With the closing of each trimester comes a phenomenon as inevitable as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West: middle-school kids suddenly begin caring about their grades.
“Miss! What’s my grade? What’s my grade, Miss? Miss! What can I do to bring up my grade? Miss! You got extra credit? Miss! Miss! Miiiiiissssss!” I hear their voices ringing in my head until I lay my head on the pillow each night, when their faces become wavy and blend into one giant, drooling, grade-grubbing 132-headed monster.
Dominique is one such thirteen-year-old grade-grubbing beast.
“Miss! Am I passing math?” she inquired, sweetly, dimples out, eyelashes batting all over creation.
“Dominique, you come in late every day, you write “IDK” on every warm-up, you text message through every assignment, and yesterday you were practicing ‘stop, drop and roll’ all through our test on integers. Do YOU think you’re passing math?”
“Yes,” she said decidedly. “I think I deserve at least a C.”
I had to laugh out loud. And when I say “laugh out loud,” I don’t mean it in the “LOL” sense, like when flippant teenagers (and my mom, who has this annoying habit of hijacking fads and colloquialisms from the younger generation) text it in response to everything that’s ever said without even cracking a smile. I mean I actually burst into laughter, so abruptly I thought a button somewhere would pop.
“Dominique, a ‘C’ implies ‘average.’ If you think your performance this trimester represents the norm, we’re in worse trouble than I thought we were.”
“But I do all my work!” she protested. “I can tell you how to do everything we’ve done in class for the past two months!”
I don’t make a habit of making deals with devils, but this one seemed like a fun exception.
“I’m going to make a deal with you,” I said. “If you can show me everything we’ve been doing for the past two DAYS, I’ll bump your grade to a C-.”
“Let’s go,” she said. She grabbed a pencil (Well, not really. She had to borrow one from me first.) and she was off.
And then something inexplicable happened. Right there before my eyes, Dominique began computing common denominators, adding numerators, converting improper fractions to mixed numbers and reducing final answers to their simplest forms. Step by step she forged ahead, asking for no assistance in between.
It couldn’t be right. An invisible nymph had to be sitting on her shoulder whispering all the answers into her ear.
“But why did you add instead of subtract?” I quizzed. “Didn’t you see the minus sign?”
“Because it’s a double negative, which makes a positive,” she explained. “And when both fractions are positive, you add.”
“And what if one was positive and the other negative?” I persisted.
“Then you’d subtract,” she explained. “And you’d take the sign of the fraction with the highest absolute value.”
It was mind-boggling. Through all the talking, the giggling, the gum-snapping and the texting, Dominique had somehow absorbed every word I’d said, like some freak of osmosis.
“Dominique!” I cried. “You’ve got some mad skillz with a Z!”
She looked at me, sighed, and rolled her eyes in disgust. “Miss,” she demanded, “please don’t EVER say that again.”
Somewhere out there, my mom is in her Abercrombie and Fitch jeggings, downloading Maroon 5 into her iPod and snickering, “Gotta luv it. LOL!”