Getting By


Articles Dante Alighieri Arthur Dent Jesus Jones Thomas Paine Other Authors Contact Us! Letter to the Editor Dante Alighieri Arthur Dent Jesus Jones Thomas Paine	Getting By Arthur Dent Last year's graduation was beautiful. Great weather. Nice speeches. Lots of students being honored for CSF life membership, good grades, and scholarships. How wonderful! How exciting! How…unfair to every student out there who had dug him or herself into a massive hole and worked like a dog to get out of it, attending summer school, night school, zero period, and more, just to make it across that stage on graduation day. Honor students work hard to earn their grades, and no one should trivialize their efforts. Getting to the top of your class and staying there for four years certainly deserves recognition. However, how hard can it be to get to the top when you've had everything working in your favor? How hard is it to earn a 3.0 cumulative GPA when you've had the benefit of two parents living in the same home, both there to help you with projects and ferry you to this event or that? How hard is it to achieve scholastically when you are born into an environment that fosters cerebral growth, complete with medium to high socioeconomic status, no drug or alcohol problems, and a supportive family? So you work hard and excel in school. But you don't have to worry about protecting your younger siblings from your mother's insane rage. You don't have to take 5 night classes and attend summer school for 2 years just to make up for a disastrous adolescent phase. You don't have to commute four hours a day, or worry about your father in jail, or where you'll get your next meal. We need an award for "Most Inspirational Senior" or some sort of recognition for those students who overcome great obstacles to even graduate, regardless of GPA. Not everyone is born into optimal conditions, and sometimes even those who are so lucky have to overcome tremendous difficulties to make it to that stage in June. Sometimes GPA isn't a measure of how hard one has worked. It's easy to screw up, especially when your home is in turmoil. There are students on the TN campus who bounce from one house to another, sometimes between different relatives, sometimes between foster or group homes. How hard must it be to get your homework done when you're not sure where you're sleeping each night! How arduous it must be to concentrate when you're worried sick about the one parent you have left in the world! Algebra looks pretty insignificant when your mother is dying. Hard to get wrapped up in Tale of Two Cities when you're called upon to testify at your father's trial. It's easy to write off people who fail classes, labeling them as "losers" and laughing at them for only earning a 1.2 GPA. However, when you see kids struggling with weighty and difficult issues, it's easier to understand why they fail classes. And once they start failing classes, it's that much harder to get back on track. But many do get back on track. With the help of supportive friends, teachers, counselors - and sometimes all or none of the above - students not only overcome incredibly difficult circumstances socially, but academically as well. They make tremendous turnarounds, coming from intense credit deficits to achieve the seemingly impossible: graduation. So why do we ignore these students' accomplishments on graduation day, choosing instead to focus only on those who earn a 3.0 or better? It's time to look around the senior class and pay respect to those who are still working their asses off to get to that graduation ceremony. To that end, The Subterranean would like to do its part in honoring inspirational seniors. Send us your story. Send us your friends' stories. Tell us what sorts of obstacles you've either overcome or seen others conquer. It would be wonderful if the school would create an award for "Most Inspirational Senior" to recognize this sort of extraordinary achievement, but if they won't, we will. And if you send us nothing, perhaps the school is right in not* recognizing our diamonds in the rough. To those of you out there just barely getting by or working beyond your own abilities, we salute you. You inspire us. -*Send your nominations to TheSubterraneanTN@Yahoo.com	Archive Back Issues Why? Cartoons Poetry Random Rants Disclaimers Losers and Kudos of the Week Letters to the Editor Editor's Notes Picture of the Week
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Arthur Dent

Last year's graduation was beautiful. Great weather. Nice speeches. Lots of students being honored for CSF life membership, good grades, and scholarships. How wonderful! How exciting! How…unfair to every student out there who had dug him or herself into a massive hole and worked like a dog to get out of it, attending summer school, night school, zero period, and more, just to make it across that stage on graduation day.

Honor students work hard to earn their grades, and no one should trivialize their efforts. Getting to the top of your class and staying there for four years certainly deserves recognition. However, how hard can it be to get to the top when you've had everything working in your favor? How hard is it to earn a 3.0 cumulative GPA when you've had the benefit of two parents living in the same home, both there to help you with projects and ferry you to this event or that? How hard is it to achieve scholastically when you are born into an environment that fosters cerebral growth, complete with medium to high socioeconomic status, no drug or alcohol problems, and a supportive family?

So you work hard and excel in school. But you don't have to worry about protecting your younger siblings from your mother's insane rage. You don't have to take 5 night classes and attend summer school for 2 years just to make up for a disastrous adolescent phase. You don't have to commute four hours a day, or worry about your father in jail, or where you'll get your next meal.

We need an award for "Most Inspirational Senior" or some sort of recognition for those students who overcome great obstacles to even graduate, regardless of GPA. Not everyone is born into optimal conditions, and sometimes even those who are so lucky have to overcome tremendous difficulties to make it to that stage in June. Sometimes GPA isn't a measure of how hard one has worked.

It's easy to screw up, especially when your home is in turmoil. There are students on the TN campus who bounce from one house to another, sometimes between different relatives, sometimes between foster or group homes. How hard must it be to get your homework done when you're not sure where you're sleeping each night! How arduous it must be to concentrate when you're worried sick about the one parent you have left in the world! Algebra looks pretty insignificant when your mother is dying. Hard to get wrapped up in Tale of Two Cities when you're called upon to testify at your father's trial. It's easy to write off people who fail classes, labeling them as "losers" and laughing at them for only earning a 1.2 GPA. However, when you see kids struggling with weighty and difficult issues, it's easier to understand why they fail classes. And once they start failing classes, it's that much harder to get back on track.

But many do get back on track. With the help of supportive friends, teachers, counselors - and sometimes all or none of the above - students not only overcome incredibly difficult circumstances socially, but academically as well. They make tremendous turnarounds, coming from intense credit deficits to achieve the seemingly impossible: graduation. So why do we ignore these students' accomplishments on graduation day, choosing instead to focus only on those who earn a 3.0 or better? It's time to look around the senior class and pay respect to those who are still working their asses off to get to that graduation ceremony.

To that end, The Subterranean would like to do its part in honoring inspirational seniors. Send us your story. Send us your friends' stories. Tell us what sorts of obstacles you've either overcome or seen others conquer*. It would be wonderful if the school would create an award for "Most Inspirational Senior" to recognize this sort of extraordinary achievement, but if they won't, we will. And if you send us nothing, perhaps the school is right in not recognizing our diamonds in the rough.

To those of you out there just barely getting by or working beyond your own abilities, we salute you. You inspire us.

-*Send your nominations to TheSubterraneanTN@Yahoo.com