Newsletter Edition 3 – Friday 4 July 2025

Rostrum Competition

A group of students were selected to participate in the 2025 Rostrum Voice of Youth Public Speaking Competition, here is a piece from Year 10 student Hadiya:

Behind The Smokescreen

“It’s just a grade,” my friends tried, as hot tears streamed down my face.

I still remember the exact state of the classroom that day. Two boys were throwing a crumpled piece of paper to one another, laughing amongst the quiet chatter of students around me. Golden sunlight was streaming through the windows, a plastic chair digging into my back, and the beauty of the spring day seemed to be mocking my hiccuping state.

Macbeth.

An essay for English, my favourite subject, my best subject, the one thing everyone told me I was good at.

What did it amount to?

A B plus, staring back at me in angry red letters. 

Academic Validation is a term I’m sure you as the audience have some familiarity with. Whether it be through a video you saw on social media, your favourite TV show, or even your own life, you do not have to venture far to come across the two words.

But what do they mean?
A quick internet search will describe Academic Validation as , ‘students relating their worth to their grades or results in a school setting’.

Now that we’ve established what it is to the internet-and arguably, most adults- how about we discuss what that definition doesn’t even begin to capture.

Academic Validation is not some fancy term to describe disappointment because of a ‘bad’ grade. No, it is getting back the test paper on an afternoon you have dreaded for the past two weeks only to feel as if the ground beneath you is cracking open, dirt swallowing you whole before pressing stiflingly against your skin. It’s as if you have climbed a mountain through a hurricane, rock by slippery rock to painstakingly reach the top, before feeling your foot slip, toppling you down its side. It’s sitting next to someone you are friends with and being forced to smile when they do better than you, even though it feels as if your lips were being held stationary by sewing needles.

Yet all of this is never visible to those around you. What friends, peers and sometimes even teachers will say doesn’t even slightly calm the storm of anxiety wreaking havoc in your mind.

“It’s just a grade.”

“You didn’t even do that bad.”

“I wouldn’t be disappointed if I were you.”

To other people, your pursed lips and downturned eyes convey determination. They convey a drive to do better next time, a persistence that you often get admiration for.

But what do they convey behind the smokescreen, you may ask?
Those downturned eyes are a barrier covering the self-degradation you’ll put yourself through when you get a moment alone. The pursed lips are a barricade to all the raging thoughts grilling your ego, slashing ruthlessly at your confidence.

When you think you have nothing else, watching yourself fail at the one thing you think you’re good at destroys any happiness you may feel at your other achievements, demeaning them with one fell swoop. After all, if you aren’t athletic, quick-witted, or the best-looking person in your school, If your grades, the one thing you work day in and day out on, aren’t worth recognition, what is left behind?

 A husk of every insecurity and inhibition that has ever plagued you, that is what.

See, quite simply, we all live in a society where women are put into narrow boxes, oftentimes only getting recognition for one of two things; their intelligence, or their beauty. If a girl is not praised for her looks, it leaves behind her intellect as a point of compliment. If she cannot be praised for her mind, it is very possible she does not get praised at all.

The issue doesn’t stop at women, however.

Hailing from an immigrant background, in my experience, amplifies the need to get validation from somewhere or the other, tenfold, and because the expectation seems ever-present, immigrant children often tend to pour all of their effort into getting desirable grades. While many rush to blame the parents of these children, I would argue that oftentimes it isn’t even about appeasing them; it is more about proving their efforts to bring you into a country where your opportunities would be more amicable in comparison to your motherland, yield fruitful results.

It can also be about proving the playground bullies wrong. The desire to prove that, even though your parents dress differently to theirs, even though you have different values, and different skin, you are still worth something.

But that need to appease yourself and the world around you? For better or for worse, it never seems apparent to others.

They see an image you have built of yourself, a palace of your achievements, the bricks hardened by your blood, sweat and tears.

Yet, if the sky above that palace was to crack open and begin leaking rain, it is very easy for those bricks to  under the monumental expectations that friends, me or even you in the audience, might strain yourself under.

They claim comparison as the thief of joy.

Well I don’t think it is a thief at all, rather a ruthless murderer, taking joy, self-worth and happiness by the throat and throttling them until there’s nothing that remains other than withered confidence, decayed smiles, and an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

The most common emotion those struggling with academic validation face after getting their grades back is not joy. It is easy to think that’s the case, when their faces light up aglow after getting their test paper back.

No, getting a grade that hits your expectations leads to this euphoric sense of relief, a quiet exhale that dissipates the flood of anxiety previously curdling your stomach.

Why, exactly, should it be like that?
Why should we as students feel as if our worth, our very existence, is demeaned by our grades?
Because that is what we have been taught to believe.

We have witnessed those with high grades get more respect from teachers, adults and people we grow to trust and seek approval from. We have been taught the only way to get that admiration and approval, is to spend countless hours studying, trying to acquire the compliments we crave. We crash and if our grades are good, we’re quoted as ‘hard working’. But if our report card does not reflect our efforts, then our burnouts are quoted as laziness.

Burnouts should not be glorified. Crashing should not be admired and worth should not be tied to a mark on a test paper.

It should not be equivalent to how others, whether that be teachers or your peers, perceive your presented intellect.

If only the youth of today was able to accept that. If only I, my best friends, and peers were able to accept that.

Academic validation is never a guise for determination. No, it is the one thing robbing the students of today from feeling proud of their existence.

We stop it by reminding people that they are, in all essence of the idea, worth more than their report cards.

They are worth their kindness. They are worth their humility. They are worth their interests, their passions.

We stop it by ceasing to perpetuate the pressure that thousands of people are facing in this country alone, let alone the whole world.

We stop it by not discounting their feelings.

Because, it never was-and, if not countered, it never will be, just a grade.