Reply to do B's matter in elementary school?

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[quote=Anonymous]Here’s the way I look at it.  Good grades are not the goal in school, learning is.  Grades are merely a rough indicator of how the learning process is proceeding.  In elementary, you’re probably the only one looking at the grade to see how the child is progressing, although when the child wants to apply to something competitive (magnet, college, etc.), others will look at the relevant grades because rough as they are they’re the most convenient measure.

As for what a B represents, it generally suggests a child is doing good work, but the teacher thinks the work could be done better.  Keeping in mind that learning is the goal, that B could mean anything from a warning of potential problems to an achievement to take pride in.  You need to investigate further and consider if questions like the following might be relevant:

Is the work too hard and they’re not quite getting it?
Are they completing the work, but not investing tine and effort to really master the concepts?
Do they fully understand the concepts, but get sloppy with the details and lose points?
Did they struggle to learn the concept, bringing their grade down, but they kept at it until they mastered it, bringing their grade up to a B?
Is the work too hard, too easy, or just right?
Is there anything bothering them (a noisy classmate who distracts them, trouble seeing the board, etc.)
Is your child mastering the concept but making a judgement call about the assignment?  (For example, schools have a habit of turning assignments for all classes into art projects.  If the art project is an art class, the child needs to learn artistic techniques.  On the other hand, when my child was in middle school, she had to make a poster for her foreign language class with pictures of the vocabulary. What mattered to me is whether she had the vocabulary memorized, I didn’t care if she had a pretty poster, although she cared).

A lot of parents encourage their child to try their best, and that may work for sone kids, but if your child has any perfectionist tendencies it will increase the pressure and make things so much worse. Sometimes kids need to be taught to remember the goal of the assignment is to learn, not to get a grade, not to do perfect work, but to master the material so it’s theirs to use when needed.

Basically a B in elementary school matters only in what it tells you, which is that the child is doing pretty well but that the teacher thinks some of the work could be better.  If adult lives were graded, we’d probably be pretty happy with Bs showing that while we might have room for improvement, we’re doing pretty well and making progress. [/quote]

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