Both high school students and college students alike are in the midst of one of the most tiring and stressful times of the first semester. It's the awful two to three week period between Thanksgiving and Christmas break in which what was once a fairly calm marathon, although not without its hills and curves, becomes a full-out, breathless and consuming sprint to finish papers, take finals, and finally reach the end of the semester. It is a special kind of hell where, rather than visions of sugar plums, visions of due dates and the Calculus final that you have yet to study for dance in your head.
In the spirit of both academic stress and references to a famous story, I would like to tell you a story about academic stress of the most extreme kind. It is a story about a girl, who may or may not be me, who strove so much for good grades that she forgot about goodness. It is, like most of my stories, a rather long one and I can only hope that you find it an interesting and valuable form of procrastination.
It is hard to say where this girl's story starts. To quote Elizabeth Bennet, it was only in the middle when she realized that it had begun. Suffice it to say, she supposed that she had, from a very young age, always wanted very much to please people. She realized that she pleased people by being good and, at that age, the most important people in life to please were her parents and teachers. Thus, good grades were the standard for goodness. She didn't mind this one bit at the time. She found school fairly interesting most of the time and especially liked to read. It did not take long at all for her to enjoy the feeling of gold stars and smiley faces on her homework that would later turn into letters and percentages, which, for a good period, were consistently in the forms of As or within the 100 to 90 percent range. This girl knew and had internalized that not only did good grades make you good, but they made you smart and that was important. So she took each gold star, each written compliment, each A accompanied by a plus sign and made it a part of her, a part of her identity that proved that she was special and worth something.
She mostly stayed on this course through junior high and high school, although there were a few bumps in the road. By this point it was not only her parents and teachers that she sought for approval and confirmation of her identity of a "smart person," it was her friends as well. She knew that she needed a distinct identity, something that made her herself and different from the rest of her peers and she affirmed her identity as a smart person with every perfect homework assignment and every test that she aced. She could, along with niceness and perpetual smiling, hold up "smart" as a defining characteristic and she felt so good. She internally reveled when her friends called her and "English major" long before she ever reached college because she was so good at English. She immensely enjoyed being known as "that girl who was really good at Latin." It didn't matter if she felt that she wasn't pretty or that she didn't have a boyfriend, that she was not particularly good at playing clarinet, or that she was nonathletic, unpopular, or any other thing that other people prided themselves on. She had her pride in marks on a page.
The problems came, of course, when she realized that other people valued smartness and she began to feel like her identity was threatened by her classmates and friends. Although she tried so hard not to show it, she was constantly peeking at passed-back assignments and tests to make sure that no one did better than her. When, towards the end of high school, she started getting Bs in harder science and math classes she hated herself for not doing better. Because all that she had, or all that she felt that she had, were her grades and the intelligence and worthiness that they proved. If other people could do the same or more just as easily then it felt as if she was nothing more than a quiet girl who smiled too much for the turmoil that was twisting her insides more and more. Many times during her senior year she felt that her friends would leave her for better, more interesting people and at times it seemed like it had happened. Everything was slipping away and she became more and more desperate for validation and attention from friends and teachers alike, to the point of embarrassment.
Graduation and the end of high school did much for her state of mind. She didn't have to think about teachers or grades or how much it bothered her that someone in her Latin class had done better on some part of some test. College was coming and with it the promise of new and different things. Although she loved her old friends, family, and teachers, the last year had left her mentally tried and exhausted and longing for something else.
The "something else" turned out to be the final confirmation that she was well and truly not the English/Latin genius that she had thought that she was. The first few papers that she turned in to the Honor College's Freshman program (ungraded and, as the professors told us, like most of us) received Cs. Her Latin professor gathered the three freshman in their advanced class and told them that they would be tutored before the quiz every Friday. After that she cried. She struggled like never before in her Logic class and refused to ask for help because she should know these things, should be able to do them by herself because she was smart.
The great thing, though, the absolutely wonderful thing that high school didn't provide but college did was the assurance that she didn't have to have perfect grades to prove that she was valuable. She did not have to wrap herself up in them to protect her meager self-confidence, only to have it painfully stripped away. Being somewhere else allowed her to see that she had other good things about her. In fact, they were much better things than getting a perfect score on a test. Getting a less than stellar grade on an assignment didn't mean that she wasn't compassionate, kind, hard-working, funny, dedicated, or any other thing that the girl wanted to be. Just being able to be happy with a B on a paper was incredibly liberating.
Maybe to some of you this will feel like the most arrogant, first-world problem-y article that you have ever bothered to read. "Boo-hoo, this girl didn't do as well as she wanted in school sometimes, cry me a river." I certainly don't intend it to sound that way. I just would like to remind you that, as important as grades may be for your future, letting them be internalized as a characteristic of yourself is a dangerously unhappy path that will never satisfy you. Even the most intelligent people among us mess up. A-students can get Bs and geniuses can get 35s on the ACT. If we take our academic failures and turn them into a personal ones then we may never feel like we are good enough to do anything successfully. Learning to leave the grade on the page, as much as I can, is one of the most valuable lessons that I have learned in my life and I didn't get a grade for it.
