Recalling how much I liked sick days as a kid, and in hindsight, what it said about school.
Recalling how much I liked sick days as a kid, and in hindsight, what it said about school.
Being sick enough typically meant spending the day laying in bed, alternately shivering and burning, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally puking, and that was still preferable to spending the day at school.
I liked school.
I just fucking wish school would stay at school and they'd fuck off with homework. I'm already giving you half of my day, why the fuck you gotta take more from me??
I liked learning. I hated school. Sometimes you had good teachers who actually wanted to teach you stuff, other times was just hell (frequently as a result of ruddy homework).
About 15 years ago I had a brief stint as a non-educational worker in a public school. They had a rule that the entire class had to line up in alphabetical order each time they entered or left any space as a group.
To enter or leave the building, the hallway, the classroom. To go to the library, the gym. For group bathroom breaks. For recess and for lunch. Seriously they spent about 20% of the day being corralled into lining up. I don't know how the teachers tolerated it. The kids never cooperated with it easily and by the time the teacher got to the end of the line getting people in the right order the kids at the front had moved themselves around. Everyone going to giggle with their best friend or get away from someone they didn't like, whatever.
We didn't have a rule like this when I was growing up but I did have the feeling it was stuff like this all the time. I literally felt they were trying to brain wash us into being compliant ever since I was very little.
Sometimes in elementary school we'd have to line up in alphabetical order, but it was for bureaucratic reasons. Since everything was still being done on typewriters and index cards, it was easier for stuff like picture day or health exams if we were all in alphabetical order.
It wasn't for every line, though. That's just nuts. Getting elementary school kids to line up in the first place is a hassle.
I know it's idealistic of me, but I still believe that it would be somehow possible to make public schools something that kids want to go to, or at the least don't experience as a low-key and long-term traumatic experience. Tearing kids out of bed as early as schools typically start is where that hurt begins, and it sucks.
It is possible!
I went to a preschool called a Montessori school. Montessori systems encourage learning through play and are based on the idea that children's natural curiosity can be used to help them learn. It was a good fit!
Unfortunately then I switched to kindergarten elsewhere and while I was really excited to go learn at school , instead I got in trouble for being unable to sit still or listen to boring didactic instruction and school became a much worse experience.
holy fuck glad im not alone i got in so much fucking trouble when i first went to public school for the same reason. one time my teacher took my chair away for the whole day because I kept standing up to do work occasionally. goddamn i hated her even as a tiny kid
It's still early but my kid loves school.
I also, as a poor, unpopular student, didn't have a horrible time at any point in my k12 education. I'm not saying things haven't worsened or that they were ever perfect but the idea that the public school system is evil or something (other than teaching pro-US slanted "history" and the weird pledge) is not something I encounter outside of random Hexbear threads, even amongst people with generally progressive views. (Not counting
here.)This place is weirdly doomer about schools.
As a former educator I am among the first to point out systemic problems and failures of policy and so-called "reforms" from the
years to even worse under 
, where "no child left behind" became "race to the top" and in both cases enriched private testing corporations and charter school conglomerates by expecting kids to fail their deluge of fucking tests and planning accordingly.That said, yes, "school sux and shouldn't exist at all" is a clownishly bad take for any society that wants to exist longer than a few years. It's "no veggies at dinner, no bedtimes" ideology at its most primordial.
Foucault was so right it hurts.
(CW: light slapstick torture scene)
Doesn’t matter if it’s public or private, schools fucking suck. I have to go back to one now and it feels like a fucking cage.
it's a good goal and is crucial to any potential revolutionary program. schools are basically too rotten for reform though, it's very much a tear down everything and start from scratch approach which is needed.
Getting a fever that would hit the sweet spot where you can stay home but aren't suffering and can play ps2 in a blanket
Animal Crossing was my "sick, but not too sick" game of choice.
You just gave me a very specific memory of being out with some kinda illness for like a week in 5th grade and spending most of it playing GameCube animal crossing
Playing the Over the Hedge tie-in game while slightly out of it with a fever is one of my core memories.
Bleh, my parents forced me to stare at the ceiling if I was home sick so I wouldn't fake it. I went to school sick a lot
School is deliberately set up to produce good and bad students. The working class is subdivided into higher-paying higher-status workers, precarious low-wage workers and the unemployed, and schools are tasked with reproducing and justifying these divisions. Pretty sure this can't be done without some pretty fucked up abusive bullying, and so here we are, most are more or less traumatized by school.
I have a learning disability when it comes to math and on the regular I'd be belittled in a very passive aggressive way by math teachers (usually men) when I was picked to go up to the board and do an equation or some such. Even being placed in special math classes I still floundered, I don't know if I have some brain damage or what but I just can't do it. Anyway this was way before people became accepting of people with disabilities and I get mercilessly mocked when kids found out I was in special classes. So I tried my damnedest to keep it secret that I was since I felt such deep shame. Anyway all of this compounded on me HATING school. Middle school through Junior High were hell. I didn't start to actually enjoy classes until I got to senior year and I could pick what I actually wanted to learn.
I did well in college though go figure. Economics class was something I was good at (with a handy scientific calculator). Who would have thought years later a business major would be a commie.
I’ve noticed that my math skills improved significantly as an adult. I think part of it was getting out of my bad home life, but I’ve noticed a lot of things just kind of clicked into place (like hand eye coordination, especially) in my early twenties.
Every once in a while I would chew some food then spit it in the toilet and pretend I had thrown up. My parents never caught on
But that's very naughty of you, so Santa definitely caught on 😤😤😤😤
Oh shit, not to mention Jesus!
Worst part is sometimes it’s preferable to work too
School sucked for me because most of my teachers really had no business being teachers.
That and having to sit through religious propaganda, which I hated even at the time, plus in retrospect other propaganda about capitalism and other weird stuff like whether cow's milk and meat are 100% necessary for human beings (turns out the answer is no
).Most of my teachers in K through 5 were good. Middle school is where things started falling off, with high school being an absolute shitshow. A lot of teachers who shouldn't be teaching because they didn't give a shit or didn't like their students. And the religious stuff was so insidious. A lot of abstinence-only sex ed combined with anti-science Young Earth Creationism. At a public school. Not to mention all the slut-shaming and policing of girls' clothing.