Report Card Day-ish?

If you're of a certain age, you can remember that fateful day every 6 - 12 weeks when the teacher would hand you that yellow envelope, sealed, with your name on it. You'd either rip it open, or solemnly stick it into your backpack, and the march home was either one of glory and triumph, or trying to figure out how you'd change a grade without mom noticing.* It was Report Card Day.

In k - 2 we never got grades, just I for improving or S for Satisfactory or the glorious O, for Outstanding. We were graded for things like "Math" and "Handwriting" and "Spelling." It was something even my 2nd grade brain could wrap itself around. By upper elementary we were getting grades. 93% and up was an A, 85% eked out a B. We had "Social Studies" and "Science" and every quarter there would be a handwritten note from the teacher in loopy hieroglyphs that were indecipherable till after grade 3. We would take our report cards around to Pizza Hut and Friendly's to get our free Personal Pan Pizza or Sundae with hot fudge and it was officially a BIG DEAL.

Nowadays, it isn't. Progress Reports are digital, and filled with statements like "Accurately quotes from fiction/nonfiction text when explaining what the text says explicitly, and when drawing inferences from the text." And there is a number, but no number is really bad, they all just indicate "levels of readiness for independent work" or something like that and frankly as a parent I can't quite suss it out, even though I'm a teacher. My kids only know that Progress Reports have come out because I tell them they have, there's no going out for pizza or ice cream and it's just not much of....anything. 

We are told to "let our children fail" so that they will learn grit and to get back up again, and to not nag and helicopter parent or push our kids to "just turn your homework in, dammit!" so they may learn it on their own, but....that means there has to be a consequence for failing, doesn't it? No pizza or ice cream, or something other than a "2" on the grade card under "shows personal responsibility." This long, cumbersome report with no fewer than 25 separate little numbers just isn't meaningful to my kid, or to me, really. So we wind up not letting them fail by default till high school, when we're back to a grade for Math and a grade for Science and there are As and Bs and Ds and Fs and they have lasting consequences. I have tremendous fear of watching my child fail then, and not really knowing how to help any more than I do now.** 

Despite all our connectivity, there is a deep disconnect between what is happening at school and what is happening at home, and I feel it on both sides. We developed this system to be a more nuanced and detailed way for families to hold teachers accountable for all aspects of learning, but it didn't quite work the way it was intended. There's an overload of information, so much that it is all just becoming noise. 

Digital learning is saving us right now, and it's clearly leading the way into the future, but there is still something to be said for getting that little yellow envelope with the signature lines that is so heavy with promise of either joy or dread. There is something weighty and meaningful about the henscratch or loopy handwriting that says "I know your child" in a way that "Comments 6 and 14" do not. There is a solemnity to the ritual of handing over the report card at dinnertime, and seeing your mother's face as she reads it. 

There is something to it, and I wish we had it back.



*note to Mom: I never did this. 
**how to instill motivation into an unmotivated person was not in the Parenting Manual. Or the Teaching Manual. If anyone ever finds a foolproof method, they could make a fortune.