She is a very engaged child, and she seems to be making friends.” The first-grade teacher smiled implacably at me across her desk. It was a parent-teacher conference session more than a dozen years ago, when I was new to the parenting gig and had not yet learned that there are some questions a teacher simply will not answer. “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But, again, can you tell me: How does she compare with other children in the quality of her work?”
“All children are different. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think it’s helpful to compare.”
“Well, sure, but some children excel, some are average, and some of them struggle. Can you tell me where my daughter fits in, vis-a-vis the other children in her class?”
“She seems very happy, and she’s doing well.”
“Yes, but I’m trying to get an idea of where she fits on the academic spectrum. She seems bright to us. Does she seem bright to you, in the context of not just this particular class, but of all the other children you’ve ever taught? I mean, there’s a range –”
“Oh, she’s a very bright little girl.”
“OK. So let’s say you were evaluating the class and thinking in percentiles. In which percentile would you say. …?” My voice faded under the force of the teacher’s relentless smile. That smile said: Lady, you can rephrase the question as often as you want but you are not going to pry one iota of comparative data from me.
You would think I’d have learned from that experience, but you would be mistaken. For years I persisted mulishly in my quest. Semester after semester, whatever the child, the instructor, or the teacher, I tried to persuade or chivvy or charm my interlocutor into revealing to me the one piece of data that they alone possess. How the heck are my children doing in relation to their peers?
And in the nicest possible way, teachers refused to answer. They obfuscated, redirected, and deflected me. “It’s not helpful to compare,” they’d say. This seems to be a line that’s issued with one’s teaching certification.
All this is on my mind because it is, once again, parent-teacher conference time – and it has finally dawned on me that maybe there’s a good reason teachers dodge the class ranking query. Maybe it genuinely is unhelpful (though, mulishly, I doubt it) because what it shows is irrelevant.
A boy can be brilliant, but lazy and unsuccessful. Another boy can have an IQ of 100 but work with such diligence and energy that he surpasses the slacker-genius sitting next to him. As a friend of mine tells her children: “Whether you have brains or not is up to God, but what you do with them is up to you.”
It strikes me that, all these years, I may have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps what matters most is whether the children are doing their best.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
