So the newest treasure unearthed from my parents' house was a shoebox containing most of my report cards from Kindergarten through my graduation from high school. I went to the same school that whole time -- a small school where my graduating class only had about sixty kids in it, and where my mom taught math and my dad was the middle school principal. One of the features of this particular small school is that when you got report cards, you didn't just get grades or check marks or similar rough evaluations of your progress. You got comments. And it is those comments that made for an afternoon of surprisingly entertaining reading.

Some things immediately stand out as downright bizarre. From my fourth-grade gym teacher: We recently learned a number of square dances. She learned them all very easily and knew all the words and calls on the record. Good Lord. Once a dork, always a dork, I suppose. But even more shockingly, it goes on to say this: She is quite light on her feet and has a good sense of rhythm. Yeah. My tremendous physical grace is usually noted right after my dainty and unassuming laugh on the list of Qualities I Do Not Have And Will Not Have, Ever.

That same year, my music teacher -- who had known me practically since birth -- wrote this: Many things have changed since her pre-school days, when her mates sometimes didn't know how to take this literate, calculating child and she didn't know how to take them. He wrote a little asterisk above "calculating," and there's a note at the bottom that says he means it in a nice way. So I was a calculating pre-schooler, apparently, but in a good way.

One of the recurring themes is that for some reason, almost every Spanish teacher I ever had absolutely hated my guts. It's not in any of these report cards, actually, but one of them once pulled me out of study hall -- despite the fact that she wasn't my teacher at the time -- to tell me that she had heard how badly I was misbehaving in Mr. da Silva's class, and she frankly "wouldn't wish a student like [me] on [her] worst enemy." He had his revenge, though -- when I was talking in class one time, he threw me out of class and sent me to sit outside my father's office, despite the fact that my father was the middle school principal and I was in upper school. He just thought I would find that more humiliating. Cool, huh?

Then there are these comments that pluck something remarkably resonant that makes me remember exactly what school was like. The lower school gym teacher again, talking about third grade this time: She needs to accept the fact that she will make mistakes and so will all the rest of us. Sometimes this causes her great unhappiness. We will work on these feelings together when necessary. In fifth grade, she said: She is very hard on herself and anticipates failure which seldom comes about. A more positive and optimistic outlook would save her lots of worry. Sigh. Maybe our hard work in third grade wasn't taking.

The overwhelming theme by middle school and high school was that I was never working as hard as I should have been, especially from about eighth grade through tenth. My ninth grade science teacher: She has appeared preoccupied in many classes. For God's sake, that was Earth Science. I hated that class. Literally, the study of piles of rocks. How thrilling. I was probably preoccupied by living things. Specifically, my lack of effort took the form of being incredibly disorganized. It appears that I handed in almost nothing on time from 1984 to 1987. My ninth-grade math teacher -- in giving me an A-, I might add: I think she would agree that her organizational skills need to be improved. He was sweet, that teacher -- young and geeky, one of several of my ninth-grade teachers who came to dinner at my parents' house one night and wound up discussing with my parents the crush I had on the Blond Wonder Boy. (Now there was an evening.) Oh, and here's a nice snide remark worthy of the girls in my class in eighth grade, even though this was the teacher: I do wish that there were some way that she would get assignments in on time. It would be nice to chalk it up as part of her "charm" but it does affect her achievement. Part of my "charm"? Ugh. Another teacher warned that my lack of organization would eventually "great limit" my academic potential, which turned out to be, quite frankly, not true. What I needed was to get the hell out of high school, where people obsess over your notebook and your homework and your handwriting, and to get to law school, where people only care whether you learned the stuff by the end of the semester. I would say my lack of organization has proved a greater threat to my credit rating than to my academic potential. But I realize that in seventh grade, they have to tell you that your failure to clean out your bookbag will lead you down the road to unemployability.

If you know me at all, get this, from tenth-grade math: She is quite "talky" at inappropriate times and hopefully she will grow out of it. Hahahahahahaha . . . yeah. Good thing that one came through.

On the up side, there was occasional appreciation for my fundamental goofball nature. The band director said this, when I was in tenth grade: I have delighted in the knowledge that at least she understands some of my extemporaneous jokes. I don't remember him being especially funny, but I guess it's all relative. And always, there was the other thing. This was my kindergarten teacher: She has done some charming creative writing. My first-grade teacher: She has enjoyed being the author, illustrator and publisher of her own book, "Camping." (It's a classic, you know. Available at bookstores now.) My second-grade teacher: She greatly enjoys creative writing. She is skillful in the use of language, making excellent choices of expressive words and phrases. . . writing stories seems to delight her. Third grade: She expresses herself well in creative writing.

One of my major discoveries was that in a few areas, I peaked early. For instance, it would appear that in gym class, I peaked in about second grade, when the teacher said: She is very much a part of our Fri. basketball game. I can honestly tell you that I do not remember voluntarily playing basketball, ever.

There are some things that sound eerily like they could describe situations I still run into now, which I always find both mildly amusing and very depressing. Third-grade music teacher, on my tendency to get in fights: Dialogues that start low-keyed turn into verbal sparring rounds with voices becoming louder and higher-pitched -- Voila! [okay, actually he wrote "viola," but still] An argument is born. He was worried that sometimes, I had a tendency to "pick up a more negative signal than was broadcast." Hmm.

It was a lot of fun, though, to even see the handwriting again of the teachers I loved most. One was my eleventh-grade history teacher, whom I adored. I idolized her and wanted to be her, and probably, when I'm on an academic roll, I actually channel her a little bit, even now. She was wry and funny and smart, and she had quit high school at sixteen because it was so boring, but then she went on to college and became really quite brilliant. She used to sometimes make these really witty and dry remarks, and she'd look around the room at the blank faces of the sarcasm-deficient high school juniors, none of whom got it, and then she would mutter, "Shoot lower, Sheriff, they're ridin' Shetland ponies." I'll be damned if I don't still think that's one of the funniest things I ever heard. She said this about me: I will miss having her in class. She kept me on my proverbial toes. A high compliment.

A special note for those of you keeping score of this sort of thing at home or at your Center for Research Into Very Bad Ideas, the first mention that I have told my gym teacher that I am on a diet comes in third grade. So that means I was eight.

Like a lot of people, I was tired of high school by the time it was over. I had a feeling there were other things to do, and I sort of wanted to go do them. I think that explains a lot about this, from my senior year physics teacher: What I enjoy most about teaching her is her refusal to accept things as given. She forces me to convince her. He made this comment about one of my more annoying high school girl habits, too: Her lab work is fine and purple. He was cool. I liked him a lot. Probably not much more than ten years or so older than we were, and looked every bit the physics geek he was, complete with outdated haircut and glasses. He used to come to our house for dinner quite a lot as well, and he and I would talk about Donald O'Connor and whether he might actually be a better dancer than Gene Kelly. When I was in law school, he got sick with something that wasn't MS, but seemed like an even more wicked relative of MS. It gradually got worse, and a few years ago, he died shortly after my mother visited him in a hospital in Chicago. Brutally unfair.

My art teacher was an interesting character. Very blunt. I was terrible at art, and I hated it, so I'm sure I was rather an uphill battle for him. In seventh grade, he complained: She does have some difficulty with very fine motor activities in that she loses patience quickly -- forget being a brain surgeon. Yeah, he really said that. Nice, huh? Sheesh. In eighth grade, he said this: Too bad as the great ideas fall far short of this mark and she ends up looking very average. Very average? Quite honestly, if you had seen anything I drew, ever, you would realize what a compliment "average" was. The next year, another teacher gave me a C+ in Surrealism. That is not a joke.

Every once in a while, I got in a few licks of my own. My report from Project Adventure -- a sort of Outward Bound Lite thing we had to do in seventh grade, with lots of ropes courses and jumping onto trapezes and balancing and a lot of other things that it horrified me to do in public -- includes my own self-evaluation, which I filled out with what was apparently the slack-ass attitude I took toward everything, if my report cards are any indication. Asked what I had learned, I wrote, "That I can accomplish certain things and not others, and that I can't climb trees." I was quite the go-getter, no?

What do you suppose I should make of the fact that I was accused by a teacher IN THE FIFTH GRADE of being guilty of "a touch of pedantry"? He went on to say: She is a notably sweet and loving youngster, qualities more important by far than any degree of woolly-headedness. I talked to him not long ago -- he and his wife are good friends of the family, and I'm pretty sure he no longer thinks I'm "woolly-headed."

But okay, this is the one that made me laugh the loudest. This is a comment about me when I was in fourth grade: She has learned that while many adults enjoy participating in long philosophical discussions or describing every detail of an experience, children are more likely to appreciate succinctness. There's really no nice way to say you bore the hell out of the rest of the ten-year-olds, I guess. Furthermore, I have no idea what she means by "learned," but I have a feeling she wouldn't be surprised that over at TWoP, my recaps are twenty pages, when everyone else's are fifteen.

What kills me is seeing how many cliched, ugly, self-esteem-nosedive habits I was picking up by tenth grade: Often she makes a barely audible but relevant remark but then won't repeat the remark. That's tenth grade European History. So much for the over-sharing, philosophical-discussion class-discussion chatterbox of youth, who pretty much went on vacation in eighth grade and didn't come back until law school. There is, however, a glimmer of my current career in my fourth-grade gym teacher's mention of my interest in "some of the finer points of rules interpretation."

Oh, and a very dreamy seventh-grade science teacher said I had a "bright, inquiring mind." My friend E and I once saw him on a class overnight field trip, walking back to his room in a towel. It was a formative experience of my youth.

And just to prove that nothing really important ever changes, I will close with a quote from my fifth-grade math teacher, who said this: I am concerned with the negative quality of the repartee she enters into with two of the young men in the class. Boys who can hold their own in verbal combat have been distracting me for twenty years. God bless 'em, every one.