Inner Life, Revealed

If you send your children to school it is important to cultivate your image with the school staff so that they don't know how crazy or unwashed your family really is. Here I wrote about how to head off a child's possible misbehavior and here I wrote about sticking to your image even when it seems ridiculous to do so.

Recently, Gianna came home with information about a program called XtraMath. I have numerous problems with this.

Firstly, the title strikes fear into my heart. Why extra? Why any, at all? But I'm trying not to pass down my problem with math to my children, so I have to pretend like my horrified exclamation "Extra?! MATH!?!?" is really excitement. I should be able to do this with no difficulties because I have a minor in theater but I am so tired. Acting is hard, as my acting prof declared freshman year. No, good sir, PARENTING is hard.

Secondly, this program exists on the world wide web and requires log in names and sign in names and passcodes and email addresses and passwords and parent ID numbers (sonuva...more numbers) and student ID numbers and I can't keep them all straight. I'm thankful we have such great technology to assist with education, we could be using an abacus or something equally rudimentary, I get it, but for real can we get some flashcards up in this piece?

Gianna loves it. Straight up, will sit for an hour doing XtraMath. You know who else loves it? Brad. The Dad. Schueler. He asked to play, too, and almost started doing problems under Gianna's name but I had to stop him because her teacher can log in and see how she's doing and if he starts messing with it our kid is going to look like a big, fat, cheater. Or a math genius. Either way, it's no good.

Not one to be deterred, Brad added himself under my parent account. I now have two children enrolled in XtraMath. Their names are Gianna and Giannasdad. He's up to multiplication now. I'm just so proud. Any sort of illusions I had with Mrs. Dickman possibly thinking we're just a regular family are gone, baby, gone. Oh man, I like to laugh at this stuff. I hope Mrs. Dickman finds us as amusing as I do.