Why I value Progress

This summer is when I realized how unhealthily competitive kids in high school are.  Some days it seems that all my friends are in higher math and sciences classes than me.  Some days, it feels as if everyone has already taken AP math exams.  Some days, it feels like no matter how much I try to study over the summer, I can’t catch up to them.  However, it dawned on me today as I was taking a walk: why am I trying so hard to learn a years worth of math in three months that my friends know just because they started learning math earlier?  This is certainly not meant as consolidation, or meant to signify giving up.  In fact it’s much the opposite.

A few years ago, my dad told me something thoughtful that I’ve somehow managed to exhume from the bottom of my memory and apply to my life almost everyday recently.  He told me, “It doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you make progress everyday.”  Something that kept nagging me last year was the fact that I was not in as high a math level as many of my friends.  It nagged me and chewed at the edges of my stomach every time a group of my friends were all doing precalc and trigonometry together in a circle as I was sitting on the side crunching at some geometry homework.  It bothered me a bit that I couldn’t participate.  

But there’s a reason behind this.  At my old school, math was taught in a different order than it’s taught at my high school.  Thus, the math I had learned in middle school was preparing me to delve right into precalc rather than geometry.  Turns out my friends’ middle schools learned math in the reverse order, with geometry during middle school, preparing for precalc in high school.  I was put in geometry simply because I didn’t know it.  

That bothered me, that I would never be able to “catch up” to them in the path of the course.  In the beginning of this summer, I was doing hours long of math almost daily.  I desperately wanted to learn three terms worth of math in the span of two months so I pushed and pushed.  I wanted to catch up with my friends, some of whom were a year ahead of me.  It was tiring and I don’t believe I actually retained information as well as I could have. 

It recently dawned on me that I don't have to do that.  This summer I realized that making progress is the most important part of learning and of development as my dad said.  I’ve found that maybe I don't need to do two and a half hours of math everyday as long as I’m making progress with the time that I am spending.  And for me, that’s enough.  

While high school students are competitive in almost every sense, from athletics, to arts, to academics, to even college applications, something I’m striving to live by is not to make noticeable progress in understanding, in application, or in habit everyday.  It’s a lifestyle of learning and improvement and while I may not start in the highest level in everything I do, I believe it’s important to fill in the gaps where they exist.  After all, there’s a famous adage, It is not where you start that matters but it is where you end does.  What I like about this particular quote is that it says where we start doesn’t matter since we all come from different backgrounds.  While I don’t believe there is ever an “end” to learning, progress, progress, progress is something I will try to live by.