R-O-N-G

I’m not usually one to complain, but when a hotel advertises hot and cold running champagne, you don’t expect the Jacuzzi to run out of Dom Perignon so quickly. Not to mention that I specifically asked for imported cucumbers to be placed on my eyes at the spa so you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered domestic fruit being used. When things start to go wrong, it’s just one thing after another. And don’t even get me started on the service on the airlines. If those snarky flight attendants with their attitude is what passes for first class, I don’t even want to imagine what goes on in business.

I am also having trouble with my husband. I suppose he’s trying his best, but what a lout. I TOLD him that I wanted a vacation to get away from it all. Did I say I wanted a vacation to get away from SOME of it? No, I did not. So you can imagine my outrage when we ended up on this non-descript island in the South Seas that nobody has ever heard of. Then he gets a room on the top floor so we have to wait for ages to get the elevator to take us out to the beach. Then he changes us to a suite on the ground floor but now we don’t have a view of the horizon. And the hotel staff? Don’t even ask. Some of them spoke five or six languages but not English. If you’re going to learn a foreign language, why wouldn’t you learn English, the language that I speak? I may not know any other languages, but at least I know English.

Speaking of inept employees, those buffoons at the hotel remind me of the teachers in my son’s school. The teachers there are supposed to TEACH my child. We pay good money. Sure my son misses classes. But he’s up late playing video games and he says some of those classes are boring anyway and that the teachers don’t allow him to learn the way he wants. The teachers are paid to teach him not to be the sleeping police telling him that he has to stay awake in class. They should teach my child when he wants to learn. When he’s awake obviously. What’s the point of trying to teach him when he’s sleeping or stoned? (Maybe he shouldn’t be sneaking off campus to buy pot, but if the school didn’t really want him to smoke pot they would put guard dogs by the eight foot fence at the perimeter of the campus. Duh!)

When we were choosing schools, they told us that this school was supportive of children with different learning styles. Supportive? Hah! It’s nothing of the kind. My son isn’t learning anything. And worse than the fact that he’s not learning anything at all, they give him bad grades. Can you believe it? Those feckless teachers aren’t teaching him then, to add insult to injury, they give him bad grades. As if it’s my son’s fault that he doesn’t do homework. How many times do I have to tell them that he’s up late playing video games?

***

How many of us as loving parents make a similar mistake to the one made by the (admittedly unbearable) narrator above? Hopefully, none of us is so spoiled rotten as to be demeaning to hard working hotel employees. But what are we communicating to our kids when we openly deride their teachers? Admittedly some teachers are more sensitive than others, some are more open to kids with different learning styles, and some teachers are doubtless downright inept.

But what is the point of going on and on about how horrible the classroom is? If the teachers are imperfect, shouldn’t we take responsibility for educating our own children? To allow our kids to play video games to the exclusion of reading books is to set ourselves up for meaningless complaint. Like the boy who killed both his parents then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan, allowing our kids to avoid learning because the teachers are imperfect is a bad strategy.

Kids should be expected to make it work, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to-as was a slogan of a previous generation-“make it do or do without”. And if the student fails to get through a class, let him learn from the experience. “Success doesn’t come from avoiding failure but from overcoming failure.”

And parenting from a hotel room never works, no matter where the cucumbers come from.