S5E44: A message to pick you up after a ‘bad’ grade

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Thursday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And today, and all the rest of this week, I wanted to send you all a message to say that if you’re getting feedback that’s getting you down, it’s okay. You’re not the only one, your language learning isn’t broken, and it’s all still going to be okay.  

And today’s message is a super quick reminder that you are not your grades.

Sometimes, exam results can really take us by surprise.

Sometimes, we know that the revision period went really badly. Or that the exam day itself went really badly. But sometimes, it comes out of the blue, and even if it doesn’t, it can be really easy to take it incredibly personally. It’s amazing the kinds of stories we can spin ourselves about what it means about us as a person. To reduce all of who we are to just this letter or this number, and in our heads we go over it again and again until we literally become that number til another exam rolls around as a kind of redemption. Or we project it into a grim future of endless low grades. 

And if this is you, I just want you to know, you’re not alone.

It happens.

Just because you got a low grade in your most recent exam, does not mean you are a low grade language learner or a low grade person. It just means that, in this most recent snapshot of the narrow scope of this particular exam, you scored a lower mark than you wanted.

Your exams are not an assessment of the whole of you, even if you feel; like you poured your whole self into preparing for it.

And this data isn’t there to insult you or to humble you or to shock and scare you into a downward spiral. I know it feels like an attack sometimes. But it might be able to help you out.

That grade means something. It’s sending you a message, it’s showing you something.

It might be telling you all kinds of stories:

-       About whether you understood what the question was looking for

-       About how you applied the knowledge that you know you have

-       How well you understand the marking criteria for that specific exam and that specific examining board

-       How many risks you took or ambitious things you tried

But not what you’re worth as a person, not what potential you have in your language, and not what potential you have in life.

This will pass, language learners, and with a bit of investigating, and a bit of getting curious about this result, you can get this back on track. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t let yourself spiral into blaming yourself or hating the class or hating the language. It’s a setback, but you can do this. You will make this work, and you have so much to give to your language. 

Have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.