Our fourth-grade teacher must have been friends with another fourth-grade teacher in another town. That’s the only reason I can think of why each of us was assigned a penpal in the other teacher’s class. My penpal was named Paul, and I remember nothing about him. I wrote to him because I was supposed to, and he wrote back to me because he was supposed to.

Toward the end of the school year, our teachers arranged a special treat: The penpals would get to meet! In preparation for the grand event, we were assigned to prepare a lunch box labeled with our penpal’s name, and to decorate it with complimentary adjectives starting with their first initial. Naturally, I hit the dictionary in order to come up with as long a list of “P” words as I could: patient, peaceful, perky, personable, perspicacious….

My teacher inspected the lunch box and told me that one of the adjectives — pathetic — would have to go.

“Why?” I said. “The dictionary says that pathetic means ‘deserving of pity.’ Why wouldn’t he deserve pity?” I imagined that if Paul broke his arm, I would say something like, “Poor Paul! It must really hurt,” to which my teacher would respond by snarling, “No! Don’t pity him! He doesn’t deserve it!”

I’d hate to be the teacher who had to explain to a fourth-grader the subtle difference between pity and compassion. Fortunately, I’m not that teacher — but then again, neither was my actual teacher, who engaged in her usual mode of problem-solving: “Don’t argue. Just get rid of the word pathetic.”

It’s understandable that in many situations, adults may lack the time, patience, or even the ability to explain sophisticated concepts to kids. That’s why every child eventually becomes resigned to hearing the all-purpose response, “Because I said so.” But I can still feel the sense of anger and helplessness that came from being deprived of an explanation.

When I was a third-grader, I won a contest by writing an essay about how great the American system of government was. (This was at a time when such sentiments were still expressed without irony or embarrassment.) I remember highlighting the idea that American citizens govern themselves by saying, “If the people want a road around Lake Whozit, the people get a road around Lake Whozit!” My prize for rhetorical gems like these was that I got to read the essay aloud to a school assembly.

Shortly before the public reading, my teacher told me that she needed to make a slight revision in the essay. It was in the section where I talked about the three branches of the federal government. I had written, “The Congress makes the laws, the Supreme Court makes sure the laws are constitutional, and the President carries out the laws.” She rearranged the sentences to say, ““The Congress makes the laws and the President carries out the laws. The Supreme Court makes sure the laws are constitutional.”

That seemed like a crazy revision. First of all, her phrasing wasn’t nearly as elegant as mine. But more important, her rewrite seemed to say that the Supreme Court determines whether a law was constitutional after it had been carried out. To me, it was evident that the system couldn’t possibly work that way. Surely the president wouldn’t want to enforce a law before knowing whether it was constitutional. If things really worked in the backwards order that the teacher was suggesting, then it was a stupid system, and why would I want to boast about it in an essay?

When I told the teacher that she must be mistaken, she assured me that she wasn’t, and that I should read the essay in the way that she had revised it. I did, but without nearly as much enthusiasm as the line about Lake Whozit.

Nobody clarified for me that judicial review was not called for in the Constitution, and that the Supreme Court rules on a law’s constitutionality only if someone challenges the law in court and the challenge works its way up through the appeals process. Again, I can understand why — that’s a pretty complicated thing to try to explain to an eight-year-old. But I was left with the embarrassment of having to read an essay aloud that I supposedly had written, but that I didn’t fully understand or stand behind.

I have no children of my own, and the classes I’ve taught have all been at the college level, so I’ve had fewer situations than most adults in which I’ve had to resort to saying “Because I said so.” I’ve still had to hear it, though — usually when I’ve asked a customer service representative why the company had done something unconscionable, and the representative replies, “Because that’s our policy.” It still makes me as angry now as it did when I was a child.