Purple with a Mix of Red

Here's a picture of my son's graduating class photo from Grade 7. He's the white boy, in fact, he's the only white boy in this picture. And there's nothing wrong with that. Caucasians in our area are the minority, we are most definitely a mixed population of sorts. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing. But mostly we live amongst each other, we become friends and we just ignore colour.

A few days ago a friend on my Facebook (never met), a Latino from New York, posted a comment about how funny it was to see "white people dance". I commented back and said "I thought you were white, so what colour are you"? What do I know ... her profile picture looks like she's white with a tan. And instead of laughing HA HA HA, they laugh back JA JA JA.

She responded back: I'm purple with a mix of red.

So there you go. If you didn't know. I responded back that purple was my favourite colour.

I'm still awaiting her response on my overuse of the letter "u" in my Canadian spelling.

Anyways, Brandon, who is now in Grade 8 and taking first year French, has a teacher who is Spanish, and who also teaches the Spanish language class. Brandon has been to Francophone school from Grade 1-4 and knows it quite well. His homework is a bit of mystery, since it appears she is teaching incorrectly. In French, all nouns have a gender - they are either masculine or feminine. The gender of some nouns makes sense (homme [man] is masculine, femme [woman] is feminine) but others don't: the words personne [person] and victime [victim] are always feminine, even when the person or victim is a man! Spanish teacher is sending assignments home that do not follow this simple rule.

I soon learn that Brandon often "dummies himself", pretends not to know the answers, because HE KNOWS THEM and doesn't want to be a smart-ass in class. He already feels he's the go-to kid when the teacher points for answers. I have to say, when I hear things like this it really pisses me off ! Brandon doesn't want me to say anything .... don't draw attention to him.

Sadly, it's true. From experience, if you complain to the school about a teacher, that teacher will soon learn about it, and the next thing you know your kid's grade went down from an A to a C.

Not being too discouraged, when you think about it, lots of kids are signed up for "ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE". And they're not even purple !