Little Rain Clouds of Negativity

I don't know why but I take it very personally when one of the girls comes home with a bad grade.  When I was in school my focus was always on getting the highest grade possible.  A 97 might just have well been an F if someone else scored higher than me on the same assignment.  It didn't matter that it was an A if there was a higher A out there.  I suppose you could say that I was driven to do the best that I could.  I saw/see academics as a competition.  Either you're beating the pants off the competition (your class mates) or you're not doing your job.

I've relaxed a bit over the years about the grades, but I still hate to see anything less than an A or an O or an E or whatever the top grade happens to be on the grading scale.  I can be content with B's coming home, but I literally feel sick and quite irritated when anything like a C or a D comes home.  I become downright livid when my child who is perfectly capable of A quality work happily tells me that she got a 40, 50 or 63.

The person responsible for the recent dismal grades has me in a total funk at the moment.  I had contacted the teacher to see if anything could be done to help said child improve her grade and I didn't like the response I got.  Even better, I was also informed that a major test in that subject was today.  OH  GOODY!  Can you guess who didn't study?  When I asked my child if she had a Math test coming up (I thought I had read there was a test this week on the online homework site) I was told there was nothing and the teacher didn't mention anything.  I suspect someone wasn't being completely honest.

So now I have sincere doubts that this child will have any hope of pulling her grade up to something respectable this marking period.  Nothing like torching your grades by not studying, rushing through your work and refusing to double check.  Maybe Bryan is right and I should just let her fail.  He thinks it's the only way she'll learn.

St. Joseph of Cupertino*, pray for the person I'm talking about.  You know who she is!

*St. Joseph of Cupertino instantly became a go to saint for us when it comes to test taking as soon as we were introduced to him by an Irish seminarian who took us on a tour of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.