The first day of school....
Chem Honors teacher: Any questions?
Red-headed Menace: Kirk or Picard?
It is going to be one of those years, I can just tell.
The teacher actually gave a thoughtful answer ("it depends who you're fighting -- Kirk is better against the Klingons, Picard against the Romulans"), and then proceeded to liven up the rest of class by demonstrating the properties of flammability by pouring various sized pools of ethyl alcohol on lab tables and setting them alight. RHM describes this teacher (ecstatically) as a "sarcastic Trekkie pyro." Just his type of guy, in other words.
I need to have a talk with RHM about classroom behavior before I start getting calls from the school and emails from his teachers. It reminds me of the time the Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy, stuck in an Econ class he needed to take to graduate but which he most emphatically did not want to be in, gave a fake name the first day of class. And the time the NSLDB responded to an assignment from a particularly humorless freshman English teacher by writing an essay on how the pot of petunias in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a heroic figure.
Basically, both the NSLDB and RHM have a hard time dealing with lackluster teaching. On the other hand, they appreciate teachers who challenge them, even when other students hate them. (RHM really likes his Modern History AP teacher even though the guy has a horrible rap among the students: he has a very dry sense of humor, RHM says, and has said that since this can be for college credit he plans to teach it like a college course.)
My kids are many things: boring is not among them. Teachers either love them or want to strangle them -- much as I do, frequently, except that I usually want to do both at the same time.
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