Sick of Being Wrong

Three to four meaningful and thought-provoking contributions to class each day will earn you an A for your participation grade, so my professor determined when he wrote up the class syllabus. People dropped the class like dead flies after the first day, but I stayed. Not many people remained, we're only a class of five students now and we meet once a week for two hours.

Since the class is so long and we are so few, it's hard not to open your mouth and say something three, four, five or even six times. But I can't get over the subjective notion of meaningful and thought provoking. What's interesting to me is what you'd love to avoid, or my perspective is just different than yours. Even the whole idea of having to participate a certain amount of times each day strikes a nerve when I get fed up with the discussions.

The young professor, freshly minted with a Ph.D. from Princeton, sort of pisses me off. At first I brushed it aside, but the trend has continued in each class. Eight weeks is enough for me to reach my conclusions. "It's capitalism triumphant," I mentioned in class today, and then proceeded to explain what I meant.

"No," the professor counters. "It's consumerism," and he continues to explain in his elegant, polished language what he means, and I find myself nodding and nodding and nodding and I agree with everything, so I wonder how that's even different from what I said. Aren't capitalism and consumerism two intimately connected things? And why is it that everything that I tried to say is everything he proclaimed but perhaps just under a different name.

It's the "no" that stings, because what it really means is "You're wrong, I'm right." So I sit there and listen to the professor knock me down time after time and begin to wonder what this is really all about. The striking similarities in our positions always go unacknowledged. It's just "no," and he clears the slate clean and trashes everything that came out of my mouth. I wonder, then, if that's the way it goes, why should I ever feel like participating in class?

"But how is that different?" I dare to venture when I get really ticked off. "How is that so different from what I tried to say when this and this and this is so much like that and that and that?" If I'm really eloquent and polished he might nod a couple times and go silent for a while until another student quickly fills the void. Most of the time, it's "but, but, but."

But whatever, and to hell with it all. Nothing I say is ever going to be good enough when you think, (most times by virtue of your expensive education and years of training), and you can say it better; just like the way nothing I write (no matter how hard I try, and how many different approaches I take) is ever worth that coveted "+". It's always check, or if you're feeling particularly generous or full of pitty, a check-plus, "oh poor thing, he tried." Some day I'll leave you to rot behind these old ivy walls and let you drown in your culture of disagreements and distinctions. That day, I hope I'll be in a place where I'm not always wrong.