OT: Life as a parent and a designer

As the parent of a 16 year old girl, one would expect to fight many a battle on a variety of topics. However, I was totally unprepared for what transpired yesterday. In all honesty, I'm struggling with the whole thing.

In school, my daughter is taking a required class on Microsoft Word. As if that weren't bad enough, in class yesterday, her teacher gave them a project: Create a document that uses at least 8 serif fonts and at least 8 sans serif fonts, all of various point sizes. Extra points were awarded for those who added color (the teacher justified this by stating that if everyone used Black, she couldn't award points for originality if students used the same fonts).

I used to think that all those people who believe that they must use every font on their computer for every document, and use all the blindingly bright RGB colors in Word was Microsoft's fault. As a parent though, I try. I really do. My daughter uses Apple's Pages for all of her reports, and they all look clean, neat, and lovely. Being my wife and I are both designers, our home and our conversations are filled with examples of good design.

The parent in me says not to teach her to contradict her educators. The designer in me says to tell my daughter to rebel and to type a single letter-spaced word set in Helvetica, colored black, at the center of the page. Wait, I guess that would be Arial. Sigh.