I've been grading essays for ten years, and the biggest shift I notice isn't in writing quality—it's in how students handle being wrong. They freeze. A wrong answer on a quiz feels like a personal failure, not a signal to dig deeper. Are we actually teaching kids that mistakes are part of learning, or are we just saying it while our grading system punishes every error? I wonder if we need to rethink assessments entirely, but I'm not sure what a better system looks like.