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My Parents Are Never Happy With My Grades
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This is Sophie! A lot of people will be able to relate to her problem: She wants to talk to you about college admission exams. But, well, any type of very important exams will do to prove her point. She wants you to know that trying to pass those exams with a high score may make your life a real hell.
Sophie feels that college admission is probably going to be the most important moment in her life so far. All her actions in life up to this point were aimed at helping her to pass her SATs with top marks and enter an Ivy League university. Her parents come from China, and she was born in America. They lived a hard life so that she could get access to new opportunities, in order to have the chance to excel in life. She’s thankful to them for that, and she wants to make them proud of her. The only problem is what that pride will cost her.
Sophie started learning math at a very early age. Her dad is actually very good at it, so he became her first tutor. When she went to school, all the kids were slowly studying addition while she was already good at decimal division. This is of course not a bad thing; the only difficulty with this was that she had to study math every evening after school to be that good. What do children normally do after school? Sports? Hobbies? Go out with friends? Forget it! You need to study in order to enter Harvard! Harvard is a very abstract notion for a seven-year-old child, so in her imagination it was like a paradise full of elves and cotton candy where she could finally relax.
However, if your parents say that Harvard is your objective in life, you tend to trust them without asking too many questions. That is why throughout all those years she was convinced that the only mark acceptable to her, not only in math but in any other subject, was an A. Even an A- seemed like a failure, and it meant that she needed to study harder. Sophie knows that her parents love her a lot. Her only problem with this is that this race wears you out. She has a strong fear of making a mistake and therefore getting a lower mark, and it drives her crazy.
As time passed, Sophie studied more and more intensely. She’s now a senior, and if she looks back on her childhood years all she remembers are the endless books, test papers and…studying, studying, studying. Her happiest memories are the birthday parties of her schoolmates, which she eventually attended, and the times when she could go out to the cinema or just hang out with her friends (whom she surprisingly managed to find considering her constant lack of free time). But she doesn’t want to make a tragedy out of that. She has a different problem. Now that she’s approaching the time when she needs to apply to university, she feels like she’s cracking.
You know those athletes who live their lives for a gold medal at the Olympics, and when they finally arrive to the finals they fail miserably because they are too nervous? This is exactly what is happening to Sophie. Now that achieving her goal is so close, and she’s polished her knowledge and abilities to perfection, all she needs to do is pass the exams and get her SAT marks, but she just can’t. She keeps reading her books, and she feels that she just doesn’t know anything at all and that when it comes to taking the exam she will end up with a task that she can’t handle. She feels burnt out, and thinks the Harvard wonderland will not accept her.
When she went to talk about this problem with her parents, they came with out that “stop talking nonsense, get back to studying” attitude. Maybe they’re right, she thought, maybe I just need to concentrate. But all the same, she turned up for her first SAT exam almost ready to faint. It was horrible. She finished the exam all panicky, because she’d been studying for it her whole life and thought she might now fail it just because of stupid nerves! It was so embarrassing, and she just hoped that her knowledge had come out automatically while she had been writing.
Her parents’ attitude didn’t help. When she came home her dad was like, “If you get less than 750 I will be very disappointed”. He didn’t add “with you”, but it was intended. Her thoughts were now racing like crazy; she kept thinking about what she should have written in her test paper and what her parents would say to her when she got an average mark. When the time came to check the results, she was so stressed that she could barely believe what she saw before her eyes: a splendid 770. She had to tell her parents at once! They would be so glad! But her dad had only a cold shower for her: “I actually thought you would score somewhere around 800. This is too low.”
The saddest thing is that her biggest fear is not she won’t get into Harvard, but that she’ll disappoint her parents. She hopes this won’t happen – wish her luck.
Music by Epidemic Sound:
