“Thirty seconds!” the teacher said, as numbers raced through my head. Six times seven is 42. Eight times nine is…um, 72. That’s right (multiplying nines had always been difficult for me). My pencil sped across the blue paper. Our third timed test for the week. “Time!” my teacher called out. My stomach sank. I had only finished 48 of the 60 multiplication problems.
“How many did you get?” my friend asked from across the pod of desks. Like I’d tell you. “Why does it matter?” I challenged. I was angry enough with myself for not finishing the set without this kid rubbing it in. “Just wondering, jeez.” He backed down.
That was third grade. The thought of those timed tests still gets my heart pumping and my mind racing. It was one of the first times where school felt like a race, a competition, a chance to prove that I was faster, more intelligent and better at math than all the other kids.
Fast-forward 12 years to today. I’m a senior in college studying Spanish and Genetics, Cell Biology & Development. Two majors, two degrees and I’m on track to graduate in the spring with Latin Honors. I’m not bragging. In fact, I’ve come to hate school. Because every day is a new race, another competition, a game where everyone is just as fast, intelligent, and good at math as you are. But we’re not talking multiplication tests anymore, no. Our futures depend on success in college, but all along we’re made to feel as if we’re sinking, not swimming.
Growing up as a “smart kid” influences nearly every aspect of your life. In high school, you spend hours with the same people each day, following them from AP U.S. History to AP Chemistry. You’re best friends with the nerdy guys that will one day rule the world—the ones who become attractive once they pick up a dumbbell and move past voice cracks and braces. You grow apart from your girlfriends on the soccer team because they just don’t understand that Friday night is for getting ahead on the following week’s homework. The “smart kids” become your groupies, who challenge you academically and personally, resulting in growth punctuated by feelings of inferiority when they get the highest score in the class—while you scrape by with a B (which to you is failing). This only increases your motivation.
By taking and succeeding in honors courses, expectations skyrocket. But, they are more often just perceived standards of excellence imposed upon you by you. In college, the “honors student funnel” still sifts and sorts through applicants, rendering one’s undergraduate education an extension of the pressurized environment that characterized the K-12 years. You continue to find yourself surrounded by future doctors, lawyers, researchers, psychologists and CEOs—now a few steps closer to achieving their lofty goals.
Everyone around you was in the “Top 10” at their high school, whether top 10% or 10 individuals. You are no longer unique in your brainpower and ability to process high-level information. You have no “leg-up,” your performance lies along the curve, you become average—normal. Average? you might think to yourself, I’ve never been average.
As a student in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, I would argue that professors use a fear of failure to motivate us to master cellular processes, anatomical structures and organic chemistry. They understand how we “smart kids” tick. That 50% on your first physics midterm will compel you to study harder or more efficiently. But it will also make you feel completely inadequate. You only got a 50% because they threw material at you that was 100 times harder than what you studied in class. That and the 50-minute time limit make the perfect recipe for a brain that won’t recall anything absorbed over the past three weeks of lectures.
“The curve” that is eventually applied (yes, even in classes that “don’t have a curve,” sometimes) is often shrouded in a haze of mystery. So, you don’t really know how you’re doing in a class until the absolute end of the semester (Merry Christmas, here’s a B!). But, all along, that 50% on your physics test reminds you that you are no longer a big fish in a little sea. Now you swim in a sea of valedictorians. But, you’re no longer trying to be the fastest, largest invertebrate—you’re just trying not to sink.
