Some friends and I were talking about individualized education, which is a real passion of mine. That led to stories about our grade school experiences and those times when the teachers didn’t know what to do with the advanced kids (set them aside, have them self-teach, and assign extra work was my horrible experience). This turned into stories of getting in trouble at school.

And that reminded me of my favorite vice-principal. Of the school administrators I dealt with, most were tools. Two were really good. One ever treated me as anything other than a child. It was my senior year in high school, and I had FINALLY gotten into creative writing. I had wanted to take it as a freshman, but it was restricted to juniors and seniors with the false assumption that freshman and sophomores needed more time to master the mechanics of writing. Because of scheduling, I could not take it my junior year, so I had to wait until I was almost done with high school. Our teacher was out sick and we had a sub, a retired teacher from the same school. It so happened it was also the anniversary of the death of one of her students fourteen years before. He had died in a car crash or some such and she wanted us to write a story about what he would say to us if he were there that day.