Look What I Found!

I found my husband's kindergarten report card from the school year 1960 to 1961, and it's funny!

His father was in the military and was stationed oversees several times.  How his mother repeatedly saved, packed, and moved things like report cards from country to country is beyond me.  But hey, here it is after all these years for all of us to enjoy.

I have a vague recollection that his mother passed his report cards to me quite a number of years ago.  Then the other day I found them stored in our "Momentos" file when I was sorting and weeding out junk in our file cabinet.

We all had a chuckle over this one at the dinner table that night.

For one, the "technology" involved in printing that report card seemed so archaic.  No clip art, no word processing, just a good old typewriter and some fairly bad hand drawings there on the cover.

And secondly, we got a laugh at the comments his teachers made regarding his not-so-stellar behavior.  Here are the first semester comments:

I'm reading between the lines of their remarks and thinking that he must have been quite a little handful.  I think he must have been a very normal little boy, with lots of energy and not much interest in the work aspects of being at school.

In fact, maybe he drove the teacher batty, for I've noticed that the comment left at the end of the second semester was made by a different teacher.

Looking at this hand typed report card form, I was reminded of a very special Christmas gift I received, somewhere around my 11th or 12th grade year.  My parents gave me a good quality manual typewriter, which I was glad to receive.  That beauty was one of the first items to be put onto my ready-to-go-to-college pile.  My typewriter even came with a correction tape.  As I recall, later there was a special kind of typing paper that easily erased using a pencil eraser, making my fancy shmancy correction tape obsolete.

Looking closely at Bob's report card, it appears as if corrections were made in several places.  Seeing this in 2014, I'm thinking how rough and unprofessional this document looks.

Of course I haven't seen a child's kindergarten progress report for many years, until I unearthed this one.  Perhaps back in those ancient days "thank you" was a hyphenated word.

And, I don't even know any more what sorts of behaviors are evaluated nowadays.  Do we evaluate children's ability to "Exhibit Courteous Habits?"

I don't know.  But all I can say is that obviously the three salesclerks that waited on us yesterday in one of the major department stores near us apparently hadn't done well in the "Exhibits Courteous Habits" category earlier in their lives.

Makes me wonder what kinds of scores they earned in reading, writing, and arithmetic, too.  Maybe I don't want to know.