Belated Clarification

1956 rolled in with my first grades ever. I was a disgrace. In one single grading I forever proved I would never be the student my Father had been. Did I tell you he got all As and never missed a day of school, with a plaque to prove it, in all 12 grades? With my first grade report the pressure was off to duplicate that accomplishment, and we were all about picking up the pieces and making the best of the shambles that were going to be my life.

The Federal school system, Fort Devens branch, graded on a numerical scale, 1-5, 1 being the best, 5 being the worst. So the goal would have been straight 1s. I got a 1 in only one subject, penmanship. We had two other academic subjects that were graded. In both "Reading and Literature" and Arithmetic, I got 2s, the equivalent of Bs. We were also graded in Effort, for which I got a 2, and Conduct, where I got a gentleman's 3. Probably, having belonged to a gang was not helpful in the Conduct area.

The Literature that the report card referred to, by the way, concentrated on the Dick and Jane classics. In retrospect what seems most odd was that although all the characters were white, the setting was urban. Our books were from before WWII and there were only urban settings and farm settings. There were no suburbs in our outdated reading materials. I remember one story was all about the kids sending messages back and forth over a clothesline hung between pulleys over the inner court of a tenement building. I had never seen a building like that, and had to have it described it detail.

[Below right: In spite of living in a city in the Great Depression, Dick and Jane and friends still always had plenty of greenery and the occasional white picket fence behind them.]

My Mother was very upset when she saw the report card. I should have got 1s in reading and arithmetic. She said, "Why aren't you learning anything?"

I said I'd been learning a lot.

"So why aren't didn't you get better grades?"

'You want me to get good grades?"

"At least in arithmetic! It's your best subject!"

"Why didn't you say so before?"

Nobody had ever told me before that the goal was to get good grades. All they'd said was that I was supposed to use school as an opportunity to learn.

Since there was so very little to learn anyway in the syllabus, the new instructions made more sense. I was just a little miffed that they took so long clarifying this point.