My family moved around a lot and I went to a lot of different schools. My mom always took great care to never put me in a school where I was at any risk of being seriously bullied, which I'm immensely grateful for, but in spite of this none of the schools I went to turned out well. Every single one was insane in a totally unique way I had never considered possible before.
-ELEMENTARY-
My elementary school ran from kindergarten to 6th grade. I was moved up from pre-school a bit early because I was ahead of the rest of the class - I could read fluently by age 2 and by kindergarten I was already at a 3rd or 4th grade level of reading. While math has never been my strong suit, and I did poorly in math classes later on in my life, I tended to come out a bit ahead at this age too. One thing I remember vividly was a "trick" question on a sheet full of simple addition problems like 2+3, 7+5, etc., where it wanted you to add 3 numbers instead of 2: 2+2+1. I thought the whole thing was very straightforward and I handed in all the correct answers to the teacher, but after it had all been graded she gave a short speech to the whole class going over the question where you had to add 3 numbers instead of 2, because nearly every single student except me had gotten that wrong. I vividly remember being completely baffled as to how anyone could be tripped up by that.
I liked to read national geographic and zoonooz magazines back then, and while I don't remember this, I've been told that one day after reading an article on butterflies I went up to my kindergarten teacher and started explaining in depth the life cycle of the butterfly, and that because my teacher was a female, she released "pheromones" that made her more attractive to the males because that's how reproduction works, and that my poor teacher had to use every ounce of self-control she had to keep from breaking down in tears from laughter. I guess I unwittingly related butterfly reproduction to human reproduction.
My 3rd grade teacher was my favorite teacher ever, and the time I spent in her class I think was the happiest time of my life. I have lots of good memories from her class but my favorite was the halloween festival where we were all carving pumpkins, but as my group started carving up ours, I freaked out and broke down in tears because we were "killing the pumpkin" and I didn't want to see it suffer and die. It took some comforting and explaining by the professor that the pumpkin was just fine, but I still couldn't stand to carve it up. Afterwards the class held a raffle to see which kid would win each of the 5 pumpkins, and I was white-knuckled throughout the whole thing, always with a look of despair whenever my name wasn't called. But it turns out the entire class had unanimously voted to give the fifth pumpkin to me, and the teacher said later I looked like the happiest kid in the world when I heard that.
So all that stuff was pretty normal, but the insane stuff came with the principal and school culture. It was crazy in a lot of good ways and a lot of bad ways.
The good insane is the snake my principal had as a pet. That thing must have been a Burmese Python or something because it was MASSIVE. She'd bring it out for recess sometimes and a dozen kids would be holding it at once, standing it a row, and still have room left over.
The bad insane was the PC culture. This was early-to-mid 2000's but my school was really ahead of the curve when it came to social justice. Around the time I was in 4th or 5th grade, the principal decided to ban all christmas music and christmas decorations because it might be offensive. But Hanukkah and Kwanzaa music, which was played every year at the school sing-alongs anyway even though I'm not sure our school even had any jewish students, that was still allowed. My mom wasn't very happy about this but she always volunteered at the school and through this managed to sneak a Greek Orthodox Christmas song into the lineup. According to her she overheard the principal say "huh, wonder how I missed that one", when it came on.
Also there was "The Knife Incident". I say knife, but it was actually a blunt spreader about the size of my thumb that I brought to spread the jelly on my sandwich. I was sick of it soaking into the bread by lunchtime and tasting gross, so I brought it in my lunchbox and kept the jelly in a separate container. This pasty white kid named Jacob learned about this, and on a dare or something from a mexican kid he was friends with, he stole it out of my lunchbox and used it to threaten another student. We all got called into the principals office, and while I didn't get in trouble, I was banned from bringing spreaders to school ever again. Jacob got a 2-week suspension, and I really had to try and keep from laughing when the principal held up this tiny little strip of metal that couldn't even cut paper and saying "this tool, when used in the wrong way, can be a deadly weapon". The mexican kid never got in any trouble, btw.
By 6th grade we had to change schools for two reasons. First, they put me in the lower math program because I was sick on the day the tests for getting into advanced math were given out, and the principal refused to let me retake them for reasons I still don't understand. And the lower math program, it was really bad. It used counters as learning aides, and about half the lesson was just taking out the counters and putting them away again. The other reason was because the middle school my elementary school fed into was really bad. Every classroom had about 50 students, none of the teachers gave a shit about the kids, there was bullying, drug use, underage sex, etc. A friend I had in elementary told me about it later and it sounded horrible. So we had to change, but the middle school I actually ended up going to - man.
-MIDDLE SCHOOL-
We were kinda limited in our options for middle schools. The only available ones other than the previously mentioned degenerate shitfest was a boarding school, which I really wasn't ready for, and a christian protestant school. My mom and dad had ended up recently converting to Greek Orthodoxy, so they picked the christian one. What they didn't realize was that this was a fundamentalist school that taught young-earth creationism. I LOVED science and anything to do with science as a kid, not merely with national geographic and zoonooz magazines, but also NOVA, astronomy related stuff, dinosaurs, geology, I thought it was all awesome. So to hear shit like "the earth is 6,000 years old", the ice ages took place between the time of noah and abraham" was extremely confusing to me.
But worse than the disdain for science was the theology itself. I didn't like church as a kid - getting dressed up in stiff, uncomfortable clothes and standing in a church doing NOTHING for 4 hours straight every sunday was extremely difficult for me at that age. We were also supposed to fast before church, or we couldn't take communion - so no breakfast. What made me not hate every second of it was the music. This is the average kind of song I was used to hearing in church:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-3h9TQ312c
I found it incredibly haunting and beautiful, almost dream-like. After mass we'd have the sermons and sunday school, which I found exceedingly boring but it gave me a decent understanding of most of the bible's main stories and themes, with sunday school covering the basics, and sermons going over more advanced stuff.
This school got as far from that as humanly possible. Every Thursday the school would have chapel, where they'd play christian rock music at absolutely deafening volumes. I've always been a sensitive to loud noises, but this was actual rock concert levels of loud. That was already horrible, but far worse were the songs they played. I'm not gonna link any of them here because I'd rather cut myself than listen to any of that tripe again, but of the most frequently played were songs from the band "Hillsong United", if you're morbidly curious. These songs were the lowest, most inane drivel imaginable. The average song was just repeating "I love you Jesus" in a zillion different ways like it was some kind of romance melody. The worst one I remember was one in spanish comparing Jesus to Superman, with the lyrics "Jesus is my superhero" with an extremely crude picture of Superman flying across the screen at 3 frames per second and a level of animation too poor even for South Park.
The sermons were equally as bad. One I particularly remember was when they showed that clip from the Lion King where Mufasa's spirit talks to Simba, and they claimed that Mufasa was actually sent by Jesus to preach the word of God to Simba, and that the "a-wimaweh" chant in the Circle of Life song where they sing in Zulu was actually repeating the name "Elimelech", the name of an old judaic figure from the bible.
The average understanding of the faith they claimed they adhered to I thought was appalling. One teacher I remember said "I can't wait to get to Heaven" to the class, which I thought was horrible, basically the same as saying "I can't wait to die". And the reward for good deeds being physical pleasures in Heaven I thought was selfish and just a form of bribery. Now, surprisingly, the bible teacher was actually the most sane of the faculty, he was very well educated in theology and an incredibly nice guy. But his class also hammered home into me the resentment towards the whole school, because I and the one other greek orthodox student there were repeatedly at the top of the class, far, far ahead of all the other students. In one classroom game the teacher asked up to list off all the books of the bible in order and see how far we could get. All the other students stopped before the end of the TORAH, but I and the other greek orthodox student made it all the way to Psalms.
The worst teacher though, and the worst part of the whole school, was the science teacher. She was fucking, fucking crazy. Every single class she'd stop the lecture at some point, rant for 10-15 minutes about how evolution and "evolutionists" were evil and satanic, then resume the lecture like nothing happened. The other students didn't like her either because she put up a paper plate over the clock in her class room with a message scribbled on it reading "you don't need to know the time
". Yes, she did actually put down a smiley face.
Now one day I noticed as I moved from class to class that she was watching me from afar as I did. This went on for weeks and I thought it was really weird but I was able to ignore it easily and she never approached me so I didn't bother asking about it. I only found out the reason for this later, after parent-teacher conferences. Apparently she had been stalking the social media of every single kid in her class to make sure they weren't doing anything "sinful", and if she saw something she thought was sinful on their social media history she would rat them out to their parents during parent-teacher conferences. I didn't have any social media, so she resorted to just stalking me in person during the school day to see if she could spy me doing anything she could rat on me for.
However, my sister DID have social media, and she had linked her tumblr account to her social media with her real name. She was a big weeaboo at the time and her tumblr account username was a variation on Erza Scarlet, a character from Fairy Tale. So when my mom showed up to the conference this teacher handed her pages of
HENTAI involving Erza Scarlet that she had
PRINTED OUT, and went on a rant about how my sister was a "harlot" and needed religious correction immediately. She (the teacher, not my sister) got a reprimand from the main office for this after my mother complained, albeit only a small reprimand.
And of course, the school library did not stock copies of Harry Potter because they were teaching "black magic" to kids. I only spent a year at that school, but man, it sure felt a lot longer.
>1/2 because I hit the word count limit which I didn't realize existed on agora until just now
