The question always hits me out of nowhere, especially when I hear it on the last day of school.
“What can I do to raise my grade?”
My student has appeared in the doorway as I’m packing up my classroom for the summer. I’m labeling every desk and chair, which will get moved into the hallway while they wax the floors, recycling whatever cannot be salvaged or reused, and filling out forms in the great wishful roulette system of school district work orders. She’s a quiet girl with shining eyes, dark hair, and a meticulous manicure that involves very long, glittery acrylic nails.
I cap my Sharpie and roll up my blue tape and wave her over to the teacher desk in the far corner.
We sit in front of my computer and I pull up her online gradebook. I point at the screen. “Here’s your whole semester. What do you notice?”
She squirms and looks down into her lap. She dabs at her eyes with a Kleenex.
“Let’s count the turned-in assignments.”
I zoom the gradebook and slide the laptop toward her.
After a moment, she realizes I’m done with my part of this conversation. So she starts counting. When she’s done scrolling and counting, she says, “Twenty.”
I nod. “O.K., so 20 out of 70 assignments were turned in, or turned in late.” I hand her a calculator from the side drawer. “What percent is that?”
She has to flatten her fingers awkwardly to press the calculator buttons, which is slow, and she frowns after typing in “70 20.”
I clear my throat. “The other way.”
‘What are you going to do next year to avoid this situation?’
She presses buttons and reads off the screen. “Zero-point-two-eight-five-seven-one.”
“What percentage is that?”
She frowns again. She has to think. “28 percent.”
I ignore the rounding issue. “So what grade is that?”
Tears pool in her eyes again. I’m nonreactive, focusing on my own breath, coming in and out at my nose. The air is so painfully fresh and awake it smells like eucalyptus.
Finally I ask, “Is there something you could have done to raise that score?”
She swallows and nods reluctantly. She twists the sodden tissue between her hands.
I silently signal to give this insight a name.
Her voice is barely audible. “Turned those in.”
A robin lands on the azalea bush outside the window and holds my gaze, then floats away. I’m jealous.
“What happens when you don’t turn assignments in?”
I can feel her falling through mental space.
She starts to cry again. “But I tried so hard.”
“And I had a lot of problems at home this year.”
“I’m very sorry for that.”
“And now I’m going to have to go to summer school.”
The whirring of gears in my teacher brain sounds very loud inside my head. That’s right — you’ve got this. You are making all the right connections. Don’t give up. Keep going.
But none of that would be the right thing to say. So instead, I say, “I understand that’s not the result you were hoping for.”
We sit together in a sad, uncomfortable silence.
“What are you going to do next year to avoid this situation?”
A glimmer of quiet resolve enters the space between us. “I’m going to get one of those planners at the bookstore.”
“Good.” I nod. “What else?”
She pauses. “I’m going to write down every assignment and check it off when I upload to Google Classroom.”
“Excellent. What else?”
“I’m going to bring in my burning questions and ask the teacher about them at the start of class.”
She is getting it. “Yes. This is going to help you to get the results you want — and that we both know you are capable of getting. I am proud of you.”
She smiles slightly at first, then more broadly.
Then she asks, “So what can I do to raise my grade?”
Elizabeth Statmore is a math teacher at Lowell High School.
