Today, I got back my test scores. You know the ones that are given by the state and come in those clean manila envelopes for no other reason but to give the entire high school population an ulcer. The flap holding it shut was like a wall between me and an already inevitable future, life depended on these three numbers like I depended on my lungs to fill themselves with air. Society has molded this lump in the throat of every teenager like anticipation between a judge’s verdicts; will you be successful in the game of life or settle with a humble just passing by.

The constant and ever growing pressure of academics forces us to believe that if we want to be validated, justified as a human we need these figures on a sheet. A paper that degrades years before the person it portrays is what students now strive for. How did calculations become so prominent over the drive we have to succeed on our own? Who conceived the idea that our whole universe as teens revolves around a character or a number found on a non-living machine?

Nevertheless, dozens of students will go home like me, disappointed in the numbers that were finely spit from the mouth of the machine only to try and tell you how much you’re worth. And we weren’t the last ones, or the first. Every autumn another rotation of hopeful faces will circulate through the doors and finish their test, but every time no one will give a second glance to see behind the stacks of student records and gold stars.

We will be perceived when we are long gone only as a record of the achievements that we were so heavily influenced by. No one will know the story of how Beth received an “A” on her final despite the fact that she worked from a hospital bed and not a typical desk. No one will see that Ruth earned a 4.0 in the wake of being a new mother. All that people will see when our generation is gone is the computer record and how far our given knowledge took us. In all honesty, we decide how we direct the knowledge the system has given us; we decide whether or not that gold star really means anything. Maybe it’s just a spot on the lives we chose apart from the ones we were handed in an envelope.