After giving up his advertising job and moving to Santa Fe with his wife, Wilder (Daddy Needs a Drink
) decided he needed a day job, so he signed on as an assistant first-grade teacher at a local “alternative” school. Its New Age pedagogy—“pursuing kindness and peace,” counting games with “recycled organic materials,” etc.—was fine, but he was spending most of his time tending a delusional nine-year-old girl, flushing bad boys’ turds down the toilet and coping with hippie parents in denial about their bullying son. So he shifted to teaching seventh grade in a private day school, where there was just the usual preteen wackiness. Some days, so many of his students were “hoisting the middle finger,” a passerby might think he was “teaching a lesson in profanity for the hearing-impaired.” Teaching taught Wilder much about what to avoid, as a parent—especially about not being a “helicopter parent,” obsessively hovering over his kids’ every move. He also learned there are “two sides to this carpe diem coin”—we want our kids to go ahead and try everything, but we’re uncomfortable when our toddlers actually start dancing with the cross-dressers on Halloween. Wilder may be a bit potty-mouthed for the mainstream parenting shelf, but he’s honest and funny. (Aug.)
