its weird being 18, 19, 20 in 2016 because i remember going into kindergarten and seeing those chunky ass giant computers at the desk and then going through school while technology rapidly develops and graduate in a world where people can have the entire internet and more just in their pocket like idk its so strange to me
sorry to add to the post but I remember in 5th grade when they invented the “smart whiteboard” and my school won one for the library and everyone lost their shit because they were so expensive and I graduated high school last year and by the time I graduated every single classroom had one. Watching technology go from glitchy and expensive to powerful and affordable within less than ten years continues to blow my mind
no but also like owning a flip phone was the Coolest Shit™ and you could take photos(???) and it was like so incredible, and it was all fun and games until you pressed the key for THE INTERNET and you knew you’d be charged so you pressed that cancel key eighty times and prayed to god that he’d take mercy on you…and then iphones became a thing and it was like unreal
Going from vcrs and huge roll in tvs to streaming the movie online and projecting that onto the smart board within the span of 5-10 years.
ok but do you guys remember before proper projectors were put in there was the overhead projector that could only read clear plastics and it projected using light and mirrors
remember when you got your first phone, and it had monoton/polyphone ringtones=? OR THE FIRST TIME YOU COULD ACTUALLY PUT A SONG AS YOUR RINGTONE 1:1 that was such a huge thing…..Also the first phones with coloured displays, 100x100px photos……god what a time….
I remember PRECISELY when smart whiteboards hit my middle school because I was in eighth grade and the installation guy showed up halfway through a geometry class like “Hey, you were supposed to give us height marks and you didn’t, what the fuck”, and my geometry teacher clearly didn’t know what to do, so she pointed to me and said “she’s the shortest person in the school, she’ll give you the height marks.”
So an entire building had whiteboards I could mostly reach for once, and that was nice.
Anonymous asked: nah, the hall pass/lockdown drill thing is something we do in my aussie school too. hall passes are accountability and are a (somewhat ineffective) method of reducing truancy. there are indeed people who cut class quite often, hence the hall pass (though we call it something diff here) and while you could argue that it's one's own responsibility to take care of one's studies, the school legally has a duty of care to us which gets problematic when someone is unaccounted for (cont.)
(cont.) just in case something were to happen. now, the ineffectiveness is because we don’t log toilet trips and so on into the school network, and rely on paper. if your student is missing carrying the only written record of them leaving at so-and-so time to go to the locker/toilet, what the hell is the use of that? the end goal is to make sure you’re in class as much as possible, because the point of a school is, after all, to educate. as a student, the place we are supposed to be (cont again)
(cont. 3) during lesson times is in class, learning. the point of kids going to school and then cutting class IS inherently contradictory to the point of a school, and i do not find that outrageous. now, one of the phrases most kids in my mandarin class (not in aus, though, this was a while back) could speak accurately was, translated, ‘teacher, can i please go to the toilet?’ i suppose it’s respect for the teacher/school as well as making sure you go where you’re supposed to be going. (cont)
(sorry this is getting so long) getting to lockdown drills and so on, we do those here too. it’s just safety. we understand the likelihood of someone showing up to school with a flamethrower or grenade launcher or simply handgun is not awfully high, hence why the kids dont take it so seriously, but the adults are Dead Serious because there is always a risk and people should know how to react. like i said, its simply safety (cont but i swear last one)
(sorry) teachers and admins have to know who’s out of the classroom and where they’re going (or where they say theyre going), not only to verify truancy and accountability stories, but also in the event of an evacuation (fire/shooters/freak floods/elephants raining from the sky), then emergency responders know where and for who to look. so i dont find it all that outlandish. sue them, theyre taking precautions. (thanks for the long read lol)
First of all, this was genuinely a fascinating trip through Australian school regs.
Second of all, particularly in the US…I still feel like a lot of problems could be sorted out with tighter gun regulations. That being said, yeah, I think there’s something to be said for knowing where your students are because, like, damn people definitely just wandered off in the middle of the day at my high school. THAT being said, I think US schools get a little…obsessive.
Third of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I can guarantee you’ve never seen a school give less of a fuck about student safety than my high school, in this context. So like I dunno if I’m the best source on this one.
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.
a junior who was taking the psat today ditched the idea of pulling the fire alrm to get out of testing and instead hacked into the school’s alarm system to set it off exactly when the English section was scheduled to start
THIS KID WAS SLICK ENOUGH TO HACK INTO AN ALARM SYSTEM BECAUSE HE WASN’T PREPARED FOR THE PSAT
and there you have it
that’s the summary of the American education system
-random applause that eventually encompasses the entire cafeteria -skipping classes to go to your friend’s lunch periods -”come with me i dont wanna go alone” -not knowing who you’re singing happy birthday for -“hey if i pay you will you go through the line and get me something” -knowing your id number so you can actually eat -only wearing your id during lunch period -that ONE security guard -”what’s even for lunch today” -HOLY FUCK IT’S CHICKEN NUGGET DAY -those girls who chill in the bathroom doing their makeup -fights = dinner AND a show -”hey what lunch do you have this year” “b” “damn i’m in c”
What the fuck does any of this mean why is there a security guard in your school what
America, you ok?
No, we’re not okay. What do you mean you don’t have security guards in your schools other countries? We don’t even just have security guards, sometimes we have actual fucking police officers.
U gotta go through a metal detector to enter the building in a lot of public schools
And yet many kids carry weapons in their pockets or purses to keep safe.
In my hs a girl brought in a can of pepper spray in her panties behind a belt cause she had been threatened to be attacked (i know cause she was attacked and sprayed the whole dam hallway, during lunch actually). Also culinary kids were allowed knives in their bags.
Of mice and men. I will always hate Of Mice and Men.
always
The Catcher In The Rye most trash book ever
^yeah, gatsby was terrible too tho
I liked gatsby because the narrator thought everything that happened was bullshit too. I HATED catcher in the rye though.
All of the books listed here I hated with a passion, but none more so than The Catcher in the Rye. GOD.
I had to force myself to read that shit. Anything by Steinbeck is a basically a sleeping pill.
The Scarlet Letter. I never even read Gatsby, still not sure how I passed that section tbh.
The Awakening. How did my eyes not roll right out of my skull while my ever-so-earnest English teacher rhapsodized for two weeks on Kate Chopin?
There is a burning hatred in my heart for anything Hemingway.
Does not help that my professor last year spent two months with the old fart’s metaphorical balls slapping against his chin.
THE AWAKENING My english teacher went on about what a feminist piece it was and how well written it was and it really just made me want to stab myself in the eye because it was neither of those things
The Awakening and Grapes of Wrath
G o d i hated grapes of wrath I don’t think I finished it
GRAPES OF GODDAMN WRATH.
Oh God did anyone else have to read You Can’t Go Home Again? It was WORSE. 700 pages of inane and plotless rambling. Fucking murderous.
one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too
the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”
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.
I put up with this shit constantly through my whole time in school (if I had a dollar for every time a teacher told me I wasn’t allowed to talk anymore or failed me on something for correcting them, I would be a rich woman), but I think possibly the most memorable occasion was in high school–ninth grade, okay–when a teacher who hated me docked me an entire letter grade for using a made-up word. The word was obsequious, which is a bit obscure but not fucking made-up. When I brought her a dictionary and the assignment, not only did she refuse to improve my grade, she said that the writing was bad enough to have deserved the grade she gave me, and handed me an example piece to model my further work on.
For reference, this particular assignment was something we had to do weekly.
The example she gave me was my own work, from three weeks prior. She docked me another half a letter grade for pointing to my name on the header of the example.
Class discussions are fun until u find out ur classmates are racists
class discussions make me cringe.
Class discussions have led to:
the discovery that half my class was racist as fuck
the discovery that half my class was homophobic/transphobic/etc as fuck (I did get a hug from the only out kid in class when I was done taking the ringleader to shreds, though, he was a great kid)
the discovery that my entire class revered Columbus as a good and kind individual who just did So Damn Much for the heathen savages (yeah, that was an ugly revelation for them)
an actual shouting match between two sides of the class over abortion laws/rights, which had to be broken up by the passing vice principal
the discovery that the history teacher was unaware of the fact that no culture EVER thought the world was flat (and certainly not the Greeks???? this is still weird to me????)
the discovery that a few people in my class believed that, if a parent was beating their kid, the kid must have deserved it (I genuinely hope those people got therapy and moved out of their homes)
and last but most certainly not least
the discovery that half the class thought that the way a girl dressed dictated whether or not she ‘deserved’ to get raped, which led straight to
the discovery that the TEACHER thought that if a girl dressed a certain way, she wasn’t a victim, no matter what happened to her, which was directly involved in
me, in my jeans and t-shirt, slamming a kid into a table by the throat for certain ongoing shenanigans
