A short nightmare

I woke up from a relatively short nightmare.

I dreamt that the teacher co-training the child for storytelling wanted me to spend time with the child on a Saturday. She said that she'll spend time with the child first in the morning while I go and take over her shift in the afternoon.

When I asked her for a reason for doing that, she replied that it's to retain children with good results in our school and she was giving a lot of crappy reasons to sustain her weak argument.

In the dream, I wanted to refute her, but didn't given her rank in school.

Towards the end, I did ask her if it's necessary since the competition is already over. And the dream faded out.

I woke up.

The whole training episode has probably taken a toll on me, so much that I view it as a nightmare. The most crappy thing is: the teacher goes around telling others that the girl didn't receive enough training!

The truth is: she got so much of it that she was put off. That explains why she was demotivated to come for training.

And there's only so much training can do. The kids at the competition were far better in all ways, especially their command of English.

The complaint about the father isn't quite justified as well. As a parent, I can understand where he's coming from. No doubt I would like my child to take part in a storytelling competition, but there's a limit to the participation. I can't possibly allow my kid to abandon her academics just to take part in it. And for 2 months, my kid doesn't have enough time or energy to study at home. How would a parent feel?

I told the teacher that I would feel 'heart-pain' to see my kid staying back in school every day to go through a few hours of training every day. The teacher said,"Do you really feel this way? If I were the parent, I would want her to go through it! It's to develop her character and to let her know that she needs to go through hardship to achieve something."

I can only say that it's easy to say this when you are not married and you don't have a kid going through the turmoil, and especially when it's got nothing to do with academic achievement.

A part of me hopes that my boss won't ask me to train another child for the competition with this teacher again. Another part of me wonders if the teacher will do the same thing as staying back till 5pm next year to train a child for the same competition when our school goes single session next year.

Let me make a guess: she won't. Then again, it's difficult to say since she's a single and got no other commitment besides work, and she doesn't have any marking or lesson-preparation to do.