A Grade Point Average of "Wow!"

Ian called me today at work and announced:

"Daddy... Guess what - I got a 'WOW!' on my spelling test!"

This was not a trivial accomplishment. It was the first weekly spelling test of the year, and really the first "test" of his academic life.

We labored over the words yesterday evening, not so much concerned with spelling as with orthography. The only word he got wrong in terms of spelling was "cack" in lieu of "sack", but when I asked him to write "dad", he wrote "bab". We worked out some mnemonics - D is for Dad, and the "o" (or circle) comes first in writing the "d", so you just remember, "O(h), Dad!" That one didn't particularly work for him, but by test-time he figured it out. Amy and I both went over the words with him again this morning - another written test along with the two that I issued last night. One of the last things I said to him before he got on the bus this morning was "Remember - sack is S-A-C-K."

At first, I wasn't sure if "WOW!" meant a completely correct test, but Ian explained something like "'Wow!' means you got them all right!"

In my youth, which was long ago because I am old, I had a first grade teacher who was extremely old even then, which would make her a remnant of antiquity from the perspective of a child in 2010, and she was a very nice lady, but she did not write "Wow!" when we got all the answers right; she wrote "100%". That was how I started to learn about percentages.

But "Wow!" is much more festive, and it wasn't wasted on a happy young Ian today, who pointed out that, between the Wow test and the winning of the pumpkin contest, things are really going his way.

I'm glad thing are really going his way.

(September 17, 2010)