COLUMN: Judge From Within

From Sonja Stumacher's, "Fragments of the Sun," Fall '95 The boy in front of me gripped his folded note in the palm of his left hand which closed tightly around the paper's thin edges as he wadded it into a tiny ball of red and white. He pulled the crumpled parcel into his lap, and then opened it up. A smile spread across his face. Next I saw the girl to my right stare at her paper as the teacher dropped it down upon her sloped desktop. She watched it's floating descent and didn't pick it up. She glared at it and I wondered how she could bare to sit there and wait, not knowing the crucial shape of the figure printed inside. When I finally saw her pained expression after she opened her paper, my stomach tightened and my breath stopped short. Thirty five pairs of eyes followed the motion of our teacher as she twirled around the room, weaving in and out of long rows of desks. She approached mine. I sat stiff as a board, tensing the muscles in my neck and trying to hold my body together in one single piece of iron strength. I accepted my own folded white note. My face hardened into stone as I reached forward to grasp the paper that I would allow to define my own self-worth for the next couple of months. Unfolding the tiny square sheet of paper, I saw the red letter B printed in bold, brilliant ink. My heart dropped into my shoes and I looked down at my hands. This scenario played itself out almost every year. I despised it. I hated myself for depending so heavily upon the grade I received and I hated the power I allowed this objective evaluation to hold over my life. But I was a good actor; I knew how to pretend I did not care. When I was awarded an A, I felt that the educational system was not that bad. But if I received anything less, I felt as though someone were telling me I was a slacker and a failure. In retrospect, I am able to see that the tallest hurdle was not the actual grade I received, but rather the way I felt after I received it. I permitted a single letter to determine too much of my value as a person. After receiving a grade in a class, I felt as though it had been swathed in thick black ink across my forehead. I felt like a letter and not a human being. Then one time in high school I wrote a creative piece for an English class. It had been one of those stories that poured out of me like water flowing from a tipped pitcher, gathering momentum and strength as it fell. As I sat and typed to the rhythm of a Bach violin concerto, I found that my words had connected to form sentences that illuminated the page with fragments of truth buried somewhere beneath the surface of my thoughts. For the first time I was truly encouraged by my own writing. I invented my own system; I developed my own means of evaluation and figured out a way to meet with the most important approval of all: the approval that came from within me. At the end of the composition I came to the realization that this, too, would receive a grade. But I also knew something else -- it didn't matter. I had created a narrative for myself, for my own discovery and my own wonder. When I received the writing back from my teacher, she had ascribed an A in the top left corner. I still had to admit to myself that I enjoyed the sight of that mystical shape written on my page. I have since come to understand that a grade means only what you allow it to mean. The only power it contains is the power you bestow upon it. I still feel a twinge if I receive a grade that is not to my liking. But I try in these moments to view myself with greater perspective and with an expanded sense of wisdom, acceptance and peace. This outlook has not, however, changed my instinctive distaste for the concept of objective evaluation in general. I feel that feedback and tactful criticism are necessities; after all, what good are we if we cannot share ourselves with the rest of the world and meet with it's comments? Yet I still continue struggling to accept the notion of a grade stamped upon a personal, creative and unique expression. This process can harbor a potentially harmful relationship between the instructor and the pupil, a relationship based upon a preconceived superior knowledge and inferior acceptance. I suppose that the underlying assumption about Penn students is that we have all, in some way or another, managed to win the approval of our instructors and have ultimately found success within our educational system. We are thought to be motivated, energetic, smart and caring individuals. I find these descriptions to be basically true. But it is easy to lose sight of our own unique worth within the system that evaluates every single step we make. It is exhausting to bare up under the pressure to be the best, to beat out everyone else, to get an A no matter what the cost. When is there a moment within this cycle to be human? I have been amazed at the power the letters A, B, C, D and F have held over me at various points in my life. As time has passed and I have pondered and even questioned the system that has awarded me any of these five letters, their magical power has begun to diminish. Bit by bit, piece by piece, I have managed to turn them back into exactly what they are and no more: just little pieces of crumpled white paper cut into squares with tiny red letters printed carefully inside. The real grade is lodged not within the folds of this paper but within the fabric of my individuality. And there it shall remain. Sonja Stumacher is a junior English major from Keene, N.H. Fragments of the Sun appears alternate Wednesdays.