We all make mistakes. Even teachers. What’s important is that we learn from those mistakes.

That’s the premise behind a new book that relies heavily on the expertise — and mistakes — of Maine teachers and University of Maine professors.

“Oops: What We Learn When Our Teaching Fails” is a collection of “failure stories” that are meant to reassure teachers who may be questioning their career choice. The vignettes were collected and edited by UM education professor Brenda Miller Power and Ruth Shagoury Hubbard, an education professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. Several UM faculty members and former students also contributed stories to the book as did former and present Maine teachers.

“Oops” is a collection of what could have been horror stories — stories about teachers losing control of their young charges, projects gone awry or other education mishaps.

There are stories about eager young teachers whose best-laid plans for an organized day are quickly dashed by squirming 5- and 6-year-olds. There is the story of a grand computer project that almost fell victim to the foibles of modern technology. There are stories of high school teachers and college professors who hoped to engage their students in deep, soul-searching dialogue about class conflict and other long-standing societal problems only to be met by blank stares and apathy.

There is the story of a Denver community college instructor who innocently asked her students to introduce themselves on the first day of class. One student announced nonchalantly that he was under suspicion for molesting and murdering a 6-year-old boy. For the rest of the semester, the teacher avoided the murder suspect, hoping he would go away. Although the student stopped coming to class partway through the semester, the teacher gave him a passing grade so he wouldn’t take her class again. The man was not convicted of murder, but the teacher still wonders where he is.

The “failure stories,” as Power calls them, are meant to complement education textbooks that portray a perfect classroom to aspiring teachers.

“Teachers usually share their best practice, not what went wrong,” Power said of texts that are commonly used at UM’s College of Education where she has taught reading and writing instruction since 1990.

Jeff Wilhelm, another UM professor and “Oops” contributor, said he used to get depressed after reading education books because his chaotic middle school classroom looked nothing like the perfect rooms he read about.

Wilhelm’s contribution to the book, which was published by Stenhouse Publishers in York, is a tale of an ill-fated foray into the world of computers. Naturally, nothing went as Wilhelm planned. One student mistakenly took a computer disc home in his pants pocket. The pants — and the disc — went through the wash. File servers crashed. Weeks’ worth of work were erased when students unwittingly ventured into areas of the computer where they weren’t supposed to.

Each failure, however, turned into an opportunity for both teacher and students to learn things they hadn’t planned to learn, Wilhelm wrote. Floppy discs don’t do well in washing machines, for example.

Looking back on his teaching “failures,” Wilhelm admits that experimentation has its perils, but it’s the only way students and teachers can truly learn.

“If you’re going to try anything interesting, it’s going to blow up,” he said.

Another important lesson new teachers need to learn is that they are not all-powerful and cannot begin to control everything their students do inside or outside the classroom.

“There’s only so much you can control,” said Rosemary Salesi, another UM education professor who shared a story about a day, long ago, when her second-grade pupils revolted at the Weatherbee School in Hampden.

On that spring day, Salesi was charged with monitoring recess. Because the annual season of mud had overtaken the playground, Salesi was charged with keeping the kids on the school’s paved circular driveway. The youngsters were not too pleased with their new restrictions, and Salesi was forced to yell repeated admonitions. When recess ended and the petite teacher ordered the children to line up at the school door, several of them refused to give up their games. Slowly, other children joined the recess revolt. When Salesi was “one moment from hysteria,” the school principal appeared at the door. Pupils quickly lined up and the revolt ended.

Salesi, who today instructs aspiring teachers about children’s reading and writing techniques at the University of Maine, said teachers must be willing to walk a fine line between control and chaos, sometimes falling onto the side of chaos.

UM professors who contributed to “Oops” praise the book for portraying the realities of teaching.

“There’s not much out there that depicts all the realities,” said Janice Kristo, an “Oops” contributor and UM education professor.

The bottom line, the professors said, is it’s OK to make mistakes. Especially if you’re a teacher.