You Are NOT Your Grades.

You are not your grades. You are not a letter on a piece of paper. You are not a percentage, or a score. You are a human being. A person. An individual. You are one person in literally millions, and you do not have to conform to the life that is school, university, work, retire, die. You are in control of your life and you should not be held back by something as trivial as your grades. You will be told that these grades are essential for your future, to ensure your "success", but what really is success? It is a point each individual person reaches and they feel they have done the best possible. So surely, if succeeding is different for each individual person, your grades are not always going to be responsible for success? 

We are brought up in a society that tells you that being intelligent is beautiful, then shames you for getting good grades. We are told that it doesn't matter what grades you get, then you are denied places at "better" learning institutions if you flunk an exam, because we may lower their results overall. We are forced to remember and recall and apply information that we have learned over two years ago, and if we are unable to do so, we are deemed "unintelligent". The education system is flawed. Each and every year, students develop anxiety or have high levels of stress because obscene amounts of pressure are put upon them because they may not flourish in an academic environment. 

So much emphasis is put on achieving top grades and going to university to work up thousands of pounds in debt. In school we are encouraged to do "creative" subjects, then denied our creativity because we must do whatever we can to get more marks and a higher grade. 

School work really got me down in New Year, I really struggled and felt that I was under a lot of pressure to excel... Then I realised... It doesn't matter. It literally did not matter whether I got all A*s or all Cs, or any combination in between, as long as I passed English, Maths and three other subjects. It didn't matter,as I would get a place at my college of choice. 

So why did I care? I had to (I'm using past tense, since my results day was yesterday) conform to who I was at school... Well, not had to, but felt as though I had to. I was more worried about not doing as well as expected, than I was about finding out my results, because I had a place in the hierarchy of my school, and that place was nerd. Smart kid. Whatever you call it. 

The education system is flawed and teenagers are being pushed past breaking point. In the UK, they're talking about making GCSE exams even more difficult, which I think is a terrible idea... So many people struggled this year. It is wrong to put so much pressure on young people. 

Not everyone is academic, we all excel at different things, and this is never accounted for when sitting exams. Some people may never be able to pass English or Maths, but they could be amazing at cutting hair or painting or composing music. 

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid." - Albert Einstein (apparently). 



Okay, so I was inspired to write this blog by this video here: 

You should probably watch it, because Carissa explains everything better than I do. 

So basically, what I'm saying here is, don't let yourself become a letter on a page or a score on a test. You are what you love (as Fall Out Boy would say!) and you are your quirks and everything that makes you you. Your grades do not define who you are, you define who you are. 

- Dottie.