no sleep for me last night...

So, I get an e-mail from my daughter's language arts teacher alerting me to the fact that my daughter has an "F" in the class right now. This being the 10th day of the school year, mind you. Two of the reasons are from assignments not turned in. There is a zero tolerance policy on homework/assignments not turned in on time. This I understand. ( "It's in my locker.", is not an excuse. ) What I don't get, and what was driven home to us at "Back-to-School Night" last Tuesday; is that THIS year they have changed the grading system to "match" the high school grading system so that we don't stress out our ninth graders next year when they hit high school, and their grades show up on their transcripts which will be looked at when being considered for college. O.k., let us take a breath here, and look at this more closely: instead of just having a grading scale which remains the same through all 12 years of school, we apparently now have a separate one for high schoolers...and we are worried about stressing the new 9th graders out with this...so we deal with that instead by stressing out our 8th graders with this new high school grading system NOW, because we don't want to screw up our 9th graders chances of getting into college by having crappy grades from all the stress...SO: we are stressing out our 8th graders about something that is FIVE YEARS IN THE FUTURE...you know, instead of just instilling a love of learning in them NOW...and of course the deeply personal irony for me here is that I believe in public education...