Point of Correction....
Hello to you all, readers. I do hope you all are doing great and fine. And for those of you not going through the best of times at the moment, I want to say sorry that you are going through what you are going through. I strongly believe in light being at the end of dark tunnels. I hope and wish for you that you see it much quicker than you know and expect.
When I was much younger, in my teens, I was asked to make a request to the then head of my school for the use of a bus to transport an ailing kid to the hospital. I was in a position in school then to have that much access to going directly to make such a request. It was my very first time of ever meeting someone that important in the school and I was tensed….very tensed. I didn’t allow myself be calm. I got to the office where the person was and I was not sounding articulate at all. I was rushing my words and not sounding clear at all. I had finished talking and the man, the authority asked if I was stupid and scolded me for not sounding so clear. That really hurt me very bad. A lot of times I replay that moment in my head and wonder, would it have killed this man to politely tell me to be calm, catch my breath and talk? Would it have killed him to be human in that moment? It hit me for a while but I’m much better now and I have moved on from it. What he did was very unfair considering the fact that he was in a position to correct or teach me in that moment or make me just do it better. Maybe he was and in his mind, calling me stupid and scolding me was his idea of a correction. If you ask me, I think that method of correction- inflicting emotional pain- is not fair at all. Majority of the time, this method of correction does a lot of damage to a person’s mental health (not to talk of having to inflict physical pain to correct but then again that is another topic for another day). It then begs or raises the crucial question- If a method of correction brings more harm, damage to a person’s psyche, then should that method be encouraged? If in correcting me, you hurt me with your words, am I to be appreciative of it?
Another time, just recently I was given a task to submit a chapter of my final year thesis (which I will give you a full gist about soon so stay tuned). I was so scared and even expected a harsh response or comments on the numerous mistakes I made but to my surprise, my supervisor corrected me in a very nice way but she was objective. Through her correction, I comfortably understood something I had been struggling to understand for quite a while. I left her office feeling more confident and very eager to take to corrections (even though she cancelled almost half of my work..lol) but I did not feel bad. That helped me. That manner of correction helped me. It did more good to me than harm.
No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. It is even safe to say that mistakes are necessities of life and I say this because how would we learn if we do not err? But the way we get corrected also matters. Correction should seek to help but not to tear down, build but not destroy, engender confidence but not bring shame and more importantly, correction should heal and not bring pain.
This is just my two cents on this. I look forward to knowing what you feel about this. I apologize once again that it has taken this long to post. I look forward to doing better as time goes on.
