Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/author/jacquelinegroskaufmanis/)
There’s an old riddle that goes like this:
A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon says, “I cannot do the surgery because this is my son.” How is this possible? Spoiler alert: the surgeon is his mother. That’s the punchline.
There’s an old riddle that goes like this:
A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon says, “I cannot do the surgery because this is my son.” How is this possible? Spoiler alert: the surgeon is his mother. That’s the punchline. The crux of this riddle is an issue of gender, and a reflection on how society often typecasts powerful, competent women as anomalies—so much so that they warrant a puzzle that manages to stump people’s minds.
By JACQUELINE GROSKAUFMANIS
It’s important to make mistakes. I know this from quotes, proverbs, seasoned elders and my own experience. Even in empirical science, we learn that mistake-making is a huge part of adaptive learning. So as humans, we tolerate it, and as we get older we learn to appreciate it in retrospect. However, when the Internet was integrated into the mistake-making process, it forever changed the ways in which we are allowed to explore and fail.