Over on GoComics.com we were discussing visiting a sewage treatment plant, of all things. Don’t ask; we tend to wander over there. Someone remarked that kids wouldn’t be as apt to wander off or touch everything they saw.
Many, many years ago, The Squire volunteered to chaperone Youngest Daughter’s school class on a trip to the Smithsonian. He gathered his troop and set off to one of the buildings. One of the girls in the class was what my grandmother would have called “willful”. A handful, in other words. The child went off in all directions – ducking under ropes and trying to sit on the chairs. Even after The Squire had a “talk” with her, she dashed down one gallery, tapping every single portrait was she went – one, two, three, four . . .
The entire group – five or six students – ended up getting escorted out of the building and onto the mall. My husband made all of them sit on benches until it was time to meet for lunch. After they ate, he took them to another building, and darned if the kid didn’t pull the same stunts all over again. The Squire was seething, and the other students in the group were all angry at her, not him, for missing out. Again he made them sit on benches out on the mall; he sat beside her and tried to get some sense out of her. She could only say she was “just having some fun.” “How much fun is it to sit out here, and have all of your classmates angry with you?” Blank look.
It turned out he had been given that group – that girl – because the staff had hoped she’d behave better for a man than a woman. What with one thing and another, it ended up with the girl having to publicly apologize to her classmates, and then her father brought her over here, to apologize to The Squire.
thisendoftheswamp 