The Right to be Wrong

I’ve been thinking a lot about right answers recently. In high school the world revolves around the right answers. We are trained, even before that, that right answers get you ahead. The best perks are saved for those of us who can figure out how to translate their right answers into tenths and hundredths of points of a GPA. Those people are the ones who are going to succeed in life. Or at least that is what we are told.

I chose to go to a college that didn’t have grades. New College of Florida was my absolute utopia for four years and I scoff at the day that I thought I wanted to go to “big state university far from home.” I can’t speak for other people’s college experience, but at least at mine, I started to develop the concept that right answers get you somewhere, but your wrong answers are valuable too. Instead of grades, we had evaluations that told us what we did well and what we could work on. So while I was learning from my wrong answers, the right answers still prevailed as a goal- something to achieve. [Read more]