God’s Report Card

I had a dream the other night where I was standing in my classroom with the mother of one of my students, and she was looking around the room, picking everything apart. I had left a simple math statement written on the whiteboard and she pointed out how it was incorrect or misleading. She went through the stuff piled on the teachers’ table and pointed out stuff that should have been sent home with students. She looked where we keep the markers and pointed out how messy it was, and how many markers had dried out because the lids had been left off. She looked at the sink area and pointed out how dirty it was. She pulled out a clipboard and started scoring me on certain things. “You get a three for …. a three for ……. A three for…..” I remember, in my dream, thinking to myself, “Three out of four? That is 75% That’s not bad. Three out of five is 60% percent. That would make sense. I’m doing o.k. but I know I have room to improve.” I asked her, “Is it three out of 4, or three out of five?” She just looked at me and said, “Its out of ten.”

In real life, that mom likes me, I think. She has said that her daughter is already very sad that I will not be her teacher next year. I think that my dream was just a product of stress. I have been working on report cards and that is always a huge stressor. Twice a year my life gets consumed by report cards. My father can’t believe that we even do report cards for kindergarten. To be fair, they are called a “Communication of Learning”, and they are entirely anecdotal. There are no number or letter grades. There are four criteria, called frames, on which we report. For each of the 28 students, I have to write around 250 words about their learning in that frame over the course of the term. (two terms: September to End of January, then February to end of June) Luckily, there is a lot of overlap in the frames, and you can pretty much say that anything a kid did falls into at least one frame. So, I just take notes about what the kids do and then I compile those notes and organize them into the four frames. The stressful part is that, once I do that, I realize that I don’t have enough notes on some kids. So, there are always a few panicked weeks a year where I have to follow around certain kids and to find something that I can write in their report cards.

You can’t write anything bad in a kindergarten communication of learning. You have to write what they have learned, or how they demonstrated a process of learning. If you say anything bad about a kid, it has to be in the context of a lesson that they learned. For example, “Johnny got mad and hurt another student. But when the other student started crying, Johnny felt bad, said sorry and, from then on, Johnny made special efforts to include him in play. This demonstrates blah blah blah blah blah.”

In my first year in kindergarten, I had a student who looked, to me, like a future monster of a man. He was angry, self-centered, mean, impatient… basically if you make a list of all the unpleasant personality traits you can think of, he fit the bill. But he was also very smart, very strong-willed, and terrifyingly manipulative. So, to me, he looked like someone who was going to harm a lot of people in his life. When it was time for report cards, I started writing what that guy was doing: getting mad and flipping chairs, hitting other kids, teasing others, refusing to comply with simple requests, manipulating peers and educators, etc. I thought that it was my duty to record all that so that his parents and future educators would know what was actually happening. I did my first draft and submitted it to the principal and, a few days later, she called me into the office to explain that I had to completely start over. All the info about misbehaviour and violence was to be shared with the parents by phone or in person. The “communication of learning” was about what the kid learned. It had to be a success story. I had to look for improvement and talk about that. So, I wrote a report card that focused only on the good things the kid did. And, if you read it, you would not have been able to equate that with the actual kid. It made him sound like an angel.

The reality is that the toughest kids often have the nicest sounding report cards, because those kids take up so much of the educators’ time and attention that they end up with enough notes on the kid to write a book. At the end of the term, educators sift through those notes and find the best examples and that is what ends up in the “communication of learning.”

I used to be bitter about writing sunny and flowery report cards for kids who made my days more difficult. But it was actually good for me to notice the good things, and it helped me reflect on the circumstances that led to them. Challenging kids are always challenging. But some days they are easier to deal with than others. A lot of that is due to their home life and their cognitive abilities. But also, a lot of that is due to what the teacher does. So, it is good to study problematic kids as much as possible.

In older grades they have something called “modifications” for report cards. Basically, if you are teaching grade 6 math but a student can only do grade 2 math, then you set a new goal for the kid: grade 3 math. It is not fair to expect them to jump from grade 2 math to grade 6 math in a year, especially if they have consistently demonstrated difficulties in math. The teachers, therefore, modify the expectations for the kid. The kid’s goal for that year is to learn and get better at math, and they will prove that if, at the end of the year, they can do grade 3 math. If they can, then they have shown that they have tried hard and have improved. Therefore, they get a good mark in math, based on the modified expectation of grade 3 math. It makes sense, but it can really complicate things for the teachers.

There is always a lot of pushback to these “everybody succeeds” type of ideas. Why do we have to give everyone an A? If they are in grade 6 but can’t do grade 6 math, then they should get a bad mark. Why give them a good mark for successfully doing grade 3 math when they are in grade 6? And, in kindergarten, why not tell it how it is? If a kid is totally disrupting everything and bothering the heck out of everyone, why tell a different story on their report card?

Well, at my school, the other two kindergarten educators have been teaching for 15+ years. One has around 17 years of experience, the other, 25. If, in real life, a parent came through with a clipboard in the middle of the school day and graded us on how good of a job we are doing as a kindergarten teacher, I would get a pretty low mark compared to those two ladies. I might actually get the three out of ten from my dream. But when I admit my struggles to my colleagues both at my school and at other schools, they all tell me the same thing: It takes time. You can’t compare yourself to more experienced teachers. They struggled at your stage as well. It takes a long time.

I’ve learned in life that steps cannot be skipped. And, some things need to be learned in order. You can’t teach kids until you understand how they learn. That takes time. Your literacy lessons will only go so well until you get your overall day schedule and routines are going well. I found that I needed to get certain basic things like the schedule, routine, layout, and play time going well before I could even turn my mind to the fine details of literacy instruction. Another example if this: The school board provided me with a religion program to follow but I couldn’t make sense of it for a long time because I had too many other pressing things occupying my mind. Once I got the fundamental things going well, then I easily understood how to do the religion program. A kid who can’t do grade 3 math can’t do grade 6 math. It’s that simple. A kid who starts the year only able to do grade 2 math but, over the course of the year learns to do grade 3 math HAS accomplished something and should be congratulated.

Compared to my colleagues I am still running a pretty rickety kindergarten program. As teachers, those other two are like big diesel locomotives and I am like a frontier-time horse and carriage with a wobbly wheel about to fall off. But over the course of this year, I have learned a lot and made a lot of improvements.

I know that, as a parent, you don’t want to hear your child’s teacher described as “umm….. he’s getting better.” You want to hear “They are good.” But that takes time.

Kids need to be given that grace as well. They aren’t all starting from the same position. They have vastly different home lives. They have different genetics. They are fed differently. Some were attended to. Some were kind-of neglected. Some have two happy parents. Some have angry fighting parents. Some get to hang out with their parents. Some are given screens while their parents are distracted with other screens. Whatever it may be, it puts them in a different position to succeed at school. The angry ego monster I had… his home life made sense.

So, are we to stand at one finish line and judge kids who started from different starting lines?

When I joined the religious order, they brought in a psychologist to interview me and the other new guys before they invested too much time and money in us. I sat down with the psychologist for 2 hours and, at the end of it, I asked him what he thought of me. He said, “I think that your parents did a really great job.” That is it. That is the truth. If there is anything good that can be said about who I am today, it is almost entirely because of who my parents were and how they raised me.

The point is: I can’t really take any credit. So, if I can’t take credit for my successes, how can I blame kids for their failures?

Some people want to condemn kids. I don’t like to condemn kids, but I often want to condemn their parents. But even that is unfair, because much of what they do is a product of how they were raised. Where does it end? Is anyone accountable for anything? I don’t have to answer that question. And, I’ll tell you why: The point of life isn’t to succeed or fail. The point of life is to learn, grow, and develop. That is why we are here. Too many people view life as a report card for entrance to heaven or condemnation to hell. They think that God’s primary role is to pronounce judgement and either let someone into heaven or cast them down to hell. They don’t think of God as the teacher, who arranges our interwoven lives for us to develop into a fuller and better version of ourselves.

In the end, all of the work I put into my report cards won’t amount to much. The parents will give them a quick read. Some might not read them at all. Some might read them out loud to their kid. That, I think, is the best case scenario. But, overall, they hold no weight. No employer is ever going to look at someone’s kindergarten communication of learning.

I had a tough student this year. If I had had him in my first year, I might have judged him similarly to the way I judged the guy who I said looked like a future monster. But this year was different. I made more of an effort to connect with this guy. I talked to his parents more. I spent more time with him. We connected. I came to understand him. And, his behaviour got a lot better. Or, at least in my eyes it did. Maybe it was all about how I thought of him.

I wrote the guy’s report card, and it will go home soon. Off the top of my head I can’t remember much about what I wrote about him. To me, it doesn’t matter as much as the relationship that we have. The report card doesn’t represent the time that I spent with him, or all the growth that I saw in him over the course of the year. There were too many little signs of improvement. I couldn’t write them all and some of them wouldn’t sound good. Like, “He hits less people now than he did three months ago.” I can’t write that.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that God can’t just be the judge. He is more than a score keeper. He is more than just someone writing report cards. It isn’t about the failures. It is about the learning. Maybe we need to fail in order to learn? My dad always said that people learn way more from failures than they do from successes.

I know that God loves everyone because, with some of the people I have met in my life, if I can love them, then God must love them. He must love them waaay more than I love them.

In regards to my little friend this year… a lot of people have been quick to judge him. I have judged him a lot this year as well. But he has been learning. He has been growing. He has been developing. That is the point. And, as I have tried harder, and have prayed for help in dealing with him, I have also grown. I remember one night I prayed for help dealing with him, and the next day I found myself reading a story to him, with him clamoring to sit on my lap. At that time of the year, I would not have given him the time of day. I had a bad attitude towards him. I judged him as being bad and that was that. But I knew that I had to do better somehow, so I prayed for help, and God sent his grace into our midst. Maybe the Holy Spirit took over. God softened my heart. He helped me to grow and develop. And, as I grew and developed, I was able to better help that kid.

None of that is on his report card, that is for sure. But that is what God cares about. He cares about softening and expanding hearts. He cares about blossoming virtues. God is a gardener, not a judge.

Out of all my students this year, the one who I will miss the most is the guy who gave me the most trouble.