It's hard to really make the transition from reality to a school interior. It had taken me years to learn how not to act like a student. At this late date, I even manage to avoid feeling like a teacher, although I am older than the Principal.

When I wander hence to speak to the child's teachers in their own bailiwick, I am often amazed at the number of them who do not know what this word means. Then I go home and marvel at how people who are supposed to be teaching my child believe that if I think I can do it better, then I probably should, while I believe that if they are going to wander out of a college with a teaching certificate, they should better be able to read the damned diploma before they try to teach my child how to read and write.

Of course, if I were capable of teaching my child, I would also most possumbly be capable of doing much better for myself in the real world... Nah, we won't go there. Home schooling is out of the question. My child deserves to suffer many more world views than mine. She needs to learn to be alone in a crowd just as I had to.

Anyway, the inability of some "teachers" to convey more than their own confusion is a source of amusement to me. This could also explain why so little is expected of many of the office functionaries at the school. Somebody has to be the clerk in a building full of people who can barely read and write... who are supposed to be teaching children to do the same... and probably are.

Herein lies the real quandary: how do I empathize with my child's, um, feelings about school (beyond it being a good place to get away from me), without skewing her viewpoint to the point that she selectively ignores or mentally ridicules her instructors?

I have been accused of "thinking too much". This strongly suggests to me that others are in the habit of rationing their thoughts so that they don't use their limited amount up... Which leads them on whom the "shoe fits" to suggest quite strongly that I suffer from "delusions of grandeur". I assure you, there is no suffering involved. That "shoe fits" quite comfortably.