Enjoy.
Potential
Growing up, whenever I got a paper, essay, project or analysis back, I would first look to the grade, usually scrawled on top in the omnipresent bad handwriting of English teachers. I had an unquestioned and unexamined belief that if the grade was less then 100 then I had messed up. Following this belief, or perhaps even the predecessor of it was the belief that if I tried hard enough, I would be rewarded with the highest grade. My score was directly proportionate on the amount of effort I put into the work. When I received 70s I was upset but not surprised, telling myself that I must not have worked hard enough, even flashing back to my working periods and admitting that I had not been efficient or even particularly laborious. When I saw that I had achieved high grades, 90s, I felt proud not (I realise now) because of the evaluation of the teacher, but the confirmation that I had indeed worked hard enough, I was sufficient.
It is currently in the wee hours of the morning on December 29, 2010, and I recently had a revelation while trying to sleep. A week ago, I received back a graded analysis, one I had done for Art History, a new subject, but not something I was unaccustomed to. Perhaps it was because my grades had always averaged around the B+/A- range, but seeing the red, circled 76 at the top was more distressing that I had thought. Everyone is stressed around the holidays and many priorities are shifted, and I am no different, certain homework took a backseat, which may have explained the grade, but this paper, and Art History in general, had been high on my priority list that week.
In vain I tried to add up how this could be. I am, unfortunately, no stranger to receiving poor marks, but as mentioned I could always previously attribute them to a reason. Every effect had a logical, explainable cause. Here, I ran into a problem. I distinctly remembered working hard on the analysis. I’d even changed topics early on to produce a stronger piece of work. I’d spent hours typing the three sheets of paper that now lay in my hands, bearing the disfiguring mark of the 76. I’d discarded several accompanying pictures because I believed the quality to be too low and had persisted until I found high quality examples to attach. I used my brief Internet time to send an excerpt to my friend for her edits and advice, all of which were positive, and now this? It didn’t sense to me then, and it wasn’t until now, a full week later that some part of my subconscious figured it out.
In order to understand my grade, such a menial part of my life, I had to dig deeply in myself and examine the truth in laws I didn’t even acknowledge as existing, so deeply were they hardwired into me. It was only then, that is to say, now, that I realised my previous faith and adherence to this law. In discovery I realised also that there must be other laws in me, uncharted and unmapped, but by whose effects and words I lived everyday. The thought was scary, and also fascinating. Even now I don’t know if it was mere folly that guided me to trust that my effort would always reward me, and vice versa, but there must be a reason I believed, or was led to believe such, and it will take a great deal of cartography to discover the other laws.
In the end, if I step back and examine my situation, I was making a mountain out of a molehill by worrying about my grade, but it is the nature of my definite rejection of the evaluation that was the mountain. It was, in some ways, much more fruitful to receive this 76 than a grade that my effort would have said, was fair.
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