Dedications

My wife is the one who monitors our kids education, their home work follow up, their tuitions, etc. Sometimes I get confused who is going to school, whether is it she or the kids.

Even more confusing are the teachers who give the kids projects to do. Most of the time it is done by the parents, and neither do would I expect the kids to do some of the weird stuff. Recent was a bizarre project where my son had to make a mat and that too stitched with different border cloth, etc. Imagine a eleven year old trying his hand with a needle and thread. Well he is good at needling our brains, with his cute tantrums when he wants something, but that does not qualify him to use a needle and thread.

Then when I am on travel I get these frantic phone calls, “Can you prepare a chart of pictures of good habits”, as our daughter needs to submit it. So there I am scavenging the Net for pictures and copy pasting it in a word document and mailing it to my wife. Then I wonder was I practicing a good habit by copying ‘copy righted’ pictures from the Net. Then there was a call from home when I was overseas asking (read demanding), “send an article on Peninsula’s in Asia”. Being in a meeting I replied as if I was attending a client call, and replied “Don’t worry Madam I will send you the reports by the evening”. My wife was on cloud nine, as she thought I was just getting better in my romantic vocabulary addressing her as a Madam.

Then to find Peninsula’s in Asia. First question in my mind was what the hell is a Peninsula? Thanks to Wikipedia and Google, I sat after (and during) office hours and got the meat. Imagine no Wikipedia or Google; my son would have doubts if I have ever been to school. After getting the stuff, he mails back confirming that the material I sent was good. I was wondering was I getting an approval rating from a teacher and wished he had to put five stars also in the mail, like how he gets star ratings in his school book, as anyway the project was a product exported from overseas since I did it there.

One of the most weird projects was to write an article on five neighbors. Can understand one, but five? So there I am knocking doors of neighbors, who give those suspicious querying looks that seem to say “Why do you want to know about us”. To make it worse pictures had to be clicked, and know where they work, etc. Fortunately having some great neighbors, I could pull it off. I can understand maybe the project was to in cultivate in kids a sense of social belonging or social neighborly awareness, but if what if the neighbors don’t want too?

When my daughter was in Kinder Garden, there was a day they had to take a pet to school, if they had one. Great novel idea, as it was ecstasy for the kids for the kids to take a pet. My house which is a zoo, it was a debate which pet to take. Whichever was the pet, it was the parent (read my wife) who had to take the animal to school. I was wondering how working parents managed this feat. Though the exercise was optional, but then kids are going to be kids, and all would love to take a pet to school. If I did not have any pets and if my daughter threw a fit, I would have accompanied her to school as a pet.

My humble request to teachers is “We don’t need no education, “TEACHER LEAVE US PARENTS ALONE”.