Student Question
How would you summarize Andrew Clements' The Report Card?
Quick answer:
Andrew Clements' The Report Card is about how one girl's life changes after she unintentionally makes a mess of everything. Nora Rowley has always been a little different from other people, but the difference between her and others was never clear until Nora got hurt by her best friend Stephen. For many years, Stephen had always been kind to Nora and never made fun of her for being so smart. However, when Stephen starts doing poorly in school and blames it on Nora, the relationship between them becomes strained. They begin avoiding each other as much as possible. Not long after this, Nora decides that she needs to do something to fix the problem.
To write a short summary of Andrew Clements' The Report
Card, focus on explaining who the main characters are and
what the main events are. The main events in any book will
always be related to the conflict, climax, and resolution.
Andrew Clements' The Report Card is about Nora
Rowley, a girl born a genius who decided the best thing to do was to
hide her intelligence in order to seem like everyone else. She does so because
she observes that people get jealous of others who are different from them and
because, when she first discovered she wasn't normal, she felt like she was
being pushed to perform her abilities, which she didn't like. After that, she
very intentionally behaved in ways that made her seem like everyone else.
The conflict develops when she begins noticing her best friend Stephen is beginning to feel stupid...
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because he felt so pressured to do well during the Connecticut Mastery Testing that he actually did very badly. After that, Noradeveloped a plan to show that neither bad nor good
grades are true reflections of intelligence, since she intentionally earns
average grades all the time but has a genius intelligence level. She carries
out her plan by trying to intentionally earn all Ds on her
fifth-grade report card.
The climax begins to develop as it becomes known that Nora is
actually a genius who has been hiding her abilities all these years. Since her
plan to expose the meaninglessness of grades was foiled once people saw her for
the genius she truly is, she and Stephen develop another plan
to encourage the whole class to earn nothing but zeros in order to protest
against the weaknesses of the education system. In Nora's mind, the
education system is weak because the lessons only encourage
students to memorize, not think, while grades encourage needless competition.
The climax occurs once it begins to look like Nora and Stephen
will get into serious trouble for pursuing the plan.
As a resolution, Nora realizes that, though she was right to
think poorly of the education and grading system, she was wrong to try and
tackle changing the system all on her own. She further realizes that her
actions caused more harm than good and apologizes to her classmates,
encouraging them to continue to work hard.