A Personal Case for Intellectual Humility
I’m going to be a C-average student for the first time. As a Senior. I’ve earned one C throughout my career as a Grand Canyon University Honors Student. This semester, I’ll have earned two more.
When I was a senior in high school, I created a distribution graph to get a sense of which levels yielded the most potential to level up my characters in Kingdom Hearts.
Now that I don’t have much time to spend gaming, I’ve been studying html, digital content marketing and SEO. I’m now breaking into CSS and JavaScript as I design a website from scratch before I even touch a hosting service.
This semester, depression slowed things up. Blogging, school, and my day job went cold. I strayed off my commitment to school. One evening, I got a message from a professor asking me to turn in my work on time. I’d be getting full credit for everything I was turning in if I were to turn it in on time. Time management and determination are the only things killing my grades. Now that I’ve gotten myself back on track, it’s too late to make up what I’ve lost. Still, I just have to keep going and maintain my C-average.
I feel stupid. Really stupid. I know that I’m not, but it gets to me every morning when I wake up that I’m going to be an underperforming student for the rest of my degree program. High school Samuel earned Cs. College Samuel was supposed to succeed flawlessly.
Upon reflection, I don’t think many people can properly be described as “stupid.” It’s a clunky, boring, damaging word that doesn’t belong in everyday vocabulary. Nobody’s stupid. At least, not if you’re basing their intellect off their total average performance over the course of four or more years. Some people have niche interests, be it philosophy, geography, baseball statistics or keeping a meticulous, record of the hours of sleep they aren’t getting (guilty).
Academic performance not the benchmark of intellectual prowess. I didn’t pick up a useful reading pace until middle school. In part, this was because I didn’t start reading chapter books until around that time. From an early age I was a lifelong gamer. My bad. I’ve always had a lot of catching up to do since.
Worse than having a history of being deficient in big brain, I’ve spent most of my life believing that grades were my worth. I had self-efficacy to match: I considered myself doomed to ever grow in the social, academic, romantic, and other core aspects of my life. I would always imagine my name being whispered whenever I caught snippets of background conversations. As far as I could tell, the world had no use for someone who knew about the wrong things.
I was wrong. I realized I have the hunger and bandwidth to learn many things. One thing I’ll always struggle with is time management and self-motivation. My grades, being dependent on my time management and the hours I put into class, will reflect poor performance. I’m willing to bet that you have a lot more to show the world than your grades can capture. Find the will to match, and then exceed, the areas of knowledge that school has tried to instill in you. At the end of the day, you have a lifetime to prove yourself. Focus on convincing yourself of your abilities before anyone else.
