After being raked over the coals for sacrificing the keiki's education to balance the budget, Gov. Linda Lingle pulled off a stroke of political genius by passing that hot potato right back to the teachers who, as it turns out, secretly kind of like their furlough days.

Not that any teacher would be quick to admit that publicly, but privately and among friends, many will say that they are glad for the found time. They've already made plans for the whole year's worth of furlough Fridays and they're not about to undo all of that.

But what they like even more than furlough Fridays are prep days, those happy calendar dates marked with highlighter pen when the kids aren't in school but the teachers get paid to go to meetings, write lesson plans and attend training sessions. Lingle's suggestion that teachers give up paid prep days was met with a collective spit-take. You want us to WHAAAAAT?

At first, it seemed the biggest hurdle to Lingle's plan to end furlough Fridays was her proposed use of $50 million from the state's rainy day fund. You'd think people would question whether our days are going to get even rainier and whether that money should stay put for other, more catastrophic uses. But no. No one balked. Sure, use the rainy day fund. "It's raining on the kids," Lingle said, and everyone seemed to sadly nod in agreement.

The Hawaii State Teachers Association isn't scheduled to meet with the governor's team again until Tuesday, and there's already serious doubts whether a deal to get the teachers back to work on Fridays can be reached before the beginning of the second semester.

Certainly having time to prepare lessons is crucial to being an effective teacher. Nobody wants an unprepared teacher. But is an underprepared teacher worse than no class at all? What happened to the argument that kids need more class time? Didn't everyone decide that was the most important thing?

It may be raining on the kids, but kids manage to dry off and go on. There isn't a generation of lost students who never recovered from the weeks of school they lost during the 2001 teachers' strike. But dark clouds might be gathering around the HSTA. It's not so much about education now as it is about public perception and political maneuvering, and with her proposal to end furlough Fridays, Lingle opened a nice big umbrella over her head.