It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

Sitting in the classroom at Independent Elementary, I’d burned through Mrs. Eckhart’s reading questions and had an hour to kill, so I launched a silent mutiny on a sheet of white art paper. I drew a submarine the size of a small nation—portholes lined up like pearls, each framing a tiny soap opera. In one, a guy flipped pancakes and invited the crew to “swing by my cabin.” In another, a woman in curlers refused to be seen “in this condition.” A cereal enthusiast raged about a missing prize. A hammock napper protested the racket. A girl clutched a shred of apple skin like it was a ticking bomb in her molar. A dozen noisy lives, each complaining, boasting, living. My plan was obvious: practice now so I could write for Mad Magazine later.

Enter Mrs. Eckhart, patrolling the aisles like customs at the border. Red bouffant immaculate, eyebrows stepped out of a Hitchcock film. She stopped at my desk and stared down at the sub—my U.S.S. Bad Timing.

“Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

“I finished the assignment. I’m working quietly.”

She read my dialogue bubbles aloud, pitch-perfect sarcasm, the kind that knives you with your own words. The class erupted. I was roast beef, she was the carving knife. Then the verdict: “Your parents should know this is how you spend classroom time.”

She scrawled a note on the back of my masterpiece and demanded signatures before I returned it. At home, Dad examined the evidence like a prosecutor smelling a plea bargain.

“You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

“I don’t know why. I finished my work. I was quiet.”

“It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

“How?”

“By finishing early and doodling, you told her the work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

“I kept quiet. That’s hardly a crime.”

“In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

“I thought they were the same thing.”

“Not always. Today you were technically right and strategically stupid. Go to your room and think about it.”

In exile, I summoned my emergency therapist: Master Po, Shaolin sage of my imagination.

“Master Po, why am I the villain for drawing a submarine? And what does ‘be smart, not right’ even mean?”

“Grasshopper,” he said, voice like wind across stone, “the world is full of educated people who know nothing. Wisdom is entering another’s mind, seeing as they see. Your father is correct. Choose smart over right.”

“If being right doesn’t count, why learn right from wrong at all?”

“Model yourself on Heaven’s righteousness,” he said, “but travel the earth with tact. Know what you do not know.”

“Know what I don’t know? That feels like a riddle you give to people you want to confuse.”

“You strain at my words as muddy water through a sieve. Clarity will come.”

“Meanwhile, I’m grounded and missing Hogan’s Heroes.”

“Unfortunate,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry.

“Life is a riddle I can’t solve.”

“You try too hard. Relax. Let go. Answers fall like rain.”

“I could relax more if Dad paroled me to the television.”

“Sitting quietly is perfect. With no intention and no movement, you will, like the perfect traveler, arrive.”

I stared at the ceiling, the paint a milky ocean, my submarine rolled into evidence on the desk. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe Mrs. Eckhart wasn’t grading my drawing so much as my social intelligence—and I’d failed the pop quiz. The adult world prized two currencies: accuracy and tact. I had exact change for the first and lint for the second.

Still, some small part of me refused to shred the sub and plead guilty to artistic misconduct. Those porthole people—pancake guy, curler lady, apple-skin girl—were ridiculous, yes, but they were also alive, chattering in their cramped circles under a thousand fathoms of routine. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I drew a submarine; maybe the problem was I’d launched it in the wrong harbor.

Fine. Next time I’d finish late, or pretend to. I’d ask one question with the tone of a pilgrim seeking wisdom. I’d keep the submarine for after school, where editors at Mad Magazine would understand that sometimes the only way to survive a classroom is to build your own vessel and sail beneath the noise.

For now, I sat still, practicing the advanced art of “no intention, no movement.” If arrival meant living through this night without losing my sense of humor—or my drawing—I could live with that. Smart over right, sure. But right over silent? Not always. Sometimes you keep the submarine.