Parentella

My daughters’ father has been absent from their lives for most of this past school year. I recently talked to him, and was trying to catch him up on all that’s happened and their futures. Naturally, he asked about their report cards. I had only received my 4^th grader’s at that time, and I honestly couldn’t tell him what it said.

Her report card has 10 headings, and she is graded on 43 different categories. I read the comments section, but whenever I try to focus on the rest of it, I think my head will explode.

The most I can get out of the report card is, did her grades progress or regress? At the elementary school level, there isn’t even a GPA to give an overall sense of how things are going. During the year, I can get more out of parent-teacher conferences, by learning where she’s struggling, where she’s thriving, and getting the teacher’s input on what I can do to help. At the end, though, all that matters is she’s moving on.

As a parent, all I really want to know is that she’s learning something, and that she’s trying. The only negative comment was that her reading fluency is still a little slow. Frankly, I care more about comprehension than how many words she can read per minute. So all in all, I guess I can call it a successful school year.

I used to be a lot more concerned with report cards, but after dealing with them for the last 8 years with both my girls, I see them simply as one aspect of their annual growth and development. I got over worrying about elementary report cards long ago when someone pointed out to me that they have no long-term consequences as long as they’re passing.

My older daughter’s middle school grades are more valuable. As we are looking into alternative high schools, her GPA will matter to a few so she is more focused on it, as she should be. Still, in the end, what I care about most is that she’s trying. She doesn’t have to be a straight A student for me to be proud of her. And again, I tend to get more out of the comments than I do the actual grade.

Grades are subjective. Some teachers use a curve, some don’t. Some praise regurgitation while others value thoughtful questions and valiant efforts. There’s a lot more to take into consideration than the end result. Particularly when the end result has 43 different answers.

What are your thoughts on the current grading systems?

By April McCaffery

Related posts:

1. Balancing Parent Teacher Communication
2. What Jaime Escalante (and those like him) Taught Us All
3. Parent Teacher Communication: A Teacher’s Perspective
4. Parent-Teacher Conferences
5. 5 Things I Learned When I Became a Parent

Tags: education, Elementary school, High school, middle school, Reading, teacher

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 11:13 am and is filed under April McCaffery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.