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@@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +I struggle constantly with pedantry, whether it's “correcting” my own +words or others', reading and re-reading a line of poetry or a line of +code to assure myself of its correctness—or its error—or revolting +at the sight of a misplaced comma. +Of course, I still mistake in these areas; pobody's nerfect, after all. +But I still have to deal with this unconscious strategy—correct for +its overcorrections. +When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was deep in to this addiction, niggling +at little spelling errors or “he and me” instead of “he and I.” +And since I was “objectively correct,” I felt validated in bothering +my parents and my siblings and my friends with the trivia that I +learned. + +The obviously anti-social aspects of this tendency didn't even dawn on +me because this type of behavior and thin-but-annoying knowledge was +rewarded by the school system. +Learning this trivia, while technically a type of learning, prevented me +from a lot of humanities, more flexible and expressive language, and +more connective learning. +I also used a set of beliefs to justify this rigidity: that facts were +inherently deducible, rational, and extremely prevalent, so I could be +either objectively right or objectively wrong. +Since school taught me to prefer being right over being wrong, I held on +to the facts that I knew and avoided anything I didn't already get. + +This adaption worked great for standardized tests and for essays graded +for grammar, so my gradual transition away started, by necessity, +outside of school. +For me, it was Model United Nations. +My first serious Model UN conference was at Georgia State University, +and in the nights and weeks before, I had had to develop and create a +position based around the policies of the Netherlands on immigration and +on a human rights/aid issue. +I know now that neither of these can ever have an absolutely correct +answer, but at the time I searched at length for The One True Policy of +the Netherlands on Immigration (TM), and didn't find it. +I read that there were dozens of different policy proposals (should we +open up the EU's borders or close them but provide FDI to emigrants? It +looked like Holland had supported both). +And there was a basketful of existing United Nations programs to choose +to support or to adjust, yet none of them were explicitly, singularly +supported by the Netherlands. +Not being able to find the correct answer was a distressing experience. +So, during the conference, which is centered around giving speeches and +convincing others to support whichever policies you chose, I stayed +quiet so I wouldn't be wrong. +And, of course, I didn't win any awards from a performance like that. + +The next time around, at a conference run by the University of +Georgia, I took a similar path. +I was a little less focused on specifics, but I still stressed over +whether the policy that I settled on was the right one, and I tried to +hedge my bets by dragging in as many other ideas as I could. +But once I got to the conference and needed to actually present, this +wouldn't work. +I had prepared parts of speeches that I recited anxiously, but once I +got through my one or two monologues, I was lost. +Thankfully, I had a much more experienced partner to help guide me. +They gave me one piece of advice (that seems absurdly obvious in +retrospect): “just go up and say something.” +So I tried it. +I rambled for 45 seconds (to the tee) about how allocating FDI for +refugee camps in Turkey was the best possible solution to the Syrian +refugee crisis, and even though it wasn't THE solution, it was +something, and it worked because there is no absolute truth. |