It’s report card time for most Chilliwack students, as the end of the second terms roll around in the younger grades and the first full semester has passed for high schoolers.
It’s always a time of stress and heavy discussion around our house. In 13-plus years of their schooling, my children have never brought home a “straight-A” report card. There have been a few “straight-B” achievements, plenty of service awards, one highly-strived-for-‘best athlete’ award, and countless well-earned high grades in various subjects.
But there have also been shocking interim reports, missed assignments, and right-out fails.
Yes, it’s been a mixed bag of successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, happiness and disappointment on their path to education. And as dramatic as those highs and lows can be, I’ve learned something myself.
It’s all okay.
It’s all going to be okay.
This is what I’ve been told, time and again by educators. It’s okay if they fail. It’s okay to have to retake a course, or go to summer school, or just aren’t that skilled at something.
“They’re good kids,” one administrator told me. “It won’t matter if they know the outcomes for Math 8 by the time they’re grown. They’ll be good people.”
And, even in the despair that parents experience when they ‘just know’ their kid isn’t trying as hard as they could, I have to agree.
So here is where I let you in on something my kids already know — I failed English 9.
I didn’t even ‘just miss’ the passing grade; I took a dramatic out-of-orbit path completely avoiding anything resembling success. The way I remember it, my English teacher that year made a comment I deemed hurtful to my inner artist, so I refused to produce any work for her for the remainder of the year. When forced to do so, I completed the work sardonically. (Psst, that means I was behaving like a 14 year old, in short.)
A change of schools — from the bustling Hugh McRoberts middle school in Richmond, to the rural, laid-back Boundary Central secondary in the desert of Midway — brought me a new cheerleading team of teachers who saw a potential in my writing, albeit sometimes laced with dark humour. They wrote encouraging notes that stay with me today, like “good writing is 10 per cent inspiration, 90 per cent perspiration.”
Sure, Facebook is full of this kind of self-empowering talk now. My own newsfeed is flowing with this baloney, as is yours. But back in the early ’90s, when you had to dig up famous quotes from things called “encyclopedias” in libraries, these little gems of wisdom were pure gold. I cherished them and they fed my writing soul.
Needless to say I aced English and English honours from then on, along with French. It was just so darn easy for me.
I read voraciously and I wrote even more. I studied writing and cried over writing and I dreamed of being a “real” writer one day, with a very vivid dream of owning a cabin just big enough for a desk with a typewriter (because I’m old) and a window. Some of my school work from those days, I learned after connecting with one of those teachers in recent years, is still used as examples of exemplary storytelling.
Neato.
But, the truth will always remain that I failed Grade 9 English. And in that moment that I failed, and the dreaded F burned a hole in my report card, I felt the hot pain of worthlessness. Branded with an F. My first and only fail. I felt defeated. I felt undeserving, even though I knew the why and how. I blamed the teacher for not liking me, right from the start. Then I blamed myself: What business did I ever have, thinking I could write?
But it was okay. Just like it’s okay today, for my own kids.
Later on I cleanly bested that F by dropping out of English Literature, immediately bored with Beowulf and The Iliad. I didn’t even warm the seat. I knew that was not my calling, and by that time (second semester of Grade 12) I wasn’t too keen on university anyway. I focused on journalism and spent hours in the counsellor’s office researching college diploma options. I just wanted to get to work.
And I did, eventually, despite failing one level of English. I’ve earned awards and written stories that people like to read. They call me and tell me. I love that.
All of this despite failing in grand style, in the subject I loved the most. The English language. The very thing I live for. The very thing that now pays my bills and fills my children’s bellies. That failure serves as a personal reminder that no matter how much you love something, if you don’t treasure it and work hard, it will slip away.
If your child brings home an F, or misses an assignment, or drops a class they abhor, take heart.
Grades are simply a reflection of what you did in the past. They don’t have to dictate your future.
