I'm sorry to report that the badness between my daughter and her teacher has escalated. I can no longer write about it. The whole thing is a mess, and my daughter's education is now up in the air.

On the sunnier side of things, my daughter wants to read War and Peace this summer. Her reason? "It's long and difficult." As much as I respect her reasoning, I want her to read instead Middlemarch, which is a more manageable book and counts this passage as one of its many jewels:

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.