I’ve always been a curious and nosy person, even as a child. I’ve always had a fascination with what was going on around me, why it was happening, who was involved etc. These traits became important to my overall development as a person and student as they began to lend to my passion for learning and understand new things. I use to love school. I loved the smell of new textbooks, the sight of freshly sharpened paper and the feel of new school supplies. I liked the structure it gave my life. The way that learning would turn the screws and dials in my head into a sort of pleasure I could enjoy through the conglomeration of new information. I loved that.

However, what I did not enjoy was this totalitarian sort of teaching in higher education in which all my worth began to be placed in how well I scored on a test given in one place, at one time, in the span of my entire learning process for that semester/year. This medium of reflection of my own being began to promote stress rather than promote learning. It squandered any thirst I had for learning rather than advocating the gaining of knowledge within the institutions that supposedly stood for the growth of one’s mind. Instead, I was only the grade given to me–a mere percentage.

In fact, that’s what that grade was. It was a percentage of me, not my whole. It does not represent my complexity as a person nor can it measure the multi-dimensional nature of the human mind. Rather, I am judged solely by one aspect of performance in a classroom at one point in time. That is supposed to define who I am, where I’m going and what I’ll be doing in the future.

I am not a singular marking on a piece of paper. My worth is not decided by a predetermined scale that does not measure what makes a person a person. I should not be judged merely by my ability to adapt to the robotics of memorization and time management.

I am not defined by my grades. They are a part of who I am, but in the least significant way possible. My grades do not reveal the light in my eyes when learning/discussing something I am passionate about. It can not determine my zeal for learning when a new subject makes my mind reel in fascination, nor can it determine the fire within me that is my curiosity and potential.

The measurement in which schools define me is not who I am. It is a marking that is half-empty and devoid of representing a person as a person should be represented–through an entire axis of their entire being.

I am not my grades and they are not me.

It’s about time that schools understood that.