School Rant Thread


Danneskjold

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So the idea here is that everyone has troubles and B.S. going on about high school. Also, everyone has fun stuff they like about high school, or any other school for that matter. Either way, this thread is where you can let out whatever it is you want to it to be about. Just let out all the fun, or lack there of, that you had.

I'll start.

Well, this was yesterday actually, but I got my first college recruiting letter for baseball, albeit from a small DIII college. They are still good at baseball as far as DIII goes and it's a start, also I got invited to a "Top 150 Prospects" camp for baseball, and I'm doing well in football and am hoping to play in the semi-final game at state on Friday. On the flip side, my friends and I are fighting because I'm "insensitive" and "intolerant" and though this is has never stopped me from being a good friend to them, apparently it is completely necessary for all their friends to have a bleeding heart.

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Oh, but he IS trying to impose his ideas on them. Right, Jeff? LOL. :lol:

I'll just list some things I hate about school at the moment:

1. The fact that my hands are bleeding from scraping the ice off my car for 20 minutes. (maybe that's not necessarily school, but it does piss me off)

2. Most people cannot read at a normal level. Or do grammer. Or spell. Or comprehend anything.

3. 99.99999% (guessing, lol) of students smoke pot or drink to get drunk. They think that you can ONLY have fun if you're high or drunk. Also, they always say, "hey, man, I got so fuckin' wasted last night!" I don't need to know that you are an idiotic pothead, k? K. Now, some people say, "well, they're just lying to try to look cool." Well, do they know that it's NOT cool? Jesus.

4. Many students are sluts. You're disgusting if you've fucked more than 10 guys per year, alright? Actually, same goes for guys. Fuck, there were a couple cases of gonorrhea going around our school! Keep your skankiness to yourselves...or, here's an idea, DON'T BE A FUCKING NASTY SLUT BITCH WHORE! phwew...

5. High school dances. Need I really explain this one? Although I hate these dances, I hate it even more that the teachers don't allow "dirty dancing" and they keep the lights on. Let us dance how we wish, please.

6. Many students think it's lame or goodie-goodie-ish to get good grades and succeed in life. I heard a kid once exclaim to the whole class that he got a 4% on a math test! I'm not such a violent person, but...

7. Most classes are boring and don't hold my attention. Same routine every day.

8. All classes are 85 minutes long.

9. Gym is required. BLEH!

10. A fine art is required.

11. In 2006, many of the students cannot type with all their fingers or without looking at the keyboard and I've heard many of them say that they refuse to learn how to type correctly. I guess you don't need typing skills to work at Mickey Dees.

12. Students in my CALCULUS class exclaim that math won't help them in life or with their degree. Well, then what the hell are you in calculus for! Get out!

13. All science teachers. Never had a good one.

That's it for now, but I KNOW I'll be back with more!

EDIT: Excuse my language and all the hatred, but it is suitable for this thread.

DOUBLE EDIT: 14. People who wear short skirts and sandals when it's 5 degrees outside.

Edited by Kori
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Guess it's not getting any better, huh? :blink::(

The 85 min. classes are just because we have block scheduling. 4 classes per day, 8 classes total (except me, 'cause I'm a senior) and they're all 85 minutes. I love block scheduling, except for it's hard to keep focused on certain things for so long.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well. I'm sitting here in the computer lab for English class, having finished early. I just have to say that I'm getting very annoyed at the selections our teacher makes for us to read. Right now the assignment is to read "Tell Me A Riddle," a short story by Tillie Olsen. For those who do not know, Tillie Olsen has been a Communist since the very beginning, and her short story reflects very much off of that. The introduction to the story seems to recognize how this whole thing is Communist propaganda. I'll put up the introduction when I get home, because the period is almost over.

But this has to be the third story she's had us read by a Communist. And all the other ones are about miserable women in bad marriages, or how bad men are and such. Really...I'm quite tired of this.

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Here is a thread I started for adults to do the same thing you guys are doing here, but it didn't fly:

How was your school daze? Lovely?

Also, here are some of my own horror stories from school (linked to in the above thread, which is also here):

I don't know what my IQ really is, but I imagine it is above average because of my performance in first grade. My parents were trying to make a living in a small coal-mining town in the southern part of Virginia (Coeburn) and that is where I first got a notion of the three "R's." I remember the praise from the adults (parents and their friends) because I "got it" about reading. I sat down one day and read the entire year's reading to my parents out loud within the first couple of months of school. I also learned to print and write longhand that year. (Southern basic education used to be surprisingly good.)

But a coal-mining town promises a coal-mining future and my parents wanted something better, so they moved up north to Alexandria, Virginia in search of better opportunities. There I was enrolled in second grade. Progressive education was the rage at that time. When my teachers learned that I knew how to both print and write script, they were appalled. I was only supposed to learn script in the third grade, so they essentially told me to forget what I had learned. I spent a long boring year "relearning" how to form printed letters. By third grade, I had dismissed all this as somehow worthless.

My disgust, which I had no way of identifying at that age, was so great that I never developed decent handwriting after that. Nowadays I merely print everything. My longhand handwriting is atrocious (worse than a doctor's). After my right elbow was fractured in an underworld "adventure" in São Paulo, my signature has become a problem. It changes every few months – and this used to cause me no end of grief with my checking account. I suppose I could make an effort and try to relearn calligraphy from scratch again, but that would take a huge amount of effort (as I would also have to unlearn stuff once again), so I moved on. Still, I think someday I might take a crack at it.

Another of these education horror stories concerns mathematics. I also have quite a knack for mathematics. I used to consider it a point of honor when calculators came out to never need one. I used to be able to do rather complicated calculations in my mind. (I remember back then doing multiplication and division with five digits and logarithms all in my head.) Then in seventh grade I had a challenging mathematics course – I think it was algebra – that started becoming fun. That is, until the day I solved a problem the rest of the school wasn’t able to solve. When the math teacher asked for the answer, there I was, bright as a polished apple raising my hand. He called on me and I gave the answer.

Then he got a real funny look on his face. He said that it appears somebody got his hands on the teacher's book and had been cheating. I was completely perplexed. We started having an argument (which was rare for me with adults at that time). He gave the answer he said that he and the rest of the school had come up with. I mentioned that I knew how they got there, but that it was still the wrong answer. He snidely turned the blackboard over to me so I could show my correct answer, which I not only did, but I also did the formula for the incorrect one and showed where the error was. He turned red and said, "Well anybody could come up with that once they had the answer." I shot back, "You didn't."

So I got sent to the principal for cheating and being a smartass – and the principal punished me. I believe this was the first time in my life I felt the total moral outrage of injustice at a really intense level. I lost all interest in mathematics after that. After years of disuse, this capacity has only returned a few times – when I start training it again (which I have done a few times), it gets better by leaps and bounds short-term, but I rarely do that, so it slides back. I never pursued mathematics. My direction in life went towards music instead.

As you can see, with school experiences like that (there were several more), I was ripe to become a Randroid on my first contact with Atlas Shrugged (at 18). What most struck me, however, was the focus on competence. I was in love with competence way before I ever read Rand. After I read her, I used to say that the only God I had was Human Competence.

In college, I had a different kind of educational experience with my trombone teacher. He used a “rational” approach. Here is an account of how some of my lessons went. I would play an assigned piece and in the middle somewhere I would fluff a note. After I finished, he would ask me why I fluffed that note – he asked me to think about it – to think about it hard. I would think then say I didn’t know. So he would have me repeat the section where the fluffed note occurred – a few bars before and going to a few bars after. If I fluffed it again (or another note), the same question. If I did not fluff it, he would ask me why I didn’t that time. Regardless, we would then go on to one bar before and play until one bar after. Then one note before to one note after. Then just the note. Then the note softer, then with a legato attack, then accented, then loud, then without tongue, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., all the time asking my why - if fluffed or not.

I would leave the lesson a nervous wreck.

I started putting up mirrors on my music stand in concerts so I could watch my embouchure and even tried to play for a while with pieces of cork between my molars to get the exact distance correct for the opening of the front teeth. I was a mess.

I had to unlearn a lot from my college education - including tons of garbage from music composition, theory, form and analysis, etc. Outside the avant garde stuff, I still haven’t used all that figured bass I spent hundreds of hours learning, even as a conductor.

This post is even longer. My focus is that education should serve the acquisition of competence, which in many cases it didn't with my education. I see that this is true with the younger people in today's education, so things really haven't changed all that much.

This is something to work on. One suggestion for the young people: when you encounter stupid lessons, do them to learn the enemy. You are the ones who will help change the world for the better.

That frame of mind might help the boredom some.

Michael

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Wow, sounds like quite the pain in the butt, Michael! Nowadays, in my opinion, the bars are set too low, so if somebody does "well" people are very surprised. For example, my 10th grade english teacher thought my writing was excellent, and it's not! I think she thought so because all she saw was very mediocre writing all the time and mine was a little bit better. It's sad. They keep lowering bars in order to make it seem like they are giving us a better education. "Oh, the MAP test scores were exceptionally high this year!" Well, that's because you did away with the math and science portions! *sigh* A tenth grader who can understand an easy book like 1984 shouldn't be considered a freakin' prodigy. Which reminds me, it took us a semester to read 1984 because my TENTH grade english class couldn't understand or read very fast! :blink:

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Your seventh grade experience reminds me of something akin to what I had in the first and fourth grades. First off, in first grade I was moved up to third grade math. Even then they didn't like me and gave me the third grade test with the intention of me getting failing it. They were sincerely trying to stop all progress of mine. I got a 96% and the highest grade in the class on the third grade test. My first grade teacher then decided to discourage me by trying to show me I wasn't as good at math as I thought. She gave me a 7th grade level math packet, seated me next to the hyper kids that wouldn't shutup, and wouldn't help me or explain the concepts of the packet she gave me. In second grade they would no longer let me move ahead in class. So I was stuck relearning addition and subtraction. I was homeschooled from midway through second grade until the beginning of fourth grade. In that time I was doing 5-6th grade math and 6-7th grade math.

I re-entered school in the fourth grade at West Hills Christian School and was an immediate misfit. The big awkward looking kid hanging out with two of the small nerds. Through fourth grade I got stuck relearning my multiplication tables, division, and other basic concepts that I had learned long ago. I constantly got in fights and in trouble because of saying such horrible words as "God" when I wasn't praying, and "Hell" in reference to something other than a place.

Enter fifth grade I had a hippie of a teacher. She invited an environmentalist to talk to the class who I promptly dispatched of in a manner that left my classmates laughter chastize him as he made sure the door didn't hit him on his way out.

Sixth grade was a real treat. This was the year when we got to learn why Creation was so much better than Evolution. The arguments were as astounding as, "They carbon dated a rock that was newly created from a volcano and it said it was millions of years old". I said, "Well couldn't the magma that was in the volcano before it became a rock have been that old?". I was the least popular kid in the grade by a very large margin. Christian schools tend to have a thing against people who deviate from their status quo.

Seventh grade, still enrolled in the Christian School, the English teacher/Vice Principle with a napolean complex decided that he needed to "assert his authority" by forcing me to participate in a capture the flag game that I refused to partake in. I was refusing to play because my friends had been unjustly punished and I was protesting the action. My vice-principle felt it necessary to assert his authority by holding me next to his face and yelling at me for a half hour. After that I dropped out.

I enrolled in the Jr. High that feeds into my current high school. Once again I was re-learning material that I had learned in the previous years and was so bored that I ceased to try. I didn't turn in assignments or anything and lost motivation completely.

This trend followed until freshman year when I decided to start trying again because I want good grades so I can get into a good division one college so I can play baseball and go pro. All of my current academic prowess in the school system stems from my desire to play baseball, not to learn. I can justly say that I have learnt far more from my optional readings than I have from any other form of education aside from possibly my parents who taught me to think.

Right now I am currently one of the most controversial students in the school. I was kept out of honors english because the administration decided that I would spend the whole time arguing with the teacher and detract from learning.

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Once again I was re-learning material that I had learned in the previous years and was so bored that I ceased to try. I didn't turn in assignments or anything and lost motivation completely.

Sounds pretty damn familiar to me. Too bad I didn't come out of it like you did. :cry: :lol:

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  • 4 weeks later...

I hate it when idiotic fellow students that you are forced to interact with turn out to be idiotic fellow students who you are forced to interact with. The other day I was forced to do a science assignment with a girl who, in my personal opinion, is a waste of flesh. However, because I thought I might have been being a tad bit close minded and had a lack of information to make a judgement, I decided to give her a fair shot. As it turned out, the girl was a complete waste of flesh and I wasted a large amount of energy that could have been better spent by doing nothing at all. More would have been produced that way.

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Yeah, the smart ones always end up doing the entire assignment. It'd be so much easier to do it all individually. Or maybe choose our group.

In my english class, the teacher divided us into girls and boys and we collectively had to decide what traits we wanted in a husband/wife. So ridiculous. Their list was far from mine. Psssht.

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Ugh, more brainless kids from my "peer group" presented themselves to me today. We were assigned to read chapters 1-5 of Kite Runner in English the day before yesterday. Now, I am really bad at reading set chapters, so I read all 370 some odd pages. So, the "peer" to my left who didn't read the book says "Jeff do you wanna work in a group on this assignment" referring to the one given to our class by our sadistic, socialist english teacher. (Actually he's not sadistic he's really nice I just felt like making an alliteration) In any case, this girl asks me if I want to be in her group. I then realize, that girl doesn't like me. The only possible reason that she would want to be in my group would be to get all the answers off her. So I told her to get a group with someone that she will continue to appreciate after she gets the homework off them, and went to sit with a friend of mine who DID do the reading.

Upon sitting down with my friend, a kid walks up who is in my spanish class complaining about the teacher giving him a referral (giving him detention) that he very much deserved. I tell him he deserved it, he threatens to slash the teacher's tires, and I tell him I'll tell on him if he does. At this point he is so astonished that he raises his voice at me saying that I shouldn't try to be superman and that if he slashes the teacher's tires it's my word against his. Unfortunately for him, he's not the brightest crayon in the box. The teacher walks over and says, "Well now I will be able to testify that you were the one that did it so I suggest you not". My classmates are not geniuses.

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I guess I have never had many of the kind of experiences being talked about here. I, however, do remember having some liberal teachers and arguing with them a lot. The worst book I had to read in high school was Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It's about a soldier who's deaf and blind and lost all his limbs from a war injury and is complete stream of consciousness about his internal thoughts.

I hung out with a group of kids who were mostly private college bound with several making it to Ivy League schools. We had an interesting ethnic mix, because many of the liberal people in Des Moines, Iowa acted as foster families for Southeast Asian refugees from Laos and Cambodia. We therefore had about 5% Southeast Asians in our school. My friend Nanh Lovanh actually dodged bullets in the Mekong Delta during his escape.

I remember one of the first R-rated movies I saw was The Killing Fields because our 8th grade language arts/social studies teacher wanted us to identify with the Southeast Asians. That same teacher took us through 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary and had us shadow a State Legislator for a day. I still remember going to all those committee meetings in the Iowa House of Representatives. It was an eye-opener.

Jim

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Jim; A quick comment about Dalton Trumbo, he was one of the members of the Hollywood 10. He was also one of the more talented members of that group. He lived in Mexico all during the blacklist and continued to write althrough not get credit for his work. The book you mentioned may have been withdrawen after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the Communist Party went from saying the Yank were not coming to demanding they leave yesterday.

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Jim; A quick comment about Dalton Trumbo, he was one of the members of the Hollywood 10. He was also one of the more talented members of that group. He lived in Mexico all during the blacklist and continued to write althrough not get credit for his work. The book you mentioned may have been withdrawen after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the Communist Party went from saying the Yank were not coming to demanding they leave yesterday.

Dalton Trumbo is a talented writer. However, I challenge anyone to read that book cover to cover without jumping off the nearest bridge :-). One of the other books I read in that Journalism class was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. I guess I might as well round out my literary education and read Germinal by Emile Zola :-).

Jim

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Ya, did it for two years. Parents don't have time anymore though. Though those were some of the best school years ever. Three hours of school a day cause I didn't have to deal with all the extra stuff.

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Not a teen (Im 20) but my experience in high school was sufficiently traumatic to justify inclusion in this thread.

Grades: Was average (essentially) until grade 11 and 12 when, suddenly, my grades shot up. Thats because in grades 11 and 12 they judge you on abstract reasoning rather than neatness of writing and pretty glitter glue.

"Peers": Bullied, traumatized, loathed, put down, and so depressed I was literally suicidal, under the belief that something was wrong with me and I was defective, that some disease I had prevented me from fitting in.

Post School: After surviving, a mental wreck and a self-loathing suicide case, I eventually discovered Ayn Rand. I then realized that I was not defective, they were. Im now a third year economics student at university and with my newfound pride, ego and self-esteem, Im genuinely happy (finally).

The essay "The Comprachicos" made me break down in tears... it showed me precisely what those little brutes wanted and why I am nothing less than morally heroic for maintaining my independent mind. It showed me that they were diseased little wretches and I was human as humanity should be.

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Amazing isn't it? The power people give to their peers. I'm quite possibly the ridicule of the football team, probably the weirdest kid that has an IQ above 80 on it, and I have been called a nerd by my coaches (although they're still the greatest and he was smiling so I know that he didn't care). I learned at the end of 8th grade that the average kid on this earth has the integrity and loyalty to reason and consistency of a rock. A rock being incapable of reason, I would say they have very little.

By the way, at just about any age you are welcome in here. It's so dull without grownups. More or less just Kori and I. Which reminds me, Michael, Kat, where's Inky?

Edited by Jeff Kremer
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I learned at the end of 8th grade that the average kid on this earth has the integrity and loyalty to reason and consistency of a rock. A rock being incapable of reason, I would say they have very little.

The irrationality is not the product of the kids themselves.... nor really a product of stupidity or average IQ. I often find that those who cannot really grasp uber-philosophy tend to have much more commonsense reason: common sense of course was relied upon by both John Locke and Aristotle. Common sense reason is an ally of Objectivism, because more often than not (not absolutely but often sufficiently) it is a subconscious grasp of Objectivity. I think that the little pack animals are often created by adults and their institutions subjecting the young to cognitive mutilation. Religious schools are a great example.

One thing I love about Ayn Rand: she never patronized the young. She often made statements praising them for their acknowlegement of the power of ideas (free of cynical disillusionment). I was frequently patronized during my youth, and I still am, by those claiming to 'know best." Objectivism, on the other hand, empowered me.

Oh, and I know how it feels to be the ridicule of the football team, albiet my perspective was that of an outsider. That pack of brainless conformist brutes tormented me endlessly... how I would love to return the favor with a rusty razor blade and a bottle of sulfuric acid.

Edited by studiodekadent
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