In American schools, if students move from one classroom to another during the day, which is the norm in middle and high schools (roughly age 11 to completion of school), the whole school does so at the same set times during the day. Being in the hallways at these times is Passing Classes, which is fine; being in the hallways at any other time is Roaming the Halls. A student who is Roaming the Halls is presumed to be Up To Something, and may be stopped and interrogated by any member of staff who witnesses said Roaming.
Of course, it does occasionally happen that a student has a legitimate reason to be in the hallways outside of designated passing times. In those situations, the student carries a pass (”hall pass”) which can be presented to any member of staff who stops and interrogates said student. Usually, the pass is written on a form that is signed by the teacher who authorized the student’s presence in the halls: at my school, the form had spaces for student’s name, date, time, where the student is going, and from whence the student is leaving.
Filling out the entire form every time a student wants to go to the toilet is a pain in the ass, so some teachers use some other form of pass. In my day, it was either just a regular pass that was pre-filled and laminated, or a block of wood with the classroom number and “Bathroom” written on it. Apparently nowadays, using some cumbersome and humorous object as the bathroom pass is A Thing.
This is all regarded as completely normal, so much so that I have explained it in what may be a tedious amount of detail, because I’m unsure what part of it strikes you as unusual. How is this situation handled where you went to school?
By raising your hand, saying you need to use the bathroom, teacher saying okay and you going. Nothing else.
So if another teacher sees you on your way there, they just…mind their own business?
That would never work here.
Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?
Over here if a teacher sees you (they’re all in class anyway too so it’s unlikely anyone would be in the hallway during class unless they have a reason) they mind their own business, unless you’re dicking around or actually doing something troublesome or loud, or if they know you and know you’re supposed to be somewhere else, and you’re clearly not going to the bathroom. Or if they’re in a shitty mood and wanna yell at you for sitting on the windowsill which was forbidden in my school but nobody cared anyway.
Otherwise, no, no one’s gonna care. Not in high school, anyway- but in lower grades yeah because the kids are younger, but elementary schools will usually have a custodian walking around the halls. They’re still not gonna question kids going to the loo.
Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?
Short answer is, the second one. Long answer is, the American school system is permeated with a sense that teenagers are this chaotic force that must be contained at all costs. (I’m right now having this very clear sense-memory of a hall monitor * saying “You can’t just roam the halls any time you feel like it!”** in the same sort of tone in which one might say, “You can’t just stab people any time you feel like it!”) It’s not even so much a matter of what you might do while out in the halls unsupervised; the very idea of teenagers Roaming the Halls (of a school, which is full of both teenagers and halls) is understood as being inherently contradictory to the purpose of a school. It isn’t even that you might go somewhere you’re not supposed to be; it’s that at any given time, there is only one place any given student is supposed to be. A hall pass creates a temporary change in your prescribed location, without undercutting the fundamental principle that your location should always be prescribed.
(*My school had professional hall monitors–grown adults who were paid a salary to keep order in the halls.)
(**At one point one teacher issued me a Permanent Hall Pass, for Reasons, essentially licensing me to roam the halls whenever I felt like it. I forget how long that lasted, but eventually a hall monitor stopped me with it and was, naturally, convinced it was fake. They hauled me to the office and were like, “We’re going to call down TeacherName and show her this,” and I was like, “Please do.” So finally they did, and she was like yes, that’s my signature, yes, I wrote that; what are we doing here?” I ended up getting detention anyway, “because the policy is that if a hall monitor brings you to the office, you get detention.” The teacher was also instructed to never issue an open-ended hall pass again.)
Today’s question: is the USA actually a giant prison?
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WHAT THE HELL????????? What if you have no class in the middle of the day? We’d just hang out in the halls. Not everybody went to the library or sth. I probably spent a year of my life in the halls. It was actually kind of a way to socialise with people.
Yeah, there’s even a stock phrase as Gaeilige which is about the first thing you learn in school (my dad taught it to me before I started Big School, i.e. age of five) asking for permission to go to the bathroom.
If a teacher sees a kid hanging around the corridors instead of being in class, they may ask them what they’re doing and wait to see if they head off to where they say they’re going (the usual dodge is “Miss/Sir, I have to get my books out of my locker”) but there’s no Hall Pass or any of the rest of this.
Dear America, why is your education system so strange?
Well for one, there’s never supposed to be a period where kids aren’t in class. There’s no study hall period, no free period, and you’re carefully monitored when you go to and from class as well as to and from lunch period. The idea is that, if kids are free-roaming, they’re going To Do Something like leave school (truancy) or cause some sort of problem.
But really, its more about training children for future jobs where their employers will treat them exactly the same way. If you are not in class/working, then you are doing something wrong.
You’ve also got to understand that, in American schools, not only is there a serious lack of trust between teachers and students, but also that the school systems will try to cram AS MUCH CLASSES into one day at a time to “maximize learning.” This includes having extremely short lunch breaks and hall passing times (I swear lunch breaks in my elementary school were like ten minutes long, which contributed to how fast I wolf down my food to this day. I also distinctly remember passing time being only three minutes at my middle school and having a panic attack on the third day of school because i couldn’t get my locker open and I was that afraid of being caught skipping class). Oh, and by the way, we watched a documentary in high school that took place in a prison once, and I was shocked at how much the prison in question actually DID look like a high school.
schools operate on the premise that All Teenagers Are Inherently Criminals
Added to this, since the late 90s, teachers and administrators also have to know who is out of their classrooms and why and for approximately how long, so they can make an accounting of which kids might be in the path of a random shooter.
Because it’s more important for adults to have the FREEDOM to amass huge arsenals of guns than it is to protect the physical and emotional safety of children.
My daughter has been in school for six years (she’s 10), and she and her classmates have had to practice hiding in the classroom corner in silence with the lights off about twice a year.
American students and teachers now go about their business every day with the background knowledge that at any moment, a kid with his dad’s guns can show up and try to slaughter them all.
Tell me that doesn’t do something to your psyche.
By the time you hit high school you don’t bat an eye at lock down drills or hall monitors. They’re pretty much part of the scenery. According to my friend who was a grade below me, they stopped letting kids have free periods at all after i graduated. Previously, they would lump your classes together and either you could leave early or come to school late, but it was a steady stream of classes.
American schools are also basically wide open to the public if you come in the front door. So hall passes are supposedly for child safety too.
why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.
Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?
yes!! oh my god!!
so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!
but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.
But how do you know it was platonic
i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.
lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.
actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.
whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).
i mean yeah there’s also a lot of angst here too because after the expedition their lives went in very different directions.
clark comes home and immediately acclimates to a hero’s life. he gets married and has a son who he names meriwether lewis clark after his best friend. he has a respectable government position and lives a long and happy life.
meanwhile lewis struggles to get accustomed to civilized life again. he misses the freedom of the expedition. he still sleeps on buffalo skins spread out on his bedroom floor. he writes that he is determined to find himself a wife but no woman can seem to stand him; one even flees town in the middle of the night to avoid seeing him again the next day. with his lifelong history of depression (which comes in bursts which, to me, seem a lot like manic depression), lewis spirals downward. he’s hated and conspired against in his political career, he starts to drink heavily, he stops talking to all of the people who had been closest to him.
he finally works himself up to taking a trip to dc to deliver his journals to jefferson and on the boat trip up he attempts to kill himself multiple times. he’s described as appearing frantic and afraid, and tries to calm himself down by repeatedly telling himself that clark is on his way, that clark will be coming to save him. we know that at this time he wrote clark a letter, but clark burned it so we don’t know what it said. i’m ashamed of the things i’d do to get my hands on that letter.
lewis dies in an inn on the natchez trace of two bullet wounds, and it’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder; everyone close to him seemed to accept it was suicide, including clark, who wrote, “oh, i fear the weight of his mind has overcome him”.
But what happened to Sacagawea and her son?
ok, more on sacagawea, because she deserves any and all the credit she gets plus a whole lot more honestly:
when sacagawea was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped by the hidatsa tribe and sold alongside another shoshone woman to charbonneau as his “wives”. charbonneau was officially hired by lewis and clark not just because he was a french fur trader who knew the pacific northwest territory as well as the hidatsa language, but because sacagawea’s knowledge of the shoshone language and people would benefit them as they traveled through their lands. sacagawea was not just some inconvenient extra, she was a purposeful and valued addition to the corps.
sacagawea had her son, jean-baptiste, while l&c and co. ™ were still wintering at fort mandan, so she was literally carrying this child on her back for the entire journey. she was also the only woman travelling in the corps! and she was given duties! strong and capable and literally perfect i love her so much!
while travelling on a riverway, the boat sacagawea was travelling on capsized, and along with saving her son she also rescued valuable supplies and papers; both the captains were blown away with how well she acted under that sort of duress (and how badly her husband did lmao). travelling through native lands, tribes were more likely to think these men were not dangerous purely because sacagawea was with them, so she literally saved their white asses through association. she was a necessary and important figure in council meetings between the corps and tribal chiefs. clark called her “janey” and called her son “pompy”. (cute.) when they do get to the ocean, sacagawea literally demands clark (which she would have to do through like three layers of translators) to let her go to the shore with them, because damn it she worked just as hard as anyone else and she wants to see the fucking whales man.
perhaps most remarkably, when the corps finally did encounter the shoshone tribe, among the very first group of people they encountered was sacagawea’s brother, who she hadn’t seen for five years. that’s. so incredible. like, that’s one of the most amazing things to me. this survivor of child sexual abuse bravely treks across huge stretches of territory with a military expedition and is reunited with her family, however briefly, and. god. i’m crying.
sacagawea was not paid for her contributions to the expedition, because the contract was with her husband. she gave birth to a daughter, lisette, six years after the expedition. she died at 25 years old of a sickness she apparently had throughout her adulthood (which may have been further complicated from her early abuse and pregnancies). after her death, clark adopted both of her children.
i love this beautiful brave bird woman just as much if not more than i love my adventurous southern sons.
i’ve seen a lot of comments about the really sorry state of spelling and grammar in the expedition journals, and just wanted to let everyone know that, since no one had a dictionary with them on the expedition, they had to spell out words phonetically, and for the most part everyone wrote how they talked. by that logic, linguists have determined that by reading the journals of expedition members aloud you can actually start to mimic their accents! lewis was a virginian with some book learning, so his passages tend to have more eloquent language and less visible accent. however, clark was kentucky born and bred, and manages to misspell “mosquito”more than sixteen different ways.
Also, there’s a national memorial in Montana that Clark carved his name into, called Pompey’s Pillar. Clark named it after Sacajawea’s son.
In another of your regular “this is the kind of person you follow” updates, I would like to remind you all that, in my latest novel (the “earth is where the trouble comes from” one), I have created an entire race of super OP plant mages who are descended from dryads solely so that I am able to point to my MC’s right hand woman and say “She’s asexual, and before you ask, yes, she is a tree.”
vld-multishipper-lesbians-deact asked: I have a Shallura fan fic idea and it hinges on whether or not you've read the Silmarillion. Shiro and Allura as Beren and Luthien.
pop culture intertextuality is just so damn *fascinating*
today a parody movie (50 shades of black) comes out, based on the 50 shades of grey movie, which was based on the 50 shades book, which was based on twilight, which was somewhat based on interview with the vampire (which anne rice based on an earlier short story she wrote), which was based on Dracula and other vampire stories, which originally came from Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (even though Vampires were a thing in folk tales before then, he was the one who made them all classy, etc.)
so really, like so many things, this is all Lord Byron’s fault.
