Throwback Thursday #32 – Report Cards and Progress Reports

Maggie’s in the chair again this week. Check it out here
This week’s prompt is: Report cards and Progress Reports.

You can use the questions that follow to spark your memories or you can answer them as they stand. It is totally up to you.

1. Looking back now, would you say you were a good, fair, or struggling student?
2. How often were your school efforts reported to your parents?
3. Did you receive letter grades, i.e. A, B, C, etc?
4. Was your behavior reported on your progress reports or report cards?
5. In what subjects did you excel and which subjects were a challenge?
6. Did you ever try to change your grade? Turning a C into a B for example?
7. Did you keep any of your report cards?
8. Did you get rewarded for good grades? Punished for ‘bad’ grades?
9. Did the subjects you excelled in prove to be where you excelled in life?
10. What was your biggest detraction from your school work?

Depending on my school and age would determine how I was as a student.
The school system in the UK is slightly different to the US and we have infants, junior and secondary/grammar schools before college or university.
I attended infants school, then had two years in one junior school before we moved from the council house in which I was born and so my final two years were at another. It was there I sat my eleven plus and was accepted into grammar school.
I hated it from my very first day.

At both junior schools, contact and interaction with parents was important.
I was encouraged in my writing and my music, I loved to read plus I enjoyed sports as well as needlework.
None of that happened at Grammar school and the latter two subjects I grew to despise mainly because of the staff who took the classes as they showed favouritism and in both I was embarrassed and ridiculed in front of my classmates.

School reports at Grammar school were in a book which was retained when I left. They are welcome to it. However, I do have my school report from 1964 when I was 8 and it doesn’t read too badly.

I was good at Maths, especially mental arithmetic (probably why I’m a good chalker at darts), and was always making money boxes out of Lego, so money matters was obviously somewhere in my future. The careers teacher (who also happened to be my Maths teacher in my final year at school in 1972) said I didn’t have the brains to work in a bank when I said that was what I wanted to do. I proved her wrong in spades, having the pleasure of serving her from First Till position in the High Street bank where I worked in 1974. I would love to have seen her face when I held the position of a financial analyst for the American Bank and was responsible for reporting the accounts of four European offices to the New York Head Office, though she was probably dead by then anyway.

I had no detraction from my school work as I had few friends, didn’t belong to any outside clubs or groups, nor did I have a boyfriend. I was an average pupil who did what was expected but little else. There was no point, but there was one highlight with a biology teacher when I took in a giant moth my Dad had found in the attic. She got really enthusiastic about it as it had laid eggs and she put it in the lab to study. No brownie points for me, but I saw her in a different light. It was she who wore a live stick insect as a brooch for a joke, and you could tell what term we were in by the colour of her rinse!
The last few months of my final year were traumatic for various reasons and because of it, I did not do as well in my O levels as I had hoped. I failed two of the five I took, but at least I got my music, English language and Maths which were the three subjects I considered myself good at.