My fifth-grade teacher was teaching us about the Panama Canal, and how it connects the world’s two great oceans with an elaborate series of locks. He described how a ship would enter the first lock, the gates would close behind it, the lock would fill up with millions of gallons of water to lift the ship up to a higher level, and another set of gates in front of the ship would open to let the ship pass to the next lock. It was all very impressive, but there was something missing from his explanation.
“Why are the locks there?” I asked. “Why are they needed?”
The teacher seemed never to have thought about this before. He paused for a moment and said, “Probably because the water level in the Pacific Ocean is higher than the Atlantic Ocean.” Satisfied with himself, he went on with the lesson.
His answer was patently absurd. Anyone who looked at a map could see that the two supposedly separate oceans were in fact different portions of a single body of water, and therefore couldn’t have different levels. But by that time, I’d learned from hard experience that it never pays to correct the teacher.1
For years afterward, I recalled that exchange with a bit of resentment and a big dollop of smugness. Why couldn’t he just have confessed that he didn’t know, instead of making up an answer on the spot? When I eventually became a teacher, I was always ready to admit when I was stumped by a student’s question — and in fact, I took it as an opportunity to model problem-solving behavior. “I don’t know,” I’d say to the student who asked the question. “Why don’t we find out?” And then everyone could watch my screen as I went to Google to investigate.
(Sometimes it was useful to say “I don’t know” even if I did know. If I was demonstrating how to use a piece of software — Photoshop, for example — and a student would ask a “what if?” question such as “What happens if I use the eraser on a type layer?” I’d answer, “I don’t know; let’s all try it and see!” hoping that the students would realize that they could easily answer such questions on their own.)
So it was easy to look back at my fifth-grade teacher and feel superior. But the longer I went on teaching, the more I realized that I had frequently been guilty of saying things that were absolutely wrong. I had told students that skin tone contained more blue than green (in reality, the opposite is true); that Tim Berners-Lee, at the time he invented the World Wide Web, was a physicist (he had a BA in physics, but that’s about it); that sans-serif characters weren’t used in ancient Rome (they were); that there’s no such thing as half a pixel (there sort of is), and many other things that I can’t remember now because, well, they were wrong.
Obviously, when I taught these “facts” to classes, I thought at the time that they were correct. Why I thought they were correct, I can’t say. But no matter where my supposed knowledge came from, I had clearly fallen victim to that age-old philosophical conundrum, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” (Or, in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld, “There are unknown unknowns.”) I’m good at problem-solving, but I’ve never figured a way out of that one.
Back when I worked in educational publishing — before the days of computerized layout and spell-checking — I was preparing to send a workbook to be printed. This was the final step in a long process for which I was responsible, which included multiple passes of rewriting and editing, getting type from a compositor, proofreading the typeset copy and making corrections, and finally having a designer slice up the type and adhere it to layout boards, resulting in “mechanicals” that the printer would photograph to make plates.
As I was about to package up the mechanicals, a colleague of mine — an experienced editor who could spot a mistake across a room — happened to be walking by. She scowled at me and said, “You have a spelling error.”
“What?! Where?” I said. It was unlikely that a typo would have made it this far through the process, and at this stage it would be an expensive thing to fix.
“ ‘Ophthalmologist’ is misspelled,” she said.
“No it isn’t,” I said. “I know people think it’s ‘opthamologist,’ but I made sure the ‘l’ is in there — ‘opthalmologist.’ ”
“Yes, but there’s an ‘h’ missing,” she said. It’s not ‘opthalmologist,’ it’s ‘ophthalmologist.’ ”
I turned pale. “Are you sure?” I asked, knowing as soon as it came out of my mouth that it was a stupid question.
“If you didn’t know how to spell it, why didn’t you look it up?” she said, glaring.
“But I did know how to spell it,” I said — meaning, of course, that I thought I knew how to spell it. How was I supposed to know that I didn’t? Since that time, I’ve been aware that each of us is a storehouse of snafus that are waiting to happen. We can hear the ticking of the time bomb, but we have no way to know where the bomb is and when it’s due to go off.
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