on #5: Yup. It's one of the reasons they have such a hard time when schools try to departmentalize (have switch classes/subtle ability tracking). And it's not really that they need to control their students' lives, it's that they need to control everything about their own lives--which, just incidentally, includes the students in their classrooms. A traditional self-contained elementary classroom is its own little fiefdom.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...