My 7 year old son was shot down by his 1st grade teacher
The american public education system in a nutshell tho
My third grade teacher actually had a conversation with my mom that I was reading to well and told her to stop having me read at home
My first grade teacher said that it was problematic that I was reading ahead of the rest of the kids in my grade and asked my parents to stop letting me read Harry Potter.
My fourth grade teacher thought it was wrong for my dad to be teaching me complex math because it fascinated me.
My elementary school music teacher hated the way my piano teacher taught me, and how I was more advanced than many of her students, and so told me, in front of my peers and my mother, that I was not good enough to participate in the state solo festival. She would not give me the form. We had to procure it from the district instead. She also hated how I excelled at reading and playing music for the recorder, and so she refused to give me my “belts” (colored beads to signify our level) and humiliated me in front of the class repeatedly.
My eighth grade algebra teacher used to fail me on take home tests because I didn’t solve problems exactly the way she showed us in class; I used methods that we had learned for other types of problems that also applied to these. She took points off my tests because I didn’t bring a calculator even though I got 100% without it, because I was able to do it by hand. I had to call my father, who is an engineer, down to the school to shout her down and give me back my A in the class.
My 10th grade Spanish teacher yelled at me in front of the class numerous times because she didn’t like the way I took notes; she thought that since I didn’t write every word off the slide, I wasn’t getting it all down. I had to explain to her that people who have taken advanced courses, like AP or IB classes, know that in a fast-paced learning environment you need to take quick shorthand notes that contain the necessary information rather than wasting time writing every word. She almost gave me detention.
My 11th grade English teacher gave me a poor mark on my first short essay because she believed that I was looking up unnecessarily complex words in a thesaurus to try and get better marks. The phrases in question: “laced with expletives” and “bombarded”. She wouldn’t hear any defense from me.
My 11th grade history teacher failed me on an essay about the 1950s because I misread the prompt. Except the prompt wasn’t words; it was a political cartoon. One of the figures was clearly president Eisenhower, but the other I couldn’t place. My teacher would not tell us who it was. I labelled him as the governor of Little Rock Arkansas during the integration period, and wrote an essay about that subject. My teacher said that no, it was Joseph McCarthy, and that there was a small picture of the man in our textbook and therefore I should have recognized him instantly. Half the class, apparently, did not.
The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; it’s here to keep us in line and silent. It’s here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Don’t let it win.
“The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; it’s here to keep us in line and silent. It’s here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Don’t let it win.”
Fun story time. I loved to read. So much so, I was reading chapter books in kindergarden. I broke the record for reading points in elementary school. They actually had to start making up prizes for me. No one in the history of the school had ever read so many books in a year. Basically, my class liked me because I won those suckers pizza parties in my spare time.
In second grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Mobley who believed all children should be average. She flat out told my father that all children should make C’s, and should never strive for more than that.
Not only was she insane, she also would routinely spell things wrong for us to copy for our spelling tests. Later, when we spelled those words wrong on the test, she would mark us off. Yes, our own teacher was sabotaging us.
I should have been tested for gifted classes, but I was not. Why? Ms. Mobley didn’t believe in “gifted” children.
This teacher had tenure and could not be fired.
Never forget.
“The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; it’s here to keep us in line and silent. It’s here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Don’t let it win.”
George Orwell couldn’t invent this shit
it’s twisted stuff
this is important.
In Kindergarten, I was prevented from using the computer because I had changed the colors of the game I was playing. The key command for doing so was listed right on the main menu, but she assumed that I broke the game because I wanted it green instead of cyan and assumed that no one of that age could read. When my father came in for a parent/teacher conference and changed it back, she refused to admit she was wrong. I was a four year old, so obviously nothing came of it.
I was tested for advanced placement during this year. I was rejected because my handwriting was terrible. Mind you, everything else I had at the time was well ahead of anything a four or five year old would do; the school was simply finding an excuse to not have a unique student.
I was pulled out of the public school system at that point for half a year. In that half year I went from an above average student to a ridiculously stellar student – roughly on par with a student four grades ahead of where I was. When I had to go back into the public school system, I was put back exactly where I was before, bored out of my mind and hating this place as a result.
This same teacher tried to keep a group of kids (six year olds save myself at five) in line via yelling at them at the top of her lungs at all times. She also insisted on everyone in the class using her specialty writing system, which was basically a hybrid of block printing and cursive, as she insisted that students couldn’t write properly at this age anyway.
A year and a half later, I had an excellent teacher that recognized what was going on. She had me placed into gifted/advanced classes and skipped up a grade level on mathematics and nurtured her students, allowing them to excel for the first time. It wasn’t just me; almost all of my classmates had huge rises in their capabilities and well being after the class. This same teacher helped out my older cousin when her father died.
Said teacher quit immediately after my class after being burnt out, likely due to administration blocking her every step of the way.
Two years later in the fifth grade, I was told that the mathematics I had done weren’t good enough (perfect scores throughout the entire previous year in a fifth grade gifted mathematics course) and placed me back into fifth grade mathematics, effectively making me repeat the subject for absolutely no reason. The teacher simply didn’t want to deal with a student more advanced than the rest of his class in anything. I stopped caring; this is when I went from a perfect score student to a somewhat-badly-graded student and I never recovered. The teacher left half way through the year because he was given a job by a test taking company.
I had a middle school teacher that never gave me anything above a C. She had to take a leave of absence during a semester of my middle school for medical reasons. During that semester, my grades mysteriously went from Ds and Cs to perfect scores in that same class. They dropped back down again the moment she returned. No other teacher thought there was something wrong, and said teacher had tenure and wouldn’t be fired no matter what she did.
In the tenth grade, I had to sign a form that forced me out of the gifted program. The legislature in Florida didn’t want to spend money supporting students (having already established a Lottery designed to have the profits given to schools and cut the education budget by exactly the amount the lottery gave) and thus had cut down most of the advanced and/or special education classes to the bare minimum. My classes themselves didn’t cost the state more, but there was additional requirements on the teachers that made them have a higher salary. They used the cutbacks as an excuse to lay off teachers.
I flunked out of 11th Grade Honors English. I took 11th and 12th grade Honors English at the same time, literally turning in the identical work I did the previous year in the 11th grade class and went from failing everything to having an A in the class. One teacher’s eyebrows were raised at this, but no one cared; the class I failed was taught by someone with tenure and would not be fired, and I was obviously a poor student anyway.
The way the US handles Education is abysmal. If only enough people in power cared.