What is "Five-Hundred Percent," Actually?

Today in class, we were asked to read our assigned lines from King Lear at “five-hundred percent.” Let us all take a moment to consider what these exaggerations of numerical values really mean.

So, there are twenty-five or thirty seventeen and eighteen-year-old standing in a circle in the middle of a classroom at ten-thirty in the morning. They’re told to read a bunch of words in Old English at “five-hundred percent.” The circle is soon thereafter filled with raised eyebrows, side-eyes, and nervous giggles.

To this group of exhausted, socially conscious teenagers, this so-called “five-hundred percent” just sounds ridiculous. They’re all probably thinking: what are we supposed to do, roll on the ground and do jumping jacks while screaming our lines at the top of our lungs? Most of the baggy-eyed students subsequently read their lines just as they would read the directions from their Calculus textbooks. Being told to perform the lines at “one-hundred percent” or to their “greatest acting potentials,” I believe, would be much more effective.

“But saying ‘five-hundred percent’ is just emphasizing ‘one-hundred percent’ more by attaching a larger number!” Okay, sure. But no one will take the phrase seriously because they know that it is not possibly achievable, as it is such an absurd number. This “five-hundred percent” does not exist and thus cannot be taken as a motivational tool. The activity, then, becomes more of a joke than a time for the students to work on their delivery in preparation for the upcoming scenes they must act out in front of the class.

Now, I’m not criticizing Mr. Heidkamp’s methods of motivating students to be successful performers (nor his teaching methods whatsoever); I am simply proposing an alternative way to tell a person (a student, a family member, a friend, a coworker, anyone) to give it his or her all. In school, we often hear teachers asking for our *insert number above one hundred here* -percent effort on studying for a test or doing a project. Okay, so they want us to try really hard. But if we can just throw around non-existent percent values over one hundred, then what does one-hundred percent mean anymore? It means nothing. Herein lies the problem with our methods of motivation.