Like Mother, Like Daughter

Daughter`s teacher came up to me today and said, "You really need to help her with her vocabulary homework."

Uh-oh.

It seems that students in her class are required to use each of their vocab words in full sentences.

"So if the word is, 'conceal,'" said the teacher,"Daughter writes a sentence like, "I know what 'conceal" means."

And when the teacher said this, I got a warm fuzzy feeling all over, because I used to do exactly the same thing.

Daughter reminds me so much of Hub that it scares me sometimes. She has his face and his personality -- classic Japanese passive-aggressive behavior, as well as hone and tatemae (which, explained simply, is the difference between one`s true feelings and one`s actions, which the Japanese have perfected into sort of a social martial art) -- to the extent that I sometimes wonder whether he managed to slip a gender-adjusted cloned embryo into my uterus, when I wasn`t looking.

So I`m always glad when I see rare flashes of myself in her. I will take her word-use strategy as a sign that she does, indeed, carry some of me in her DNA.

I did things like that all the time. I vividly remember arguing with my ninth-grade French teacher, who wouldn`t give me credit for a portion of a test that asked us to describe a picture of a room.

I had written, "There are no chickens here." And, goddamnit, there weren`t any chickens! It wasn`t wrong!

And to this day, I still remember that the French word for chicken is poulet. This kernel of retained knowlege has helped me read menus and order my preferred protein in countless restaurants over the years, proving that there are indeed advantages to this method of "learning through arguing with the teacher."

It`s not quite the Socratic method, but hell, you`ve got to start somewhere.