Where I'm from, most parents actually aren't involved all that much in their kids' education either. I just happened to luck out and get a mother who pushed to make sure that my overeager self was allowed to learn to her heart's content as well as stay with kids of her own age. If the school had had their way, they would have just skipped me ahead a couple of grades and left me to fend for myself at the first sign of my mother's request for additional education, but she thought that my social development was important as well and just kept pushing.

Both of my parents are teachers, though my mother doesn't teach anymore, and with the ridiculous "no child left behind" bullshit that they pull in North American school boards these days, kids no longer even get punished with poor grades, let alone physical discipline! Not that I think that spanking is at all necessary for education, but this "everyone gets a gold star" philosophy is leaving kids woefully unprepared for the real world, in my opinion.

Off-topic, but does that mean that you actually got to watch Gunsmoke when it first aired on TV? I used to watch reruns of it (and a half a dozen other westerns) with my dad all the time when I was growing up, and it's left me with a terrible fondness for the genre. I would love to have watched it when westerns were "popular" and I could have actually discussed the show with people.

Where I lived, we had a Junior and Senior Kindergarten - I never did preschool, but we started school with "JK" by attending every other day. It changed to every half day by the time my little sister was in school (you were either a morning or an afternoon student). You were eligible for enrollment to Junior Kindergarten once you were four as well, so I think that our schools just called them different things. xD

Miss. Smart is the most fantastic name for a teacher, especially an elementary teacher, haha.

I found out in maybe my second year of college that I guy I'd been friends with since ninth grade had been in my dad's class, and to this day, my dad was still his favorite teacher. I loved being a teacher's kid, because people who'd been in his class were always more open about approaching me or starting up a conversation, and since that's how I was all the time, it was nice to see other people acting the same way sometimes instead of just wondering why I was trying to talk to them.

We actually had a kindergarten/first grade (I can't remember which - she wasn't my teacher) teacher who threw a kid against a wall once. Her name was Mrs. Kraplin, and you can imagine how well that went over once the students found out that she was a bully. She was terrible to her students, raising her voice, demeaning people who did something wrong and picking clear favorites. I imagine that being in her class would have been akin to taking potions with Snape. She actually got relocated (unions around here make it next to impossible to actually fire someone) shortly after the throwing incident, and believe me when I say even kids who weren't in her class weren't sad to see her go.

Thankfully, paddling wasn't allowed when I was in school. I mean, I was a total suck up and I can't think of anything that I did in grade school that would have warranted it (maybe once where I got caught throwing snowballs), but it still would have probably terrified me.

I'm happy that I brought up some fond memories (which I've been trying to phrase another way, because "fond" and "run over by a car" don't exactly belong in the same sentence, but I'm sure that you'll know that I mean the supportive aftermath and not the actual accident). My mother was actually hit by a car in elementary school as well, but it was in a parking lot, so the only damage was where the driver ran over her leg, freaked out and stopped the car without realizing that she was still on top of my mum's ankle and then had to get back in and drive off. It sounds pretty ghastly and my mother still gets ankle pain from time to time, but it doesn't compare to being actually run down. Kids can be so cruel, so I'm glad to hear that no one made a big deal out of it! That would have been the last thing that you needed.