By BARD HOVENGA
Assistant Opinion Editor
My high school psychology teacher once issued a challenge to all the girls in our class: bring in your scale and smash it to pieces in front of everybody. The reward would be $100. One hundred dollars, and nobody did it. Seems crazy right?
Refusing to live without a scale really isn’t all that strange. We base our lives on them. We need an objective standard to measure ourselves against. This is obvious as far as weight and health go. Fad diets and gym memberships are more popular than ever. We can’t even buy or eat a meal without hearing something about how many calories are in it. But scaling ourselves goes way beyond just how many pounds we weigh.
As students, most of us live and die by a different scale: the grade point average. This is exactly the type of scale we could never bring ourselves to smash. Grading information stands front and center in every syllabus. We spend entire days and nights in the library before exams and papers worth 20 percent of our grade. We plead with professors for extra credit or do-overs. When we finally do get that A, we walk away with all our memorized knowledge left for dead on bubbled-in Scantrons, gone forever. But the grading scale doesn’t care about what we actually learn. It’s about what letter you see written on top of your graded exam, not what’s in the exam itself.
The most dangerous thing about the grading scale is that it’s rarely questioned. When a girl is obsessive about her weight, we call it an eating disorder and urge her to get help. But when someone stays up all night to ace a history exam or finish a 10-page paper, we praise that as hard work. We forget that obsessing over your GPA can be just as compulsive as calorie-counting.
Another thing about scales is that they never tell the full story. How many pounds you weigh is never an accurate depiction of your overall health. Grades will never be a full measurement of what you know or your true potential. We can count calories all day, we can study all night, but we’ll never be perfect. At least not according to some arbitrary scale.
In the book “Fight Club,” Tyler Durden says, “You’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job.” Let’s add a few more nots to that list. You’re not how much you weigh. You’re definitely not your grade point average. You’re not a number on a scale. Stoic Marcus Aurelius has this to say about the subject: “God sees all our souls freed from their fleshly containers, stripped clean of their bark, cleansed of their grime. He grasps with his intelligence alone what was poured and channeled from himself into them.” Well guess what? God doesn’t care about your GPA either. Knowledge, beauty, achievement – these things exist outside of man-made scales. We forget this all too often.
We could live our whole lives by scales. Now it’s our GPA, later it will be our salary or how many hours we work a week.
But will this ever make us happy? We’ll always be looking to lose one more pound or score one point higher. It’s better to break our scales and concentrate on really improving ourselves. In the end, the reward for this will be far greater than $100.