My Hero

As part of her family studies course, my daughter has been asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on someone she considers a hero. The teacher kindly explained at our parent-teacher interview that this hero might be “mum or dad” (not likely), or an athlete or performer. Presumably choosing a left-wing activist would not earn my child an F on the assignment (not that she is likely to choose an activist either—for better or for worse, my daughter seems a bit immune to hero worship, which might provide some explanation as to why family studies, the easiest course on the grade 9 curriculum—and that’s according to the teacher—is also the course in which she has earned her lowest grade).

But I’m not interested in my daughter at the moment, or at least only tangentially. What I’m interested in is how much this course and its assignments remind me of those fuzzy-brained professional-development seminars I was forced to attend in a former, more corporately governed life. In fact, I remember that at one of these seminars the facilitator gave us the very same assignment. And one tiresome little sycophant actually volunteered to explain to the group why his personal hero was the corporation’s CEO.

Which just goes to show that if you ask a stupid question, you will get what you deserve. And if you have an ounce of skepticism in your soul, you will probably not get a great mark in either family studies or in corporate life.