Grad at Grad- Academic Excellence
In the beginning of my education experience, success was measured by effort. To this day, I still have a participation ribbon from the science fair, a medal for being part of a 0-10 soccer team and a report card from fourth grade just talking about how hard I was working. Back then, success was an idea, not based on any result. Unfortunately, when I entered my public school in Virginia in sixth grade, the definition of success given to me as a child was no longer applicable. In this new school, success was measured by numbers, letters, and scores on standardized tests. The days of me getting medals and ribbons without results were over, and by the time I got to Loyola, my understanding of success in school was solely reliant on names and numbers. Entering Loyola, I only had one goal when it came to academic success, grades. All I cared about was the number that showed up on my report card. For me, the grades were the way I proved my academic standing. And as long as I got the grade, I didn’t notice the rest of it. I did work hard and I got those high grades I wanted, but they were only part of my path to academic excellence. When I solely considered academic achievements as my grades and hard work I realized something about them. They were all about me as an individual. They revolved around the idea that I was the only thing that was leading to my success. I had gotten to a point where I no longer believed that I needed help. I had achieved my goal and to me there was nothing else I needed to do. Now, as this quality grew in me, my ideas about academics changed to the point where I hated getting my work reviewed, I hated hearing about what I did wrong and dreaded each day where I would get a test or paper back. I hated the idea that there were things in school that I couldn’t do, I didn’t want to believe that I needed help or advice to become a better student. I was used to being self-reliant in school. For me, school was about proving myself, and accepting help and criticism felt like I was giving up. When I got tests and papers back I
would just quickly glance at the grade and then bury them at the bottom of my bag, all that mattered were the numbers I would see on my report card every semester. School stayed like that for me for my entire sophomore year, and honestly I didn’t really see an issue with it then. It wasn’t until I started tutoring for my christian service placement my last year that I started to notice errors in my thinking. At my service site, I tutored Jahmir, a fifth grader who hated work more than anything else in the world. Every week at service was a long, painful experience of me trying to get him to do his homework. One day, he came in with his report card and showed it to me. His grades were low, and all the teachers had written the same comments, “he could do better if he worked harder”, the teachers and the report card all pointed at one thing for his poor performance, him. Now his work ethic was poor, but it wasn’t the key to his failure. As I looked through his report card, his thoughts were similarly shaped like mine. After reading through his report card I asked him why he didn’t do his homework, and he said it was because he knew it wouldn’t be right. I then asked him why that was bad, and he said there was no point in trying if he didn’t get the right answer. As we continued to talk, I asked him why he accept help, why he wouldn’t let me try and teach him, and he said it was because his teachers said that he needed to improve, and to him that meant that it was purely his responsibility. I realized that Jahmir and I were very similar, we both believed that it was solely up to us to succeed, and that nothing mattered if it ended up in failure. I tried to explain to him that failure and accepting help were important, but they didn’t stick because at that point I didn’t believe in them myself. I was still stuck in my own world of doing things myself that I couldn’t lecture a kid about reaching out to others for help. So instead of trying to persuade him, I made him a deal. I told him that for every assignment he brought to me, I would give him a cookie, as long as we could also go over any his mistakes he made. Now this didn’t make a huge impact on his grades as he still rarely did work, but that was no longer the goal, I was trying to teach him to steer away from my view of only success as the numbers on his report card.
Through working with Jahmir, I learned that academic success wasn’t reliant on me or him as individuals, or the work that we produced. It was how we thought of academics and how we thought of our own efforts. We both believed that we were by ourselves and that we need to be the ones who get better, that we must be perfect. And while for me it meant shutting out my failures and locking them away, for him it meant not doing any work because of the fear of failure. Academics were lonely to us, they were filled with doubt and denial, and school isn’t supposed to be that. We looked to ourselves for answers instead of looking for help, we didn’t take time to look at our failures and try to understand, we simply tried to erase failure. We saw school only through the things we could do, not the things we couldn’t. Becoming more academically excellent to me used to be as simple as a few numbers on a piece of paper. It was all about isolation and self-reliance. I believed that becoming more academically excellent was a burden solely for the individual, and that I could only achieve it if I did it myself. But as I’ve learned through my experiences from Loyola, I was only scratching the surface of what the grad at grad tries to bestow in us. Now, I still strive to get first honors and I work pretty hard for the standard of a second semester senior so I don’t want anyone to believe that hard work and grades don't matter and that we can just toss them out the window. Our efforts and grades while important, only take us so far. And for me, being truly academically excellent can only happen when we stop thinking of success by not being complacent in the numbers that we receive on a report card, but instead learning to accept our failures and limitations and growing from them through seeking help.