The Report Card

The Report Card is written by Andrew Clements. In this book, Andrew Clements successfully portrays an exciting story of two children with completely different intelligence and attitudes toward grades. Nora Rose Rowley, the main character, is a super super-smart fifth-grade girl. She had found herself far more different from other kids since she was a very little girl. She knew that she's not a "normal " person but a special, intelligent girl. However, she didn’t like that. Because being too smart, people often treated her differently and always had high expectations of her. And this made her stressed. Stephen Curtis, Nora's best friend, is not as intelligent as Nora, but he’s a very diligent student. He worked very hard and never gave up whenever he failed in the tests. However, getting bad grades too many times, he kind of lost faith in himself. To help her friend, Stephen, not be defined by grades, Nora made a plan, which resulted in chaos in their school.

The story is truly thrilling, appealing, and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop until I finished it. Actually, The Report Card is the most fantastic storybook I have ever read so far. Since the main theme is grades, which I am quite familiar with and also feel stressed with, it is easy for me to relate to the feelings of the characters. I can especially relate to the words from this book, such as “bad test grades do not mean you are dumb.” Indeed, judging a person by his or her grades is not fair. Grades can only reflect how well a person have learnt, but it can’t define a person since humans are way too complicated to be tested by academic tests.

In "The Report Card ", I also realize that how strong a friendship could be. As Stephen best friend, Nora couldn’t tolerate seeing her best friend often feel frustrated by bad grades. She worked very hard to not hurt him by hiding her cleverness; moreover, she even launched a protest to address that standardizing tests couldn’t test the potentials of students. In fact, Nora could have ignored everything and enjoyed being a smart student with good grades at school. However, Nora viewed the friendship as the most important thing, so she would love to do so much work just to help her friend gain the confidence and realized grades couldn’t define him.

Thanks to Andrew Clements, I learn to look at grades in a deeper, insightful way, and not try to judge myself as soon as I get the scores. After all, there is no perfect test that be likely to test how good people are. Whether people are good or not depends on how they perceive and define themselves. Also, I have learnt selfishness is not the key to a good friendship, but love is. If I care about a friend, I will be at his or her best interest and give unconditional support whenever my friend is in need. Only love can create love, and in this book we can clearly see how powerful the result the friendship have been creating. Overall, this is an excellent storybook, easy to read, but covers inspiring insights. Like what I said, once you started reading it, you can’t stop until you finished it.