Today's Rant:
"The Pathetique Sonata", or "The Smallest Violin in the World..."
Ahhh.... Spring has sprung, the trees are in bloom, and the sap is running... to court. Indeed, we once again have a case of some Misguided Young Person (MGYP) out on a mission to save her honor from being sullied by those of equal achievement but lower GPA. I have had a certain amount of personal life experience with this issue, and, as a result, have formed an opinion, which I will dispense now:
Once, a long time ago, I went to a certain High School. There I worked, ran, worked, did push-ups, and worked some more. After that I did a lot of working, which gave birth to a ponderous amount of work. In the end, I worked a lot. After 4 years of labor, I had produced a 4.0 GPA, a small cadre of good AP test scores, a bajillion hours of community service, an Eagle Rank, 8 weeks of summer science enrichment, and an additional list as long as your arm of smaller achievements, certainly enough to stand out a sterling individual in the performance hierarchy with which the members of my graduating class would be gauged. However, I was not alone. There were no less than 7 individuals (out of a class of ~87) whose mettle passed the discerning noses of the suits in the ivory tower. The ivory tower, afraid to choose 2 individuals from the best and somehow brand the rest as inferior, selected 5 people to be salutatorians, and 2 to be valedictorians. Things like this had happened before, and (it was presumably presumed) would happen again. The duties for the graduation ceremony were delegated, bright yellow ropes ordered, and diplomas printed. We graduated with no commotion about our "honors", and all was well.
Fast Forward 11 months:
About a month before the next classes graduation, it was discovered that the ramifications of dumbing down classes and raising enrollment standards had the unpleasant side-effect of producing a large number perfect students. The class (of ~95 people) had about 13 students with GPAs in the 4.3-4.4 range, with fantastic achievements such as Ivy League Scholarships, Academy acceptances, completing every AP class available, and concurrent enrollment in community college (Note: this is a private school that required relatively large class-loads.... not some Dumbville High that you can get by on 4 classes per day). The administration had a problem: awarding 1/9 of the graduating class as (vale/saluda)torian was a ludicrous idea. Their solution was to create a new class award: "High Honors" (or something similar). 1 Valedictorian and 1 Salutatorian would be choosen, and the rest of the pluperfect premadonnas would receive "High Honors." This, however, created another problem....
The award-ees had been expecting to recieve a distributed (saluta/vale)dictorian status like the previous groups. There was a precedent for the way things were going to be handled, and damnit, why should things change because there was a large number of students? The administration had been misguiding their minions, and had accidentally produced a squad of MGYPs.
The MGYPs and their legal guardians brought everything their feeble forces could bare on the administration; they argued that they deserved to be treated like everybody else (especially since the new ranking system appeared completely out of the blue just before graduation), and that they were now being dishonored and unfairly separated. Much to the students dismay, the administration (stubborn and unresponsive to outside ideas as it had been for generations) did nothing. Several parents gave birth to baby cows, most of the MGYPs were dishonored (in the MGYP eyes). There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. The all the students were graduated. Then policy has yet to change back.
Now come back to the present:
What did all my hard work and labor, and the resulting title, return to (ostensibly) my fellow cohorts and I? Jack and Shit (And Jack left town). High School is its own little social clique that believes it is Gods gift to the world and acts that way. Once one has left, you discover that very few things carry forward with you: you GPA and you SAT scores, and even then, you need to be an orphaned jewish african-american woman with a mother who was a Daughter of the Confederacy, a mental handicap, obscure political affiliation, 6 kids, and a history of cancer for it to them a real impact on you life. Everything else is of little importance to others, so the experiences you had previously are... yours. Your only hope is that they were personally meaningful and perhaps imparted some life skills that you might find useful... like how to push start a school bus where to buy the weird screwdrivers so you can break into the school to get your homework.
In the real world, people care about what you can do, how little money you can do it for, and how fast it can be done. Titles, honors, and achievements from a closed system mean very little in the face of lots of other people like you, and the leveling forces of standards, certifications, licenses, and 'real world experience', and the vastly unfair forces of social contracts (see The Dilbert Principle), unfair grading, un-scholastic real life events (love/kids/car accidents), and the lottery.
The point of my long winded diatribe is that the MGYP at the beginning of this article is wasting a great deal of money and energy on something that is only important in her own little universe. In 6 months, it will just be a happy memory. All the lawyers and the yelling screaming, and fierce rhetoric will have been for nothing. In 6 months, this will all be some happy memory.
If she's lucky.
5/9/04