Greetings, fellow connoisseurs of the quirky and quizzical tales that make our mundane lives a smidgen more bearable. I’m Roger, your intrepid navigator through the tempestuous seas of human folly, bringing you a story so deliciously contentious it’ll make your toes curl. This, my friends, is not a drill. This is a real Reddit story from a real person, and it’s as juicy as a ripe peach in August.
Picture this: a struggling single parent, barely keeping the wolf from the door, raising a budding literary genius in the making (or a defiant teen rebelling through the medium of fiction; the jury’s still out). Our protagonist’s daughter, Ines, is an 8th grader with an imagination so vast it transcends the pedestrian boundaries of school assignments. Given a yawn-inducing essay prompt (‘what I did on spring break’), Ines decides to take a metaphorical sledgehammer to the proverbial box and crafts a ten-page epic about a time-traveling door. The twist? The realm she visits is not the sunny beaches of Florida, but the annals of the past, courtesy of a mysterious door in the office her mother cleans. Talk about escapism!
Alas, the English teacher, clearly a subscriber to the ‘creativity-is-fine-as-long-as-it-fits-in-this-tiny-box’ philosophy, was not impressed. A ‘D’ was stamped on Ines’s magnum opus, and thus, the battle lines were drawn. Ines wanted her mom to plea for an upgrade on the grounds that reality, in her case, was simply not as riveting as the worlds she could conjure. Mom, adherent to the tough love ideology, was having none of it. Enter grounding, silent treatments, and a school counselor suggesting mom might be quashing her child’s creative spirit.
Now, I hear you ask, ‘Roger, darling, where do you stand in this domestic drama?’ Well, buckle up, buttercup, because you’re about to ride the Roger Coaster of Unfiltered Opinion.
Here’s the Hot Take: the educational system’s rigidity is suffocating the next generation of writers and thinkers under the guise of discipline and conformity. Yes, rules are important. Yes, assignments are meant to be followed. But when a young mind like Ines’s decides to take a leap into the uncharted territories of creativity, do we really want to be the ones to clip her wings? Perhaps the real issue here isn’t Ines’s disdain for reality but our own lack of imagination in nurturing it.
To the single parent in this saga, I say this: your plight is real, your struggle valid. Yet, in your battle to keep your daughter’s feet on the ground, you might unwittingly be burying her head in the sand. The world has enough realists. What it thirsts for are dreamers who can envision doors to the past in the monotonous walls of reality.
And to Ines, I say: write, my child. Let your pen be your rebellion, your stories your sanctuary. The world may not always appreciate your vision, but that is no reason to blind yourself to its possibilities.
In the grand scheme of things, we’re all just trying to find our doors to the past, present, or future that make life a bit more bearable. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time we stop penalizing each other for the ways in which we choose to open them.
Until next time, keep your wit sharp and your takes hot. This has been Roger, signing off, but never down.
Original story
My daughter Ines is in the 8th grade. I am a single parent who is barely getting by. We can’t afford the activities for the graduating class like trips to New York, dances, etc.
I told Ines this and she seems to understand that we just can’t afford it.
I got called in to talk to her English teacher over a paper she wrote last month. The prompt was “what I did on spring break.”
Ines spent it at home or tagging along with me to my job. But instead she wrote this ten page story about how she found this door in the office I clean that took her to the past.
She wrote a short fiction story instead of the paper her teacher wanted. She got a D.
Ines wanted me to convince the teacher to change her grade.
I told her that she can’t submit short stories instead of homework, so she deserves that poor grade. But Ines said that she doesn’t have anything to work with otherwise she hates English.
We are going back and forth. She has a C in English and I told her she is grounded until she gets her grades up.
Ines is upset and won’t speak to me. I had another meeting with a school counselor who suggests that I’m being too harsh on her, and to encourage her to write more. That’s not the problem.
My problem is that Ines doesn’t listen to me or her teachers and acts like she’s living in that dimension in her stories. That’s not how the real world works.
AITA?