Perspective

(H/T: Dave Barry)

Here's the scenario:

A mom in Connecticut asks her kid where all that lunch money is going that she's been giving him for the past few months. Shuffling of the feet, downcast look of abject guilt, then a defensive posture.

"My teacher took it."

This is filed under Dave Barry's "Public Educator of the Week So Far" file:

A public school teacher has been suspended with pay while Hartford school officials investigate allegations that she took cash to excuse students from detention.

[snip]

One parent who made a complaint said that the teacher took $30 or $40 from her son.

"She was always getting $2 or $3 for him not to serve detention," Raynette Little told the Hartford Courant.

So which reaction makes more sense to you?

[Mother's apparent reaction]: "The teacher took how much money??"

[Woody's probable reaction]: "You've been in detention how many times??"

I mean, okay, the fact that this teacher was probably bending some obscure school district regulation is, on the surface, disturbing. I personally lost gobs of money in high school by throwing it away on things like cafeteria "food" and getting "shaken down" by seniors who'd been shaving for twenty years already. But here we have a kid who (depending on how you work the math) has been in detention anywhere from 10 to 20 times, and his mom wonders where the money has gone.

I'm not altogether certain that a questionable public education employee is the real issue in this particular case.