A- Is Not Good Enough

A younger Nick

A few years ago Nick received his report card.  Straight As.  Most kids would be ecstatic.  Not Nick.  There was a problem with one of his As.  It had a minus sign after it.  Well, another A had a plus after it.

Yes, Nick had 5 As, 1 A-, and 1 A+.  He was not happy with that report card.  Sad.  The obsessive/compulsive aspect of autism shows itself!  Nick simply stated, "I want straight As. No pluses nor minuses.  Just As."

He could not get over that A-.  It just wasn't good enough.  He didn't try hard enough.  That lead to him thinking that he's not smart enough.  And the thought process did a downward spiral.  He started doubting everything he did.  "Is this good enough?"

At moments he was ballistic.  He brought it up constantly.  I had to reassure him that he had done well!

I spent days trying to get Nick to see that his grades were great.  More importantly, Nick said that he loved school, and he was learning a lot of new things.  That is what Mike and I strive to encourage.  We really don't care about the grades on the report card.  We want our boys to love learning and seek knowledge.

With today's emphasis on SAT scores and standardized tests, let alone report cards, we continue to stress to Nick that these items may be important to the world, but HE is what matters to us.  What is he doing?  Is he putting his best effort forward?  Does he like what he's doing?  All these will carry over to his adult life.

This year Nick received a C in Algebra II in the first semester.  He is proud that he brought it to a B.  Again, I told him that I glad he's happy, but what matters most is that he is learning the math. He reflected that he loves math better than any grade, and he wants to be a math teacher.

I Hate Report Cards

Looking at my youngest son's grades, I am amazed at how my attitude toward grades has changed.

I relied on those trusty A's and B's with my oldest son.  Throughout elementary and junior high, Michael brought home As sprinkled with Bs.  Then came high school.  My son went from Valedictorian to schlep, a GPA from 4.3 to 1.78 roughly.  He got lazy, but I still demanded A's and B's from him, which he slowly produced.  I thought that as long as As and Bs came home, my son was learning and progressing as he should.

Not true, but I would not learn that until he was out of school.  I'd learn with my special needs kids years later.

"Do you want competitive grades or not?" asked the school psychologist. I didn't understand the difference.  The explanation equated to competitive grades are comparable to classmates on the same grading scale.  Otherwise, the teachers would give a grade based on the skill of my child.  Still not sure I understood the difference because there was no definition of what would that grading scale be?

Then there was the idea that report cards could hurt the self esteem of kids, so the school changed the grading scale from letter grades to number.  A "1" was low, and a "4" was high.  So kids just made a chart that 1 = F up to 4 = A.  Yeah, that solved the self esteem issue.  NOT.  My kids knew they didn't want 1s.

I learned to ignore the grades eventually as I was more interested in what my kids could tell me.  I wanted my kids to learn. We soon found that my sons could remember facts and stories from years prior as they told us these.  I realized that my sons could not relay information in the format that teachers wanted, expected, or accepted.  Hence, report cards and grades did not indicate their true mastery of skills and knowledge.

I take report cards now as one simple indicator of how my sons are doing.  Standardized tests take even a lower priority.

I value the results when my sons can tell me about history when a subject comes up.  I love when they laugh and tell me I am doing the math wrong.  I get pleasantly annoyed when they say, "Don't you remember when we read that?"

They demonstrate solid knowledge of many subjects through daily tasks and conversations.  That is better than any report card.