Achievement and reward is something I've never really had to think about before. Calling it simple would be an understatement, put in effort to complete a task, and rewards are bestowed. Life had worked this way for me for as long as I could remember, and while my view on this hasn’t changed to this day, something would happen in the 4th grade that would strengthen my belief in this even further, and make me realize why I believed what I did.

It was May of 2018, or so I remember when it all started, and it was Field Day. Every year at the beginning of summer at my old elementary school, we would have a Field Day. It was a school holiday of sorts where the entire day was spent outside doing races and other outdoor activities. There were multiple rounds of activities, and at the end, kids could get a medal for how good they did. So when we were out in the middle of our potato sack races, because I guess that's what schools do. I went to the bathroom for a while. When I came back a teacher gave me a second place medal for the race. Confused, I immediately realized the absurdity of it, but I brushed it off as just some weird teacher who had mistaken me for someone else. Little did I know that next year I would start encountering more and more phenomena identical to this one.

“Participation” is a word that has been used countless times over again as an excuse to make personal achievements irrelevant, from participation grades, participation trophies, participation points, and of course, participation medals. I first started to really pick up on this in seventh grade when it seemed like every assignment was graded on the basis of participation. I especially remember this with my seventh grade English class, and currently most of ninth grade Phy Ed is graded off of participation points. I hate this concept with a burning passion. And not just because my environment has told me too, but because I have experienced it first hand.

At my old school, participation based grading was called “equity”, and I think it still is hiding under that veil to this day. Equity says that if people are unable to reach the goals and status of other people, then they will be forcibly brought up with them. It sounds all fun and games when those people aren’t achievers, and I admit, communications is a class I don’t put all my effort into, but I do for many of my other classes. And when what I worked so hard to achieve on a sometimes personal level is made worthless when others get the same rewards for half the effort that I put into the same project. It's disheartening. It disincentivizes effort and achievement.

So yeah, a medal is defined as a metal disc given to someone to commemorate them and to acknowledge their achievements. I didn’t earn a medal that day, I earned a “medal.” The whole notion or concept that people should be brought up in life sheerly because they are low to begin with is not only bad for a society, but will create a society of entitled people who expect everything to be carried out for them. And that is what I call completely and utterly ridiculous.