E for Effort

The post title may seem like a bit of a non sequitur but it actually is a reference to my childhood, or specifically the fourth and fifth grades. The elementary school I found myself in when my parents moved the family from New York to New Jersey used a grading system where both achievement and effort were monitored (indeed, there was both an Honor Roll and an Effort Roll) and the achievement grades were numerical, so instead of getting an A, B, C, D or F, you got a 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. (I think there were also plusses, so you could get a 2+ on your report card, but there may or may not have been minuses.) Effort grades were given out for every subject at report card time, broken down as E for Excellent, S for Satisfactory and U for Unsatisfactory. I suppose the idea was to allow teachers to quickly convey to parents the difference between a child who is only doing middling well in math but is really, really trying to master the material, another child who gets similar test grades with minimal trying, and yet another who isn’t trying at all: 3E, 3S, 4U. Which also meant, in the first hypothetical child's case, it was possible to miss the Honor Roll by a wide margin but still make the Effort Roll, presumably to encourage the mediocre students via faint praise to Just Keep Trying.

Granted, this same school would also intermix the multiplication table dittos and paste-based glacier modeling with circle-time discussions about self-esteem and conflict resolution, so … the curriculum was kind of touchy-feely? Which is somewhat bizarre in retrospect, this rather Free To Be, 1972-ish vibe in the classroom when the rest of my life was 110% Reagan's America 1984 (the actual year in question) as I played with G.I. Joes and watched the Hot For Teacher video on MTV.


In any case, I don’t say it very much anymore but for a long time I used to say “E for Effort” because that was the honest-to-Tanngrisnir real-world example I had originally been exposed to. Eventually I realized that most people express this idiom as “A for Effort.” I also realized that, out of context, “E for Effort” doesn’t sound like praise, even of the sarcastic variety, unless one interprets it as a sardonic subversion in which the speaker doesn’t want to lie and therefore says something reflexively true but non-committal. “J for Jackass.”

My (theoretical) point: it’s been an effort to blog this week. I’m not sure if that’s come across in the posts or not, but it’s only Thursday and I find myself meta-blogging about the blogging process and that’s never a positive sign. There’s very little earth-shattering news to report, which by and large is a good thing. The little guy had a rough night last night, but we’ve run that gauntlet before. The new house is still coming together little by little and the Great Re-Painting Project looms before us but has yet to commence. Work has settled down to the long-since-reconciled-in-my-mind dull grind. I’m in the middle of reading a longish book, actually technically two longish books, one I read at home and one I save for the commute (Stephen King’s Under the Dome and Dan Simmons’ The Terror, respectively); I haven’t caught any new movies, I’m still way behind on comics, and The Biggest Loser is kind of boring me so far this season. I’m tired of winter and counting down to March. Even my brain seems to be half-hibernating, with nothing jumping out and grabbing it as particularly interesting and no wild flights of fancy of its own. This might all sound boring, but from my perspective, it’s serene. I’m not dissatisfied, wishing things could be more dramatically action-packed. There’s only so many words I have for ruminating on how the awesome things in my life steadfastly remain awesome.

But, I’m still going to make the effort.