There was a
period of time in the last academic year in which I focused on only one of my
GCSE subjects. It was a subject that had eluded me since the days of primary
school, when my classmates proceeded onto the “fun” challenges of extra work and
I was left staring at a blank calculator screen. It was, up until year 11,
universally acknowledged that I couldn’t do maths. I just couldn’t.
I hated the
numbers. I hated how somehow the alphabet got involved with all the numbers.
And as if that wasn’t complicated enough,
somehow the Ancient Greek alphabet got involved with the numbers too and there
were special signs to show different things and I couldn’t keep track of any of
them because they all looked the same and it felt like I was drawing squiggles
on past papers and getting marks for it anyway.
By Year 11, I
was predicted a B. This letter always frustrated me whenever it was mentioned
by tutors or teachers or parents, because I felt I could do better. And I
could. I had spent so much time telling myself that I couldn’t do maths that I
failed to realize how many people were worse at it than me. And so I worked,
with the help of my selfless teacher who gave up some of her lunchtimes to help
me, a friend in the year above who went over any questions I was stuck on and
my sister, who threw revision books at me like I was the middle of a dartboard
and she wanted the perfect score. I stayed up late every night during study
leave going over what I didn’t understand. I started maths revision earlier than
any other subject. I worked so hard that I started daydreaming about what my
reaction would be if I opened my exam results envelope and saw an A in maths
staring back at me.
I got an A.
And I was so happy. I was ecstatic, crazily so for about three weeks until the
excitement wore off and there was no one who hadn’t already heard my exact UMS
mark in each of the specific modules I had taken.
GCSE’s are
important. They require work, knowledge and dedication. Over the past academic
year, I had managed to prove to myself that I was able to do maths and that I
was able to get a good grade in it, but I stopped focusing on everything else.
My fundamental problem with my GCSE grade was this: I had started to define
myself by my own level of productivity. What happened if I hadn’t gotten an A?
How would I have taken the news? Would a grade lower than I wanted mean that I
wasn’t good enough?
The ruthless
way society puts pressure on pupils is destructive. We focus so much on grades
that they sometimes feel like they matter more than we do. Henry Thoreau is
famously quoted to have said that, “ what you get by achieving your goals is
not as important as what you become by achieving your goals”. I’m normally not
a fan of aphorisms, but I believe Thoreau was right in this instance. My
ambition, in this case, did not matter. It would not have mattered if I didn’t
get the grade I wanted because I worked for it, and revised for it, and the end
result proved more than my ability to satisfy criteria on a sheet.
