How was school for you guys?

It really does seem that way, I wouldn't believe it myself had I not lived through it.
Just to offer something more concrete, I remember this was one of the posters they had hung up in the hallways

View attachment 36914
I don't understand these... things at all. Do they think people would just forget their sexuality/gender if they didn't see these. These is a slight difference of progressive ex between a radically Muslim family in Turkey and a progressive family in Boston but that didn't make me less bi or not liking trad gender roles. Sexuality isn't something you have to fuck around to find out, you just know.
 
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gorilla squid

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-HIGH SCHOOL #1-

I went to two different high schools. The first one is probably the most normal school I've been to, albeit it was during the worst time of my life. Also not helped was that my family moved 3,000 miles from California to Maine in order to be closer to my mom's side of the family (not the full story but this was a big part of the reason for it because my father had died recently), only to have them snub her because she had gone to an out-of-state college and left Maine to be with my father after she grew up, and they treated her with an air of "oh , so you think you're better than us for going to Boston University, huh". Then then unceremoniously dumped her elderly parents on her because they had been passed around from family member to family member and nobody wanted to take care of them, and Mom was guilt tripped into doing so even though she really wasn't well equipped to take care of them. This lead to a lot of trickle-down-effects for me, and although it had a huge effect on who I ended up becoming I won't get into it here since that could fill up an essay on its own.

Anyway, school #1 was very normal. I had lots of good teachers and lots of okay teachers, but 3 really stand out in my memory. My Spanish teacher was incredibly nice and he and the entire homeroom continued to send me cards for years after I had left the school. He was Filipino and his wife was deaf, and he always had a ton of interesting stories to tell.

Then there was my history teacher, who is probably part of the reason I even started studying history in the first place. He gave a lecture on day 1 about
Mohammad Mosaddegh that was so fascinating it drove a lot of my further studies into the middle east. I started reading al-jazeera and arabic news stations learning about the Syrian war and my studies in the field continue to this day. I also adored his approach to tests. He just told us exactly what was going to be on the test, and exactly what he was gonna be looking for in the essay questions, and had a review day in class where he went over it with everyone. It was excellent and I feel like the stuff I learned in that class stayed with me in a way a lot of other things I studied from that time didn't. One last side note, a fun memory I have with him is a paper on hyperinflation of the continental in the early united states, he gave it an A+ and said to my mom during parent-teacher conferences that it was the best paper for his class he'd ever seen and that it was equivalent to the paper a 3rd-year university student might write.

Finally there was my english teacher, who was one of those teachers. You know the ones, those english teachers who obsess over every little irrelevant passage of a book or play and make you write unbelievably pretentious shit about what it all means and how it made you feel. She also spent like 8 weeks of the course on a book called Cold Mountain, which even to this day I think it's one of the worst books I've ever read. My mom didn't like her either because she was a third-wave feminist and gave out assignments which instructed us to describe how Cold Mountain empowers women.

-HIGH SCHOOL #2-

So eventually my mom was able to pass off her parents to someone better equipped to take care of them and we moved house and schools again. This time we went to a private school in Portland (ME). It seemed like a really good school, well-received, gave lots of help to students, friendly, etc. And it was all of those things. But it left out that they were a also a cultish group of FUCKING INSANE zealots. You thought the creationist school was crazy? Holy shit this school was fucking mental.

The first time I started to notice that something was off was during a class discussion in a literature class I had. The professor said "There's no such thing as race, it's a social construct, race doesn't exist." I was baffled at this, and responded something to the effect of "Yes there is, scientists can tell what race someone is just by digging up their skull out of the ground". The professor scoffed at me as said, and I quote "Are you implying that I don't know science?". It got worse from there.

This school was super super super far-left social justice. They denied that different races existed. They denied that sex or gender existed. They insisted that all white people had inherent privilege to them and that they had a responsibility to understand, accept, and act upon their privilege in order to make amends for the crimes of their ancestors. They had an entire fucking hierarchy of most privileged peoples to least privileged peoples, with thin straight white men being at the top, "most privileged", and fat gay black transsexuals (and jews) being somewhere near the bottom, which existed as a physical chart hung up in one of the hallways.

The school did not like me and I really didn't fit in. They had a ton of unwritten rules that I couldn't have followed for the life of me. One time I wore a US Navy sweatshirt to school that my Granddad had gotten for me, and the school called my mom to ask if we had a gun in the house because they were afraid it was a sign I was gonna shoot the place up. Another time my mom was talking to one of the faculty, and she mentioned that she grew up in Northern Maine. That bitch of a faculty member actually grimaced and said, "Oh, that explains a lot". (Northern Maine is known for being much more conservative than the rest of the state)

I got sent to the vice-principals office nearly every single day for saying something racist or offensive, most of which was for stuff that anyone normal would not consider to be so in the slightest. I couldn't even just shut up either, because in some classes participation in group discussion was mandatory. The vice principal used the time to try and convert me to the school's beliefs, and we held long, in-depths debates about philosophy, politics, and ethics. I think he liked me because I could argue really well and talk on his level even though he was much older, but his main motive was to win me over.

Eventually the school got used to me and even some of the kids appreciated me because in class discussions it always ended up being the entire class against me on any given topic, and I could argue well enough to actually hold my own. So they liked that because without me the entire conversation would have just been a circlejerk, and here they actually had someone to go up against.

There was this one jewish girl though who absolutely fuckin' hated my guts. She always made a point of staying as far away from me as possible and shot me nasty glances every so often. The angriest I ever saw her get was during one class discussion about Palestine and media coverage of it from different sources. I remember the New York Times got brought up and I said something like "Well, maybe the New York Times is more sympathetic towards Israel than some other sources because the CEO is jewish", and she absolutely lost her mind. She was almost yelling at me, speaking in a crazed tone of voice about how I was slandering her entire people and how not all jews are pro-israel. I decided not to push the topic but she seemed to hate me even more after that.

I'll never forget the day Trump won. I had been very confident about his victory because I had been following the election very closely, and I had seen everything he had done right, and everything Clinton had done wrong. Trump was hitting all the rust belt states and focusing and his most appealing messages to that demographic, while Clinton was wasting time screwing around in Texas and giving ridiculous speeches about the "alt-right". Most people at the school either laughed at me or rolled their eyes, and the faculty even called my mom and said they were concerned I might commit suicide or harm myself after Trump lost. Then he won of course, and the school sent out a mass e-mail saying that anyone who wanted to take a day to "process" the news didn't have to come to class tomorrow and they wouldn't be marked absent. My mom kept me home on purpose because she was afraid I would gloat. I didn't, but I still remember the sunken, confused, despairing faces from everyone in the school after my day off. It was glorious. Shame he ended up not fulfilling any of his campaign promises though.

This school was 99% white, by the way.

-THE END-

So that's my school story, just one blend of mental asylum after another. College was kind of a different beast for me so I won't go over it here. Kudos to you if you actually read through this monster of a post and I hope you found it something worth the time spent.


This was quite the compelling read, my friend.
I graduated high school in 2013 so the insanity and polarization of politics from 2016 and onward wasnt really present for me. Though I wish it was, because it would have been a great trash fire for me to watch. I was very apolitical in my youth. I would've loved every minute.
 
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bnuungus

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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

11/10 post right here. What a crazy ride
 
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Skorp

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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

That's fuckin nuts man, it honestly reads like some false flag troll shit. How did you withstand constant bombardment by those headcases for so long? It seems like it would be quite difficult to maintain an even keel.
 

Marmot

Were it so easy
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Kindergarten and the first few years of school were good. Nothing out the ordinary. Then it got worse. I got depressed, had anxiety around school in general, felt like something was wrong with me, because none of the other kids seemed to have any problems, but I had for some reason. I did well, it wasn't that. There was just an over-arching anxiety around school. I went to school less and less, got more and more depressed. As soon as school wasn't mandatory any more (after age 15, I think) I stopped going entirely.

It wasn't until around a year ago I learned about Asperger's/autism and the struggles in my life all made sense. The reason I had this general anxiety about school where I couldn't say what it was I was worrying about was because I have a really hard time doing things when I don't want to do them or if I feel like I'm forced to or if it has to be done in a certain time. That's why school was so awful. It went against how I'm wired to learn. That's why I couldn't just do what all the other kids did with no problem.

I like to learn. I learn very well if I can do it my way. But school isn't made that way. It's a miracle I learned as much as I did, though. I came out with a decent education, I think. Just never had a normal high-school experience and never went to college or university. I'm a bit sad about that, because college sounds kind of fun with the more specialized learning subjects and the friends you could make. But now I tend to do the typical autist thing and learn about subjects I'm interested in with no way to practically apply that knowledge :nomTime:

TL;DR: School was awful, turned out I had the tisms.
 
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boredtodeath

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Honestly highschool was the best experience in my life. I went to tech oriented school and attended general it profile, the teachers knew that we don't give a shit about general subjects and they never gave us any problems. The it subjects were interesting and it was all pretty basic stuff, so I never spent much time learning. I had a chill class, we quickly formed a few groups and never bothered each other. I was spending my days playing video games, smoking weed and drinking with friends, attending concerts and events. Those 4 years pretty much felt like one huge holiday, and whatever I did, it was always just to have fun and fuck around. I think that was the best thing about it, the absoutely carefree experience of life.

I think that the best thing I did, was that at some point, quite early in my life I realized that nothing really matters, the world is not a just place and no amount of work guarantees any award, so instead of trying to be the best, most liked, most informed etc. I focused on having the most fun. I never tried to be someone that I wasn't and I simply spent most of my energy on having fun.

You know, when you think about it, the fact that people don't give a shit about you is quite comforting because it means that whatever you do, if you don't fuck up royally, they will forget you anyways, so why not act like an idiot just for the lolz right?
 

Shantotto

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Middleschool/highschool was one of the best eras (yet). There is comfort in knowing you will get to see the same people every single day and you're all discovering the world together. I think high school is that sweet spot in life where you are young enough that you don't need to take care of yourself because your parents, teachers, adults (idealy) will and old enough to explore and take on the world even more so with privilege of youthful recklessness.
 
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ECHETLAEUS

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School was boring but with both many funny moments but also some drama. I wasnt good at school cause i was bored. Only interest back then was video games and hip hop. I had some potential but i was a lazy ass king. Nice crushes, some toxic friends, just boring stuff. But i am gratefull about these years.
 
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AllNightNippon

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Somehow I have less of a workload in grad school than I did throughout grade school and high school. The amount of assignments and tests we had to push through was insane, I'm glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. I have some good memories, but I also had to deal with a lot of not so good teachers. During community college in a Psych class the prof. (who was very good) would always close the door before class started and without fail I'd feel a sense of anxiety/dread. I had no idea why until I remembered that that's what teachers would always do before yelling at us, that stuff digs deep into you. Romance wise, I'm glad I never got into it during high school lmao. I had enough problems keeping up my grades, throwing all the problems of a love life onto that would've killed me. My only real regret of high school is sticking around too long with people who I didn't really gel with and not grouping up with more like minded people until near the end, but that's also just some of the growing pains of life.
 

Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意

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I really fucked up my school years. Girls were into me, I was too autistic to tell. I was very good at school work, too ADHD to do any of it.

Only thing I excelled at was going to after school clubs and making my parents mad.

But, a decade after graduating I am fairly happy with life and making more of it, so, whoever you are, where ever you are, just remember: Things can always get better if you want them too.
 
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Sketch Relics

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-HIGH SCHOOL #2-

So eventually my mom was able to pass off her parents to someone better equipped to take care of them and we moved house and schools again. This time we went to a private school in Portland (ME). It seemed like a really good school, well-received, gave lots of help to students, friendly, etc. And it was all of those things. But it left out that they were a also a cultish group of FUCKING INSANE zealots. You thought the creationist school was crazy? Holy shit this school was fucking mental.

The first time I started to notice that something was off was during a class discussion in a literature class I had. The professor said "There's no such thing as race, it's a social construct, race doesn't exist." I was baffled at this, and responded something to the effect of "Yes there is, scientists can tell what race someone is just by digging up their skull out of the ground". The professor scoffed at me as said, and I quote "Are you implying that I don't know science?". It got worse from there.

This school was super super super far-left social justice. They denied that different races existed. They denied that sex or gender existed. They insisted that all white people had inherent privilege to them and that they had a responsibility to understand, accept, and act upon their privilege in order to make amends for the crimes of their ancestors. They had an entire fucking hierarchy of most privileged peoples to least privileged peoples, with thin straight white men being at the top, "most privileged", and fat gay black transsexuals (and jews) being somewhere near the bottom, which existed as a physical chart hung up in one of the hallways.

The school did not like me and I really didn't fit in. They had a ton of unwritten rules that I couldn't have followed for the life of me. One time I wore a US Navy sweatshirt to school that my Granddad had gotten for me, and the school called my mom to ask if we had a gun in the house because they were afraid it was a sign I was gonna shoot the place up. Another time my mom was talking to one of the faculty, and she mentioned that she grew up in Northern Maine. That bitch of a faculty member actually grimaced and said, "Oh, that explains a lot". (Northern Maine is known for being much more conservative than the rest of the state)

I got sent to the vice-principals office nearly every single day for saying something racist or offensive, most of which was for stuff that anyone normal would not consider to be so in the slightest. I couldn't even just shut up either, because in some classes participation in group discussion was mandatory. The vice principal used the time to try and convert me to the school's beliefs, and we held long, in-depths debates about philosophy, politics, and ethics. I think he liked me because I could argue really well and talk on his level even though he was much older, but his main motive was to win me over.

Eventually the school got used to me and even some of the kids appreciated me because in class discussions it always ended up being the entire class against me on any given topic, and I could argue well enough to actually hold my own. So they liked that because without me the entire conversation would have just been a circlejerk, and here they actually had someone to go up against.

There was this one jewish girl though who absolutely fuckin' hated my guts. She always made a point of staying as far away from me as possible and shot me nasty glances every so often. The angriest I ever saw her get was during one class discussion about Palestine and media coverage of it from different sources. I remember the New York Times got brought up and I said something like "Well, maybe the New York Times is more sympathetic towards Israel than some other sources because the CEO is jewish", and she absolutely lost her mind. She was almost yelling at me, speaking in a crazed tone of voice about how I was slandering her entire people and how not all jews are pro-israel. I decided not to push the topic but she seemed to hate me even more after that.

I'll never forget the day Trump won. I had been very confident about his victory because I had been following the election very closely, and I had seen everything he had done right, and everything Clinton had done wrong. Trump was hitting all the rust belt states and focusing and his most appealing messages to that demographic, while Clinton was wasting time screwing around in Texas and giving ridiculous speeches about the "alt-right". Most people at the school either laughed at me or rolled their eyes, and the faculty even called my mom and said they were concerned I might commit suicide or harm myself after Trump lost. Then he won of course, and the school sent out a mass e-mail saying that anyone who wanted to take a day to "process" the news didn't have to come to class tomorrow and they wouldn't be marked absent. My mom kept me home on purpose because she was afraid I would gloat. I didn't, but I still remember the sunken, confused, despairing faces from everyone in the school after my day off. It was glorious. Shame he ended up not fulfilling any of his campaign promises though.

This school was 99% white, by the way.

Oof, that sounds painful. I'm thankful that I didn't have to deal with any thing like that as politics were relatively absent from my school. Oddly enough I did have to deal with debating entire classes on my own, not because of stupid, religious like political beliefs, but because most people in the class with debates weren't comfortable debating in front of a class so they just let me go. This led to an odd situation after awhile since I was considered the winner every time, towards the end of the year nearly everyone just waited to see what side I wanted to take, then followed me. This resulted in the teacher asking if anyone wanted to move over to the other side, so I did. Not as some 4D move to screw people over, but because I could argue for both sides rather easily and didn't think it would be fun for me to argue against so few people. The look of betrayal when I walked to the other side was pretty good though.

As for my own experience in retrospect, while I think I would have complained in the past about it, it was good. For highschool I basically never had homework because I found I had enough time to just finish things at school, either during slow classes or at lunch. My studying was largely done in class as well as I liked to read textbooks during my free time. There were no real bullies that I was aware of weirdly enough. Closest thing I was aware of was a kid that got ostracized for trying to act like a sociopath. I hope he grew out of that eventually.
I had quite a few friends(though, as one of them pointed out, they weren't friends so much as they were acquaintances. Only about two people could have really been considered my friends throughout highschool). I think any actual complaints I could list would just be me being a dumb teenager. Oh except for the writing standard test and everything they taught to prepare for it. That was actually beyond useless and I didn't really know how to write till I got to college and had a teacher who just let me write rather than doing some dumb exercise that had no relevance to any aspect of writing, including what was on the test.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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Very good. I kinda miss it. I knew that there would never be a time as chill as school where you get to hang with your friends all day, have 0 responsibilities and tons of free time.
I had strong comradery in my class and later when classes were dissolved I met very good friends. I never had to study hard for good grades so it was an amazing time.
 
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