Report cards for dummies

I just met a reader at an event that I was doing and she gave the most concise, generous description of why she decided to upgrade to a paid subscription: “I read the newsletter consistently. It adds to my life. Why shouldn’t I support it?”

Maybe it’s as simple as that. If this little corner of the internet that I have created is doing something for you, consider supporting it financially. And thanks for telling people you think would love about it. That’s a huge boost, too.

---

We have some confusion about report cards at our house.

Both my husband and I have consistently told our daughters—10 and 7—that we don’t care about them. I think we have very different reasons. My husband wasn’t a great student, and generally didn’t realize that he was smart at all until he discovered architecture in college (he got into University of Minnesota on some sort of probational basis). He has visual and spatial intelligence that isn’t the kind of thing that usually shows up on a traditional report card, but has led him to design houses made out of trash, fight against sexist and racist licensure standards in his profession, and co-found an organization focused on curiosity. In other words, his shitty report cards have not held him back from a fulfilling professional life in the least. I think recognizing that, and also just never wanting our kids to feel “less than” in any way, shape, or form, he consistently tells them that he doesn’t care what grades they get as long as they are learning and feel safe and loved at school.

I was an excellent student. I didn’t fully realize it back then, because my older brother was one of those people who gets a perfect score on the SATs while hungover. In his shadow, I considered myself good, but not great. Now I realize how disciplined I was, how genuinely eager to learn, how relational with teachers and other students. I almost always loved school. But I tell my kids that report cards don’t matter because I realize how arbitrary it is that one is endowed with the kind of skills and temperament to excel on a report card, how un-invested most teachers seem in report cards (at least at our kids’ school, it seems like an administrative necessity, but not like something they actually value), and I also suspect that caring about report cards is a slippery slope into agro elite college application culture which I am hoping to take zero part in. (This is where I’m sure all the parents of teenagers are rolling their eyes at my naivete. So be it.) I went to Barnard College, the all-women’s school within the Columbia University umbrella, and it was a hard and thrilling experience for all kinds of reasons, but I also think my kids can have an amazing life going to a community college, or no college at all.

Anyway, here we are—two parents not exactly on the same page but definitely singing the same report-cards-are-BS song (I think it was originally written by the Indigo Girls). So you can imagine my surprise when my 10-year-old and I recently had this exchange:

Me: Great job on your report card.

Her: You said you don’t care about grades.

Me: I don’t. But you seem to and I want you to excel at things you care about. Do you care about grades?

Her: Yes. How else am I going to get into a good college and get a good job if I don’t get good grades?

Record scratch. Wait what? What happened to “I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind/Got my paper and I was free”? I’m played that song a million times while cooking mediocre vegetarian dishes and she never once understood that I was trying to dissuade her from taking metrics from “the man” seriously instead of her own palpable longings? How had this gone so wrong—and at just age 10?

As I thought about it later, I realized that Maya is kind of a rule follower. She is always yelling at her little sister for turning every board game into some sort of dada performance art. She likes baking because the measurements are precise and the product expected. She’s also competitive as hell. Give her a math test and she’s calculating with a perfect score in mind, but more importantly, to beat Noah. It kind of makes sense that, despite John and my best attempts to turn her into an anarchist, or at the very least, a rebel, she’s a little curious about doing something “stable and impressive.” (I was the same way. My mom, at the very least, tried very hard to make me weirder and cooler than I was as a kid.)

At least we have Stella, who seems to have zero interest in completing her homework according to the instructions and instead prizes imagination and relationships. Case in point: she wears a matching Care Bear t-shirt with her very veteran teacher every single Thursday (Mrs. Turner literally texts me before school to remind me). Also case in point: she came home with the name of her best friend’s “feelings doctor” on a little piece of paper last week (accurate—I checked with the mom) and said she was really interested in “talking to a stranger about her feelings.” That made me feel like she was definitely going to be okay in the world, no matter how bad her grades.

Then, the other croc dropped. This morning Stella was reading Diary of Wimpy Kid (the worst, I know) to me out loud and I said, “Dude, your reading hasn’t gotten so good. I’m so proud of you.” And would you believe what this kid said to me?

I have to learn to read so I can get into college. That’s why I’ve been practicing a lot. You have to go to college to get a good job.

Are you kidding me? Where are these kids getting this linear, elite hogwash? Are they injecting it into the Annie’s Mac & Cheese these days? Is this the secret theme of those YouTube channel they watch with Harry Potter trivia and slime tutorials? (Yes, I let my kids watch YouTube. Another thing to hold against me when they don’t get into Harvard. Except isn’t Harvard cancelled anyway?)

Listen, it’s not that I’m against college. Like I said—I went. I really liked it. And I know that not being invested in my kids getting good grades and getting into an elite college is the hallmark of privilege in many ways; only those of us with racial and economic advantage can question the system that already gives us a major head start. But it doesn’t change my bafflement that my own messaging about what makes me proud and fulfilled, what I consider a true marker of meaning and accomplishment, have somehow not been stronger than the culture’s messaging about the “right” path to follow—1) good grades, 2) good college, 3) job that pays well. I wrote a frickin’ book called The New Better Off, decrying American Dream ideology for goodness sakes.

I am comforted by remembering my big brother’s Alex P. Keaton phase. You remember, the trickle down devotee who breaks from his hippie parents and drives towards getting into Princeton at all costs from the 80s sitcom, Family Ties? My brother’s phase was alarming, but brief, and then he quickly became an experimental poet obsessed with fluid identity of all kinds, the “more than human world,” and celtic mysticism.

Maybe my high achieving older daughter will become a Wall Street tycoon (or a blockchain tycoon? what is the future of money anyway?). More likely, based on the feel of things around the house, she will be a film director. Maybe my not-so-high-achieving younger kid will become the president of the United States, as she announced was her aspiration on Saturday, while we were walking to the Spring Fling at school. (That would be wonderful, though I would be stressed out for her, and will America still be a thing to be president of?!) Or maybe she’ll be a therapist or a midwife, as are my two hunches.

I don’t care what they are, as long as they know that life is non-linear and often surprising, that it will bring you to your knees no matter what, but especially if you think you can do something (good grades, perfect choices, whatever) to earn an easy, individual path. My husband’s bad grades don’t mean shit now. My good grades don’t mean shit now. What matters to us both on a daily basis is work we love and feel called to do, collaborators who value and push us, friends who mirror back the best of us and help us through when we’re at our worst (or the world is), and them—our kids—these delightfully different, brave, obsessive, conflictual, imaginative, infuriating, ever-evolving creatures that we never rank or grade because their beauty transcends all of that.