Teacher's Day and an Honest Answer

As usual, this year too they celebrated Teacher’s Day in my 7 year-old daughter’s school with the older kids acting as the teachers for the day. It meant no studies that day. Not even a single period, said my daughter gleefully, just fun, games and events all day.

I expected her to ask why every other day can’t be like this. Turns out she’s old enough to know that hell will freeze over before every day becomes like Teacher’s Day. So then you’d think she’d be happy about that one day? Nope. If Teacher’s Day can be so much fun, she argued with impeccable logic, surely Children’s Day should be even better, right? But no, that’s just a regular day with studies, she grumbled. Why call it Children’s Day if there’s nothing special for kids?

What can I say, kiddo? Adults make the rules, hence the weird world you encounter…

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It takes a while to learn that exams and tests only accept certain answers as “correct”. Conversely, there are certain obviously true points that can’t be mentioned. I realized my daughter has come to that realization when she was revising the answer for the question, “Why do we wear clothes?”

The first part of the answer was along expected lines (“to protect us from heat, cold and dust”). The second part was so unexpected that she refused to believe it (“to make us look beautiful”). Right from birth, all girls know that’s true the primary function of a dress, but a school book answer saying that? Days later, after she knew I wasn’t fooling her, she still has a sheepish, amused look when she cites the “to make us look beautiful” part of the answer.

Don’t get too used to such honesty though, munchkin, this was probably the odd instance that slipped through the proof-reading process…