Errotica
In which readers share hilarious, horrifying, and fascinating stories of their own and other people's errors
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Me: Wrong about testing
Back when I was a little teacher, I thought I’d found a way to eliminate the adversarial relationship between teachers and students. Teachers think of themselves as purveyors of knowledge and wisdom, but students often see us as gatekeepers who test them and stand between them and good grades. I believed that if someone besides teachers wrote the major tests, students would view their teachers as allies in a struggle against the test writers in the same way that athletes view their coaches as allies against opposing teams. I was wrong. Over the past decade, due mostly to NCLB, more and more tests are being written, even graded, by outside agencies. This has had countless negative effects on public education (as Diane Ravitch can attest), but it has not had the one desirable outcome I was anticipating. Rather, it appears that students appreciate their teachers (or not) for reasons unrelated to who composes their tests. FWIW, I’d give anything to be able to write my own tests again.
Me: Wrong about Comfort food
My girlfriend and I were arguing playfully about which foods qualified as "comfort foods" when she suggested that we look it up in a dictionary. I chuckled dismissively and assured her that an expression like comfort food was too idiomatic, too colloquial, too figure-of-speechy to be found in a dictionary. As luck would have it, we were standing in a bookstore at that very moment, and we were in agreement that our home was in need of a really good dictionary -- if for no other reason than to settle pointless arguments like this one. We made a bet on whether or not comfort food would be in the best dictionary available in the store, and the loser would buy that book. I bought us an expensive new Encarta World English Dictionary that day, which seems like a pretty good dictionary except for the fact that it contains idiomatic expressions. We've been displaying it ever since on a lighted pedestal at home, and we always refer to it, ceremoniously, as "The Law."
Me: Wrong about intelligence
Upon moving back to the USA , to NYC, after an overseas hiatus , In an attempt to broaden my social possibilities, I took the Mensa exam and passed.
My first meeting was held in a midtown hotel on the third floor and I arrived there and saw a group of what I knew to be mensa types standing and waiting at the bank of elevators . I joined them, none of us speaking or meeting any one's eyes. We waited and waited , and after a while, a newcomer joined us, waited a moment and then pressed the elevator button. Instantly the elevator door opened. Duh!
I never did meet anyone meaningful there, but my husband and I had a saying based on that experience ......"Intelligence does not preclude stupidity."
I am thoroughly enjoying your book altho I made the error of buying it on the KIndle..the mistake being no margins to write notes in!!
Being old now, ( and only into chapter 4,) I do hope that there is evidence that we do get a little more savvy about the degree to which our ego
Me: Wrong about happiness
How is it that what I believe makes me happy (marriage, friends, work, food, a book, the smell of pine needles) sometimess right, and sometimes isn't?
And why is it that when I think about having a child I believe it was always right and it makes me happy?
Maybe I'm mistaken about when I'm happy?
Hmm, emotion and certainty: oil and water inextricably mixed (or am I wrong about that too?)
Me: Wrong about The Pledge Of Allegiance
When I was little the Pledge of Allegiance always made me a little uneasy. Why? Not because I was raised as a crazed militant. Nor was it was it because I somehow had some suspicious feelings abut the government. It was because of the Wizard of Oz. Whenever I faithfully put my hand on my heart and said ".... for which it stands...", I heard "...for WITCH it stands.
I had visions of the Wicked Witch of the East standing on the steps of the Capitol- and it didn't make sense. Fortunately, as a second-grader I had the sense to ask my mother about the whole thing. She set me straight. But I still raise an eyebrow....
Me: Wrong about Travel
I knew the conference was in France, so naturally, I booked a flight to Paris. It wasn't until I landed in Paris that I looked up the exact address of the hotel in ... Lyon - 8 hours away.
Not as bad as my friend Dave, who flew for a conference to Japan - the right destination - exactly one year too early.
My Romantic Partner: Wrong about zebras
It was late at night, and my girlfriend and I were both sleepy. She was talking about whether to wear this particular shirt of hers to a party the next night. I said, "Oh, the one that's striped like a zebra?" She looked at me and said pityingly, "Honey, zebras don't have stripes!" I stared at her in confusion for long enough that she eventually realized something was wrong, and we both cracked up.
"Zebras don't have stripes!" has become our shorthand for when we are condescending about someone else's error while actually being completely wrong ourselves. I wish I could undo every time I have ever done this. It is cosmically embarrassing.
Maybe she was thinking of leopards?
Me: Wrong about laptops
I stole someone’s computer the other day. I was at the airport, I'd just come through the security line, I’m packing up my stuff, I look down, and there’s a shiny Apple Pro silver computer. And I’m like "uh, I kind of thought I put mine away already, but okay." I pick it up, put it in my backpack, I’m leaving security, and this nice woman taps me on my shoulder and says, "Is that your computer?" I say, "I think so," and she says, "Can you just be sure you don’t have two computers?"
Sure enough. Oops.
Me? My wife? Both?: Wrong about chores
When my now-wife Deb and I first lived together, we kept getting into fights about housework, because each of us likes to live in a clean house but each of us is also fundamentally lazy (at least about housecleaning). We were both totally certain that we were doing 80% of the housework and the other person was a damned freeloader. Eventually, after much arguing and itemizing of all the toilets we had scrubbed and dishes we had done, we discovered The Cleaning Fallacy. TCF arises because each person is hyper-aware of every horrifying stroke of the toilet brush when they themselves are brushing, but notices only the end result (if that) when somebody else is doing the cleaning. As a result, each person has a long mental list of all the household chores they have done, each of which is remembered as a major self-sacrifice on the altar of cleanliness. But the other person's chores? Did you even do any?
The solution, obviously enough, was to do housecleaning together. And also just to stop bitching about our housecleaning perceptions, because we now knew that they were systematically biased by TCF.
Me: Wrong about hamsters
I thought there was a P in hamster till last year... Hampster. My girlfriend whose 1st language is not English corrected me...
Okay, maybe you don’t have strong beliefs about the “right” way to load a dishwasher, or about your sweetheart’s propensity to do it “wrong.” In that case, either you are unusually saintly or (like me) you don’t own a dishwasher. But you almost certainly get involved in domestic disputes about who’s right and who’s wrong all the time; we all do. Although interpersonal arguments can have a number of causes – from serious and painful breaches in trust to the fact that we haven’t had our coffee yet – an impressive number of them amount to a tug-of-war over who possesses the truth. We fight over the right to be right.
