Kalynn Writes Things

Everyone treats grades like they’re the official scoreboard of intelligence. Teachers, parents, colleges, even students start believing it. You can get an A and suddenly you’re “smart.” You get a C and you’re “lazy” or not “trying hard enough.” The whole idea doesn’t make sense. Grades don’t measure how smart you are, they measure how well you fit into the system that school was built around.

Getting good grades doesn’t always mean you understand what you’re learning. A lot of the time it just means you’ve figured out what your teacher wants and how to give it to them. You know how to take notes, how to answer the question the “right” way, how to memorize just enough for the test. That’s not bad, it’s actually a skill, but it’s not the same thing as being intelligent.

You can be incredibly smart and still struggle in school. Maybe you think differently. Maybe you understand things in ways that don’t fit perfectly into a multiple choice test or a five paragraph essay. Maybe you need more time to process things, or you’re more creative, or your brain just works in a way that doesn’t fit how school is structured. Whatever the case is, it doesn’t mean you’re not smart. It just means the system wasn’t designed for how you learn best.

Something that people don’t talk about enough are that grades are also about circumstances. Some students have extra help at home, tutors, quiet places to study. Others have jobs, responsibilities, or stress that make focusing on homework a lot harder. Two people could be equally smart, but one of them has a whole support system making things easier, and the report card will never show that.

Then there’s the pressure. When everything depends on your GPA, colleges, scholarships, even your parents’ opinion sometimes, grades stop being about learning. You stop caring about what you’re actually learning and start caring about how to keep your average up. You start doing things for the grade, not because you’re passionate about it, and that’s when many students, including myself, start feeling like school is an obstacle course testing our endurance instead of a place for growth and discovery.

Here’s the biggest thing: A BAD GRADE DOESN’T DEFINE YOUR POTENTIAL! You could fail a math test today, and still end up as a world class surgeon. You could struggle to write essays and end up publishing a book. School is just one small environment, and its not built to measure everything that matters.

You’re not your report card, you’re not your GPA. You’re a person with skills, ideas, and ways of thinking that can’t be measured by letters on a screen. Keep working hard, but don’t confuse grades with intelligence. They’re not the same thing, and they never were.