by the perceptions of peers, for a child who is establishing her identity through expression of courageous taste, perhaps we can see the Hemingway ideal apply. Bruner, however, defines his concept by talking about experienced professionals who have been practicing their craft for some time. Is it fear of the Monday Morning Quarterbacks that keeps these professionals up at night? If not, is there heroism in their work nonetheless? This seems to me to be a hard question to address directly. So I want to postpone doing that and first go to something simpler.

It is time to turn to the subject of this chapter, verification. To let the cat out of the bag, I want to argue that verification is largely a courageous act, perhaps more in the sense of Per Hansa than in the sense of Linus Rawlings or Pasquinel, but courageous without any doubt. Ideas have life to them. Verification is principally about preservation of ideas, especially when they are in jeopardy and under assault.

The threat may not yet be apparent so let’s make it more overt by focusing on self-teaching. We live in the knowledge society where we do specialized work and are remarkably dependent on the work of others. In spite of the interconnectedness there is a sense where the notion of rugged individualism survives to this day. It is manifest in self-teaching, wherein I mean learning that doesn’t come with explicit coaching from others, though it can depend on books, movies, etc. that others have already produced as long as that production was not done specifically to enhance the learning of this individual in this instant. Such specific production would be coaching, which is what I want to rule out. The ability to self-teach creates a certain sense of independence, the same sort of independence the child feels when she can feed herself, no longer needing to be spoon fed. The child still relies on the parent, but now also on herself and the relationship to the parent changes as a consequence. So too it is with self-teaching.

For anyone who does self-teach, and to a certain extent we all do this, the natural questions emerge: Do we know what we’ve been trying to teach ourselves? If so, how do we know that we know? These questions demand good answers.

When I was a young kid there was a TV game show hosted by Merv Griffin called Play Your Hunch. Other than the name, I really don’t recall the show at all. I mention it here because I definitely do not want to take pot shots at that show, nor at the correct observation that real time decision making often requires making a choice with far less information than what one might want. I do want to challenge, however, the relying on a “gut feeling” when there is information available to refute the assertion and time enough to gather that information. In this case relying on the gut feeling is irresponsible, which is how much of the American Public feels now about the Bush Administration’s original justification for prosecuting the war in Iraq. This in itself doesn’t mean that acts of verification are courageous. In normal parlance we distinguish between acting responsibly and acting courageously, the former not necessarily implying the latter. In the opposite direction, courage of the Per Hansa kind does necessitate a strong sense of responsibility, so let’s be perfectly clear. In my agenda to advocate for guessing, which I certainly want to do in this, I want to advocate equally for doing so responsibly, which means verification needs to go hand in hand with guessing wherever possible.

There is a tendency to fall into a trap when thinking about verification, believing it little more than busy work, a necessary bit near the end of the process before calling it quits. Even Bruner falls into this trap. In the Process of Education Bruner has a delightful chapter on Intuitive and Analytic thinking. It is the former that holds the exalted perch, perhaps because it is hard to teach, or because it is comparatively rare to observe. Bruner’s chapter focuses on mathematics. Professional mathematicians so value intuition. On occasion a brilliant mathematician discovers a theorem through intuition, but then is reduced to prove the theorem through analytic means. In other words, discovery is elevated while validation is ordinary.

This is just plain wrong on the validation part, as consideration of that most famous of conjectures, Fermat’s Last Theorem, clearly indicates. It took over 300 years from when the conjecture was posed to establish its proof, a triumph of both will and ingenuity. Clearly, verification was not a pedestrian matter in this instance. Why do we assume otherwise as the norm?

Verification is fundamentally about providing validity for a proposition. This is done by following a path different from the original path that led to the idea in the first instance. If evidence of the truth of the proposition is found when reaching the conclusion of the alternate path, confidence in the proposition increases. (If the inference from reaching the conclusion is inductive, it may be necessary to follow many alternative paths to get the requisite confidence. With deductive reasoning, one alternative path should suffice.) When the gateway to the alternate path is evident, the path is well illuminated, and it is easy to traverse, then there is no heroism to verification. Most schools teach verification as error checking, implicitly assuming each of these conditions has been met. Then error checking is necessary but it is mostly drudgery, spelling and grammar mistakes, arithmetic errors, or the like. Because it is perceived as such, many students don’t develop the habit to do these sorts of checks. Consider the following alternative question. Is this an interesting path to follow given the proposition under consideration? That type of checking happens far less frequently. It’s the type of question that would motivate the student to take verification more seriously.

While one might associate verification with mathematical proof or the scientific method, it is important in many other fields of endeavor. Take journalism, for example. Having multiple sources and disclosing as much about those sources as possible is fundamental to the method. In a fascinating review by Russell Baker of a book by Robert Novak chronicling his life as reporter, columnist, and pundit there is some good drill down that discusses the motives of the source and the reporter alike and how they see the investigative journalism as a kind of bargain. Because a source has his own agenda and that is understood as a matter of course, there has to be corroboration. The movie version of All The President’s Men, makes clear the yin and yang of whether the “Woodstein” team had the story or not. The game is not just between the reporters and their sources, but also between the reporters and their editor, and then between that editor and the editorial board. Verification is not absolute. It is weighed for the business sense of scooping rival newspapers, for the potential liability in case the story proves false and the person(s) who are the object of the story sue the paper, and for what standards of professional journalism demand.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate that verification comes up in all sorts of contexts, many where we are not conscious that’s what we’re doing. On occasion in my job I’ve had the opportunity to hire new staff through a formal job search. Invariably in the job description we use the phrase, “salary commensurate with qualifications,” meaning we don’t have a number pegged in ahead of time, though I will have had a prior conversation with my Dean and the Business Manager about a ballpark figure. The question then is how does that get set? Since I work at a public university, staff salary is a matter of public record. So my task is to identify current staff around campus whom I think are comparable to what we’re looking for in the position and then find what each of them are paid. There is an odd combination of experience, specialized knowledge, formal education, and personal disposition that affect just how comparable these other people actually are. Coming up with a ballpark without this information is well nigh impossible. At the absolute trough of the housing market after the bubble burst, bankers were in that position vis-à-vis real estate values since there were essentially no transactions to monitor of homes being bought and sold.

This sort of verification provides information, in this case the salary range of comparable staff elsewhere at the University, but otherwise has no effect on the learner’s world view. In that sense it is well within the comfort zone of the learner. The more interesting case to consider is where the learner stretches himself beyond current capabilities, creating a potential for deeper learning, but also taking a risk of failure. Indeed, a post mortem on a serious try that ended in failure would be most illuminating about the issues with verification when the alternate path is not well illuminated or is hard to traverse. Typically, however, one does not keep good records of past failures. Like the crumpled up balls of paper a struggling writer produces when trying to draft a document, most of our aborted creations that ultimately result in failure end up in the (virtual) trash bin. I did stumble upon one of those as an email attachment in the process of writing this chapter. From that I will attempt to reconstruct what happened and the issues that emerged during that experience.

At around the time I read that Russell Baker review of Robert Novak’s book, I saw The Ox-bow Incident on the TCM channel. It is a movie from more than 60 years ago, but it is still a powerful indictment against the rule of the mob, and from reading some of history about the film it apparently was quite controversial when it appeared because of the implication that Fascism could readily have emerged in the U.S. I also read the John le Carré novel The Constant Gardner and then saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes in the title role. All these works seemed strangely interconnected to me. Their story lines were quite different, but each featured a soft spoken, intense, and intelligent individual overwhelmed by another force that was considerably louder, brusque, and oblivious to the harm it caused. I started to write a blog post entitled, Bluster and Understatement. My usual pattern is to author those in MS Word first, producing about a five page document, and then copy and paste into the blog for posting. In this case I produced about three quarters of a page and stopped. I don’t frequently get writer’s block, but here I was stuck.

Most of my postings tie some personal experience, say from watching a TV program or reading some magazine article, to some issue with teaching and learning with technology, my professional field. On occasion, for the latter I make specific reference to things going on at my campus, the writing is more particularized that way and hence I believe more compelling to read. The vast majority of these pieces would ruffle no feathers whatsoever. Infrequently, I take on a more controversial subject. I have fairly strong internal filters, some which developed while I was a campus level administrator for almost ten years and occasionally in the public view, so unlike others I would not simply stake out an extreme position to see what reaction that would create from my readers. Instead, I would aim to make a fairly tight analytic argument and make sure to consider the issue from multiple perspectives. Readers might still not like it, but my goal was definitely to produce something balanced and if I felt what I wrote met that goal then I’d be okay with publishing it to the blog.

In this case I did want to tie to some things going on around campus at the time, but I couldn’t see how to do that without seeming accusatory in the writing and doing that was a no-no. My sense is that had I been able to resolve this tension the resulting posting would have made for compelling reading. Other times where I’ve stretched myself to take on tougher issues in the writing, I’ve gotten feedback from readers indicating they really appreciated the perspective. Rather than persist, however, and continue to search for that resolution this time around, I stopped. Not seeing how to get unstuck, I quit.

The courage of Per Hansa was in persisting and seeing it through. The courageous taste Jerome Bruner talks about implies the confidence to get unstuck in circumstances like these. About a year after going through this experience I found this piece, Successful Students’ Strategies for Getting Unstuck, from the ACM Portal. (Your Campus may need to subscribe for you to have access.) Below is an excerpt from one of the students. I really liked how he expressed it.

I would say, deviate from the assignments on your own time and write programs that you think are completely useless and stupid. You think of these programs, no one’s going to use them. ... Just do it anyway because you’ll understand. You’ll run into problems and you’ll find the solutions to that problem. [...] And then, when the school project does come, you’ll have had the experience from what you’ve done on your own. But I think it’s important that you don’t just do the schools. You’ve got to do it on your own.

Certainly much of being stuck is not having sufficient familiarity with the environment to let ingenuity take over and try out interesting possibilities. The noodling around done beforehand enables the sense of confidence, in large part because it creates a good deal of familiarity as well as repeated prior success. Yet I believe it easier to envision the benefit from writing dippy little computer programs that nobody else sees than to imagine writing short essays on controversial topics held in confidence because with the former the author can still see whether the programs runs and do what they are supposed to do while with the latter there is not an obvious test for the essays to pass. Nonetheless, the point on noodling and gaining familiarity still holds.

Persistence is not the only issue. Patience is also important. Most of us are aware of the problems generated by getting ahead of ourselves since athletes constantly bring it up when discussing their own performance. A case in point, with the Masters golf tournament just concluded, Kenny Perry had the tournament won, up by two strokes with two holes to play only to bogey those last two holes and then to find the victory not to be, a bitter pill to swallow. The article asks how long it will take for Perry to recover from the setback, entirely ignoring his performance over the first 70 holes of the tournament, which was magnificent.

Personally I find the problem not severe at all in my writing. Over time and owing to my economics training in grad school, I’ve disciplined myself to look hard for the holes in the argument and see where it might fall apart. I test the writing both during the pre-write stage and when proof reading. (I’m much less patient about typos and many of those do get through.) Most of the time I’m confident there are no land mines to be found with the writing, though even with that confidence there is still worry that one might be there. A more realistic appraisal, however, indicates the problem is present when in conversation, where often those checks are set aside and we get caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment. There is a strong desire to want the answer immediately and not work through the intermediate steps. Doing that could put a damper on the enthusiasm. It’s usually not avoidance of responsibility that is the cause, however. It’s more a kind of infatuation with the idea. Feeling it has to be right, the urge is to let’s just do it. Play-your-hunch is temptation. Courage is required to fight this devil.

My personal solution is to develop the habit of writing up something afterwards, even when there is agreement to go forwards verbally ahead of time. This builds in some opportunity for reconsideration if the mine does become visible. But I’m not always conscious of the need at the time, so on more than one occasion I have had to backtrack on commitments made. Sometimes it feels as if there can be enthusiasm or patience but not both. The answer is not grim determination, certainly not as the long term solution. Better to aim for moderate amounts of patience and enthusiasm each of which sustains. I’m no hero. I typically can’t do that. But it is something I strive for.

* * * * *

Memory plays tricks on us. Mine seemingly is doing it more frequently now. I thought I had written the blog post titled Bluster and Understatement. But when I searched for it, I couldn’t find it. That puzzled me. I’m vexed by such puzzles. So I looked some more.

I note the date of the Russell Baker review, October 2007. I look in the My Documents folder on my computer for something around that time. I still can’t find anything. I tell myself to forget about it. Go back to writing this chapter. Yet I dawdle on the writing and can’t stop fixating on the blog post. I get annoyed with myself because I’m wasting time. I’m not finding the blog post and I’m not producing text for this chapter. It doesn’t matter. The fixation is getting stronger. I need to find the blog post. It’s an incredible urge.

Eventually it occurs to me to look at my email archive from around that time and search for messages I may have sent myself which have a file attachment (for me to continue working on later). I do that with some frequency when I write at home and the office. That’s the way I port the file from one place to the other. Lo and behold, I find something this way. I’ve got the file attachment but it’s only the beginning of the document, not the completed thing. So I need to check at home on the computer there for whether there’s a fuller version at that location. I do that. Alas, it’s the same short document but now it is in the My Documents folder at home. I’m forced to conclude I never wrote the entire thing.

This little episode is itself an example of verification. It is verification impelled by being vexed about not finding the blog post. Developing these sorts of fixations is an ingrained habit. Chatting with my friend Steve Acker about this, I mentioned how I get locked in on something and when that happens I can’t think of anything else. I must address that thing, solve it some way, shape, or form. Only then can I move on. In telling Steve about this I called it a vice. Sometimes I get fixated on things that are really trivial and of no consequence to anyone in any other context, myself included. Steve, however, argued it was a virtue, an important learning habit. Resolve a situation when you feel vexed. Do whatever it takes to come to a reasonable conclusion. I suppose it can cut both ways. Perhaps to become Per Hansa we need fixation.

There are numerous information flows I receive that I ignore entirely. I completely filter them out. They don’t interest me. When something does get through the filter, however, if it then offers up a puzzle, I get hooked. Usually I don’t look for the puzzle directly. How can I? I’m not aware it is there. The puzzle emerges only after a chain of prior connections has been made first. In this case I was looking for examples of verification that were not from science or math. I’ve already written a chapter about guessing in math and I wanted some variety in my examples. It didn’t take long to come up with Journalism. Verification there provides an interesting alternative. I do some searching on that and find a few interesting references. Then I ask myself what else do I know about Journalism and I think of All The President’s Men and the Russell Baker piece. When I drill down on the latter I recall, incorrectly, my blog post. I’m ready to go further down the chain of connections but then I get stuck, which is what starts the whole thing. Here I don’t give up, however, because the memory of writing the blog post seemed strong.

I can’t fully explain this interplay between guessing, verification, and personality but there clearly is some looping between the three. Some of the looping is of the urgent type I just described. But there is another form as well, one that is more subtle, that helps determine what type of questions should be of interest in guessing an answer. It’s this other more subtle form of looping that I believe we refer to as developing a sense of taste. The point I want to make about it here is that developing taste happens hand in hand with verifying matters of importance. Taste is acquired this way and it is therefore idiosyncratic, depending on that personal experience of verification.

* * * * *

Let’s wrap up this chapter by comparing self-teaching to the creativity that Bruner describes in the opening quote. In my view, they are largely the same with one substantive difference. Self-teaching can end up with new understanding but without any tangible product worth speaking about, neither document, work of art, nor other media creation. There may be many intermediate products produced through self-teaching, the results of the noodling we talked about earlier. But those are only stepping stones to the new understanding, not one and the same with it. Creativity, in contrast, requires both new understanding and a tangible product or set of products. So it differs from self-teaching in that respect. But otherwise they are remarkably similar, if not identical.

The reason why both self-teaching and creativity require confidence and courage is that we as individuals are in battle with ourselves. Many of us succumb in that battle. The courageous succeed. Courage is not just a matter of will. Habit matters too. Perhaps habit is the more important factor.

In Chapter 1, Why Guessing?, I argued that the approach should be started very early in the school career, say at the start of Middle School. Verification needs to be part of this right at the outset. That may seem daunting. It needn’t be. Following the same path for a second, or even a third time can be verification, if there is some lag between the times when the path is traversed. Proof reading is a kind of verification of writing. Placing the mind in a different frame when reading one’s own writing is sufficient to determine whether the work rings true. Watching a movie or a TV show for a second time where detail was missed the first time can be verification too. Does the same sense of the story survive or does the added detail change the meaning? Having the learner find other gateways for herself perhaps is something that can be postponed till she is more mature.

The rest of what happens in verification should be encountered early, including running into roadblocks. If we want to develop courage in our children, they need to learn to get up after they fall, to work through the difficulties they encounter. It’s the most important early lesson.