8th-Grade Lessons Overall Message

I chose the song Whatever it Takes by Imagine Dragons to describe my 8th-grade career because it describes my experiences in both the specific lyrics and the overall message of the song. The overall message of the song is that hard work is required to do well in life. This certainly describes my 8th-grade career, as it has taken a large amount of effort in order to do well in all my classes, while still balancing a social life.

The overall message of this song relates to my 8th-grade career because maintaining satisfactory grades and doing well in my classes has taken a large amount of hard work and effort, and it has also required my unflagging attention. I have always needed to stay focused. This also relates to some of the lyrics, such as “tripping in the world could be dangerous,” and “everybody circling its vulturous.” What these lines mean to me is that if you mess up in school on just one assignment (especially at the beginning of the year), your grades and learning will suffer
greatly, and the “people” circling like vultures are a metaphor for the impending failure that could befall you if you mess up. Because this, I have always been driven to always remain focused and never stop working hard. Not only has it taken a great amount of attention and effort to do well in 8th grade, but it has also taken a strong will to succeed, such as when I once spent 3 hours reviewing for a test, just because I wanted to be absolutely sure I would get an A. The lyric, “I do whatever it takes,” expresses my desire to do well in school, as well as my willingness to work for it.

Another reason this song describes my 8th-grade career is that it talks about the feeling of being exceedingly overworked and tired out. The song says, “I’m just a product of the system, a catastrophe and yet a masterpiece, and yet I’m half-diseased,” in my case the system represents the school that has taught me so much (to make me a “masterpiece”) but has also taken away very large amounts of my free time (making me a “catastrophe”). Sometimes the workload can cause me to feel “half deceased” such as when we were in the Short story unit, and we were writing our rough drafts. For this project, I had missed class on Wednesday for HP, so I had only Thursday to write my rough draft. It ended up taking me until 11:00 to finish it, and I felt so done with homework that I never wanted to do any more again, but I was willing to do “Whatever it Takes” in order to keep doing well in all my classes, so I didn’t slack off at all and I continued to put in a great amount of time and effort on all of my assignments.

Although I have worked very hard, sometimes it feels like it still isn’t enough, and that no matter how hard I try, I still can’t completely succeed at something.
An example of when this happened is in the Outsiders essay at the beginning of the year. I spent vast quantities of time on this essay and I felt I had put in my best effort, but I ended up getting a C as my grade. When I go back and look at this essay now, I completely agree with the grade, as it was clearly not the best I could’ve done, but the feeling I had then, that sometimes it felt it was never enough, inspired me to work harder to prove to myself that I could do better. This feeling is described in the song as “Never be enough, I’m the prodigal son I was born to run, I was born for this.” Never be enough, expressing my feeling that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t succeed, and “I was born to run, I was born for this,” refers to the feeling that I must work harder and do better because I know I can do
it.

The song Whatever it Takes describes my 8th-grade career by speaking about challenges that apply to my 8th-grade career and by expressing the notion that hard work and a will to succeed are required in order to accomplish things. The challenges mentioned in this song were able to be overcome with hard work and a will succeed, which is also what has allowed me to do well in 8th grade.