High School Report Cards: Fill & Download for Free

Abigail and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins. Each controls one half of their shared body. They have always had separate grades and report cards through elementary school, high school, and college. It helps that each twin controls one hand, and so can write her own exams. Abby is better at math, and Brittany is better at writing.

This happens almost every year:“Mr. Bates, can I get a list of all of my missing assignments? Can I still do them and turn them in for credit?”Inevitably, there’s a student who simply won’t do any work. They just don’t care. They get chance after chance, and still they do nothing. They simply take up space in the classroom. Their attitude is usually a reflection of their parents’ attitudes. The parents don’t care, so the student doesn’t care.There are two main types of public high schools in Chicago: selective ones that you have to test in to, and the regular high schools that act as gang-recruitment/dropout/teen pregnancy factories.Basically, if you don’t test well to get into a good public high school, and you want any chance of a good life, your parents need to move to the suburbs or pay for a private school.Part of the selective enrollment process for high schools includes middle school grades. It’s not just the enrollment test. You can ace the enrollment test and still not get in because your regular grades were bad.So when it comes time for high school placement, and the students and parents suddenly do care, they expect me to find and print months of missing assignments, and grade them all.No. That ship has sailed. I’m not stopping everything to help you with something I’ve been trying to help you with all along but you didn’t care about until now.I also have students who act surprised with low grades on their report cards, when they’ve literally done zero work in my class.“Mr. Bates, why do I have a 20/100 on my report card?”Because you show up most days, and 20% of the grade is “participation.” I’m being generous and saying you “participate” just by existing in my class. You’re welcome.

“Mr. Bates, I just don’t care.”A seventh grader (13 years old) told me that while I was working one-on-one with him during my lunch break several years ago.I, like all of his other teachers, decided to do everything we could, including giving up our lunch breaks, to work with this student so he’d do well enough on his report card to get into a good high school.Chicago has a complicated high school placement system, but the gist of it is that you have to do really well on your seventh-grade report card if you want to have any chance of getting into a decent high school two years later. (They can’t use the 8th grade report card, because it comes too late.) If you don’t get into one of the good Chicago magnet high schools, your choices are to go to private school, move to a better school district, or go to the neighborhood high school and pray that you’re the exception, not the norm, when it comes to outcomes from those schools.We knew that this kid’s mother couldn’t afford a private high school for him, and couldn’t move, either. His mother worked for the city, and the law in Chicago is that anyone who works for the city has to live within the city limits. His only hope at a decent life was to make it into one of Chicago Public School’s selective enrollment programs.This student had all of his teachers and his mother doing everything in their power to help him, and it was all for nothing. He genuinely didn’t care. He didn’t care about wasting people’s time. He didn’t care about his grades. He didn’t care about his future, beyond what video game he was going to play when he got home from school that day.We never gave up on him, but he gave up on himself. The last I heard, he got into a private high school on a needs-based scholarship, was kicked out after his freshman year due to low grades, ended up at the local public high school, and had several drug-related run-ins with the law. I ran into his mother at the grocery store about two years ago, and she said that she never knew what he was doing during the day, or when he’d come home at night. She only knew that he quit going to school altogether… the school told her that… and that some nights he’d come home and sleep in his room, and other nights he wouldn’t.What I learned from that student, and similar students I’ve taught since then, is that you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. If you have limited time and effort and too many people who need it, you’re better off focusing your time and effort on the people who actually want it.