What Is More Important the Grade or the Lesson Learned?

Motusaga Vaeoso
Journal Assessment # 10
Feb 06, 2008
English 130
What is more important, the grade or the lesson learned? Most students go to class to make a good grade, so that when it comes on their report card it looks great. Others want the good grade because it is what their parents want. However all of these reasons that I have and not listed are all wrong. Reason enough for this is that your are not getting anything from it, nothing, nada, zilch. The main reason why we go to school is not to get a good grade for the report card or make our parents proud but it is to learn something. We go to school five days a week to retain something that will not only help you now but also for the future. I love getting good grades but only because I earned them, that I learned and retained something from that class. I took chemistry last year during my junior year and the grade that got from Mr.Malele’s class was an A. I was happy with the grade but there seemed to be something missing that I could not put my finger on. I then realized that I felt no satisfaction with the grade I had. Some of my friends said that I should be happy because they had worse grades but I felt that it was not enough, that there was something missing. I finally realized that I never learned anything in chemistry at all. All I did was go to class, do the assignment so I could get the grade and get it over with. I blamed it on Mr.Malele for being so lacking but it was as much my fault as my teacher’s. It was then that I decided to retake chemistry this year and this time I wanted to do it the right. Right now I am the only senior in my chemistry class but you know what, I do not care because I know I made the right choice and I am proud of it. One of my teachers asked me why I would want to retake a class that will never affect my GPA even if I fail. I told her that even if I have a good grade it will not help me in college, what is the use of a good grade when you do not even know how to read the period table, solve chemical equations and understand why certain things react the way they do. Exactly, learning is more important than the good grade because learning something useful will yield more rewards than that good grade. A lot of students, including me, who take SAT score really low and I believe that one of the main reason for this is because most of the students never really learned anything from the lower levels. They may have done really good and got a good grade to prove it but when these basic things are tested in the SAT’s, well their scores speak for everything. The most important thing that you are there to do in class is to learn and that should be everyone’s goal. Do not do it for your parents, or anyone else do it for yourself, do it to make you proud. I believe that it is better to receive a bad grade but you learned something then just getting a good grade without learning anything at all. It is just a waste of your time, your teacher’s time and your parent’s money.