Where is my Permanent Record? I was told there would be a Permanent Record.
When I was a student at North View Elementary in Muncie, Indiana (go Rockets!), our teachers told us over and over that our tests, our grades, and our disciplinary issues would all go on our Permanent Records, following us through our academic career, and even into our adult lives.
They were so important that they were pronounced with capital letters: Permanent Records.
Our very successes depended on the sanctity and purity of our Records, because they would tell future school administrators about our abilities and potential. They told future employers about our knowledge and rule-following. They would even determine which college you got into, sending you to the Ivy League or attending the bartender college housed above a pizza parlor in a shady part of town.
Any marks on your Permanent Record could shatter all your dreams like a milk bottle on the sidewalk, and so nearly everyone lived in fear of having it besmirched.
"What even is our permanent record?" we asked our teachers, failing to capitalize the letters. They shook their heads at our innocence.
"Oh, children," they’d say, pitying our ignorant naivete. "Your Permanent Record is the most important document of your life, even more than your birth certificate." (I’m paraphrasing a bit.)
"It follows you around forever, for your entire life. It’s a Record of everything you’ve ever done in school, and school counselors look at it to understand what kind of person you are.
"It can affect whether you get into a good college. And your employers will even look at it and decide whether you are good enough to work for their company."
They said that if we didn’t get into a good school, we’d get a terrible job like digging ditches, for other people to lie dead in when their parents didn’t know where they were at night.
And you’d have to live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Your children — assuming you found someone who could love you despite the stains on your life — would carry the shame heaped on your family name, forever tainted by you failing your 5th-grade fractions test.
"I was going to be an accountant, but the firm saw on my Permanent Record, and so they threw me out of the company on my first day."
Our teachers spoke of the Permanent Record with a sense of fear and reverence. Awe and dread. Admiration and shame. Their own Records, they said, were gleaming white, free of any blots or embarrassing incidents like the kinds we were committing. The only people with records as spotless as theirs were priests and angels, and when they were our age, they never blackened their reputations by doing anything so un-American as teasing their friends or not doing their homework.
So, where are our Records? Who has them? Why have I never seen them? No one ever mentioned them once I got to high school. It’s like the entire concept was completely forgotten and never mentioned again, like the TV show Northern Exposure.
Good thing, too, because I got into plenty of trouble in high school. Plus, I failed freshman algebra the first year I took it. I had to retake it in my junior year, but no one batted an eye when I applied for college. They never asked me for a copy, and they certainly didn’t ask my high school to send a copy. (Go, Muncie Central Bearcats!)
So I’m left to wonder, nearly fifty years later, did we even have Permanent Records? Were they just a hoax? A monster used by teachers to scare little children into behaving?
I’m starting to think they weren’t real, because our principal’s office wasn’t big enough to hold all the records of all our current and past students. Believe me, I would know; I was down there often enough.
Which means we were lied to. Our teachers convinced us of the existence of bureaucratic boogeymen who could spin our fate in any direction, making decisions about our lives based on ink marks on a page, and many of us worried about this well into adulthood. But it turns out that these things never even existed.
That’s a relief, because I’m always worried that Santa Claus is going to find mine one day.
Photo credit: Card file, Freckle80 (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)
Files on gray shelf (PickPik, Creative Commons o)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.