Those Who Teach You Don't Always Have The Answers

I failed an IT assignment in high school for getting two answers right.

Not partially right. Not right in a way that missed what the question was asking. Right, in the way that a dictionary is right.

I was maybe fifteen, sitting in a computer lab full of beige boxes, arguing with a teacher about what a GUI is. She had the marking pen. I had the answer. Only one of those things counted that afternoon.

What A GUI Is

The question was simple enough. Identify the GUI.

I wrote that the graphical user interface was the whole thing. The desktop, the windows, the icons, the taskbar, the pointer. The entire graphical layer you use to drive the machine instead of typing commands at a prompt.

She walked over to a screen and started pointing.

“This is a GUI.”

The recycle bin.

“This is a GUI.”

My Computer.

“And this is a GUI.”

A folder shortcut, sitting on a green hill wallpaper.

I said no, those are icons. They’re part of the GUI. The GUI is the environment they sit in. She said I was overcomplicating it and moved on to the next one.

What A CPU Is

The next disagreement was the box on the desk.

She said the box was the CPU. I said the box is the computer, or the case, or the system unit, and the CPU is the chip inside it doing the actual processing. You can hold a CPU in your hand. It has a name and a clock speed printed on it. It is a component, not a piece of furniture.

Here’s the part I’d want to be fair about. Half the working world at the time called that box the CPU. Sales catalogues did it. Office managers did it. If you rang a supplier and asked for a CPU you’d probably get a beige tower delivered on a trolley. She hadn’t invented the usage. She’d absorbed it from the same place everyone else had.

So she wasn’t being stupid. She was repeating something she had heard often enough that it had stopped sounding like a claim and started sounding like a fact.

That happens to all of us. It’s happening to me right now about something, and I don’t know what it is yet.

Fine, I’ll Mark Them Wrong

There were a few more like it. I don’t remember every question, I remember the shape of the afternoon.

At some point it stopped being a conversation about computers. She said that if I wanted to leave those as my answers, she’d mark them as wrong.

I left them as my answers.

That was enough to fail the assignment. And I want to be precise about how that felt, because it wasn’t outrage. It was a strange flat feeling. I knew I was right. I knew it in a way that had nothing to do with confidence, the sort of knowing where you could go and check. And it didn’t matter even slightly.

Being right and being believed turned out to be completely separate problems.

The Other Teacher

The school had a system administrator. Actual IT, the person who kept the network alive.

I took the assignment to him and asked him to read it. He read it. It took him about as long as you’d expect.

He didn’t make a speech about it. He just went and had a conversation with her, and the assignment came back marked correct.

That was it. No apology, no moment. The marks changed and everyone got on with the day.

How Was I Supposed To Know?

Her response, when it was explained to her, was “how was I supposed to know.”

I’ve thought about that line for a very long time, because it’s a fair question with an unfortunate answer.

She was right that nobody had trained her. She’d been handed a subject she didn’t have a background in, which happens constantly in schools, and she was doing the best she could with the material she’d been given. That isn’t a character flaw. That’s a staffing decision landing on a person.

But the answer to “how was I supposed to know” was standing about forty metres away, in the server room, and had been the entire time.

The problem was never that she didn’t know. It was that when she was told, she defended the position instead of checking it.

Those are two completely different failures. One is ordinary and forgivable and happens to everyone. The other is the one that does the damage.

She never taught IT again. I don’t think that was a punishment, and I’ve never enjoyed that part of the story. It was probably the correct outcome for everyone, including her.

The Part That Cost Me

She was also my business studies teacher.

My marks in that subject, on the next assignment, fell off a cliff.

There was nothing to do about that one. There was no dictionary to point at, no sysadmin to fetch, no objectively verifiable definition of a CPU. It was subjective assessment of subjective work, and subjective assessment is unappealable by design.

I’m not going to claim I know what was in her head. I genuinely don’t. What I know is what the marks did.

And the honest lesson there isn’t a nice one. Being right sometimes costs you something, and no amount of being right pays it back. I’d still do it again. But I stopped expecting that being correct would protect me, which is probably a useful thing to learn at fifteen rather than at thirty-five.

The Lesson I Actually Took

For years I thought the lesson was about her. It isn’t.

The lesson is that the person at the front of the room, the one with the credentials and the marking pen and the authority to decide what’s true today, is not automatically the person with the right answer. Those two things sit in the same chair often enough that we stop noticing they’re unrelated.

Authority is a position. Accuracy is a property of a statement. They travel together so often that people assume one implies the other, and it never has.

That’s a very useful thing to have learned early, because you spend the rest of your working life in rooms full of people who sound certain. Consultants, vendors, architects, senior engineers, the guy who’s been here fifteen years and knows how it works. Some of them are right. Some of them are repeating something they absorbed a decade ago that stopped being true six years back.

You can’t tell which is which by listening to the confidence. The confidence is identical either way.

And Now I’m The One At The Front

Here’s the part that took me much longer to work out.

I’m the teacher now.

I get brought into businesses as the person who knows. I’m the one in the room with twenty years behind me, and when I say “that won’t scale” or “that’s not where your problem is”, people write it down. They don’t go and check. Why would they? They hired me so they wouldn’t have to.

Which means I am now perfectly positioned to be confidently, expensively wrong in a room where nobody feels able to argue with me.

And I have been. I’ve been certain about the cause of a performance problem, sent a team off in that direction, and been wrong. I’ve called an approach a dead end that turned out to be fine. I’ve had a junior developer tell me, carefully, in the tone people use when they’re not sure they’re allowed, that the thing I’d just confidently explained wasn’t what the code did. They were right. They’d read it. I’d assumed it.

That’s the exact same failure. Someone with less standing, looking at the actual thing, telling the person with more standing that the accepted answer is wrong. I’ve been on both sides of that conversation now, and the second side is much less comfortable.

The dangerous thing isn’t being wrong. Everyone is wrong constantly. The dangerous thing is being wrong in a chair that nobody argues with.

Cheap To Correct

So the habit I’ve actually built out of all this isn’t “question authority”. It’s making myself cheap to correct.

Show me. It’s my first response to almost everything now, including my own assertions. Not “that’s how it works”, but “let’s open it and look”. The lab had the answer sitting right there on the screen, and nobody opened anything.

Ask before answering. If there’s someone in the room closer to the code or the process than I am, they get asked what they think before I say what I think. Once I’ve said it, half of them will agree with me on principle, and I’ve lost the information I actually needed.

Make it explicitly safe. People do not push back on the expensive consultant by default. That silence is not agreement, it’s politeness, and it will cost the client money. I’d rather say out loud, early, that I’m going to be wrong about some of this and I need to be told.

Change my answer in public. When I’ve been wrong I say so in the same meeting, in front of the same people, in plain words. Not buried in a follow-up email with softer language. The whole point is that the correction has to be visible, or nobody learns that corrections are allowed here.

Treat “how was I supposed to know” as a process problem. It’s a genuinely fair complaint most of the time. But the response to it is to go and build the way you’d have found out, not to defend the gap.

None of that is humility for its own sake. It’s just cheaper. A wrong idea caught in a meeting costs an hour. A wrong idea that nobody felt able to challenge costs a quarter.

The Marking Pen

I think about that classroom more than you’d expect. Not out of any lingering resentment, that went a long time ago. Because I know exactly which chair I’m sitting in now.

I’m the one with the marking pen. The person who might be quietly wrong, being agreed with by people who assume I checked.

So when a fifteen-year-old version of somebody tells me the answer is wrong, I’ve only got one job.

Go and look.

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John Croucher builds practical software and AI systems for Australian businesses, focused on solving real problems with measurable outcomes.