I Am Not a Number

Numbers.

I don’t like them.

I have never enjoyed doing math. Who does?

I don’t like having to worry about how much money is currently in my back pocket. 

I can’t stand listening to statistics of how many RBI’s that fat guy got because he hit so many home runs or how many yards that other guy ran for in a single game of football.

But there is something I detest more than dividing 348 by 212 and those one dollar bills currently not in my back pocket.

Somewhere out there in our wonderful country, somebody has gotten into their powerful brain that I am just a number, just stuck in with the other members of that 99th percentile ranking I got on my reading assessment. You know, I’m one of those kids who can read and write and talk real good.

Great.

Thank you for that honor.

Thanks for tricking me into thinking I’m actually getting a real education in my core classes.

Thank you for not even beginning to prepare me for the world outside of these great big brick walls called high school.

Thank you for sucking out the creativity my peers and I used to posses and injecting the dull, boring character of someone who can only feel successful when they’ve achieved perfectness.

Thank you for teaching my parents that anything less than a A is unacceptable because a C isn’t ‘trying hard enough.’ Hell if they are you know what my best is. 

I am not perfect and a perfect score on an ACT isn’t going to make me perfect. Getting National Merit isn’t going to make my brain bigger. Neither of these are going to make me any smarter and they sure aren’t going to make me happy. I have been force fed by mindless drones for four years that if I want to succeed, I have to get a good ACT score and I have to get into a good college and I have to pick a profession that is acceptable for these trying economic times. Because if I don’t, I am going to just get stuck in among the rest of the failures.

Does anybody think there is something wrong with this?

I want a real education, one that is more concerned about my actual learning, not improving the general test scores for my school.

I want an education that teaches me about responsibility and confidence; about life. An education that teaches me that I am a human with flaws and that life isn't easy and that I am ultimately going to do just fine whether I get a 21 or a 32 on a standardized test designed to worm out the kids who aren’t supposed to succeed. What a joke.

I want an education where my classes teach me how to be confident in myself, how to be responsible with my time, how to have an intelligent conversation about life and death and how they relate to today’s society instead of wasting my time writing about the great characterization of the character Piggy.

I refuse to think that one day, I will be just like this society, pushing, pushing, pushing until my child has reached perfection with his straight A’s and that 99th percentile ranking on his Kansas Reading and Math Assessments and that perfect 36 score. This is not the society I want for him.

I will challenge him to want to learn for his own sake, not for the sake of the school so it will receive a pointless national distinction.

I will show him that there is more to a good education than your AP class load and semesters spent on the Principal’s honor roll.

I will make sure he knows that I will be proud of him no matter how much money he gets in scholarships, because he can still get a quality education without buying one.

I will tell him to ignore anything anyone says about his ACT score or GPA, because those people have been brainwashed into believing that we are all numbers. 

We are not all numbers.

But society has convinced us otherwise. Let’s change that. Let’s tell our counselors that we don’t need to be forced to take an ACT plan because they think we should. Perhaps we should mention that a sign on a wall telling me to push myself isn’t really that effective. Maybe we should fail those assessments on purpose because we are not going to let a test score define us. Let’s point out the fact that we are not numbers. You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.

And I am not a number. I am a person and I dare society to try and grade that.