Parent power

Small-town living leads to its own set of unique circumstances. This is how I live in a tiny town, my kid goes to school in the next, slightly larger town, and I teach in the neighboring district at a school out in the middle of nowhere, but equidistant from most of the small towns in that district. This is also how I can wind up coaching knowledge bowl for my school, and my kid is on the team for her school. I teach with a lady who lives in the larger town, but her husband teaches in ANOTHER neighboring district. Now that you're totally confused (or completely don't care) I can move on to my fascinating story about how I went to my kid's parent night to compete against her. As it was, her team beat the parent team by ONE point, but only because of their younger, quicker reflexes on the buzzer. I did get to spy out their t-shirt designs for this year (there's an unofficial competition to create the wittiest, geekiest, inside-jokiest shirts) and I think ours is cooler. Theirs is an upside-down "cheat sheet" of common recurring answers from the past; ours is various misspellings of "I'm a genius" struck through and replaced with "I'm really smart!" 'cuz we're clever like that.