H is back at school today after the Thanksgiving break. Before he left, he got his first “report card.” I was handed an envelope with the words “To the parents of…” on the front and was definitely was not prepared for the rush of emotions upon opening it.
My first reaction was from my teacher brain, not my parent brain. When I saw the letters we needed to work on, and the numbers he didn’t recognize, I thought immediately of the assessment process. How many tries did he get? Was he distracted? What sort of instruction did he get during the test? All of the things I have to consider when assessing my own students started flying through my head.
Next popped in the parent brain. How could he not recognize 12 through 15? He just counted to 40 in the car! Maybe he was nervous. Does he have testing anxiety? Is he going to be behind? Well it’s no wonder he doesn’t know “P,” he’d only studied up to “J” in school! Why are they testing him on letters they haven’t covered yet?
And then, eventually, logic prevailed. He’s only three. He’s doing great. He has plenty of time. I started to look past the “needs more practice” and started to see that he can write his own name and age. He knows most of his letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. Literally, “great job” was written at the top with a smiley face and I didn’t see it until after my mental jumping jacks were done.
I have a very complicated relationship with report cards. As a kid, I measured my self-worth by them. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did, and it caused me a lot of unnecessary stress. As an adult, report cards are my job. I want to say that teaching and learning is my job, but report cards are a literal requirement of my profession, one of the few things I am bound to do by contract. I want them to care about their grades, because, well, they matter. But at the same time, I don’t want them to care too much, because one grade is not going to make or break their lives – like they often think they do. Much of the time I wish I could do away with grades all together. I wish I could grade students on effort, attitude, skill, and potential. I’ve tried to do that, but it always comes down to something that must be quantifiable, and human rarely are.
He’s going to have many more report cards, ones that matter a lot more than this one. As a teacher, perpetual over-achiever, and mom, I need to decide what my reaction is going to be, especially when he starts having reactions of his own. I hate when my students focus on their grades and scores, rather than their learning and progress. But like Alice, I often give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.
For now, I’m going to try to keep myself grounded in what matters: raising a kind, polite kid. (Who can also read and write, because let’s be serious, this matters too.) But it doesn’t matter if he’s at the top of his class. Especially when he’s three.
