Burlington High School
Burlington, Kansas
Teacher: Devra Parker
Excellence at Heart
By Katie McMurray
12th grade
In today’s world, many people wonder how to define excellence: producing high quality work? Being the best in a sport? Winning an academic award? I, too, could only wonder what true excellence really is until I eventually came to understand it through several years of experience. One event in particular would help me see through the fog which surrounds the actual definition of excellence.
I was a high school junior, striving for high grades in my classes, which included some tough courses such as chemistry and trigonometry, and trying my hardest to hold onto the goals which I had set for myself when I first entered high school. When I received a letter in the mail telling me that I had been chosen as a Wichita State University Scholar, I was shocked. For me, this was a real achievement. A few weeks later, I received an award at the WSU Scholars’ Day, a large framed certificate saying that I was excellent. Only once before that had I been told that I was excellent; that was when I had received the Presidential Academic Award in eighth grade, and I hadn’t known then what I now knew about excellence. As I was looking at the award, I realized that I was receiving another gift that day, and that was the gift of knowledge on the genuine meaning of excellence. So, today, I look at the world around me, the world which I will soon enter when I graduate from high school, and I look for what experience and knowledge tell me is excellence. True excellence, my observations have told me, is all too rare. So, now I look for an answer to a new question: I have not let go of excellence, but has our nation?
I have a very clear definition of excellence that gives me motivation every day. In order to achieve excellence, we must strive to be the best that we possibly can be in our lives. We must work hard and learn everything that we can possibly learn. For excellence to be earned, the activities we love most must sometimes be put on hold or even cancelled. Reaching a state of true excellence is not easy, but it is possible by setting goals. I set goals for myself every day and, when I reach or pass them, I know that I am excellent by my own standards. Once I reach excellence, though, I know that I can keep going. Excellence does not have a limit for any person on this planet, and it really never does unless an individual makes it have limits by simply coming to a stop in his or her strive for excellence once they surpass their first goals. Excellence comes not only by personal values; it is also achieved by principles in society- in other words, national standards and even international standards. In a country, the leader, often by suggestion of some sort and with the agreement of the majority of the people, sets values for the citizens of the realm.
Here in the United States, there are standards for excellence. America has not abandoned excellence, and it cannot be wholly right to say so in any way. There are still many people, like me, who strive for excellence. However, the principles for excellence here have all but slipped to where they no longer really represent true excellence but rather mediocrity. Other problems accompany this: some people do not care about excellence anymore and others just don’t notice the drastic changes, in terms of excellence, in our nation. Another such problem is that there seems to be no real majority that agrees that we need to raise excellence standards or that we are all right as we are. It is really easy to see how much our principles for excellence have gone down in recent decades and even years. Take a look at the average person’s vocabulary in the 1960’s and compare it to what it is now. In the 1960’s the average person knew over twenty thousand words; now the same person would know only around ten thousand words.
The lack of excellence in America shows in the workplace and schools, too. Observe the workforce: some companies will now bend so low as to hire people who hardly have an eighth grade education and some of these companies are government funded. Pick any common object, a car for example, and observe and compare newer variations with older ones. The change in quality is horrible and getting worse. Today, a car that would have lasted 20 or 30 years in the 1970’s lasts only about a decade. Countless products are made cheaper and never last as long than they used to. Look at our schools: children are not learning at near the rate that they should be, grading standards are shrinking, and many kids just get shuffled right through the system. Every day it becomes more apparent that something needs to be done here.
America has not abandoned excellence; to say that we have would be a lie. Excellence is at heart and truth, not at opinions and lies. The problem is that too many people have become accepting of mediocrity, not realizing what it is or confusing it with real excellence. America is a leader in the world, a superpower, so we should be notable for our standards of excellence. The United States has what it takes to be truly great in excellence; we just need to try harder to reach it. To regain excellence in the United States, we must raise the standards of excellence: use more requirements in the workplace and schools, raise the principles in curriculum for education, and entail more of ourselves as individuals and as a country. Excellence is essential in life because, though we do not have to be truly excellent to survive, we must strive for genuine excellence or else we have no real purpose in our days of living. Excellence comes from within our heart and soul, and we must respect it.
No Answers To Questions Re: Required Reading
Disqualified For Prizes