Not Good Enough

You spent hours the night before studying for the big test, but today just wasn’t your day and you missed nearly half the questions. You didn’t get that assignment turned in on time and lost points on your grade. You hadn’t quite understood the project, and your grade percentage went down because of it. You finished the term one percent below an A.
It wasn’t good enough; your grades weren’t good enough.
Students often feel like there is so much pressure on getting the perfect grades, and not really on what they’re learning in class, or even how they are doing in life. Teachers and parents make such an effort and push for students to have those perfect grades that the main purpose of school is forgotten. It typically feels as though the learning part of school is forgotten.
In this world, it seems as if someone doesn’t have good grades that means they will fail later in life. If someone doesn’t have good grades and does poorly on tests, they aren’t going to make the cut for being a decent person.
However, this seems somewhat dramatic. But there is such an emphasis on getting good grades in school that one can’t help but stress over them—maybe one day all the stress and late nights spent doing homework will pay off.
“There are multiple ways to get your money’s worth out of high school and to be an amazing human in the world; grades are like one tiny part of it,” Highland counselor Lisa Madsen said.
Grades can’t portray or predict who kids are going to be in the future—they can’t tell you what someone is going to become. Despite this, they can give a broad idea of what someone is like now, mainly in work ethic.
Highland principal Jeremy Chatterton stated how everyone is unique in their own way, and you can’t judge someone for that. For some students, an A- is not good, and for others it’s fantastic. Everyone has a different perspective on life, and on grades, and you can’t categorize people because of that.
Everything in life is about perspective, and everyone has different perspectives—that’s just how it is. But it feels as though adults’ perspectives on grades are all very similar: good grades means success later in life.
“We want students to obviously have the skills that they feel that they need to be able to be successful [in life]. But realize, that that’s not everything that they are as a person, and that doesn’t define who they are, or how good of a person they are,” Chatterton said
School isn’t just supposed to teach kids how to prove a triangle is a triangle, how unit circles work, or how to play the recorder. They are supposed to teach kids to understand how future finances and taxes work, how to deal with mental health and time management, and how to just be a good person overall.
Being able to (or not being able to) play the recorder, understand unit circles, or proofings shouldn’t define someone’s grades, or who they are as a person. Even the important skills that schools teach shouldn’t define one’s future potential.
Being a good person doesn’t mean someone is good at schoolwork or homework. There’s a lot more that goes into a factor like that, but kids in this world are under constant pressure to fit that perfect form, and it feels as though perfect grades are the way to do that.
“I think students put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect and perfect looks like straight As. And I wish kids would just take a class and enjoy it and get what they need out of it, regardless of the grade,” Madsen said. “I also think the world they live in is very focused on grades being perfect, and being perfect in general, and I wish it wasn’t.”
Perfectionism is something that everyone has, all just to different extents. No one is perfect and your grades shouldn’t have to reflect that. But pressures from teachers and parents add up over time, and, eventually, students can feel like perfect grades are required in order to be a perfect person.
Additionally, another aspect that the leaders around students now-a-days don’t understand, is that school is different than it was for parents or teachers when they attended high school. Our guardians didn’t have the same requirements or push to get certain things done in school—they didn’t always get to constantly see their grades either.
Chatterton described how students being able to constantly see their grades can have numerous positive or negative effects. Students can always see how they are doing, and what they need to improve on. However, some get so fixated on the percentage of their grade that they only focus on how they can improve that grade, and not really what’s happening, what they are learning in class, or how they can be a better person.
Students become so fixated on how they can improve their grades and appearances that they sometimes forget those letters and percentages don’t actually determine how good of a person, or how successful of a person they are.
“Straight As doesn’t always mean you’re successful, or a great person,” another one of Highland’s counselors, Nicole Bogue, said. “Success looks different for every person.”
Success doesn’t come from how well you were able to get extra credit to boost that one percent, it doesn’t come from being able to get points back on that one missing assignment, nor does it come from spending hours a day doing homework to keep the perfect grades. While success can vary for each person, it is something that is not simply defined by grades, neither is it defined by test scores.
Standardized testing. Those are two words most students always hate hearing. Those words cause immense stress and panic, and yet it’s the thing that most students are defined by. In numerous classes, especially college level classes, testing is what students are judged on. Not how well they did in class, not how helpful they are around the community, not how well they get along with others, it’s how well they can answer questions under pressure. Sure, testing is important, and it’s a good way to gauge what students know, but it is not something that should determine what college high schoolers get into.
Chatterton described how our educational system is evaluated on these kinds of standardized tests. Even Highland as a whole is judged on end of the year tests.
ACT tests and AP tests are some of those select tests. Both are timed, in a select location in the school, and really, really long. The ACT is nearly three hours of straight testing, and the AP tests can be up to four or five hours of testing. Students are required to remember everything they have learned in the past year—or the past nearly five years in the case of the ACT—in only a few long hours.
Everything students have learned in the past years is determined in one day, a few straight hours of insane stress, and then it’s over. Your future relies on how well you did in those hours.
Although, these tests are improving over time. Many Utah colleges aren’t requiring ACT scores to get into the school, or for scholarships—grades and class rigor are considered now more than ever.
With AP tests, there is another option—Concurrent Enrollment classes. These classes offer the same curriculum as AP classes, but without the stress of a big end of the year exam. With Concurrent Enrollment, students only need to get a C or above in the class, and not a just a three on the big end of the year exam in order to get college credit.
But these things are new, they haven’t really been around until now, and in most cases, it’s still tests that determine if students have passed the class or not. Tests that are supposed to determine almost everything for a student, except that they don’t—not really.
“There are people that are great students that aren’t good test takers, and there are people that are not good students, but are really good at test taking,” Chatterton said.
Testing shouldn’t be the thing that determines how good a student is. There are plenty of kids who aren’t good at testing—its stressful, intense, and scary—but do very well in class and vice versa.
So, taking end of the year finals like the ACT and AP tests out of the picture, and looking at just straight GPA is what Highland does look at for its valedictorians.
Highland selects its valedictorians a little different than other schools. Instead of simply picking the top student in the graduation class, Highland accepts all students who have a 4.0 GPA (along with a few other requirements). However, all students who achieve these grades are eligible to be considered a valedictorian. While on the surface, it seems a smarter, almost more inclusive way of running things, it really does cause problems.
“Unfortunately, it causes some students to not take classes that would challenge them. They’re afraid that they won’t maintain that 4.0 or they want to drop classes that are too challenging to them,” Chatterton said.
Bogue added how kids are scared to take classes that seem too hard, or that they could lose that perfect GPA in. Students become afraid to lose the idea that they are ‘perfect’ because of their grades.
But grades don’t define you. The titles and labels society puts on you when in school or even just living life don’t define you. Only you can decide who you are.
“Just trying to take a step back and say, I’m going to do the best I can,” Chatterton said.
Someone’s worth is not something that can be defined by a letter or a percentage. But that doesn’t mean just giving up, or settling for something you could be better at, it means giving something all you have and knowing that whatever the outcome, you gave it your best shot, and that is good enough.