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The Little Student Who Couldn’t
Despite good grades, I failed at school
Like many children of the 1980s, I had the “The Little Engine That Could” read to me many times. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s about a small train trying to get up a hill. The moral of the story is that if we try hard enough, we can achieve anything. That attitude certainly responsible for my and my fellow millennials’ workaholism. Ah, the American Dream and its bootstrap mentality. All we had to do was get straight As and work hard, right?
I was a Good Student, in more ways than one. I made good grades, raised my hand, and did my homework. Yet school, to me, was artificial and limiting. It seemed to be skewed toward having us please the system, rather than innovating the solutions that people expected of our generation from a young age.
I learned this through the pushback I experienced whenever I dared think outside the box. My eagerness to learn repulsed some of my teachers, who seemed threatened by students who actually had independent ideas. How many of us millennials were fed this idea that we needed to constantly push up that hill, yet were punished when we expressed our ideas?
When I was in third grade, I first discovered a teacher who hated me for no reason. I finished a math quiz before everyone else, then fished a book out of my…
