I was not a good student in high school. I was a C+ average student at best. It didn’t help that in eighth grade I attended a hippie Christian school in California where we taught and graded ourselves. Yep, you read that exactly right. Obviously I was a straight A student at that school because I was teacher’s pet and had the best teacher EVER!
After eighth grade we moved away from CA and my opportunity to potentially be the valedictorian of my graduating class (and coincidentally the only senior but that’s here nor there) (my hippie school had a mere 80 students from kindergarten to 12th grade (no we were not in a cult)). Instead I was thrown to the academic wolves and attended what was at the time one of the top 25 high schools in the country.
It did not go well.
My A in pre-algebra in CA (naturally) became an immediate D in Algebra (no surprise there), and an F for the 4th quarter of 9th grade. I BARELY passed that class.
In 10th grade I was a solid C-D student in Geometry, and succeeded in passing despite an F on the final exam.
Also in 10th grade I took Chemistry, which I eventually dropped because I could never get anything above an F. I took it again in 11th grade with the same abysmal results.
However, don’t feel bad because I killed it in Chorus for three years straight, in the roles of piano player and alto voice. I also did quite well in my Speech class despite making 1960s pop band “The Monkees” the subject of 90% of my speeches (I was more than a little obsessed with them at the time thanks to their brief 1980s revival courtesy of MTV (I saw them in concert three times during their reunion tour in 1986)). So it wasn’t all bad. I graduated solidly in the lower-middle of my class so those electives REALLY helped me out.
Cut to present day, where my kids are now in the very grades during which I struggled the most. CootieBoy is a freshman, and CootieGirl is a sophomore. It was with great trepidation that we (I?) approached these seminal years of learning.
But my kids are doing an amazing job! I’m so proud of them. In particular, I want to sing praises about their Geometry grades. CB took the class last semester and ended the semester with a solid 91. He’d have gotten a higher grade, but he turned in four assignments late and those reduced scores brought his overall grade down. So I think his actual year-end grade would have been 93 or 94 had he turned in those things on time (turning in assignments late for no reason other than sheer laziness is one of my pet peeves).
As for CG, she’s taking Geometry this semester and so far these are the grades she’s received on classwork, quizzes and tests:
Uh, HELLO? What is THAT all about? Her current overall grade in Geometry is a freaking 98. A 98! How does that happen when half of her gene pool came from ME? Don’t get me wrong though – I’m a realist. I know the laziness factor will kick in, and she will do the same thing she does every semester – she’ll slack off and get a couple D’s which will cause her grade to drop to a high C. How do I know this will happen? Because it has happened EVERY SEMESTER OF HER ENTIRE SCHOOL LIFE. And if she were to read this right now I know she’d start laughing and say, “You’re not wrong.” So don’t accuse me of being a mom who doesn’t believe in her kids. Because I do believe in her. I believe in her innate ability to throw away a nearly perfect A in a hard class and wind up with a low B instead because she decides turning in homework isn’t important.
But for now I’ll bask in the notion that my kids might actually be smarter than me (or a bit less lazy because let’s face it, I never turned in my homework in high school either. In fact, I never actually DID my homework in high school. Maybe THAT’s why I was a solid C student. Hmmm… Anyway, at least my kids do their homework. But I didn’t create this GIF in 2015 in CG’s honor for nothing:
). <– that’s hanging out there because that’s where my parenthetical interjection ends. You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?
