Sometimes I wonder if I take my grades and perceived intelligence too seriously. Today I got back an English 301 paper that I thought I did really well on, only to find out that I actually got a 'C+'. It was a poem explication, and I did a close reading on "Living in Sin" by Adrienne Rich. According to my professor's notes on my (5 page, 4 hour) paper, I had good insights and thoughtful interpretations, but I didn't use enough technical literary terms in my explication. That made me kind of mad because even though I may have explained and interpreted the poem well, I still didn't get a good grade because I wasn't 'technical enough'. I feel like at this point, being able to interpret and understand a poem is just as important as being able to say "she used a metaphor here, this was a good use of imagery, there's some personification over there". In all though, I was more upset than angry (even though we do get a rewrite, and in a few weeks I will get a new grade to replace the C+).
I even ended up in a fight with my boyfriend about it, because he doesn't know how to make me feel better when I get upset about school, and that makes him frustrated and upset, and it becomes this big awful thing (but we're fine now). What he doesn't necessarily understand is how much I value my intelligence and grades as a part of my actual self worth. When I was younger, I was really obnoxious and weird - still am, of course, but in different ways - and a lot of people didn't like me. They wouldn't actually come out and say it, but you can just tell sometimes when people are very annoyed by you, or when they just generally don't want you around. I picked up on that a lot in middle school. It got to a point where I would make myself feel better by considering my grades, and the fact that I was in all of the 'upper classes' for my grade level. Even if people didn't like me, it was ok, because at least I was smart. And that got me through, and now, even though my social situation has changed, it still has a big affect on how I view myself and my levels of self esteem.
Now when I get bad grades, or even grades that are just average like a C+, it still makes me feel like I have nothing. It doesn't matter that I have more friends now, that I have a boyfriend, that things are going really well in my life. All that I can think about is my grade, that this one teacher might think that I'm stupid, that if anyone else finds out that I didn't get an A or a B, they'll think that I'm stupid too. All I had was my intelligence, all I had to make myself feel better was the fact that I was smart, I knew what I was doing, I could get better grades than other people and even if they didn't like me, at least I had something to be proud of myself for. But when I get those average grades, when I don't understand math or I don't write a paper the way my professor wanted me to, that all goes away. I can't be proud of myself, I have nothing to hold up in the mirror and say 'hey, I'm worth something today'. And even though I know that it's not necessarily true, it still bothers me a lot.
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