How do we define success? Is it something tangible? Is it a personal reward that comes from hard work and commitment to our principles?

The transition from summer to school year is demanding. After summer break, chances are you lost a few IQ points, statistically speaking. Gone are days of blue skies, sunshine daydreams, endless nights, and freedom. It’s back to the grind. It’s back to a nine-to-five worker-bee repetition to prepare you for what may become you’re mundane reality.

School is in session, so the state law-mandated classes are ready to inject you with all the facts and know-how to hold you up to the competition of the rest of the world‘s children. This is what you’re parents might tell you is the way to happiness. It’s enough facts and taught-to-the-test regurgitated information to leave you comatose. It’s how students’ futures and fortunes have been dangled in front of them for years.

In all truthfulness, the grading system is not as crucial to define success in school. It’s just an ideal that maybe it will provide us with financial security in the future. It is a sacrifice of personal experience, childhood and adolescent spontaneity, concerning us about our ability to perform, assessing knowledge by bubbling in forms and codes.

Failure threatens us with a fear of an unstable future, success strengthens us to continue cranking the gears of society. If you want success in school, you may or may not find it directly from the education system itself.

Find you’re passion. Find opportunity to empower yourself. Success will come from immersing yourself in sports, clubs, people, art. It’s a choice of living, rather than existing.

Success in school is finding the romance in life to push forward it’s boundaries. It is to accept the challenge of freedom in the face of the unknown. It may be found on the sweat of the field, the rapture of the stage, the life of the party, the community service, the laboratory.

It’s a matter of personal choice. This is no call to push aside education; it’s a choice to accept personal responsibility for the future. Grades are part of the equation to a college acceptance letter, but experience and the ability to try new things is part of the equation for overall success. As a student you must ask yourself if you are willing to confront what may be rigorous, elusive, captivating. Will you conquer the beast that is high school? Or middle school? The road less taken is harsh, bumpy, occasionally just a gravel path with no direction, but is an endeavor satisfying and rewarding to the human spirit.