"Where the women are strong,
the men are good-looking,
and the children are all above average!"
--borrowed from A Prairie Home Companion
The anticipation was great—after five months of school, the semester was finally coming to an end and report cards were being issued!
The third graders in Anna’s class were excited to be receiving real grades for the first time. This grading period was especially important for Lara’s classmates in the sixth grade, who would also be told which secondary school the teachers were recommending for them: college prep, a trade school, or a school for “laborers.” And Hannes’s classmates at his comprehensive school were nervous about receiving bad grades that would make them go down a level in their courses and prevent them from getting a college prep diploma.
We had made it clear from the beginning that we weren’t too interested in the kids’ grades as long as we could tell that they were working hard, so the report cards were not anxiety-producing for our family. On Friday the kids had a period or two of classes and then the homeroom teachers ceremoniously passed out the Zeugnisse, the diploma-like report cards that the children carefully put into Zeugnis folders containing all their previous report cards.
Anna's expurgated report card
(grades were removed to protect the innocent)
On the German grading scale of 1 to 6, a grade of 3 is probably equivalent to a C+ and a 4 to a C-. Germany doesn’t seem to have been affected by America’s grade inflation, and the teachers didn’t take the language barrier into consideration in their grading of our kids, so we knew we wouldn't have to worry about straight A's. Not surprisingly, they ruined the curve in their English classes, but they had some other nice surprises as well. And Lara came home happily proclaiming, “I’m a college-prep student!”
We took the report cards as evidence that they’d really applied themselves, and we’re tickled pink with the results!
