I’ve written for this specific prompt many times, but have never gotten around to posting the final product. So here it finally is. My relationship to grades has always been difficult. I was never really committed to school, I always thought of it more as something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do. Kindergarten to third, I was enrolled in a charter school for the “talented and gifted” after I passed a specialized test. I felt very isolated and lonely those years. I didn’t have friends, was bullied, and was severely behind everyone else in my class. I ended up repeating the third grade, so I’m obviously not very fond of the grading system and how it works. I felt like my teachers had totally abandoned and given up on trying to understand me. In reality, a little bit of one on one intervention would have probably helped me, but I never received that. 

After I switched schools, I immediately started performing better. In fact, I even started to excel compared to some of my peers. But getting good grades didn’t really change how I felt about school in general. I still didn’t enjoy it, but it was a bit of a confidence booster to get high scores. Middle school, I was severely depressed, and stopped caring about school altogether. This is around the time I was still figuring out my gender and sexuality. As a result, I was failing most courses, acted out, and skipped class. I was admitted at one point, but it didn’t really change anything. The classes that I did do well in, I had a great relationship with my teachers and peers, but that was it. 

Freshman year I had hoped for a “fresh” start, but I was overjoyed when schools closed because of the pandemic. However, my grades, which had just started to improve, took a massive nosedive since classes were online now. Throughout all of school, I was also doing terribly. I had a very low GPA, and was always skipping class and getting high to cope with my depression. I kept telling myself I was going to drop out, but I never did. Somehow, I was able to turn everything around halfway through my senior year. All my friends were getting into good schools, and I felt like I had just wasted a decade of my life doing absolutely nothing. I was being told by my advisors that I would either have to repeat my senior year, or have a late graduation. I was already a super senior at that point, which was already embarrassing to be 19 and still in high school, so I pushed myself to actually try. And I actually managed to graduate. 

I’m still not sure how I was able to do it, but I think that reaching out and gaining a good support system definitely helped. Even though it was already too late to turn my cumulative GPA around to get into any “good schools”, I was accepted into Guttman, and here I am now. It wasn’t that I never understood what was being taught, in fact I could have done everything very easily, I just didn’t care for it. I felt like the school system wasn’t doing enough for me, so I essentially gave up on myself. I’m not sure how an educational system would work if we didn’t have any grades, but I would definitely be open to trying that out. Grades never really motivated or mattered to me, and I think that applies to many people. I think if we didn’t have grades, it could encourage students to try through other means.