Now with 100% more puzzles

This is a post mostly directed at my parents, who probably don’t even read this blog. You could sort of call it a rant, I guess.

I have never been a particularly studious person, at least in relatively mundane subjects in school. Of course, I do my homework and stuff partly to learn the material as I go and of course to get the points, because grades obviously matter to some extent. You could guess that my grades are not all A’s at this very moment, or else there probably wouldn’t be anything to write about.

But there have been various accusations that have caused plenty of arguments around my house. I address them as follows:

1) YES, I know about my grades too. I get emails from Schoolloop every weekday. I usually don’t check the progress reports unless something major has changed. But when something major has changed, I will want to see what happened for the better or for the worse. And many precipitous drops can be explained by…

2) Ok, it’s a zero. Wait… I turned in this assignment! But of course, you’re going to call me a liar because the teacher knows more about me than I do myself. Please note that teachers have a fairly large latency period and I communicate to them about grades in the following manner:

a) The day after I see that the grade dropped, I’ll go contact them. Of course it’s patently ridiculous to expect instant gratification. But my parents expect it anyway.

b) I’ll then probably wait a day or two to see if the issue resolves. No, I won’t ask them every single day. Teachers in my opinion are people and are not machines that do things instantly. 

c) I ask people relatively non-intrusively. This is to add on to the unspoken politeness I guess. MAYBE it lowers the chance of it actually getting changed, but I think cordiality is an asset that is realized in better subjectivity.

3) Maybe the zero is actually a zero. Well, ok I admit that I forgot to do the assignment. I can’t remember everything. Of course you can tell me to organize better, but I’ve done that before. It doesn’t help that significantly and I believe it poses a significant burden. That is to say, yes, still zeros exist. Yes, I write assignments down if I feel that there’s a lot of things to do for the next day. 

That said, I believe the number of legitimate zeroes that I have had has sharply declined in the past few years.

4) It’s near the beginning of the school year! The teacher decided to change the point system into a category-based one. (or conceivably the other way around but I don’t think that has ever happened) This can wildly affect grades and clearly it’s something to comment on. NOT. I really don’t want to spend another half hour explaining what actually changed, so stop getting onto my nerves about this issue.

5) The grade has still been [insert not that good of a grade] for the past week! Yeah, as if it’s my fault that the teacher either doesn’t update much (Bellotti updates, what, once a month?), or there really wasn’t much to add. I really can’t affect the updates if there are no updates.

6) YES, I do care about my grades. Maybe not with the same enthusiasm as you, but I recognize that an A is better than a B. I will attempt to get an A without spending an overly large amount of effort doing so. 

7) While I appreciate you caring about my grades, and I guess your possible stress over the grade rollercoaster is possibly justified, please note that this stress is entirely optional. If you need to relieve yourself of this stress by ignoring the grades for awhile, DO SO! I actually encourage you to do so. I look at the grades every day, so I know about my situation already.  I think I can handle this “stress” relatively well, but it seems by your outbursts that you guys might not take stress nearly as well. So… yeah. You don’t have to be a proxy for me, especially if it leaves your health/emotional stability in the worse. 

kthxbai.