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“Failure,” and an A student is, of course, “Excellent.” During our schoolyears, we begin to develop a bottom-line belief that states, “Results are everything,” regardless of how we achieve them. Why else would people cheat?
    I am not here to promote a New Age scoring system that makes us all feel that we are head-of-the-class material. That would be beyond both the context of this book and my ability. What is within the context of this book is how the grading system affects our attitudes toward making the product the priority, rather than the process .
    All through my school years I found math to be a most difficult subject. Even at a very early age, certain aspects of math just didn’t make sense to me. The teacher would go over something new on the board, and I would listen intently and try to follow, but to no avail. I would start on the new assignment with a resolve to overcome my lack of understanding with hard work, but it never seemed to help. I was very much a creative-minded child, not an analytical one in the mathematical sense. My grades always reflected this, and my report cards consistently showed I was somewhat of a B student, with an A sprinkled in here and there, except in math. In subjects that were more right-brained, such as creative writing, I was usually the first one done with assignments. In math, I was working after the bell had rung and most of the other students had left. Some of my trouble was probably due to poor instruction. I say this because there were one or two math teachers who presented the material to me in a way that was very clear, and I could manage at least a Bor C grade in those classes, but they were the exception to the rule.
    What I learned about myself through the experience of school and grades illustrates how the product becomes the priority instead of the process. Most of us heard phrases during our school years that were actually rooted in the correct mindset of “process, not product.” I am speaking of encouraging words such as “just try your tandist; that’s what is important” and “do your best; that’s all anyone can ask.” These phrases were very good advice, but somehow most of us knew they were empty, bogus statements. In regard to math, I can honestly say I did try my hardest, but that never consoled me when I got my report card. I would immediately skip through the Cs, Bs, and As that were scattered through the columns and go right to “Math Comprehension,” where the D (most likely a gift for trying hard) sat as big as life. I was very fortunate to have parents who were unimpressed with academic achievements. They were always encouraging, despite the low grades I received. Still, in those elementary school days and all the way through college, I carried an inner perception that those grades were who I was and a measure of my self-worth, at least as far as math went. I learned to dread math of any kind, and I felt inadequate in my ability to overcome that feeling.
    I was not alone in this perspective, by any stretch of the imagination. Some people, perhaps those whose parents were very invested in academic achievement, had aneven stronger commitment to the power of the grade. An example of this was when I took a music theory course at a local college when I was twenty-five years old and living on my own. I owned a business that supported me, and the decision to take the course was strictly my own. Because I was self-employed, I had the luxury of not having to take a night class. I could get right into the day class with the fresh-out-of-high-school kids.
    One of the assignments in this class was to work on a computer whose program tested us on all the material that was covered in class. It graded us on each area of the work, and it did not allow us to advance to the next lesson until we had passed the one we were presently on. The Big Brother nature of the whole system made things worse. We worked in a lab full of computers, as you would