Well, I try...
But first, the meme, the beloved cornerstone of this blog. (And our society, if we're being honest with each other.) It's one of the true classics; Boromir from Lord of the Rings explaining the difficulty of a given situation with obvious exasperation. I know what poor Boromir is feeling, as I've felt pretty exasperated myself recently, and mainly because of the stuff I mentioned above.
Naturally, when we do poorly on exams, we feel pretty bad about ourselves. We start worrying about how it'll affect our grade, then our GPA, then our scholarship...it's like a never-ending cycle of torment, all brought on by a letter on a piece of paper. But the amount of stress that we cause ourselves serves as a reflection of how overcomplicated we let our lives get because of all this academic stress, and we're feeling it almost all the time. Now, I'm not saying you should abandon all responsibility and go relax 24/7, but there's merit in taking a step back and analyzing what a bad grade, for example, can really teach us.
My Spanish professor made an excellent point when some of us worried about our exam scores: we define our lives by numbers, achievements, and statistics, often to an excessive degree. We've gotten it into our heads that our GPA is somehow a reflection of ourselves, and that doing anything to damage that means that we've failed as people. It's no one's fault really; modern society has taught us to be competitive, and if you're like me, you've always taken pride in good grades. But we've gotten so focused on perfection and performance that we forget to just learn sometimes. It seems like a simple thing, but we make it needlessly complicated by hyping academia up to more than it really is.
Grades are important, absolutely so. But they reflect something impersonal, cold hard data rather than what a person really is. It's the experience of being here and learning to be well-rounded adults that's teaching us to succeed, not percentages that show quantifications on paper. We put so much value on numbers that we seem to lose ourselves in the stress; ultimately, college is about being here and taking away what matters to you, not what some numbers show as "intelligence" or "effort".
So, what should you take away? One, don't be like me: study for your exams and ace them instead of stressing yourself out over a letter grade. Two: take a step back from all the grades sometime and think about what your college experience means to you. Don't let grades be the sole standard by which you define your performance, intelligence, or anything else. There's value in those numbers, and you should want the best for yourself, but learn to relax and roll with the punches, too. That's how we learn; our mistakes are great teachers, and they may sneak back up and help you when you least expect it.
Probably why I didn't pass those exams.
I absolutely love this meme. I remember when I first saw it, I was so excited that I could recall the exact scene from Lord of the Rings and that knowledge made it personable to me. Additionally, similar to grades, I feel like memes at some point are impersonal too. For example, Ken Bone has become an internet sensation and meme after speaking at one of the presidential debates, and this "memefication" has stripped away what he is as a person. Overall, interesting post! Keep up the great work!
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