[JonInMiddleGA]

And today the end of year report card arrives in the mail.

Let's just say that my son finishes about as well as the Nationals bullpen. Pretty much blew his grade for the year in every subject except math, the one thing that he struggled with most of the year. Turned a near straight-A report card into an almost straight-B year, his worst ever by a wide margin.

B- in Language Arts ain't acceptable when he just copped a 98% and 99% percentile nationally on some damned rigorous standardized tests in the same subject.

The aggravation, erm I mean "joy of parenting", is that he managed to accomplish this by being very selective about which graded papers we saw during the final quarter, keeping just enough of them away from us that we were pretty clueless about what was happening. I'm a bit miffed with some of the teachers for not making us more aware but the responsibility rests mainly with him & us.

Short-term, your final marks in fifth grade don't come up very often later in life. The ramifications have some pretty rough potential though, as he basically demoted himself from the top group of his grade to the bottom group and the difference in how teachers treat those seems to be pretty sharp. He already worked with one strike by not being "old Athens", he got another strike with them by not being there from at least first grade (sucks but that's the reality of it). I'm afraid they'll pretty much have written him off as a lifelong B student & won't bother to push at all after this.

I'm going take a short nap now, my stomach hurts.