It Takes a Cowboy

Blair stood and began to clear away the dishes as Jeffrey pulled a pencil and notepad from the drawer Scott had indicated. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he set the pad on the table in front of Scott. Drawing an oval with a slash through the bottom, he asked, “What letter is that?”

Scott answered cooperatively, “Q.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Right. It’s my middle initial—my mother named me Jeffrey Quentin, for some dumb reason.”

“A perfectly good name,” Scott assured him.

The boy shrugged. “Anyway, my teacher wants me to write a Q like this.” He scrawled something else on the pad. “Isn’t that dorky? It looks like a number two, not a letter.”

Laughing softly, Scott nodded. “It is a standard cursive Q. I remember that’s the way it was taught to me, too.”

“I hate it. I won’t write my initial that way. Miss Greene makes us sign all our papers with our first name, middle initial and last name, and she yells at me and deducts points every time I won’t write the Q the way she wants me to.”

Blair waited for Scott to explain to Jeffrey—as she had numerous times—that Miss Greene was simply trying to teach the traditionally accepted rules of penmanship. It was her job, and she was performing it conscientiously, if a bit rigidly.

Instead, Scott commiserated with the boy. “Man, that is picky. Your teacher must be a total hardnose.”

Blair spun to stare at Scott. That was not what she wanted him to say! “Um...”

“I can’t blame you for losing patience with her,” Scott continued, still looking at Jeffrey. “Or for wanting to write your initial the way you like it, rather than the way your teacher tells you to.”

“Exactly.” Jeffrey shot a glittering look at his aunt as he took encouragement from Scott’s input into the familiar argument.

But Scott wasn’t finished. “This is a great example of what I meant by working the system. You want a good grade, right?”

Jeffrey scowled and shrugged. “I don’t really care.”

“Sure you do. Good grades are your ticket to getting what you want out of life. They’re for you, not for anyone else. They’re your proof that you played the system—and you won.”

Jeffrey looked as confused as Blair was beginning to feel. “Are you saying I should make my Qs the way Miss Greene wants me to?” he demanded.

“Yeah—but only in her class,” Scott added quickly when it was obvious that Jeffrey was prepared to argue. “When you’re out of class, writing just for yourself, you make your letters any way you want, as long as they’re readable. After all, if no one can read what you’ve written, then what’s the point, right?”

“Uh...”

“So, anyway, you’re almost finished school this term, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So in the fall, you’ll have a different teacher, and chances are she won’t give a spit about how you make a Q, as long as it’s reasonably neat. Of course,

she’ll have some other dumb rule, but you can play that one, too, as long as it gets you what you want—the grade. It’s like a job, you see. You do what the boss says at work so you’ll get the pay you want, but what you do on your own time is your business.”

Blair wasn’t at all sure she approved of this conversation. “Now wait a minute—”

Ignoring his aunt for the moment, Jeffrey concentrated on Scott’s unusual advice. “You’re saying I should do what the teachers want because it will get me what I want?”

“Exactly.” Scott beamed at the boy as if he was delighted to be so well understood. “You aren’t giving in. You aren’t surrendering. You’re working the system. You get the good grades you can use later, you get your teachers off your back, you stay out of trouble—which keeps everyone else off your back. It’s a win-win situation.”

“But the teachers think they win.”

Scott shrugged. “So it makes them happy, too. A happy teacher is a less annoying teacher.”

Blair definitely did not approve of Scott trying to turn her nephew into some pint-size con artist, even if he thought it was for the boy’s own good. “Scott, that isn’t why students cooperate in school, just to keep the teachers happy and finagle good grades out of them.”

“No?” Scott looked at her blandly. “Then why?”

“Well...because the teachers know their subjects. Because being a dedicated student is the right thing to do.”