I just paid my daughter a dollar to play with my son for one hour so I could answer my e-mails and do a minuscule amount of urgent work.

For those of you calculating, that means I lasted a total of two hours of the teacher’s strike before begging for childcare help. Teachers obviously have some sort of gene mutation which allows them to single-handedly manage large numbers of children for hours at a time. Either that, or I have a gene mutation which causes a craving for silence.

The noise level this morning gave me an idea on how to quickly solve the labour dispute:

1. We find out where negotiations are taking place, and we take all our children there. Whenever negotiations reach a stand-still, we send all the kids into the room, until the two sides are again willing to talk.

2. If that doesn’t work, then we leave the kids in the room, and have the negotiators try to work while getting interrupted every nanosecond. By the end of an hour, they’ll probably agree to anything.

And if ALL of that fails? We send them to cook with a grade one class.

What do you think?