Several years ago I dated a girl that was a public school teacher in a middle school in inner-city Colosse. Her occupation was a plus on the general assessment as teaching is an admirable occupation. Though she didn’t particularly choose her school (when you’re doing on-the-job certification, your school is chosen for you) it was still a tough job that doesn’t get enough recognition. That was my thinking going in to it.

The scorn that she had for her students made itself apparent very quickly. I was understanding about it until she talked about how some days she would see how many students she could get to cry. There wasn’t another date after that. “Who,” I thought to myself, “gets pleasure out of making junior high school kids cry in class?”

Coming out of a convenience store at lunch, I saw a couple mothers coming out of the Laundromat right across from the convenience store. One of the little boys was fussing up a storm with an obnoxious little whine. My sympathy for the mother started to dwindle when she started mocking her kid’s whine. Then again, I don’t have any kids and I figured maybe that was the only thing that worked so maybe that was excusable. Then she threatened to put the kid (probably 8 years old or so) in his little sister’s babyseat. The kid started bawling.

Then the mother of the bawling child bragged to the other mother about what she had just accomplished.

Yessirree… getting an already whiney eight year old to cry. That’s sure something to be proud of, isn’t it? It was quite difficult to imagine any way at all in which that might be remotely helpful. But Mommy got to feel good about her temperamental superiority, which was apparently what was really important to her.