A New Grading Scale
I’ve been keeping this list for years. And I’ve never gotten an A. Not even once.
For ten years, I was an elementary school teacher. I taught kindergarten for a year, second grade for two years, and the rest of my career was spent teaching children with special needs. My last year in the classroom was the 2007 school year, and I’ve been a stayat-home mom and freelance writer for the last 12 years.
Years ago, I made a list of 20-something tasks I want to do each day. Many of them are health related. Things like exercising, drinking water, eating fruits and veggies, applying sunscreen, and limiting screen time for myself and my kids.
by Diane Stark
Although I’ve now been home for longer than I was in the classroom, I find myself still thinking and acting like a teacher. In many ways, that’s a good thing. Kids generally like me, and I make connections with them easily. My previous teaching experience definitely helps out when I teach Sunday School at my church. It even helps when I write certain types of stories.
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Other tasks on the list are household chores like laundry, making beds, washing dishes, and just generally warding off chaos in my house. Still other tasks are related to my current job as a freelance writer. Any magazine writing deadlines go on the list, as well as devoting time to the novel I’m attempting to write.
Because of my prior teaching experience, I feel comfortable correcting other people’s children, but only when absolutely necessary. Like on my son’s last field trip when I was responsible for a dozen fifth grade boys. If I hadn’t been a teacher, they might have eaten me alive before the bus ride back to school.
At the end of each day, I go through my list and check off the things I did. Then I give myself a letter grade based on how much I got done.
But thinking and acting like a teacher has one major drawback. Despite being out of the classroom for more than a decade, I still rate things by assigning them a letter grade. Movies, food at restaurants, even lattés.
Because the only way to get an A is to check off every single item on the list. To get an A, I’d have to live a near-perfect day.
But rating those things isn’t an issue. The problem is my habit of assigning each day a letter grade. I don’t decide the grade based on how much fun I had or how much time I spent with my family or friends. I don’t assign a day a good grade because my husband took me out for a delicious dinner or because my favorite TV show was on that day. Nope. The letter grade is assigned based on one thing only. How much I accomplished that day.
16 :: Sasee.com :: January 2020
I’ve been keeping this list for years. And I’ve never gotten an A. Not even once.
But every day, I miss my work out or I forget to do my skin care routine or I just have to drink a Diet Coke instead of water. Every day, I get busy and miss something. And missing even one thing automatically drops me to a B. Many days, I skip more than one task, and the grade is even worse. When I was a teacher, I never graded my students as