I was on my way home from a day kayaking in the Pine Barrens with a few friends when my daughter called on the cel phone. Would I be home soon? I told her I would be there in about an hour, and asked why she wanted to know. She told me she had to print something out for school, and needed help. I said I would help, of course, but that it was getting late and she should probably just put the thumb drive on my desk with a note about which file, and get to bed. She told me it was not that simple, because what she needed to print was a website.

Wait. What? You want to print a website? I don’t buy $75 ink reloads so that we can print websites. What website were we considering printing? Turns out it was a website that she was asked to make for a class in school. I asked whether it was a fake website, because that would make sense, if it were a Powerpoint presentation or something. Nope, a real website. It was made with webs.com, and her teacher wanted the class to print out their websites and bring them in for review. At this point I spluttered, and mumbled that we would talk when I got home, and that I shouldn’t really be discussing such silliness on the cel phone while doing 70 MPH on the turnpike.

In any case, there was nothing to discuss. We’ve been down this road before, and she gets very hard headed at the merest suggestion that I oppose something one of her teachers wants her to do, which I admit I do quite a bit, usually because it involves me spending money. These days I just grit my teeth and acquiesce. But dammit, printing a website? Allow me to humbly suggest, dear sir or madam teacher, that you are doing it wrong. If you ask my daughter to make a website, and the only way you can come up with to review the work is for me to print the whole thing out in color, then please stop trying to teach her about websites. Honestly, she knew more about websites than either of us by the time she entered your school, and I build them for a living. I’d go back to math, science, history, English, etc., because this Internet stuff is hard.