Andréa sent me this for the Oy folder, but I’d already tagged it as a CIDU. I assume it’s a 50 Shades of Grey reference.
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Her name is Shaileen, or Shay for short. She is doing badly in her classes, and so has lots of grades in the 50’s (presumably out of 100). So her father is looking at the “50 grades of Shay.” Which sounds like the name of a popular book/movie.
I think that’s all there is.
I was wondering if the name was pointing to actress Shailene Woodley (the only person I knew of with that name). But nothing in her credits suggests a connection to 50 Shades. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0940362
It’s a spoonerism. It’d be okay if Shaileen and the nickname Shay were more common or if refer to grades by the percentile (“I mostly get 80 grades but I’m trying to average the 90s”) but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that.
As it is, this is way too tortured (which may be appropriate?)
…..
“So most single horse drawn carriages have difficult going up steep inclines but this one…. this one can do 50 grades of shay”… No… still too tortured.
Is that even a name? Too obscure, so it feels forced. And a grade in the 50s isn’t an ‘F’, at least not in my schooling.
What else could it be, other than a ’50 Shades of Gray’ wordplay?
SingaporeBill: A teacher can have whatever mapping from percentages to grades that they want, of course, or they may curve. But somehow I have in my head that the “canonical” mapping is A=[90,100], B=[80,90), C=[70,80), D=[60,70), F=[0,60)
“at least not in my schooling”
That’s the relevant part.
It’s hard to get a 51 on a test with only about 6 questions on it.
Maybe they could have used the name “Che.”
“It’s hard to get a 51 on a test with only about 6 questions on it.”
Most of my law school exams had 6 (or fewer) questions on them. I tended to do better than 51 (thankfully)
The fact they’re all F’s is likely an indictment of the quality of 50 Shades.
Shaileen is a name; it gets 422,000 raw Google hits. “shaileen shay” gets 204,000 raw Ghits. So neither is terribly rare. It’s in the sporcle.com/games/Shinx/top-300-girls-names-starting-with-sh list but where in the 300 is not clear.
When I first saw this, I thought of the “50 grades” as just giving a count of how many individual grade items she has accumulated. Some good but many bad. But not until this CIDU discussion did I realize the 50 has to be intended as characterizing the level of the grades. And I also have to agree, as you-all have made clear, that yields a very awkward bit of dialogue, that nobody could ever sensibly say in this meaning.
But could it have been saved by going in the direction of my initial reading? If you don’t think there could be that many grades on one report card, consider that there would be one per subject (5?), times per grading period (6 per year), so we’re at about 30… and separate grades for scholarship / effort / conduct (so X 3). So those could be the “50 grades” (or more). And he would still be plausibly berating her if just some of those were bad.
billybob – only if the questions are all equally weighted.
When I was in school, it was:
A=[80,100], B=[70,79), C=[60,69), D=[50,59), F=[0,49)
I was quite surprised when I found that the bottom ranges had all been bumped by ten when my daughter hit school!
Too many kids failing made the schools look bad.
@Andréa: Eh? They *raised* the thresholds, thus failing more.
My bad – reading too fast. I do think, however, in WI the thresholds were lowered, at least for B on down, to have more kids being ‘successful’. Sort of like handing out ‘participation’ trophies to everyone on both teams.
My memory of school days (fifties into early sixties) is that A- was 92% or 93%; A was 94% up; and F was anything below 75%. I don’t recall the exact breakpoints for the grades in between.
I don’t think 80 was a A anywhere on a consistent basis when I was in school (60s and 70s). Some teachers did grade on a curve, so there were times that could be the case.
@Shrug: wow, a much tougher scale! Where was it? Mine was southern Ontario in the mid-70s. I actually graduated from Palo Alto (at the time allegedly one of the top two public high schools in the country), but don’t remember the scale there.
Ontario also had Grade 13 at the time, which meant a university degree was a three-year effort. Really a good thing: kids had an extra year to mature before going off to college, and of course it reduced college costs as well. Kids not planning on college stopped with a Grade 12 diploma, so Grade 13 really was “college light”, with people who {at least thought they} wanted to be there. There were threats to get rid of it for as long as I could remember, and it finally went away in (I think) the 90s.
” not until this CIDU discussion did I realize the 50 has to be intended as characterizing the level of the grades.”
That’s because the caption should have been “50’s grades of Shay” That strays too far from the original, apparently.
She’s acting out; it’s Shay’s rebellion.
@Shrug: wow, a much tougher scale! Where was it?
***************
Lake Park, Minnesota (small town about forty miles east of Fargo, ND.)
I don’t think changing the mapping from percentages to grades has much to do with what the final grade distribution looks like. Probably most teachers have some background idea what the final grade distribution should look like, and choose the difficulty of questions with that mapping in mind.
The cartoonist thought of the Spoonerism, and decided he had to make something that fit it, no matter how forced.
I have to take 20 hours of tax education to be able to prepare taxes as a business. I take classes online and there are an assortment to choose from (with 2 of them specifically required). The 1 hour classes have 5 questions. One has to have at least 70 to pass the class (and not get stuck paying for more credits). On the one hour classes one can only miss one question.
(One more of the choice classes plus the smaller required class – Ethics and then the dreaded – by me – 3 hour class with timed exam and I will be done for the year and I have until December 31 to finish them.)
Back when the original phrase was fresh, Piraro did a rendition in Bizarro that was
– more intricate
– less tortured
– an actual book title
That puts this rendition to absolute shame.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Her name is Shaileen, or Shay for short. She is doing badly in her classes, and so has lots of grades in the 50’s (presumably out of 100). So her father is looking at the “50 grades of Shay.” Which sounds like the name of a popular book/movie.
I think that’s all there is.
I was wondering if the name was pointing to actress Shailene Woodley (the only person I knew of with that name). But nothing in her credits suggests a connection to 50 Shades. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0940362
It’s a spoonerism. It’d be okay if Shaileen and the nickname Shay were more common or if refer to grades by the percentile (“I mostly get 80 grades but I’m trying to average the 90s”) but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that.
As it is, this is way too tortured (which may be appropriate?)
…..
“So most single horse drawn carriages have difficult going up steep inclines but this one…. this one can do 50 grades of shay”… No… still too tortured.
Is that even a name? Too obscure, so it feels forced. And a grade in the 50s isn’t an ‘F’, at least not in my schooling.
What else could it be, other than a ’50 Shades of Gray’ wordplay?
SingaporeBill: A teacher can have whatever mapping from percentages to grades that they want, of course, or they may curve. But somehow I have in my head that the “canonical” mapping is A=[90,100], B=[80,90), C=[70,80), D=[60,70), F=[0,60)
“at least not in my schooling”
That’s the relevant part.
It’s hard to get a 51 on a test with only about 6 questions on it.
Maybe they could have used the name “Che.”
“It’s hard to get a 51 on a test with only about 6 questions on it.”
Most of my law school exams had 6 (or fewer) questions on them. I tended to do better than 51 (thankfully)
The fact they’re all F’s is likely an indictment of the quality of 50 Shades.
Shaileen is a name; it gets 422,000 raw Google hits. “shaileen shay” gets 204,000 raw Ghits. So neither is terribly rare. It’s in the sporcle.com/games/Shinx/top-300-girls-names-starting-with-sh list but where in the 300 is not clear.
When I first saw this, I thought of the “50 grades” as just giving a count of how many individual grade items she has accumulated. Some good but many bad. But not until this CIDU discussion did I realize the 50 has to be intended as characterizing the level of the grades. And I also have to agree, as you-all have made clear, that yields a very awkward bit of dialogue, that nobody could ever sensibly say in this meaning.
But could it have been saved by going in the direction of my initial reading? If you don’t think there could be that many grades on one report card, consider that there would be one per subject (5?), times per grading period (6 per year), so we’re at about 30… and separate grades for scholarship / effort / conduct (so X 3). So those could be the “50 grades” (or more). And he would still be plausibly berating her if just some of those were bad.
billybob – only if the questions are all equally weighted.
When I was in school, it was:
A=[80,100], B=[70,79), C=[60,69), D=[50,59), F=[0,49)
I was quite surprised when I found that the bottom ranges had all been bumped by ten when my daughter hit school!
Too many kids failing made the schools look bad.
@Andréa: Eh? They *raised* the thresholds, thus failing more.
My bad – reading too fast. I do think, however, in WI the thresholds were lowered, at least for B on down, to have more kids being ‘successful’. Sort of like handing out ‘participation’ trophies to everyone on both teams.
My memory of school days (fifties into early sixties) is that A- was 92% or 93%; A was 94% up; and F was anything below 75%. I don’t recall the exact breakpoints for the grades in between.
I don’t think 80 was a A anywhere on a consistent basis when I was in school (60s and 70s). Some teachers did grade on a curve, so there were times that could be the case.
@Shrug: wow, a much tougher scale! Where was it? Mine was southern Ontario in the mid-70s. I actually graduated from Palo Alto (at the time allegedly one of the top two public high schools in the country), but don’t remember the scale there.
Ontario also had Grade 13 at the time, which meant a university degree was a three-year effort. Really a good thing: kids had an extra year to mature before going off to college, and of course it reduced college costs as well. Kids not planning on college stopped with a Grade 12 diploma, so Grade 13 really was “college light”, with people who {at least thought they} wanted to be there. There were threats to get rid of it for as long as I could remember, and it finally went away in (I think) the 90s.
” not until this CIDU discussion did I realize the 50 has to be intended as characterizing the level of the grades.”
That’s because the caption should have been “50’s grades of Shay” That strays too far from the original, apparently.
She’s acting out; it’s Shay’s rebellion.
@Shrug: wow, a much tougher scale! Where was it?
***************
Lake Park, Minnesota (small town about forty miles east of Fargo, ND.)
I don’t think changing the mapping from percentages to grades has much to do with what the final grade distribution looks like. Probably most teachers have some background idea what the final grade distribution should look like, and choose the difficulty of questions with that mapping in mind.
The cartoonist thought of the Spoonerism, and decided he had to make something that fit it, no matter how forced.
I have to take 20 hours of tax education to be able to prepare taxes as a business. I take classes online and there are an assortment to choose from (with 2 of them specifically required). The 1 hour classes have 5 questions. One has to have at least 70 to pass the class (and not get stuck paying for more credits). On the one hour classes one can only miss one question.
(One more of the choice classes plus the smaller required class – Ethics and then the dreaded – by me – 3 hour class with timed exam and I will be done for the year and I have until December 31 to finish them.)
Back when the original phrase was fresh, Piraro did a rendition in Bizarro that was
– more intricate
– less tortured
– an actual book title
That puts this rendition to absolute shame.
I found the link from which I had downloaded it myself: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2015/05/30/shifty-grades-of-fey/
Arnold Zwicky! Okayy!
Props to Piraro for showing Tina signing with her left hand, which is correct.