When I was growing up in rural Maine, it was the custom for the eighth-graders — all of 10 or 12 of them — to play hooky on the day before graduation. The teachers hated this, and when my cohort’s turn came, one of them warned us that if we cut class he’d give us D’s or F’s, even if we were A students. By blessed coincidence my report card arrived before my father got home. Jerking open the envelope, I regarded for one awful moment the terrible carbon-copied D and then ran upstairs, folded the report into a tiny square, and wedged it into a gap in the floorboards at the back of my closet. My father forgot to ask about my final grades, but my guilt burned for years. (Dad? Sorry.) Pity today’s eighth-graders, who haven’t a prayer of pulling off such a stunt. Because of the miracle — or curse, depending — of online grading, their parents see every fluctuation in their work, with e-mails shooting homeward often after every quiz.
This ought to be a good thing, right? Improving parent-school communication, keeping students on their toes, busting kids who play hooky, giving everyone another excuse to spend life online – the list goes on.
So why is it so demoralizing and unpleasant to get a child’s grades online? That list goes on, too:
“Just seeing the grades brings out the nag in me,” confides a friend. “I’m all, ‘How could you get a B on that English test?'”
Another confesses: “I have literally just finished writing “please see me” on a printout of [my son’s online] math report and put it on his desk – is he my son or my cubicle-dwelling midlevel employee?”
“In loco parentis doesn’t mean driving parents loco, which this absurd level of involvement does,” complains a third.
Tiger mothering aside, not only does online grading eliminate any breathing room between school and home, but it can also show a deceptive moment in time, not the full picture.
Consider this scenario, taken, alas, from more than one life: The e-mail alert comes at 9 p.m., and despite knowing she oughtn’t, the child’s mother marches upstairs to confront the malingerer — a child bent over his books, doing schoolwork.
Why does his report show asterisks in several places, indicating that he’s missing homework? Why didn’t he turn it in? What possible explanation can there be? Does he realize that failing to hand in his work drags down his grade, which is not good enough in the first place?
The child’s face reddens unhappily. He doesn’t know why the report says he’s missing homework; he thought he’d turned everything in; he has no explanation; he can’t understand why the grade is so low.
Too late his mother remembers that he’d been sick. Too late she realizes that the days he missed would account for the asterisks that seem to suggest indolence, fecklessness and indifference. Too late she considers that asterisks can also indicate where stomach flu has been. But it’s too late.
Perhaps the cubicle-dweller’s mother sums up online grading best: “I feel like a horrible mother however I respond.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
