Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Average

When I was in the Eighth Grade, my homeroom teacher had this habit of calling out our names one by one as she handed back assignments at the front of the class. Once, when I was called up, she gave me back a write up that I had done on some television series we were watching in class and I saw at the top a bright red 7/10. She held onto the paper a little longer so I couldn't walk away just yet and said to me, "I'm very disappointed in you." All I can remember from that point on is going back to my desk with tears in my eyes and thinking, 7 out of 10 isn't that bad, is it?

7 out of 10 is a 70%, is a B, is a grade that most students in that class - and in most classes - receive; 7 out of 10 is an average mark, a perfectly good average mark. I suppose the problem in this case was that I was not an average student. I do remember getting 9s and 10s on those little write ups and I don't really know what I did wrong or differently to get a 7 that one time.

By the time mid-high school rolled around, I found out that grades in the 70 range were great and that grades in the 60s were considered average - according to the school or the government or society, I don't know. But...60s. In my house, I would have gotten The Lecture from my parents if I ever walked in the door with a 60-something in anything (even gym). But this is just a Messed Up Immigrant Parents And Second Generation Youth Thing that doesn't apply to most people. Lucky bastards. I ended up graduating high school with a 93% average in my top 6 classes and after my first term at university, I had a GPA of 10.8 out of 12. My GPA is still in the A range and since I've been here I've received 2 or 3 scholarships/awards per year. Go ahead, you can say it, I'm an overachiever, a geek, a nerd, whatever (though I do prefer the term 'geek' over anything else). The kind of pressure I received from my family eventually translated into a funky kind of internalized want to do well (mmm...self-inflicted frustration and mental anguish...yum!) and when I got anything below an 80%, I freaked out a bit. Yeah, I'm one of those people.

Don't worry, I've since become a normal person. This isn't to say that my standards aren't still high because they are (after 21.96 years of conditioning, how could they not be?), but this is to say that I now know how to take things a little bit easier, to relaaaxxx and all that jazz. I do things that most/all students do: I cram the night before an exam, I don't start my 12-page papers until the last minute, I've walked into a test without having done any of my class readings, I go out to the bar in the middle of the week when I'm sick and have work the next morning, I chat on MSN all night when I should be working on a take-home final. I don't know when it was that it hit me, but I eventually realized that doing things the 'right' way doesn't always work out to be the 'best' way. Now, I'm not advocating major slackage by any means, because social-scientific studies have shown that slackage is indeed positively correlated with bad marks in school, but it doesn't hurt to take some time every now and then and just...go with it. Take some time for fun, for your friends and family, for yourself(!) - it's all about balance in the end, isn't it?

I just came out of my final exam for my Operations Management class and it didn't go as well as I would have liked it to (does anything ever?). I spent all of last night and this morning studying, but as luck would have it, the one chapter I didn't read was covered extensively on those 17 pages of paper. I don't expect a 90 or an 80 and only goodness knows if I'll come out with anything in the 70s range. I didn't have all the time in the world to prep for this thing and I did have a wee bit of vodka with my orange juice before I left the house...and that's okay. I'm not disappointed in myself, I doubt my parents will ever find out, but I do wonder what good old Ms. Hector from homeroom will think. Alas, it happened, it's done with, it's not that bad and I don't care. Contrary to my parents' belief, this one bad mark will not ruin my life.

I'm going to go buy a bag of chocolate eggs now, head home and have an Easter Egg Hunt with the roomie. Maybe tonight we'll go out to a bar or to dance or we'll stay home and cuddle up with some snackies and a movie. Who knows.

Life is a lot easier, not to mention a lot better, when you don't take things so seriously all the time.