#I identify strongly with this#I got reprimanded on multiple ocasions for reading ahead and/or already having knowledge

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 Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.

when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.

I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.

My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.

“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.

“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.

And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.

YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER.
FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.

ANVILS ARE A THING.

From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:

“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”

I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.

Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.

THIS. when i was in first grade i was bored in class a lot. my solution was: finish my work as quickly as possible, then read a book, because teachers said that books were good and i liked to read. except i got in trouble, more than once, for working ahead. because… we were doing it as a class i suppose? but if y’all are gonna take an hour to descirbe how to tell time, why shouldn’t i finish my worksheet? i remember we had these clothespins with our names on them and we had to move them to yellow or red from green if we got into trouble, and because i answered the next three questions ahead (correctly, i might add) i had to move my pin to yellow and miss recess. 

and it didn’t stop as i got older. i once had an 8th grade science teacher tell me off for reading in class and said he would throw my library book away, because i had finished my work and the other people in my group, who didn’t want to do their work and were whining to copy off mine, hadn’t finished. because i was expected not to be done until they were, and he refused to believe they wanted to cheat. (of course the solution here was to let them cheat and go back to harry potter, because fuck if i was going to listen to them complain through every single problem they didn’t want to do).

tl;dr: STOP PUNISHING KIDS FOR WANTING TO WORK HARD

in fourth grade we had an end of the trimester pizza party or whatever for the kids that had worked hard enough to read x amount of books. it was like, four books and the only requirement was that it had to be at your reading level or above, so the kids who struggled to read could also get the chance to partake.

well, i had read the third and fourth harry potter books along with some others, and i had one book left. we had to tell our teacher what we were reading so she could keep track.
i told her i was reading order of the phoenix and she said no. “you’ve read too many of those.”

YOU REALLY, HONESTLY WANT TO TELL A NINE YEAR OLD THAT WANTS TO READ AN 870 PAGE BOOK TO NOT DO IT?

I said fuck her and read it in two days. she was pissed but she had to count it because i passed the computer test on it so she knew i had actually read it.

don’t tell a kid they can’t read something, for god sakes. don’t punish children for wanting to learn or to do something above the regular level. thats how kids wind up not doing anything.

More recently for myself is when highschool teachers embarrass kids for asking “dumb questions” or asking about things they should “already know.”
You’re the teacher???? Teach, maybe????

as someone studying teaching, I can attest that organising a lesson plan tailored to ~20 children, all at different levels of competency, skill, and timing, is ridiculously difficult. but it’s part of the job and you should never EVER punish or embarrass a child for being eager to work and learn.

a story about how to deal with this correctly: when I was in second grade my teacher noticed that I was finishing all my work early and reading to myself while everyone else finished. rather than punishing me, she went home and made me my very own writing book. whenever I finished my work early she would give me a prompt to write about. it kept me occupied with something that I loved, allowed her to help the rest of the class without worrying that I was bored and didn’t make the other kids feel jealous of me finishing early because I want getting ‘free time’.

moral of the story: when students put in extra effort, teachers should too.

My high school English teacher got mad at me for correcting him on how to spell “intelligence” and gave me a D on my next essay. Would you like to know the reasons he said he gave me a D? One word was apparently used wrong. So I looked it up in the dictionary. My entire family (both of my parents are editors and my dad is a writer) told me I had used it correctly. He also marked me down for using the term “hand signals” rather than “sign language.” Um, excuse me, genius, that ape was not fluent in sign language. It knew fucking hand signals.

According to my mother, one teacher nearly drove my eight-year-old self into an actual nervous breakdown, because I dared to correct a spelling error (I don’t even remember what it was - something of the there-their-they’re variety, I think). Even his colleagues said I was right - and apparently the way he treated me was so infamous that my mother had teachers from other schools coming up to her and telling her she needed to move me from his class.