Honor Student Bumper Stickers Were Just Participation Trophies

Millennials are oft told that they’re just overgrown children who can’t cut in the real world and expect our participation trophies just for showing up.

This is a bigger load of bullshit than claiming trickle-down economics actually works.

Oh, where to begin with the participation trophies. Don’t recall getting one myself. Closest recollection I have was when I entered an art contest and anyone who didn’t receive one of the real ribbons or keys simply got an “honorable mention”. I would later get a few other honorable mentions in other art and writing contests at various phases of my life without having the other contestants also get one just for entering, but felt the same degree of not being noteworthy enough. Those flimsy stock certificates with a visible OfficeMax logo and the plastic trophies that almost painfully proclaimed “At least you tried”? They felt as cheap as the materials as they were made with. Our parents didn’t need to give us trophies to hammer home this point that winning is the most important thing in life. None of us expected trophies for showing up, but hey, it wasn’t our decision to give them out?

Moreover though, those participation trophies weren’t for us. That shitty little honorable mention certificate for my graphite drawing was for my parents who couldn’t take that I wouldn’t become the next Mary Cassatt fresh out of high school and those plastic baseball trophies were for the crestfallen parents consumed with anguish that their progeny wouldn’t be the next Derek Jeter. (I’m sorry, I don’t know who the most-discussed baseball star is today.) Poof and begone, dream of being whisked off to Paris on a full-ride scholarship to La Sorbonne to study under the French masters, wait, hold the phone that wasn’t my fucking dream. I just wanted to go to the mystical land of California so I could write dialog and push pixels when that wasn’t exactly presented as something you could do for a living.

That thin certificate with stock fraktur lettering wasn’t for me to feel like I achieved victory with my talents and that the world recognized it. It was for my father who couldn’t be happy that I got an A on a test and would give it exactly fifteen seconds after I delivered the news to inquire, “So did you get the highest score in the class/were you the only one to get an A?” and would continue to do this until I was in grad school, pushing 30, and about to lose my goddamn mind because it was three years into the Great Recession and I feared those accounting degrees were all for naught. That honorable mention that still practically had a fresh OfficeMax emboss effect wasn’t meant to make me feel like my contribution mattered, it was for my mother who harassed me nonstop that summer between fifth grade graduation and starting middle school about how I better make honor roll solely so she could get a bumper sticker for the car.

I mean, I wrote my first book and had it professionally edited in less time compared to how long she spent going on about that goddamn bumper sticker.

This seems to be a uniquely American thing, like many other forms of torture that should be outlawed under the Geneva Convention.

Now, back up, angry parents about to unload on me in the comments or on Twitter just dying to tell me to shut up because I don’t have or want children and have subsequently been far removed from the school system for almost two decades. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your child’s academic prowess, and/or your child is just as stoked about getting that bumper sticker as you are. But just like how those participation trophies were a social failure designed for parents, not kids?

Those bumper stickers were another form of participation trophy for parents that put an inordinate amount of pressure on their kids solely for the sake of getting into dick-waving contests with other parents. There, someone had to say it.

Before I continue, I need to state that I am a child abuse survivor who has openly discussed my experiences. The antagonistic environment I lived in — and the separate one I attended school in — wasn’t exactly conducive to getting good grades and the constant arguments about my poor academic performance definitely compounded the physical and emotional abuse I had to deal with so it was just this Ouroubouros of shame and stress I didn’t have the space to really sort out.

So with that out of the way, I get that some of my peers might not have such visceral reactions to memories of those stickers, trophies, and whatnot and the arguments that may have spun from them. Undeniably though, the most irksome aspect of it all is that these rinky-dink little tchotchkes were really meant to coddle our parents’ fragility, not ours, yet we’ve been told the opposite 25 years later even though we grudgingly accepted those paltry trinkets with the same enthusiasm as getting socks for our birthdays instead of a Nintendo game.

Those bumper stickers served as enforcement of American cultural norms that your child is your possession who has no agency, a showdog to get you comments and nowadays, clicks and likes. And showing off your child’s academic prowess is simply a more socially acceptable way to do this that predates Web 1.0.

But let’s talk about the actual grades behind the bumper sticker now.

In recalling the bumper stickers, I find myself asking “What for? WHO for?” just like I did when I was 13 and had to gird myself for the shouting and hitting that would come after I picked up the phone and it was one of my teachers wanting to speak to my mother. This happened so frequently, I can’t even remember what most of those talks were about but a common theme according to my father was that I didn’t pay attention, didn’t apply myself, and so on. The thing I heard so much was “You have so much potential!” Yeah, but for what?

Keep in mind, it’s the late 90s, I’m on the East Coast, so the economy’s still doing pretty awesome but being a digital entrepreneur is still a pipe dream to a teenager who’s told A JOB is a be-all end-all. I knew I wanted to have a band and tour, create and build worlds with games hopefully, but this was still pretty far from my 13-year-old mind that was just focused on survival and dreaming of my 18th birthday just five years away when I could hopefully leave my abusive household and never come back. So…did they mean potential to be a writer, a game developer since it was already treated as given that musicians don’t make money? Potential to work some corporate job that’s just a paycheck and nothing more? I mean, I had no idea just yet that due to structural inequities post-2008 and the ridiculous expectations placed on women that I wasn’t going to get the easy ride from college to an amazing public servant job that lasts over 30 years like my father got. And my mother hadn’t held a job outside the home since Welcome Back, Kotter was still on the air even though her children were now 13 and 20.

Anyone who’s gotten through high school and/or college alive knows how arbitrary grading can be. (This doesn’t even get into how attendance will impact grades, which disproportionately discriminates against disabled and/or impoverished students.) There are the truly meritorious grades, the easy A’s just for showing up, then, some teachers or professors simply grade very unfairly. I never got straight A’s my entire life, I came close in fifth grade but my teacher really just didn’t fucking like me and constantly said I was a strange toad girl who should get a more suitable hobby so despite doing very well on her quizzes and tests, always having the homework done? Always got one or two B’s just for spite. Came close in college a few times after doing terribly in high school but since I already scored my first financial industry job prior to graduation and they really didn’t give a shit about GPAs, I felt like Guybrush digging up the Stupid T-Shirt in the first Monkey Island game.

Then when the plateau was picked clean once that job was done for and I finished that accounting degree I was told I needed more than anything for the first 25 years of my life, GPAs really didn’t matter when employers could suddenly offer less than half the pay to accounting majors because of all these people who lost their shirts in the financial collapse, had 35 years experience, and would work for peanuts. It was 2013, and I’d only been “out” as a child abuse survivor for a couple years, but I remember just having a complete meltdown one day after having another job interview that was a totally demeaning experience: “THIS is what I was told I had to sacrifice and bust my ass for my entire life? THIS is why grades would be oh-so-important, more important than ANYTHING else?! So I could be pushing 30 with two accounting degrees to my name trying to convince this i-banker with a dead thing on his head that I deserve more than $18 an hour in NYC dollars to enter data on Excel sheets? Hey Mom, hope that goddamn bumper sticker was worth it.”

I’m pretty far removed from that life now, and it has its ups and downs. The world completely changed from what it was in 2013, let alone when I was first looking at colleges and then a few years prior to that when the furor over the bumper sticker was a regular microaggression in my daily intake of antagonistic bullshit. No less, I just remember being pushed to “succeed” without really being told what success was. Grades were important, but what for?

Undoing so much of what we’ve been indoctrinated with on a societal level takes time. One of those things is the fact that paying for college is a gnarly, knotted stitch in the scratchy fabric that is American society. When I was growing up, I remember always seeing TV commercials about financial products that were meant to eventually help kids like pay me for college, a nebulous concept at best when I just wanted Garfield and Friends to come back on after all the Barbie commercials. My sister had phonebook-sized tomes of scholarship information and there was the FAFSA form every school had that my father told me to leave to him so I could focus on writing my application essays and getting my portfolio together. I was always hearing something about doing various things to pay for college.

Getting good grades meant taking on less debt and/or being less of a financial burden to your parents because you were more likely to get financial aid and/or scholarships. That’s not a stressful prospect for a teenager AT ALL! But hold the phone. Why did my whole generation have to grow up with the spectres of the financial industry and bursars’ departments looming over our families, when people like my parents got FREE college degrees without joining the military or giving their employers first dibs on their kidneys? Who attended literally the same exact school I got a degree from, except I had to pay when I went?

That bumper sticker my parents, and millions of other parents, harangued me over was more than a symbol of trotting out children like showdogs. It was a way of telling other adults, “Haha fuck you, maybe I can use my kid’s 529 plan to buy a boat if they get a scholarship. Let’s continue this dick-waving contest at the marina.”

Free public college and student debt forgiveness are policies America badly needs. But while we need means to evaluate how children are doing in school, grades and tests often being those tools, we also need to stop putting so much pressure on them this young because grades do not set your life in stone. It can exacerbate mental health issues and/or abusive situations at home. But in the many-headed hydra that is the sickness of American culture, seriously, giving out those bumper stickers was one of the worst ideas ever from education policymakers. They don’t encourage parents to tell their kids to push themselves, they just create more pointless dick-waving because a parent can’t take that they can’t one-up another parent they dislike.

That bumper sticker will get all grungy and faded with time, covered with other stickers, or since cars aren’t built to last anyway you’re probably not going to have it long after your child grows up. That oblong artifact will be out of your life and no one will care when that car’s at the junkyard, but the child who remembers the pointless obsession with that stupid paper participation trophy will really wish you’d fixated on encouraging their passions and interests instead.