I am not a number. That’s obvious enough, isn’t it? I have two eyes, four limbs and my own unique personality. Still, the past four years of my life have been spent molding me into a plethora of test scores, percentiles and grade-point averages. All for what? For the American school system. To it, I feel I will only ever be a number.
Back in April, my classmates and I settled into the rigid desks at our schools to take one of the most important tests of our lives – the ACT. My advisor pulled out his script and prattled off instructions as we directed our attention to the sea of bubbles on the sheets before us. My heart raced uncontrollably; I was in full-blown panic mode.
As I removed my eyes from the blurry bubbles on the page, I took a moment to look around at the students sharing this torture. It was this moment of absolute mental chaos in which the clarity came.
I watched the girl with blonde hair bite her lip as she scrubbed her eraser against the page. I saw the boy in the Nike shoes stare at his answer sheet as if waiting for inspiration to strike. I looked at this group of peers – peers whom I had grown to know deeply over the past four years – and I realized this test could never detect what I saw in that moment. The girl with the blonde hair volunteers her time at the Soup Kitchen and enjoys making other people laugh. The boy with the Nike shoes runs on the track team and wants to promote healthy lifestyles to other people.
My peers, my fellow students, my friends are not just their ACT score, and I refuse to believe the ACT test can determine any portion of their value.
People are not meant to be measured, yet our whole lives are built on the idea that if we don’t make this achievement or if we don’t score that arbitrary, meaningless number on a test, we are somehow inadequate.
I’m calling B.S. on this system of thought. While the ACT can validate college readiness, it cannot determine the worth of a person. The worth of a person revolves around the strength of each individual’s character.
So why do schools focus on meaningless test scores? Why does society place more value on achievement than on character? I may not know the answers to these questions, but I do know one thing: It isn’t right.
And I sincerely hope that as we move into the future, we will be seen not by the number of As or Bs we received in each class or by the number of math problems we can solve correctly, but rather by the good works we do and the lives we touch. I hope we all put aside the false judgements of the ACT tests and the GPAs and realize – first and foremost – we are all people. Immeasurable, equally valuable people. And we will never be just a number.
Elise Tidwell is the incoming editor-in-chief of El Diablo, the Durango High School student newspaper. She is the daughter of Ann and Chad Tidwell of Durango.
