Day 28: Making Mistakes

Things could always be worse; for instance, you could be ugly and work in the Post Office.~ Adrienne E. Gusoff


I made a mistake at work, again.

I just found out, halfway through marking the midterm-exam papers of my students, that I made a mistake of writing down A = B*C on the board a week before the exam. In my presentation slides however, I had correctly wrote A = B*D,  but still, a mistake is a mistake. Several students used the wrong formula in their exams, and it broke my heart knowing that no matter hard I tried to prepare my classroom materials, I still made mistakes.

As apparent from the first sentence of this post, this was not my first mistake. I once made a typo in a problem set for a class' midterm exam, years ago, and it freaked me out because of course the whole class couldn't solve that problem. Come to think of it, I made that kind of mistake twice. Or three times.

I am still sorting out why I feel so bad about making this kind of mistakes. I know it will be majorly embarrassing to own up to it in front of the classroom next week - telling some 40 students that what I had boldly written on the whiteboard was wrong. I also know,  that my students (or some of them) can understand the fact that even lecturers make mistakes, and can actually forgive me. However, I know some of them will feel helpless as in "Now how can we tell if what she is writing on the board is correct or incorrect?"-- and I know some of them will even talk about this behind my back, to my supervisor, to my colleagues, and continue to talk about it between themselves, long after I myself forgot about it.

All of the above may be the reason why I feel so bad right now, but there is something else: with every mistake I make, I feel like a failure. I know this might not necessarily true, but still. Plus, I have this strange need to appear as if I were perfect.

Now that I've written that last paragraph, I've gain some perspectives on this. Yes, next week I'll have to publicly apologize for that mistake and it'll be a major pain in the neck. Yes, some or even all of them might mock me, accused me of being incompetent, talked to my supervisor who would fire me because clearly A = B*D, etc, etc. But for the sake of my sanity, I have to be kind to myself and just quit trying to be perfect.

And whatever ugly path my students will put me through for making this mistake, I need to remember that quote from Adrienne Gusoff.