Reading Response: In Praise of the "F" Word

Marry Sherry’s “In Praise of the “F” Word,” shows a different side of the word failure. She tells of her being a remedial teacher for students that have gotten a diploma from high school but have not learned anything from the class they took. They just barely passed their classes enough to squeeze by with low grades so they could graduate. “Tens of thousands of 18-year-olds will graduate this year,” says Sherry, “and be handed meaningless diplomas.” (515). She goes on in the story saying how she was having trouble with her son failing his senior year of high school at a parent teacher conference. Her son’s grades were declining because the student liked to joke around in class. The teacher said that she was going to fail him if he kept on this track. Once the teacher said that, Sherry became flustered. She then saw that the teacher was right to have that attitude towards her son. Once they got home Sherry told her son that his teacher was going to flunk him and that’s all that was said. His grades soon after improved. She goes on to finish her article by saying that teacher should not just pass off students and they should instead flunk them for not mastering the work they are given. Any way of passing them cheats them of that.

            I think that when Sherry said that people should be flunked for not passing classes on their own, that she is both right and wrong. It is good that we should be harder on students and that some should be flunked for not doing work or just not caring about the work at all, but this is not true all the time. Some students can’t help that they are not as strong in one subject as another student and do more poorly on require classes that they need to graduate. Sherry wrote vary strongly when she used her own account on her son failing and at the beginning when she was talking about her underdeveloped adult students. She didn’t do so well in telling how we can change the way things are. She did at the end when she was using the hypothetical student’s names but not so much form her example to that point.

Work Cited

Sherry, Marry. “In Praise of the “F” Word.” The Longman Reader (2010): 515-17. Print.