As the second semester of my junior year comes to a close, I find myself less than eager to begin anew. Instead, I feel dread’s lingering presence, waiting to sink its claws into me. While in previous years I found myself excited to start new classes and to learn new material, this year is utterly different. I knew my junior year was going to be hard, but I wasn’t expecting to spend hours upon hours on homework each night, only to receive mediocre grades after submitting it. My teachers say “grades don’t define you” or “grades don’t matter,” but honestly, that’s just not true. It seems that in my junior year, grades matter more than ever, and I feel that especially at a school like Lake Oswego my grades do define me. I walk through hallways full of students who are dissatisfied with a 4.0 GPA or peers who are taking a plethora of AP classes, and I constantly feel less than.
The other day, I spent a solid seven hours working on an assignment for one of my most challenging classes. When I finished the project, I took a step back and was honestly proud of my work. I had somehow managed to squeeze so much content, meaning, and information into such a concise project. I turned the project in the following day only to receive an email a few weeks later from my teacher telling me that my project lacked depth. She graciously gave me another chance to alter my assignment in order to increase my grade, but even then, all I felt was hopeless. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I had essentially failed a project that I truly was proud of. I wanted nothing more than to boost my grade, but I felt too deflated to do any more work. How could I do any better than the first try when I was already so proud of it? At that moment I felt like I had lost all passion to learn. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to enjoy school.
After many tears shed, I talked to my teacher. She told me that she could tell I had the right ideas but that I needed to dig deeper. She believed in my ability to do better work which is why she gave me the second opportunity. I collected all of the materials that I had turned in for that project from her classroom and carried them to my car after school that day. I remember maintaining silence the entire car ride home as my friend (and personal chauffeur) tried to make polite conversation. I just felt too drained to try and conversate. School felt impossible.
I redid my project in a state of gloom. Obviously, I tried my best and put in a lot of work, but in the back of my mind, there was a voice telling me that whatever I did wouldn’t really matter. It told me that I wasn’t going to succeed either way. A few days later, as I was waiting on my new grade on the assignment I had redone, I had a meeting with a college counselor. He asked me how I was doing in my classes and how school was going, and I told him honestly that it was becoming a true struggle. He reviewed the information that I had given him and subsequently told me that one of my dream colleges that I had been pining for since I was a child had become more of a reach school for me. I smiled through tears, and as my vision began to blur, I said that I understood and logged off of the Zoom call.
It was a Tuesday night, and the thought of going to school the next day almost made me physically ill. I couldn’t conjure up any feelings of excitement, even for the more fun classes that I had. I felt that the grades I had been receiving had been defining who I was as a person and affecting my ability to experience joy. It wasn’t until that weekend, when I went to dinner with some friends that I hadn’t seen in a while that I recognized a flaw in my logic.
As I talked with my long-lost friends about sports, hobbies and changes in our lives, I realized that the grade I had in AP Stats or Lang had not come up once in conversation. Between spurts of laughter, one of my friends exclaimed: “this is so fun guys, we need to hang out more.” My friends valued spending time with me and enjoyed my company regardless of the score I had gotten on my assignment. I realized that my teachers were partially correct; my grades truly do not define me. The things that define us are our values, how we treat others, our work ethic and our attitudes. Nobody in your life is going to devalue you because you have a B in math or because you dropped a 70% on your last test. And while it is important to work hard, it is just as important to give ourselves a break and remember that we possess so many other valuable characteristics that mean so much more to those around you.
I can’t lie and say that grades don’t matter because in our society, they obviously do. To an extent, the grades you receive determine what opportunities are available for you in the future, but they don’t define you as a human. Some of us have to study for hours to reach the class average on a test while others may never open a textbook and earn a 100% every time. As long as you try, your results don’t say much about you. It’s the work you put in that matters, and as long as you work hard, you’re okay. We need to stop basing our self-worth off of a letter on our phone screens. See how silly that sounds? There is so much more to life than grades.
