As unschoolers, we have nothing to do with grades.  So I was a bit surprised when I heard them giving each other grades the a few days ago.  What were they grading on?  Jumping on the bed.  “That was pretty good, but that last flip was kind of crooked.  I’m giving it a B minus.”

That’s what I heard Luc saying as I was coming in from a dog walk, yesterday.  My ears perked up.  Squealing, whump-whump sounds of bed jumping, all normal, but then, “That was great!  A minus!” says Sophie.  And then, “Ooo, belly flop.  D.”

Apparently they heard about grades from tv (Luc) and a book she listened to on her ipod (Sophie).  “There was a character in school.  She was worried about her grades,” thus was Sophie’s answer when I inquired.  They seemed unconcerned about the “bad” grades, probably because they seemed to be in accord with the grades given.  I wonder what would happen if one of them graded the other on something unfairly, say, a C for a truly excellent flip?  I don’t think it would go over well.

“Can you get an ‘E’ ?” asked Luc at one point.  When I said, no, he wanted to know why.

“I actually have no idea,” I said.  “But they skip it.  A, B, C, D, F.”

“F for FAIL,” said Luc.  And he laughed, as if this idea was quite charming.

They certainly fail to live up to their own standards sometimes.  In drawing, for example, Sophie can get terribly frustrated with her painting, and Luc will refuse to draw something if he thinks he’ll do a bad (meaning, not up to his vision) job.  Occasionally, Sophie will make an error about which she feels simply terrible, breaking something, say, or accidentally hurting Luc (she doesn’t feel this way when she hurts him on purpose, ha).  She will hide her face and not want me to touch her.  Why such shame over a mistake??  Have I shamed her at times for messing up?

Yesterday, I heard Luc giving Sophie a “class” in Luc-Fu, a martial art of his own design.  “That was pretty good,” I heard him saying.  “B plus.  But watch out, this next move is tricky….”  This after we got home from her aikido class, where they have no grades.  Interesting.

And then this morning, Sophie asked me how to spell “nature.”

So I answered, as is my wont.  “N. A. T. U. R. E.”  This is 90% of reading “instruction” around here.  If they ask me to read something, I read it.  If they ask me to spell something, I spell it.  So far, so good, Sophie is learning how to read and write with no apparent effort on her part.  Luc, a year and a half behind her, hasn’t expressed much interest yet, except for video game buttons—he knows how to read all the “Play” “Pause” “Resume” “Exit” sort of words.  Motivation is everything.

Anyway, Sophie wrote down the letters as I called them out, I’m not sure what she was working on, but she’s been making lots of lists lately. But when she finished, she looked back at me with annoyed frustration.  “But that doesn’t have a CH in it at all!”

Huh?  CH? Oh, yeah. “Nature” does sort of sound something like nay-chure.  “Sorry.  That’s just how they spell it.”

She looked back down at her paper.  “That’s stupid.  D minus.”

I laughed.  “You’re grading English on how it’s spelled?”

“No,” she said, prim.  “I’m grading all the people who insist on spelling English in stupid ways.”

Ah.  A bit harsh.  But I see her point.

I suppose there is power in being able to rate the world on a handy scale.  The letter-grade system does have more nuance than a simple Good/Bad dichotomy.  Still, not much room for fun in such a system.  Still, I like that they get to give the grades here, rather than always be the one graded, as in school.  And that they can leave it behind the second it isn’t fun anymore.  Honestly, I’ve come so far  away from the mainstream way of thinking about grades (that “good” grades are “good” and worth striving for, for example) that the whole concept seems really strange to me now.  Seriously?  You’re going to let some probably-indifferent person rate your performance according to some arbitrarily-chosen standards in activities you probably don’t care one iota about, comparing said performance to all the other indifferent, non-caring people, and then have that rating matter?  Really?  Why?

(I say this as a person who had a 3.8 GPA when I dropped out of UNC.  I am intimately familiar with the grades game.)

I was thinking about all this as I was lying in bed with the kids this morning, snuggled deep into the blankets—it’s cold in the yurt in the mornings lately.  Way down our road is an elementary school which must have it’s PA system cranked to maximum because, when it’s quiet, we can hear the Mwa-mwa-mwa of some announcement being made, and an occasional buzzer of the school day starting, as we burrow deeper under the covers.  Hearing it this morning I thought, jesus, I am so glad my kids aren’t going there, getting graded.  For one thing, we couldn’t still be in bed….

We’ll see where the grading system around here goes.  Maybe there will be a rating M for Boring. Or G for On Fire. Or maybe X for Needs Ice Cream.  Those ratings might actually make sense.