I saw the movie ‘Precious’ a few days ago. There was on incident I noticed that many might not have noticed. Don’t worry, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet this doesn’t spoil the plot.
Early in the movie Precious, a high school student, is called in the the Principals office. She doesn’t know why. Her first reaction is to defend herself, which she does, by saying that she has an A minus grade in English so she doesn’t know why she is there.
The problem is that it is obvious that Precious can neither read nor write. So how did she get an A minus in English?
Her’s my guess. The school looks like an inner city school, large numbers of students in each class, teachers with lots of problems to handle. At report time the teachers just want to make life easy for themselves so they give Precious an A. That way they will not have to work out how to help her learn to read or to handle the wrath of her mother.
Now I know that this was an extreme case, it would be very unusual for a teacher to actually give such a grade to a student who was obviously failing in class. But it does happen. And it is not always the teacher’s fault.
Some reports have to be filled in a certain way, a way that has been agreed by the education system. And some grades, or remarks on report cards are supposed to start a whole set of actions designed to help a child. For instance, if any child in m,y school had ‘does not meet expectations’ on their report card it meant that the teacher had to find a way of helping that child meet expectations, had a whole set of actions that he or she had to do on top of writing the report card.
So what do you think happened? Teachers did not like using that phrase because it meant a lot of extra work for them. As a result I am pretty sure that some students who should have received extra help did not get it. I do know that many parents thought that their child was doing well in school when this was not the case.
Just something that I noticed in the movie and that got me thinking. Perhaps you should be thinking about your child’s grades and whether or not they are justified.
