A reworking

Ms. Kos continues to enjoy her recently re-acquired position as paramount figment of my imagination--so here's a cropped reworking of an old sketch of her.

She appears to have filched Mebby's cloak and added runes to it.

"You *know* what you did!"

Five words that modern parenting and schooling would be better off without, I assure you. To this day, I'm convinced that my seventh grade teacher kicked me out of her classroom for randomly sighing heavily, but I'll never know the real reason, because like a great many other authority figures who like playing mind games, she never saw fit to tell me. And like a great many other authority figures, she got away with this bullshit because there was no one in a position of power around to tell her to knock it off and do her job. Hell, even my own mother has pulled this stunt at least once*, and I generally stand by her parenting methods.

Near as I can figure, there are two reasons people do this:

1. You're a bunch of lazy bastards who can't be arsed to take a minute to explain what the kid did to offend your sensibilities so.

2. You know that kids are devious little bastards who've probably done a dozen similarly bad things within the past few hours, and you hope that by saying "you KNOW what you did!", you might be able to get them to confess to several others that you haven't found out about yet.

Number two, by the way, never works--or rather, for every time that it does, there are about a hundred kids wondering what the hell they're being punished for. And yet the people disciplining them are surprised when they do it again, or slink around behind their backs in fear of seemingly random wrath.

And people are surprised when I tell them that I never want to be a kid again. Hah!


*No, I am not saying what I suspect it was for. See point #2.