It was the first classroom observation day of my life—first grade, early spring.
I remember the slightly oversized desk, the smell of chalk dust in the air, and my mother standing quietly at the back of the room.
Our teacher wrote a single word on the blackboard:
“Climb.”
Then she asked us to make a sentence with it. I raised my hand.
“A tiger climbs a tree,” I said.
Some of my classmates giggled. But the teacher didn’t.
She wrote it carefully on the board.
Then came more answers: “A monkey climbs a tree.” “A boy climbs a mountain.” And with each one, she nodded, wrote it down, and finally said:
“They’re all good answers.”
I’ve never quite forgotten that moment.
Because for the first time, I realized—a question might have more than one valid answer.
It was a small revelation, but a profound one.
In that classroom, language was not a matter of correctness, but of possibility.
Later, though, came math.
And with it, the world of one right answer.
That’s how school—and society—often works.
Whoever gets to that one correct answer fastest is “smart.”
Those who don’t are seen as lagging behind.
This model of evaluation is efficient, but it’s also hierarchical.
It builds a system where knowing the answer grants you power, and failing to know it diminishes your voice.
Today, we live in a world designed by those who know the answers.
The algorithms, the platforms, the interfaces—we navigate them daily, often unaware of the assumptions baked into their design.
What’s efficient is what’s rewarded.
What deviates gets filtered out.
But diversity—true diversity—doesn’t come from answers that align.
It comes from sentences that begin in different places.
As Wittgenstein once said, “The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” And use is always contextual, cultural, and individual.
Looking back, I don’t think the teacher’s words—“They’re all good answers”—were just an act of encouragement.
They were an invitation:
To imagine, to deviate, to trust that our own sentence might be worth saying, even if it sounds different from everyone else’s.
In an age of platform logic and precision metrics, maybe that one sentence from a dusty blackboard matters more than ever. ◾️
