Report Cards, Braces, and Medical Jargon.............

(Editor's Note: I meant to post this last week, but never got around to it. My parents came in town, then had sick kids, then Halloween, then had more sick kids. I'll post some Halloween pics later this week.)



I am officially the John Kerry of progress reports. Yes, I did vote against the progress reports after I voted against them. You see, the entire time I was in school, I HATED interim grades, or progress reports, or whatever you want to call them. I absolutely hated them. They were pointless. Because I was notorious for slacking off for the first half of the nine weeks, then barely squeaking out A's on my report cards. So every nine weeks when it came time for interim reports, I'd come home with nothing but bad grades and yabuts. Don't know what yabuts are? Then you must not have school age children. The yabut is how every kid starts off any response. And not just about school, kids use the yabut for questions pertaining to just about anything:

"You have a D in Spanish?"
"Yabut the teacher said that if I do my extra credit, I can pull it up to an A."

"Didn't I ask you to clean your room?"
"Yabut I didn't know you meant right now."

"Did you just stab your sister with an ice pick?"
"Yabut she was making faces at me."

So anyway, I'd come home with my progress report, my parents would yell at me, threaten me, take things away, things like that. Then a month later I'd come home with my report card full of A's, and my dad would look at it, obviously expecting something bad, stare at it silently for about 5 minutes too long, take his deep slow angry breath and say, "What's with the 93 in Social Studies? You gonna pull that up?"

"But dad, a 93 is an A!"

"Yeah, but a low A. Don't be a slacker, son. You're better than that."

And then I'd think, 'Wow. He's crazy.' For the record, I still think he's crazy, but now he's just kind of 'quirky' crazy. I used to think he was like, 'Gary Busey' crazy. Like 'I'm gonna cut your tattoos off in the middle of the night with a fillet knife' crazy.

But now, however many years later, I've completely flip-flopped on my progress reports stance. I think they're great. I think they should send them home every week. (Which is actually already happening in middle school because their grades are being posted online. That's reason number 7 of why I would hate to be in school right now, right behind having to re-learn the Dewey Decimal System. Wait, what? They don't have to know the freakin Dewey Decimal System?! Well then how do they check books out of the library? What a crock!) When the kids came home with their crappy progress reports (You can read about it here), we were able punish them and get them to clean their rooms, and do all of their homework, and eat all of their dinner, and etc, etc, etc. It was kind of nice. And I didn't have too much reason to believe that their report cards would be much different.

Tuesday morning, the day they were getting their report cards, Tori tried to convince me that it was okay for her to get C's. She said that all of her friends can get C's, and because C stands for average, and she's just an average student. And that Drew Brees is an average quarterback. (Alright, she didn't say that about Drew Brees, but what she said was still just as ridiculous.) So I explained to her that if she is, in fact, average; then when she gets to high school she would have to get an average job to pay for her average car to go along with all of the other average student friends. She quickly realized my point and conceded to being well above average. Does anyone want a 12 year old?

Well I was pleasantly surprised when I picked her up that afternoon, and she showed me a report card with mostly A's and a few high B's splattered around. She said that she knew the whole time what her grades were going to be, but she just wanted to see what I'd say if she came home with C's. Seriously, do you want a 12 year old? (Just kidding, she just got braces this week, so I'm going to start getting her back by eating lots of candy around her. And maybe sunflower seeds. That'll show her.)

That's a report card smile

Alright, so we got one kid's grades in the books, but Racheal was at home with the other kids when they got off the bus that day. And when I got home, I was half expecting to walk into a Gitmo type atmosphere. But it was quite the pleasant surprise to see their happy little faces when I walked in. Scarlett got mostly 3's with a couple of 2's (3's mean she's beyond a 2nd grade level, 2's mean she's at a 2nd grade level), Cole brought up his grades to all A's and B's, and Gavin was a couple of points away from straight A's. The only 2 B's that he got were a 91 and a 92. I mean, this could quite possibly be the biggest one year turn around ever. Bigger than last year's Miami Dolphins. Last year, Gavin didn't feel comfortable reading ANYTHING. He hated it. It was like pulling teeth. (Which he coincidentally had to have done the other day, but I digress). But this is how far he's come: The other night, I was sitting on the couch studying my MCAT flashcards (Oh, by the way, I'm studying to become a doctor), and Gavin comes over and sits down next to me to see what I was doing. So I explained to him how I was studying, and he asked if he could help. So he started reading the flashcards to me, and pronouncing words like 'mitochondrial membrane' and 'homologous chromosomes' and stuff like that. It was really cool. If this were baseball, people would start making HGH and PED innuendos.

So there you go. The kids get to go trick or treating. And I get to keep using phrases like, "A 91? C'mon, you can do better than that!" and "Well your room isn't going to clean itself, now is it?" and "Next time you leave the light on, I'm going to make you pay the light bill" (FYI, Before having kids, I had never referred to our electric bill as a 'light bill', but this is one of those little things that you do that you said you would never do). It's all part of my slow painful metamorphosis into my parents.