I am coming around to the feeling that one of the worst things we do to ourselves is quantifying everything, and training ourselves to judge everything by whether we did it on hard mode or not. Some of this is probably the weird way in which our school lives are structured—you must check a certain number of boxes in a certain correct pattern, and you get rewarded more for doing it in a more difficult fashion, as if it’s ever going to matter in your post-age-18 life if you got an A in Honors French or just a B in regular French, when what you’re going to be using it for is puzzling out a menu in Paris in fifteen years when you’ve forgotten most of it.
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