2024

I was devastated. She had ruined everything. My seventh-grade gym teacher hadn’t even justified her condemnation; the only comment offered in the report card’s margin was “Good Effort Good Attitude.” I had done everything right – I never dallied in the locker room, I passed the swim test with ease, I put my all into those mountain climbers and high knees – so why couldn’t you just give me a goddamn A, Ms. Cieri?! 

At my school, the only public middle school in a small Massachusetts town dominated by WASP-y lawyers and doctors and business executives, there were many helicopter parents who surveilled their kids’ grades with life-or-death urgency, like diabetics monitoring their blood glucose levels. My mother was not one of them – she almost never asked to see my grades. It simply never occurred to me that not getting straight-As was even an option. She had done the hard work of constructing the panopticon, then retreated to its central guard tower, and watched as I disciplined and punished myself.

In the years following that mortifying A-minus, I ensured my Effort and Attitude surpassed the mere “Good.” My high school and college transcripts would display column after column of only As and A-pluses, neatly aligned on the page like obedient soldiers.

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It only cost me everything.