Senior Moments: A Little Failure

I’m now in my final quarter of my senior year. Everything is winding to a close, and if the first three quarters dragged their feet getting here, the fourth one is sprinting.

The end of the third quarter snuck up on me. I blinked halfway through the school year, and now, I only have one report card left. We’re getting ready to start that final math chapter, that final composition paper.

In school, there seems to be an unspoken rule that there are two types of people in the world: Math People and English People. There are the few lucky ones among us who are the exception to the rule, but for the most part, people fall into one of these two categories. I’ve always been an English Person. I could write you a 10-page paper on why I don’t want to take a math class. In second grade, I would cry over multiplication facts I couldn’t memorize, then go finish reading the unabridged version of "Little Women."

Taking all of this into account, I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to save the hardest math class I’ve ever taken in my life for the second semester of my senior year. I guess I decided senior year wouldn’t be stressful enough, without the added duress of trying to understand a language of numbers I am nowhere close to fluent in. I spent the majority of the quarter doing reasonably well, with my math grade lagging slightly below the rest of my grades. It wasn’t until we were creeping up on the end of the quarter — and a big test I wasn’t sure I was capable of doing well on — that I began to worry. What if the decision to take this math course, made in an apparent fit of insanity, would ruin the grades I had spent the last three years working towards?

When I got my report card back, my math grade wasn’t an A. It wasn’t an earth-shatteringly terrible grade, either, but in my eyes, if my grades had been playing limbo, math would’ve caught the bar square in the chest and crumpled to the ground. I didn’t want to lose my head over one grade, but nothing could stop that gross feeling of failure that climbs up from your stomach and into your head. It’s easy to say, “Grades aren’t everything,” but somewhere way in the back of my mind, a part of my self-worth had been tied to my ability to get perfect grades.

It took grabbing my brain with a steely grip to realize freaking out over this one math grade wasn’t rational. What kind of example is it setting for others around me? That it’s not OK to only be OK at something that’s challenging for you? That you should beat yourself up over doing your best? A little failure is OK. It took failing my own expectations to start killing that part of me that thinks I’m only as good as my worst accomplishments.

When I look at my third quarter report card, I don’t want to scream or cry or throw it in the trash. I think, “This is fine,” because it is fine. I still get good grades, I’m still going to a good college, I can still read and write and do a bunch of other things I’m actually good at.

I did my best, and I’m proud of that.

Mia Timlin is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School. She has lived in Cape Girardeau for five years and loves reading, dancing, watching movies and listening to music by the Beatles.