If the new grading system were a song it would be…

Pink Floyd’s, ‘Comfortably Numb.’

While this song speaks of drugs and isolation from society, and the grading policy really has nothing to do with that, the two both have the same dismal tone and crucial core theme: giving up.

Just like a student under the new grading policy, Pink has realized that he is burned out and can’t take it any longer. He has created this world, adding bricks to a wall, breaking his mind off from society. He can’t tell the real world from this fantasy he has constructed anymore, and so he lies there. Comfortably numb.

I’ve tried. We’ve all tried. To get through this terribly asinine system that rewards the strong test takers and not the gifted thinkers. We entered this school year in hopes that the school system may perhaps be moving in the right direction and provide salvation to the disastrous system that has plagued the minds of students for too long. But that’s not the case at all. It’s merely moving backwards.

But sometimes I find comfort in giving up. Now bear with me, when giving up, your worries are stripped away. With this policy, homework is not focused on as much as it was in the past, allowing us to spend time enjoying our lives outside school. The homework side of the policy goes class to class with its grading, but either way, it is the homework that prepares us for the tests. Without doing homework, test day becomes much more stressful.

Now I reminisce of the times when I was graded on more than just my tests, more than just my scores. But that “fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye” has now left me. “The child is grown, the dream is gone and I have become comfortably numb.”

I tried to fight it. But it led me nowhere—backwards if any direction. The schools stress competition rather than cooperation and prepare students for conformity rather than creativity. All for a meager letter. So now I sit here, letting this calamity engulf me. I sit here, doing what I’m told and letting society constrict me in its grasp. I sit here, comfortably numb.