Chasing the A+

Remember straight A’s? If you’re like me, you might not. Though I did get a perfect report card my last semester of graduate school (#HumbleBrag).

The heir pulls off this feat every quarter. Considering his load of extracurriculars, it’s a pretty impressive feat. I mean, I had to deal with baseball in the spring and that was pretty much it. I realize grades were harder to come by in those days, but I didn’t come by any.

Now, though? Kids are busy. Crazy busy. During the academic quarter that just ended, my own progeny dealt each week with three wrestling practices, a weekend practice for travel baseball, three rehearsals for the school musical, which is set to open as this publication hits mailboxes, and a meeting of the Pancake Club – a two-hour workout with the middle school football team.

All that and his grades never got so much as a ding.

Maybe I needed more activities.

He doesn’t just get straight A’s, though. Oh, no. That would be too easy. He chases straight A-pluses. This wasn’t even a thing when I was in my formative years and still isn’t now in most places.

It means if you have a perfect quarter on your report card, you can get a 4.3 grade-point average. Because we all should be tracking the GPA of our sixth-graders. Harvard is watching.

A quick survey of 70 or so university students produced just one other school in Northeast Ohio that offers the A+ to its students. Very scientific research, I know, but you’d think there might have been a couple others.

What is an A+ exactly? It means your grade was 98% or better. That’s rare air.

It also means that if your grade is 99% and you get a 96% on a summative assignment – in other words, a really good grade – your overall letter grade may drop.

Imagine 96% being a letdown.

From a mathematical standpoint, if you get 53 out of 55 questions right on an exam (and I say you because I almost never did this), your overall grade could fall from 98 to 97, so a near-perfect score is bad.

Not bad in the traditional sense, where it’s just plain bad. More like bad news.

You want an A+, you basically must be perfect. It’s a quest not for the faint of heart. I give my kid, along with anyone else’s kid who can pull these off with regularity, a ton of credit.

And I’m going to celebrate today’s youth, which gets a bad reputation for all sorts of things. These kids are butt-kickers. They are busy but not overcommitted in many cases. They are smart. They are driven. They enjoy success, so they pursue it hard.

And it’s fun to watch, actually. When I was in sixth grade, I don’t think I knew what a single one of my grades was until my report card came, and even then we had to take them home so our parents could open them while we ducked.

Now, we have PowerSchool, a demonic app that sends us instant updates on our children’s progress. Imagine our horror a couple weeks ago when we saw the spawn had gotten 0 out of 20 on an orchestra assessment.

Turns out it was a glitch. Luckily, my heart meds were refilled.

The kid? He brushed it off. Gotta be a mistake, he said.

It’s weird. My dad was always right; now, my son is. Apparently right skips a generation.

Good for him. And good that he is able to drive himself hard and get these results. He doesn’t put a lot of pressure on himself. Just does what’s necessary.

As a college professor and high school teacher, his parents don’t pressure him much, either, believe it or not. We don’t have to. We know he’ll take care of business and ask for help if and when he needs it.

Which is definitely a plus.