No doubt you’re correct, David. They’re almost certainly a rarity both in and out of the teaching fields. While I did embellish some for sake of color, it was an honor and a kick to know and tow beside the Reverend Monte Mo, cleric and wrecker driver. If you ever met their “home schooled” kids, I think you’d dig ‘em, though you might be hard-pressed to feel the same about a good segment of the kids who attended the public schools in that county (…sigh). It’s one of the reasons we moved back east. Cali schools were falling apart at the time, & we knew first hand because we’d been fostering high school kids up until B was born. It’s why we nearly home schooled ours. Until we came to our joint wits & realized that we would best serve the kids we bring into this oddforsakenshitstorm by letting them grow up with their community. With us as their continuous allies, tutors, trainers, cheerleaders, conspirators in crazy music and poetry, spiritual guides ~ for what we’re worth, and everything else one could imagine inspired parents doing to persistently redirect their youth and energies away from the easy dire straits of the lowest common denominator and negatively charged sad sack escapism of the woe begotten and the just plain lazy. Not that those kids don’t have a spirit in them as well, but there’s a lot of woe out there and not near enough inspiration to go around. I know, it’s a sorrow. So we led ours to believe in their best efforts; focused on Academics, Athletics, Arts/Music. So far, so good, even though the public school’s often high-handed shortcomings have tried and tried to knock them for a loop with a new & burgeoning devotion to mediocrity at nearly every turn. Puzzling. Tell you what though, David, it’s a good thing that grade school is merely a stepping stone, a rite of passage, a means to far greater ends, because I’m fully convinced that all our grade schools nationally are undermined year after year by the present economic trickle-up effect of government & industry. & private schools are feeling the pinch as well, & so the American family/mortgageowner is being pinched for more and more dollars every year. & I think sometimes the price is getting too high for the quality of the service provided. The price is getting too high because the federal government isn’t supporting the schools as it damn-straight aughta be, with education funds galore, the plutocratic bastids! & the teachers are being pinched, and the students are being pinched, …there’s a whole lota pinchin’ goin’ on, …except…wayyyyy up there in the ethereal where the money flows, in a day after day contempt of Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion and we, the disenfranchised. So I don’ know anymore, David, good son o Mr. Baerwald.
