Eighty-nine — so close yet so far.
Fingers racing across the keyboard, I desperately draft an email. One percent, just give me that one percent. I've worked so hard all year: I stayed up till 3 a.m. studying for exams and filled up three notebooks with practice problems. My fingers were a blur against the keyboard — I wasn't sure what was racing faster — my fingers or my heart. My first B of high school. Absolutely not.
Send.
Anticipation. Hours of anticipation. A run around the block, lunch with a friend, a day at the museum, but all that was on my mind was that number. Eighty-nine. All my self-worth, my entire junior year of high school, and all of my efforts to excel to the best of my ability lay wrapped up in the tiny sans serif percentage at the top of my PowerSchool account. The list of assignments under it were unimportant — the assignments I spent hours or days on, trying harder than I'd tried in any class. It was just that number. That was all that mattered.
4:30 p.m. My phone pinged with the sound of my destiny, with the email from my physics teacher. Hands shaking, I unlocked the screen and stared at the place where the glass of my iPhone met the edge of my screen protector as the red and white envelope of Gmail loaded, taunting me with the prospect of failure. My eyes raced across the phone screen, swallowing up every tiny printed word beneath the glass screen. And then they re-read: top to bottom, top to bottom. Over and over again. My teacher valued my efforts, but an 89% was just too far off from an A to bump up.
6:30 p.m. Teachers finalized grades and with that my physics teacher finalized what I saw as my failure. I had dealt with failure before, so it wasn't like I was incapable of dealing with it, but so much of my self-worth had been wrapped up in this tiny number that really only made up 1/7 of my GPA. Until that point in my high school career, I had put my faith in the numbers — everything else was undetermined but those neat baby blue and white rows in PowerSchool were neat and organized and unyielding. They were the definite in a world of chaos, a world of handouts, piles of notes and 90-minute lectures. So I had wrapped up my self-worth into one number, but people cannot be reduced to a number because education is about so much more.
If the ultimate purpose of school is to receive an education, tell me, why do we put so much value in numbers? Into ACT and SAT scores, into GPAs, into numbers of extracurricular activities. What happened to learning for the sake of learning?
My parents and grandparents grew up in the former Soviet Union, where the information learned in schools was not a reflection of reality but a reflection of the values of the person in power. From a young age they instilled in me the idea that education was valuable because only with true, relatively unbiased education can ignorance, the cause of so many prejudices, be eradicated.
But here I was not valuing education because I was learning for the numbers and not learning for the sake of learning. Now, people attribute this "grade obsession" to high school attendance. They argue that in some respect, learning for taking tests and for achieving good grades in classes stops at high school graduation. After all, the goal of high school was just to get into college, and now that that's done, it's time to start learning for real, right?
Wrong. I wish it was that easy. I'm noticing more and more that learning for the sake of learning doesn't suddenly begin after the magical threshold of high school graduation. Learning to gain knowledge that is useful for life rather than for a test is a realization an individual must make on their own, not one brought upon them with the passage of time and the transition between academic institutions.
In my junior year, I realized the importance of learning for the sake of learning and found benefit in the knowledge I absorbed my senior year because I was not fixated in learning the material solely to increase my grade in the class. When I learned the information in my classes just because I was passionate about it — when I annotated Dostoevsky for hours or wrote an essay about my obsession with Jane Austen's use of punctuation in Persuasion or wrote a 25-page essay about the links between Putin and Stalin, I was learning just to learn, to know, to broaden my perspective. Not to boost my GPA. Not to find the most effective way to do well on the test with minimal effort.
Because learning is a privilege; knowledge about a wide-range of topics is what moves people forward in life. Standardized tests don't. So today, I challenge you: learn something. And use it — not for your next exam, but in the context of your life, because that's where you need it most.
