Raising Future Adults

I was always a sickly child. In eighth grade, I missed like a week of school or something and so I turned in my project late, well after everyone else. We were supposed to make a scale model of the solar system. I used a beach ball for the sun and various sizes of other balls and marbles for the planets. I was a smart kid and this teacher took GLEE in busting me. She's the same bitch who got after me for explaining the letter substitution thing to my Hispanic friend who spoke English as a second language. That's the point at which I concluded I'm not necessarily inherently smarter than anyone else. I knew what it was because my high school drop out father did the cryptoquote in the newspaper every single day. This kid had no idea where to start and she bitched at me about "cheating" for telling him it was a letter substitution puzzle so he had some hope of succeeding. So we are having a fairly private conversation about my very late project and she asks me about s...