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Grades |
The
people crowd noisily around you, pushing and shoving for a quick, violent
glimpse of you. The people in
front of you regard you with an intense, almost feral glare as you shrink
away from their fierce scrutiny.
People jab their fingers at you and yell, “I’m first!” with
wild glee, as others protest loudly and even others slink away angrily,
muttering under their breaths.
Contrary to what you may be thinking, (“Eeeeep!”) you are
not a lamb about to be eaten by wolves.
Rather, you are a grade sheet in a competitive honors class.
You’d be better off with the wolves.
Honors and AP classes are tough, but the coursework’s only
half the work. The other half
is enduring the fierce competition that occurs between the students as
each, in their fight to get to the top, metaphorically gouges the other
students’ eyes out, with their cruddy academic claws.
Imagine that you have just studied really hard for a
test—you’ve gone three days without eating, drinking, or sleeping,
just reading the book nonstop, doing sample problems and reciting passages
to your stuffed animals. You
are by this time so delirious that you believe that, in a hallucination,
or an epiphany as you call it, Einstein himself came to you and
sang “Fly Me to the Moon” before explaining iambic pentameter.
By the time you get to class, you’ve fallen asleep so many times
that the print has now come off your book, imprinted onto your feverish
forehead.
After explaining to your skeptical teacher that no, the text
on your forehead is not a badly-concealed attempt to smuggle in notes, you
sit down to take the test. You
fish through your belongings for a pencil and a few erasers, and begin the
test. The teacher announces
that the grades will be posted at lunchtime.
Afterwards, you go outside, throw up in the bathroom and rejoice!
You have finished the test! However,
the rest of the class is sullen, angry, and they leave the classroom with
dark looks on their faces. This
will not be a good day.
As the lunch bell rings, you head towards the classroom to
see your grades. Although
your class is on the other side of the school, you begin to get an idea of
what you got on the test by the murderous looks on the faces of the other
students in your class, tus compañeros de clase.
Companion comes from Latin—the words com (with) and pan (bread),
basically, who you break bread with, eat with.
However, by the gnashing of teeth and the numerous capillaries you
see appearing in the eyes of wild-eyed classmates, the only thing that’s
going to be broken is your head.
You may be wondering how all these people know your grades.
Don’t worry; in an honors class, if you forget your student ID
number and grade, your classmates won’t.
Most kids know exactly where another student is in their class, and
in a town like this, exactly where that student lives, too.
You begin to regret your happiness.
After all, kicking the curve out from under the butts of
upperclassmen is fun and all, but is it worth the mental pain and
suffering? Einstein’s words
play through your head, “Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and
Mars..” You guess that if
this keeps on going, you won’t make it to junior year before you get a
one-way ticket to Mars and get dropkicked to a distant planet.