when adults tell teenagers that the dull ache of high school is just a survivable mess that they’re making up to be worse than it is, i think of this:
when i was in sophomore year, i was in an accident and the left side of my face was hit. i sat in the emergency room with a clearly broken nose and blood coming out of a laceration on my cheek. and i did my homework. i did my homework with a black eye swelling up, with little red fingerprints on it.
and he told me to redo it. that it wasn’t good enough. the assignment itself was worth maybe five points out of a hundred. he wouldn’t forgive me for it. when i explained about my concussion, he told me to do it somewhere dark.
we don’t make it up. the value of our lives becomes almost nothing at all. the quality of living that is allowed is so low that students learn to apply it to themselves. they are useless, unimportant, a machine to figure out problems without any food, sleep, family time. nothing. we call teenagers moody because something in them breaks a little. we don’t say: they are stressed beyond measure and they believe their own physical health is less important than the quality of the product they’re forced to produce. we don’t say: wouldn’t you be moody too?
Its almost like it was designed to create corporate drones who allow companies to pay them dirt for their time and sanity withou t thinking twice about it.
for reference, the price of going to the nearest state college for 1 year is $50,442, and the nearest community college is 40 minutes away. The “attendance fee” alone is already twice the amount it would cost me to go to the private college in Japan, which I already received a scholarship for, for the same amount of time.
USA schooling system broke, anon. idk if you’ve noticed that.
Schools tell you to express yourself and then suspend you when you do.
“You can only express yourself in ways that we approve of. You can’t be yourself if yourself is something that we don’t like.” ~ Schools… and every single organization ever.
Here it is: how I got Horrible Histories banned from my school.
Sit down, I’m going to tell you a story.
Imagine a little girl, a 4’9” fifth grader with dimples and twinkling blue eyes. Oh, look, she’s going to the school library. Perhaps she’s going to rent Little Women, or read On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder!
Five minutes later, she exits the library holding a large stack of books called “Horrible Histories.”
And she’s thumbing through one called “Angry Aztecs.”
Record scratch. Freeze frame.
Yup, that’s me! The only history geek in a fifty mile radius. Living in Bumhicksville, Nowhere (name changed, but very accurate) is pretty terrible, and going to school at Caucasian Christian School of Goodness (again, a name change, but an apt description) is even worse. I snapped a bit while I was attending, due to the lack of permissible self-expression, but horrible histories were my guiding light.
Flash forward six months.
Our teacher wants us to do a history project about an ancient civilization. Since our curriculum is Eurocentricism.JPEG, most kids pick the Greeks or Romans (and completely skip over all of the good stuff, like orgies and gladiator fights) in their presentations.
I choose my favorite ancient civilization:
The Aztecs.
My teachers knew I’d been reading Horrible Histories, but what they didn’t know was that I’d also been avidly reading all about Aztec mythology. I walk up to the front of the class, pull on a turquoise skull mask, and raise my arms to the sky.
My teacher goes sheet white.
I give my presentation and skip nothing. Nothing. Every detail of the sacrifices, every dirty, disgusting part.
It all culminates when I point to the calendar.
“It’s May!” I shout, my little girl voice rising an octave. My teacher looks like she’s about to phone the police. “The Aztecs called May Toxcatl.”
No one moves or breathed. I continue blithely.
“Toxcatl was a month dedicated to the worship of the god of the night, Tezcatlipoca.” I’m still going. Everyone is afraid. Marie, one of my classmates, looks like she’s about to cry.
“They’d dress a brave warrior as the god all year, and at the end-“ I pull the red streamers out from behind my display, shouting: “They’d sacrifice him!”
The kids shriek as the streamers of “blood” roll out across the floor.
The principal walked in, hearing the commotion, just in time for me to really get into character and shout “BLOOD FOR THE GOD OF THE NIGHT!”
And that’s how Horrible Histories and all mentions of the Aztecs were banned from my school.
this is like the opening of a children’s movie about a girl who was reprimanded for over-creativity / morbid obsessions, and i love it
adhd student: i love learning and i actually hunger for knowledge, but the way the school system currently operates doesn’t work well for people with brains like mine. i am capable of maintaining acceptable and even good grades, but it takes about 3x the time and effort of the average student. all my life i have been receiving messages, overt and subtle, that i am deficient, lazy, and/or weird for my inability to perform well in that environment, and my self-worth has been utterly decimated as a result.
maskedmadnessq 