Worth Ten Thousand Words

About this work

This is the write-up I did regarding this piece for the course for which I made it.

In my household, academic achievement is taken very seriously. Though my parents emphasized that all they wanted was for me to do my best, they also made it clear that they were only interested in and impressed by grades above a certain point. Back home [i.e., Cayman], under the Caribbean examination system, [that point was] a grade 2, which was the second highest pass (the raw score required to attain this fluctuated, and it doesn’t really translate perfectly to North American grading systems, but I digress).

Many other students I’ve met over the years have expressed similar sentiments to varying degrees, saying that their parents were the type to berate them for not getting 100% without congratulating them for the 99% that they did get. This, many have said, leads to students placing their self-worth in their grades, and basically striving so hard that they burn out.

Because my parents were more lenient than other, similar parents, I never felt that way until first year. I had written a five-page essay as part of a course I took in the fall which I received extensive feedback on and took this feedback into consideration when writing a ten-page revision in the winter. I worked on this essay tirelessly. I read almost twenty research papers, took fourteen pages worth of notes, and then, as the deadline approached, wrote and revised for hours at a time after my obligations were done for the day, sometimes getting kicked out of Maanjiwe nendamowinan [an academic building] by cleaning staff. My grade was 64%, and it was accompanied by extensive commentary that, though constructive, crushed me.

For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to touch on it with a self-portrait that reflects my feelings at the time, using the very essay that brought those feelings about.

Process

I took a picture of myself in my dorm room, removed the background, and put a threshold effect on it in Photoshop. I put the essay on the project as one big paragraph, rasterized it, and, using a mask, put the text over the white part of my face. Then, in Illustrator for iPad, I did extensive markup on the essay.