Sometime before my most recent trip to my parents’ house, an engorged file folder full of old grade reports and school notes appeared in my bedroom desk.  (This, along with the hermetically sealed Tupperware boxes in the closet and cardboard boxes full of books in the garage attic, tends to be my mom’s preferred method of dealing with my residual childhood possessions.)  Pete and I spent some time flipping through the contents, many — if not most — of which I’d forgotten about.  One thing that hadn’t floated too deeply into the recesses of my consciousness, however, was my handwriting grades, here documented in my second-trimester first-grade report card:

Amidst the field of Satisfactories, a Needs Improvement!  My earliest penmanship efforts were resoundingly unimpressive, although, I remember thinking at the time, the problem maybe wasn’t so much that I was a bad writer as much as it was that I was a bad eraser.  In third grade we practiced our handwriting weekly on individual sheets of pastel, blue-lined paper, and one week in late fall — after turning in yet another smeary pencil essay where half-erased words were scrawled on top of each other and the paper was lightly crumpled and pockmarked from my most earnest erasing efforts — my teacher moved me back to remedial paper.  Every week, the classmate passing out sheets of mint green or dusty rose loose leaf would forget about my special paper needs, and I’d have to do a walk of shame to the cubbies in the back of the classroom to exchange my pastel paper for a landscape-oriented, pulpy sheet  printed in red and blue,whose extra-tall lines were subdivided with an extra dashed line through the middle.  I was moved back to the pastel paper sometime before the end of the school year, but retained my dislike for my teacher.

Looking back through my report cards, though, I was never a stellar student.*  Strong, yes, but not uniformly top-notch.** (“It’s amazing,” Pete remarked, after looking through yet another sheet of standardized test results showing 97th-percentile marks in the language arts and 50-80th-percentile marks in math, “that your parents thought you’d be a scientist for so long.”)  I got Cs in random classes throughout high school: 11th-grade Government, Applied Tech (!), some French and Biology exams.  I worked hard, and graduated 50th in my class of 330-odd students; college was easy in comparison, and I finally got my first 4.0 sometime junior year when I was slumming it with 12 credits a semester all up in the Liberal Arts quad, having decided that graduating early wasn’t something that particularly interested me.

After teaching in grad school, though, I think that getting a heavy dose of Bs and Cs throughout middle school and high school was one of the best things that could happen to me.  I saw a lot of kids enter their freshman year at our large state university from small towns and even smaller school systems, where they were used to earning top grades.  Placed into a huge pool of talent, however, they’d either have a minor crisis of self-doubt, or confidently inform me near the end of the semester that they were A students (who, I’d have to reply, were definitely demonstrating work at a high C level).  By the time I entered college, though, I was used to not earning a string of As and glowing praise for everything I produced, and it certainly made the transition a whole lot easier.

My handwriting eventually got better, too.

* If there’s any recurring theme in my teachers’ neatly-composed comments, it’s that “Katie is gaining a quiet confidence.”  I think that this is a rather elegant way of saying that I was a shy kid, but one not particularly bothered by my lack of social interactions.

** This makes me remember HHS’s inane 8-point grading scale, no doubt instituted to prevent grade inflation, wherein the A range was between 100-93%, Bs were 92-85%, and so on.  The transcripts sent with our college applications, the guidance counselors placidly informed us, would contain a note explaining this fact.  This note, however, did nothing to recalibrate my graduating GPA, which ended up knocking me down a bracket in the scholarship system then in place at Case.

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