Written by Kathryn Austin, Relate Intern
(Photo by www.time.com)
Labor Day is over and school is back in session and in full swing, which means you may be feeling the pressure and stress of the Number Game creeping back into your head. Grades, standardized test scores, GPA… they all constitute the continuous battle we fight every day versus numbers. Though these numbers are important to our system of education, it is vital to remember when fighting this battle that numbers are just numbers and they don’t have to take over and ruin our lives.
When I was in high school, I was a straight A student with tons of extracurricular activities and a high GPA. Upon entering senior year of high school, my preliminary list of colleges to which I was applying included Ivies as well as the top liberal arts schools in the country. Following the trend that had been set for me all of my life, I expected to receive a high score on my SAT and glide into college. Well, it didn’t happen quite as planned.
The first time I took the SAT, I received a score that was significantly lower than what I was expecting. My score didn’t even put me in the bottom 25 percentile at most of the schools in which I was interested. Oh well, chin up- I’ll just take an SAT class- one of those classes that guarantees to raise your score by 100 points. Two months later and I’m getting my scores from SAT Round 2. All of my work in the class had raised my score ten points. Ten.
All of the sudden I had no idea what I was capable of anymore. How can I coast through school, yet have difficultly on a standardized test that is universally used in evaluating college applicants? What was going on with these numbers? While some of the numbers used to evaluate my academic performance were stellar, the others just didn’t make sense. I felt like I was truly unintelligent, and I was certainly confused.
It took me a very long time to be able to look at the numbers and evaluate them for myself, outside of the way that they are commonly used. Test scores and grades are commonly accepted as ways to measure intelligence. If you make good grades, you are smart. Unfortunately, research is showing that intelligence is not so black and white. There are multiple theories of intelligence out there, but most of the research is proving in favor of some variation of multiple intelligences. What does that mean? It’s not all about the numbers. Some individuals excel in some areas, while others excel in others. Each girl is smart in her own unique way. There is no specific number that can tell you if you are smart or not. Even the IQ test has fallen under harsh scrutiny in recent years!
Don’t get bogged down by numbers. If some of the numbers in your life aren’t as high as you would like them to be, try getting a tutor or talking to your teacher about what you can you can do to raise them or get extra credit. But don’t let them define you. I guarantee that there are areas in life that you excel at, from sports to being a good friend (both fall under types of intelligences according to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences!).
While you may bring yourself to truly believe that numbers aren’t a good evaluator of your intelligence, you should not ignore them. The truly frustrating fact of our education system is that it operates by placing emphasis on the numbers. If you fail Biology, you can’t graduate. If you don’t take the SAT, you can’t get into college. Keep trying in school, but don’t forget to acknowledge the other unique aspects of your intelligence. The best we can hope for is that the education system will grow and change to acknowledge them as well!
For more information about theories of intelligence including Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, check out http://otec.uoregon.edu/intelligence.htm. Look for some more school tips here.
