Scriptorium Daily
Being wrong need not be bad.
Of course, nobody wishes to be wrong, but sometimes it is good for us. Sometimes when I am wrong about a fact or make a mistake in work, I take it as a moral failing when it is not. Assuming normal care and reasonable precautions, there is no sin in being mistaken.
We should embrace our errors of this sort, because they often teach us more than an accidental correctness. I poured hours into a chapter of my dissertation only to have my wise advisor cross it all out. She wrote only one short comment, but that comment summarized my error.
I was tempted to despair. All that work wasted.
But it had not been wasted, because when the error was revealed my mind was freed from error and able to soar a bit higher than it did before. Even the process of developing the wrong idea had helped me, because the labor was not wasted. My mental capacity and knowledge of the text I was studying increased.
I did not learn from this to embrace error, but to accept it. Error must come, but woe to the one who clings to it. Being wrong requires no forgiveness; stubborn love of my error is unforgiveable.
Many of us think a critique is personal, because sometimes it is. “Take this in the spirit in which it is intended,” has generally meant somebody was going to make me feel badly about myself. These critics also take our mistakes personally and so attack what they should gently correct.
I had a math teacher once who would glare at me over a red marked page as if I personally had insulted her by doing my best and doing poorly. “How dare you give me this?” she would towering over me in her zebra pantsuit.
I never knew what to say. My mathematical ineptitude only grew worse as I tried harder and the notion that I would have dared to insult my powerful teacher was ludicrous.
Hard enough to learn from error, but it is nearly impossible if error is used as weapon in hateful hands. Yet even a kind mentor finds it hard to communicate error well to a traumatized generation. The temptation is ether to ignore mistakes and focus only on the good or to despair of education altogether.
Self-esteem is fragile, because it is too often based on false praise and collapses under the weight of the tiniest just criticism. The weighty reality of error crushes the papier-mâché of false praise. The giant “most improved trophy” on the mantel cannot compensate for the realization, even kindly expressed, that the student actually cannot play the game well.
So I am praying for the mercy to accept my errors and be able to learn from them. I should not exactly love making mistakes, but not be worried about them either. If that is the judgment I must use on myself, then it is the standard I must use on others.
When a neighbor, or even an enemy, makes a mistake, I will not use it as an occasion to mock or denigrate, but as a chance to teach. God help me never to take honest errors personally.
