As a parent there are a lot of events in your child’s life that you are not fully prepared for.  One of these events for me was my daughter’s first day of school.  We were prepared for her to be shy and hide behind our legs as she took in her new world in small doses.  We were prepared for our tears as we left her on her own for the first time.   We were even prepared for her to beg us never to make her go back to that big scary place again.  What came as a shock was when the teacher pulled us to the side her first day of school and chastised us for teaching her the alphabet. 

At first I thought I had misunderstood.  The fault must have been with me and that I had mistook what she was saying. This had happened before, I go into a restaurant and order chips and get what I consider fries instead.  But no, this seemingly intelligent woman was standing there telling me I had destroyed my child by teaching her the abc’s.  Apparently, the alphabet is an archaic and outdated form of teaching.  They now use a system of grunting, clicking, and moaning.  They call it phonics.

Most parents will do anything to help their children, I hope I can be counted among them.  For months every afternoon I would sit on our living room floor with my daughter and grunt and moan.  We would play games and act like animals. We would pretend to be vehicles, plants, or sometimes just made up characters. We would do anything that made a sound that she could associate with a certain letter.  I felt like a sideshow act.  I looked like a moron, I sounded like a moron, and after months of these ‘excercises’ I was proved to be a moron. 

At a parent teacher conference, my husband and I were informed we were once again failures.  Because my daughter and I are American, our accents are different. This caused the phonics program they were using to be ineffective.  Not necessarily because of our accents, but because the teacher refused to believe that my daughter was making what she deemed as the appropriate sounds and following their program.  The other fact  being  that the children were spelling using letters whose sounds changed because of their placement in the word. They were no longer using phonics.  They were now using this new teaching technique, they called it The Alphabet!

I consider myself a fairly reasonable woman.  I usually bite my tongue and refrain from sharing my innermost thoughts with the people I come into contact with.  But as I sat there, I had the image of every parent, teacher, and student collectively smacking their foreheads. So I did what most students wish to do to their teachers. I called this educated woman a moron and walked out of her classroom.