So SS’s progress report is in;

There are no grades, but there are a series of “default” teacher comments that one can easily do a mapping to a letter grade system

A - Participates well in class. Exceeds the requirements of the assigned tasks
B - Participates well in class. Meets the requirements of the assigned tasks
C – Participates well/ Needs to use class time more wisely. Meets the requirements of the assigned task/More effort required.
D – Needs to use class time more wisely. More effort required.
F – Has trouble working independently. Has difficulty completing assignments.

So using this grading scheme on the generic comments, I can estimate the following grades for his 8 classes:

1 B
4 Cs
3 Ds

DW says this is good.

I gave her the Spock eyebrow raise. She insists it is “better” than last year.

Really DW?

*Sigh* I suppose she is going to try and convince me that “F” means fantastic?

Okay, there are no F’s in this progress report, HOWEVER, a D is teetering on the edge, and I see a lot of Ds here.

While I was cooking DW was trying to convince me that this progress report is an improvement. I shut her down. “It’s NOT an improvement DW. I am NOT happy with it. If you are, that’s fine, and I am not going to bother trying to convince you that this progress report is sh*t. But DON’T try and convince me that this report is delicious chocolate pudding. SS is fooling around in class AGAIN and not concentrating on his assignments. It’s the same problem year after year…”

DW disagreed and went into defense-team-SS mode.

I told DW that it is pointless to argue over this because we are not going to see eye to eye.

“When SS’s report does come in next month,” I said. “then we are going to have a ‘coming to Jesus’ conversation. But until then, I am not going to argue with you over SS’s efforts in school. It’s just obvious to me that this is the same pattern repeated from last year.”

So DW went to talk to SS about this progress report. She asked him why most of the teachers remarked that he “needs to put in more effort” and “needs to use classtime more wisely.”

Without even looking away from his iPad SS answers “I dunno.”