Louisa Quits

My niece Louisa has all but quit the 5th grade. She has become completely errant in doing her homework. Instead, she has given the whole school thing the finger and gone to play with the Underwood kids next door. She is doing squat for schoolwork and this runs in our family.

I too was a 5th grade degenerate. I cite as evidence the French menu case. During my fifth-grade tenure, we were tasked with creating a menu for our French teacher, Madame Nordness. I knew when the menu was due. I also knew I had no plans to participate in the project. I felt not a pang of guilt or embarrassment as I delivered my pitiful “I left it at home” excuse. I nonchalantly told Madame Nordness I would bring it tomorrow and proceeded to blissfully space out as my classmates showed off their meticulously engineered poster board menus. ‘Cabaret de Caterine’ arrived a few days later looking just as it was, a half-assed last-minute throw together. No glitter, no stickers, no ribbons. Just some black magic marker scrawled on a misshapen piece of leftover red poster board.

To this day I don’t know what possessed me to feel as though I could do zero work and get away with it. But that’s exactly what I did, zero work and got away with it. And that is what Louisa is doing. Louisa’s waterloo is the “jot.” All year I have heard rumblings about these jots and the desperation of trying to force Lulu to complete them. This prompted me to inquire … what the heck is a jot? For fear that I would write about it and throw little Lulu out into the fray for public consumption, my sister Lizzy refused to answer me. Undeterred, I turned to Google.

A “jot” is defined as a very small amount. This holds because a very small amount is the interest Lulu has in 5th grade work. As I have come to understand it, the jot, the assignment that has given my sister a yearlong migraine, is a small writing drill in which the student is asked to answer a page of short questions pertaining to the reading she did not do. Simple enough yet requiring more effort than Louisa is prepared to give.

Louisa has spent 5th grade phoning in her jots at the last minute with the aid of a screaming parent close to meltdown. But for most of the year, Louisa turned in SOMETHING. Trash though that something may have been, she submitted something resembling a half-hearted completion of the assignment. That is until 3 weeks ago. 3 weeks ago, Louisa began to see that the end of 5th grade was nigh and closed shop. No further attempts at jots would she make. When her mother asked if she had completed her jots, Louisa looked her square in the eyes, lied, and then sprinted to the trampoline at Underwood-land next door. Lu’s teachers, however, were having none of her early shutdown and sent home a naughty note.

And this is the moment when you come to understand that Louisa is not a lazy 5th grader. No, Louisa is a BALLER. Not only did she NOT take the note home to be signed, she left her whole damned binder at school and pleasantly issued the “we didn’t have any homework” line to all parental questioning. It was more than a week later that Louisa’s parents caught wind of her shenanigans. Louisa has eclipsed my 5th grade assholery and taken it to new heights. What can I say? I am impressed.

For me 5th grade was a turning point in school. My attention to detail waned and my understanding that assignments were critical ceased. Over time this morphed into a strongly held personal creed that homework was simply not worth my time. I showed up for school and paid attention; I did this for 8 hours a day. And 8 hours was all I was prepared to give. Could I have honed my understanding of mathematical concepts better by going home and continuing with practice problems? Certainly. But this would have interfered with my previously scheduled afterschool lessons with Cyndi Lauper, Double Dare, and Sassy Magazine.

Louisa is light years ahead of me in her 5th grade blow off prowess. She may not have done 2 decent jots all year, but she will probably be running Google someday. It is this level of arrogance and chicanery that will launch someone into the stratosphere of success. Or she’ll be throwing leg for meth.

We’ll see which way the wind blows.