I can remember slipping my stack of disheveled worksheets from my classroom mailbox each week when I was about eight. It was a week’s worth of activities, ready to take home to my parents. I’d thumb through them. Looking carefully at each grade the teacher had written. Scanning the stack for anything less than an “A”. To see a B? It just wasn’t acceptable to me. This pressure? It didn’t come from my parents, it came from me.
A pressure that I kept up, all the way through school. High school? It was easy. I had settled in to accept that A’s were given for completing things. I was a completer. I was constantly told what a “great student” I was and became wrapped up in points and grade point averages.
Until college. The “A” suddenly wasn’t easy. Studying? I had never had to before. Hours of reading? I didn’t really understand how to manage my time. I didn’t understand how I had been a “great student” and suddenly, I wasn’t. I had to learn, after years of being in school, how to struggle. The thing about struggling? It’s hard. When it’s supported? It leads to growth.
I want that growth for all kids. I don’t want to be blinded by a transcript full of A’s and believe that a kid has achieved. Overcame. Struggled. Grown. Thought deeply. Learned. Sometimes the ceiling that we set for kids to reach just isn’t high enough. We live in a universe of infinite possibilities, and sometimes the bar is set about 3 feet above our heads. Something we always need to be aware of and continue to raise. Because there is a kid in every classroom that has learned the game of reaching the ceiling with ease. And even though they have a transcript full of A’s, they’re not actually learning anything.
And that kid? We are failing him.