By Faith Gonia
Loved ones of mine—bless their patient hearts—know that I care a lot about school. I cancel plans to finish assignments, check the Canvas app more than Instagram, and dread each class period’s dismissal bell. Thus, most people around me are relatively shocked when they find out that I have an F on my transcript.
Entering my sophomore year, I could not wait for the long-anticipated return to in-person school. In my optimistic expectations, I envisioned the transition from March 2020 to August 2021 to be seamless; we would all pick up right where we left off. However, upon stepping onto Westmont’s campus, I quickly found myself overwhelmed. Seventeen months of isolation takes a toll on anybody, let alone a fourteen-year-old. As I juggled new classes and new faces (the top halves of them, at least), I had a lot of trouble adjusting. Consequently, my time-honored love for learning dwindled. I dreaded coming to school.
As time passed throughout that first semester, my grades began to reflect how I was feeling. To me, it was no shock when I took my math final, and the exam score dropped my 58% in the class to a glaring 52%. With a brand new, very permanent F on my transcript, accompanied by Bs and Cs, the seeming reality of my actions set in: I would not be attending college, and I would be lucky to even graduate high school. The academia-filled life that my parents and I had imagined was now nonviable.
Come January, I told people I was struggling, and as people do, they helped me put everything back together. I started going to a weekly tutor (shoutout to you, Oscar!), studied for hours on end, and earned a C on my first test of the second semester. I had never been so happy about being average. Then, I earned a B on a test in February. And in March, I earned an A. Sitting in my Photo app’s “Favorites” folder is a Canvas screenshot from March 2022: 100/100 on “Solving Equations & Linear Programming.” That test remains one of the proudest moments of my high school career. Eventually, after working hard all semester and receiving support from those around me, I finished the year with a B in math.
While proud of my new grade, I still constantly wished to erase that F. It stood as an incessant reminder that I failed. Wanting to run as far away from that memory as possible, I remember making a promise to myself at the end of tenth grade: from then on, I would put maximum effort into school at all times, thus detaching myself from my prior mark of failure.
Two years later, I can confidently say that I have kept my promise. Through countless late nights and early mornings, anxiety-filled exams, and never missing a day if I could help it, I never earned an F again.
But here’s the thing: I no longer wish to erase the F. It no longer makes my heart beat fast; nor does it make my stomach turn at the thought of it on my college applications. In fact, I have grown rather fond of the little letter.
If I had let one minuscule grade define my entire future, then I would have never continued trying in school. I would have never applied to college, and I would have never gotten into UC Davis. One F does not mean that you are an F-student—it means that you are human. Life does not end after earning an F in a class. Take it from me: my life began.