I like the New York Times puzzle, Wordle. You have 6 attempts to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, you are given feedback about how well your guess matches the target word. If you have a correct letter in the wrong place, it is coloured yellow. A correct letter in the correct place gets coloured green. You use these clues to inform your next guess, until you guess the target word.

The goal of Wordle is not to guess the word correctly on the first try. If you ever did that, it wouldn’t be skill but sheer luck. The purpose of your first try is to get the feedback – the first set of clues that will shape your second guess. After that, it’s a repeating loop of guesses leading to more and more feedback until you can home in on the correct word.

Assignments are much the same. The goal is not to get 100% with no feedback. In fact, if that ever happened, the whole exercise would be pointless because you wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it. The feedback you get on your assignments is not a rebuke because you got something wrong. It’s literally just teaching. And the fact that you didn’t know something and needed to be taught it is not a failure. It’s literally your job. As a student, your job is to not know things, and to be in the process of learning them. That’s what “student” means. The cycle of essays (the word “essay” means “an attempt”) and feedback is how that process proceeds.