The marks are in

For better or for worse, I remember being my children's ages. I can sympathize with them as they prepare for the combination of happiness and dread. Happiness because Spring break is at the end of the week. Dred because they first have to run the gauntlet of report cards.

CU2 came through with nice strong marks - two As and many Bs. She's done a nice turn around since first term where she got pretty close to the edge with a couple of dud marks on key tests.

CU1 continues his wrestling match with school. Smart enough to do be able to do the work. Smarter still to complain and whine so much that the adults get to a point where they want to through their hands up in the air because they don't know how to motivate this otherwise capable kid into doing something brilliant. He slides through with a solid row of mostly Cs.

I dread the three time a year these evaluations come out. So much can ride on the results of a single test that culminates into a letter on a report card.

Each year I join my children in the struggle to surmount difficulties in various subjects. It’s as if I’m their age again. How’d I do it when I was there age? That’s just it. I don’t think I did.

I see a lot of me in CU1. I’m not saying that I’m smart – at least not book smart. I had troubles with just about every subject they offered. I lacked motivation to study. I still distinctly remember a period during my 16^th year when I must have mouthed off to my mother something awful. She with held everything she could think of – the car – that was ok, I was on a learner’s permit at her insistence, the TV – that was ok, it was broken anyway, and the list went on. I remember how I thought “Woo hoo! Grounding! What a great excuse to get my history assignment done!”

When I wasn’t hammering at the boring assignment about Mesopotamia, I would lie on my bed and day dream, much like Anne Shirley did, up under my own gabled roofs.

It wasn’t until I hit university that I kind of caught myself. All that time, I plodded along. I remember being in grade 2, then in grade 3, counting off the years between me and the end of high school. Is this what CU1 has in store?