Whats your GPA? How high are your SAT scores? Ask how many times a college student or a high school student hears that throughout their lifetimes. I promise the answer will be somewhere north of the population count in Asia, multiplied by about 15.
School is not something I have never taken or probably will ever take lightly. Saying GPA doesn’t matter to me would be the equivalent to Nixon having nothing to do with Watergate or Santa Claus existing, aka one of the biggest lies in history. In 2016, most of us are bred to believe that our grades are our only token to success and a happy life. We are trained to use our GPA to define not just what we get in school but how good, how smart, how capable we are of being successful in life and in your career. When you look at the big picture, it seems almost funny how something that accounts for so little dictate our worthiness in this world.
There is so much more to people than being able to memorize and reciprocate knowledge back onto a piece of paper. This is coming from someone who’s spent a very large majority of her life believing that knowledge was exactly that. Being a biology textbook's personal African grey parrot by reciting word for word material may be a start to learning, but what does being able to recite plant organelles functions actually teach you? (Yes, obviously about plant organelles) But when memorizing these topics and listening to lectures, most of us aren’t thinking about how textbook chapters could teach us to better ourselves and those around us. We’re memorizing textbook pages so that we get an A on our test. We focus so much on the grade itself we lose touch of why we learn in the first place, let along the benefits of what we’re learning.
What we forget to tell ourselves, or what we think is unrealistic, is that everyone is brilliant. Just because you don’t see what you excel at on a test, doesn’t make it any less valuable.
Your GPA doesn’t account for the way you sat up with your friend at two in the morning for hours because she was crying and needed someone to talk too. Being someone who takes the time to care about others around them is a lot more useful to society than one of the hundred test questions about logarithms. It doesn’t tell you that getting lost in reading a book and falling in love with the words on the pages indicates more comprehension than getting an A+ ever could.
Great things and great success come from passion, interest, and hard work. GPA is talked about so much because it does have some impact on the schools we attend and as result some of the jobs we are eligible for. So yes, study, do your assignments the best you can, don’t sleep through your classes, go to office hours. But you can't let yourself believe that just because you don’t have a 4.0, you’re not going to find a job or that you aren’t smart. Find something you love doing, you love learning about, or you love observing. Let someone else watch you do it, watch you see it, watch you talk about it. Nothing will depict your brilliance or worth better than that, and nothing will show how powerful teaching is when it’s done by someone who cares about what they teach.
The world doesn’t need more African parrots as students, simply reciting and memorizing for tests, rather than for the knowledge itself. The world needs more compassion, uniqueness, and learning as it should be. I'd find it incredibly sad to know that my GPA was my greatest legacy in school, in my family, or anywhere honestly. And isn't it ironic that we have narrowed down something as limitless as intelligence to four numbers when numbers themselves are infinite too.
