Bravo. Quite the accomplishment, Mom.

Last night was "Vocabulary Night" at Ben's school. The point of vocabulary night was to introduce the grade schoolers to a variety of new vocabulary words by playing word games like Pictionary, My Word, Scattergories, Password and Concentration. The kids would play a game for ten minutes and then move to another. It was a pretty decent event, well run, and the kids seemed to really enjoy themselves. Ben certainly did, exclaiming in his usual completely un-self-aware, loud and sincere way, "I love this!"

In My Word, someone slowly flips over cards with a letter on each. If you can spell a word with the letters on the table, you shout it out and collect the cards that make up that word. Whoever has the most cards when the deck runs out wins. Very simple but fun game. The kids were all on the edge of their seat trying to come up with words. I was proud of Ben for coming up with "reek" rather than "my" "an" or "in" like some of the other kids. Of course, I would have kicked their butts. Unfortunately, my sense of fairness wasn't shared by all the other parents.

At one side of the table was a little girl. As the game got going, after a couple of words were claimed by other kids, her mother leaned down and whispered a word to her. She shouted it out and got some cards. One of the other parents said, "Let's let the kids play by themselves" but the woman didn't appear to have heard. As the game went on, she continued whispering words to her daughter.

I wouldn't have minded if the girl was doing badly and the mom wanted her to get at least one or two words, but at the end of the game, the little girl had trounced the other kids. Fortunately, the kids were having too much fun to notice, but Carol and I were quite annoyed. We don't cheat, and this was, more or less, blatant cheating. I realize the game didn't amount to much and the point was to teach the kids words, but still.

I sometimes wish I was the sort of person who could loudly ask the woman to stop helping her daughter, shaming her into behaving. Had this been happening at my house or during gaming at Borders, I would have done something. Alas, in a room full of grade-schoolers and their parents, I was loathe to make a scene. Such a thing would horribly embarrass me. And so I sit here and burn at the immaturity of parents who want their kids to win so badly that they'll cheat against a table of third-graders.