Hiya!
I am a terrible blogger. It’s been five weeks since the last entry! Sure, I have many excuses, but you’d think that at one point or another over that lengthy and busy period I’d be able to sit down for an hour and hammer out an entry. As I always say, I can’t promise that the next entry won’t be another five weeks down the line, but I’ll try to do better in the future. Somehow my posting average is still once per 4.8 days, meaning that I had way too much time on my hands back when I began this blog just before starting high school.
I still have a hard time getting over this idea that in less than a year I’ll be gone from high school for good. Even with the upheaval that occurred during my sophomore year, the past four years have still been a fairly stable, somewhat happy time for me, and stepping into the unknown of college and adulthood remains a bit intimidating, even after the glorious weeks I spent at Stanford. In case you didn’t notice while reading my long and whiny lamentations about my sorry life after moving here, I don’t really like change all that much once I’m content with my current situation, though it seems like I usually handle them well (with the move to Wisconsin being the one glaring exception). Thankfully, I’m rapidly losing the few things I once liked about high school, so by the time June rolls around I’m sure I’ll be itching to leave.
It could be the senioritis getting to me, but I feel as if I’m getting progressively stupider. I feel sluggish, out-of-practice, over-the-hill, washed-up, et cetera. The weird thing about it, though, is that I don’t feel burned-out, like I feared I might be toward the end of last year. I’ve actually been working harder in school this year than I did last year, usually. But for some reason, my hard work no longer seems to yield the excellent results that it once did. I guess it kind of began in the last week of the last school year, when I turned in a rough draft of an English paper that was more than a little bit rough. It was incomplete, badly organized, and it basically sucked. I felt ashamed to put my name on it and submit it to a teacher who I’d never had before and who would probably use this piece of writing to gauge my abilities in anticipation of having me as a student this year. But I was so exhausted from all the other end-of-year crap that I’d been through, I just couldn’t put forth any more effort to make it better. So I turned in my crap and didn’t really think about it for the next three months. During that time, I enjoyed the breath of fresh air that was the first few weeks of summer after a harrowing school year, went to Stanford and had more fun in eight weeks than I’d had in the past two years, and neglected my summer homework. When I came back down to earth, I read most of my required summer reading and started school again, figuring that things would quickly return to the way that they were last year. I got my crappy paper back on the first or second day with a tape on which the teacher had recorded his comments - I still haven’t listened to it yet.
I was right about the “returning to last year’s horribleness” thing. About three weeks into this term, I was already staying up until two, three, even five or six in the morning in order to finish all my homework, work-work, and newspaper-design-work. The first time I was faced with a long night like that, I thought, “Well, I did it most of last year - what’s to keep me from doing it again this year? I can handle it.” And so I pulled the near-all-nighter - several of them, actually, in rapid succession - and when things returned to normal I realized that there was no way that I could keep doing that. I can barely express in words the feelings that those weeks would spawn, feelings whose sharpness had been dullened by months of sleeping eight or ten hours a night. Sometimes I’d walk around in a robotic stupor, other times I’d feel sort of “high” and abnormally happy, but usually all I felt was a kind of muted anger at myself mixed with deep frustration with the circumstances that had led me to lose so much sleep. Always it was accompanied with a sharp increase in morbid thoughts and random joking utterances about suicide. Looking back, I’m not so sure it was always a joke.
I don’t think it was the momentary dark mood that made me so depressed and unhappy during that week and during similar weeks and months last year. I think it was the idea that this was rapidly becoming more regular than irregular and that there wasn’t much hope of it ever coming to an end. But, as of about a week ago, I’m done. I’m tired of sacrificing my health (physical, spiritual, and especially mental) for a few silly markings on a piece of paper. I’m not saying this from the point of view of someone who has always struggled to get good grades and has now decided to give up - I’ve been to the top, and I stood there unchallenged for a good six years. From fourth grade through tenth, in every class I was a member of, there seemed to be no one who could surpass my grades across the board in all classes. There were several who came close: back in seventh grade I remember a girl who tried to beat me in social studies and English with grades of 114% and 110%, respectively. (The teacher gave extra credit liberally.) I came back with a 124% in social studies and a 114% in English. I can’t believe I was ever proud of that.
I also can’t believe that I earned such sky-high grades in middle school and yet never was I offered a place in an accelerated program, nor was I advised to skip a grade. (That’s Arizona public education, for you.) Though I probably never would have wanted to do something that would tear me away from my friends back then, I wonder now if I wouldn’t have been much better off if I had been challenged to my fullest earlier on. I think I got lazy after a while. I began to expect that I could always get As with only a little bit of work. Sadly, that expectation wasn’t challenged until the first semester of my sophomore year when I took AP European History. Until then, even honors classes in which I was getting extra individual instruction (English) weren’t really challenging me. I would often jokingly complain to my friends that an essay that I’d turned in was a complete piece of crap, yet the teacher had still given it an A+. Back then, I didn’t think much of it. But now, I see just how bad that was for me. The problem, I think, was that my work was always judged either against the baseline standard or against the work of my peers. So when I turned something in that truly blew both standards away (sorry for the lack of modesty, here), the teacher would scrawl their 100% on the cover and hand it back with few comments other than “Great Job!” or “Nice work!” What I needed, however, was a real assessment of how good my work was, according to a college-level standard that I could never hope to meet in 9th and 10th grade. I needed to fail.
But, although one or two papers got less-than-stellar grades (an A-, oh no!) in AP European History, and I began to see that my writing was far from perfect, I never got that crushing F that would have jolted me out of my arrogance and put me in my place. Then came Wisconsin, with its top-ranked education system. Suddenly, I had to work for my grades. Not so much in English or social studies or other liberal artsy subjects, but definitely in math and science. In chemistry and physics, I struggled to keep an A- for pretty much the duration of both classes. I was better in math, yet not as perfect as I once was. I could feel a slow slippage beginning to take place. I got into the IB program, and everything became tougher. I still had my enviable grades, but I had to spend more and more time on school in order to keep them. School wasn’t the only thing I did (I had to have other activities in order to get CAS hours for my IB diploma), but it was close to it.
Now we come to this year, my final year, the one in which I’m supposed to shirk some schoolwork and actually have some fun or do what I want to do every once in a while. Yet it’s also looking as if it could be the hardest thus far. I feel like suddenly the classes that I once liked have become tiresome and difficult, and the classes that I’ve always hated or felt neutral toward are slowly killing me. In English, I now have to pay attention to literary devices rather than basing my ideas strictly around symbolism or historical analysis. In history, we beat our topics to death early and barely cover the events that occur toward the end of the time periods we study. We spent a good two weeks on both the causes of the Mexican Revolution and the causes of World War I, yet in neither did we talk much about what actually happened during each conflict, nor did we cover their effects on their respective countries or (most importantly) their impact on the US. Even worse, I’ve studied both topics in depth in earlier courses. In Spanish, I’ve become almost incapable of speaking anything coherent, though my writing continues to improve. In TOK, my presentations never seem to pass muster because I still have a lot of contempt for all the semi-idiotic TOK jargon that we’re supposed to incorporate. And then there’s calculus…ah yes, dear calculus. In my dumb arrogance I thought that I could handle the jump from pre-calculus to AP Calculus BC (IB Math HL), one that I had to make because of changes in the curriculum for IB Math SL. The result? A difficult-to-move B in the class and Cs on both of the tests we’ve taken so far. Cs! Twice! In a row! Part of me screams, “This is not me! I am not a C student! What the hell is wrong with me?” I have no idea what my problem is, but I really don’t care that much about fixing it this time around. I’ll put in all the effort that I can, but I’m tired of feeling crappy about getting a bad grade even when I know that I’ve done all that I could to learn the material.
In the past my mantra has always been, “Try your hardest and be content with the result, no matter what it may be. Feel happy in the knowledge that you did all that you could.” It was a stupid mantra for a long time, though, because I never really had to be worry about anything beyond the first comma. In school, the result was always good. Now, though, I really have to come to terms with it. I have to look at it a second time and realize that I’ve finally reached a stage where the whole thing applies. In the past, I could base my happiness with my work on the result because it was nearly always positive. But now, I’m taking a page from the IB gods’ book. It’s not the end result that matters, in most cases. It’s the effort that goes into it, the process that achieves the result, however good or bad it may be. The IB diploma program is similar: they care more that you accepted the challenge and did your best to meet it than whether or not you excelled in the program. The standards for actually obtaining a diploma are surprisingly low considering the rigor of the program’s courses. Sure, failure, or Cs in calculus, or teetering A-s in physics and chemistry, is never pleasant. But can it really be called a failure when you’ve done everything in your power to try to make it a success?
Well, I’d better stop. A history paper beckons. Until recently, I hated doing papers or preparing for presentations. I didn’t really dislike the assignments themselves, just the act of doing them. But when the grade is out of the picture, I feel inspired to try harder, for my own benefit. It’s strange that a system that would appear to spur students into working harder and learning more can have such an opposite effect on me. I think I actually want to write this thing. I want to make it good. I want to be a student again, not a machine.
The robot to human transformation is nearly complete.