that education meme

[flamingsword]

With the caveat that I am a neuroqueer autistic person, I have Thoughts and Opinions on public school education in the 80's and 90's.

Adults responsible for your care actively helped facilitate your early learning. (Reading at bedtime, playing educational games, going to child-friendly museums...)

Yes, most of them. Dad didn't understand children or people in general, but after Mom left him we moved in with Aunt Rhoda who had most of a degree in early childhood development.

You had a library card.

I sometimes had to bribe people to take me to the library, but yes, I had a library card of my own, and was encouraged to read.

Adults in your life involved you in tasks that involved mathematic skills.

Not often? Like I was okay at math without them needing to do that, so I mostly remember them being focused on getting my brother to pass history and social studies (which he was failing when he died).

If you started falling behind in school, you received help from a private tutor.

Lol, no. When the insomnia and depression got bad and I started failing in school, I got yelled at and punished instead of helped. Was it not great to get this treatment from my parental figures as well as being unprofessional behavior from teachers? Yyyyyeah.

You went to a well-funded school.

I went to a private school for about 6 months once during middle school, to get me away from the bullies nobody was doing anything about? Does that count as a well-funded school?

You typically attended school adequately clothed and fed.

Yes. Mom sometimes would skip meals to keep us in food and clothes, before we got government assistance, but at the time I didn't know that we were food insecure.

Adults responsible for your care were able to help you make decisions when it came time to pursue higher education.

No. I looked up to the only members of my family that had gone to college, so I knew I wanted to go, but during the time when their advice would have been relevant, one lived 800 miles away and the other was in the middle of getting treated for cancer. The subject never came up.

If you were disabled and/or neurodivergent, you were classified by your school and received support through the education system.

LOL NO
I think everyone knew there was something "different" about me, but I kept getting told things like, "Maybe if you didn't choose to act so strange other kids wouldn't bully you." (I wish I remembered the name of that particular vice principal so I could have found him and shat on his lawn.) Oh, the 80's and your lack of anti-bullying programs in schools, so so very fail.

You generally felt physically and emotionally safe at school.

No. Not at the public schools, not at the Christian private school, not at school-sponsored events with my peers. Basically not anywhere connected with education at all.

You were in relatively good physical and mental health.

No. I have had weird physical and mental health shit from the jump. Which my educators dismissed as things I was choosing to do - somehow including the sprains, cracking joints, broken noses, and various other shit they watched happen to me. Health and PE teachers: maybe Texas should require them to have a degree in a related subject? I'm just saying! My degree of joint hypermobility is not something you see every day! Somebody should have twigged to that!

For the most part, you were able to study and complete assignments without any struggle.

Ahaha. Again, no. We were poor and I was victim-blamed for any struggles I displayed until I learned to stop displaying my struggles and only care about the things I was naturally good at. I hope that my educators at any point figured out that they were part of the problem that their classes were having with school, bc it wasn't just me.

Test-taking came easily to you.

Yeah, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. I got so many people using my test scores as proof that I wasn't "applying myself" and "wasn't living up to my potential". Not that they ever went out of their way to help me reach that potential or even told me what they thought it was so I could have reasoned with them about it. No, that would have been too helpful.

You read at grade level or above.

I've been reading since I was about three from what Mom remembers. And I'm reasonably hyperlexical? Yay for the 'tism!

Your mathematics skills were at grade level or above.

Until I stopped having two functioning brain cells because I was not sleeping/having daily meltdowns/too depressed to function, yeah.

Adults responsible for your care supported your academic journey for the better and for the worse.

I mean, I didn't really feel like they supported what I was specifically good at or wanted to learn, not until I went to massage school and my boyfriend, Mom, and Aunt Rhoda conspired to pay for it? Mostly I was expected to do well in school just because.

Comments

Not All Times Are Equal

[nyyki]

It's clear this survey is focused on current values and perspectives, because there are things in it that don't fit at all with what I experienced -- this may all be good for modern helicopter parents and current understandings/misunderstandings of divergence and non-parallel ability in students. This is not even worth bringing up from the time I was in school. I also question some of the value in this woolgathering unless it's for psychological assessment and learning deficiency reasons, because assessing past school experiences using modern metrics and expectations (grumble) seems divisive and limiting.

Re: Not All Times Are Equal

[flamingsword]

This is not useful to you bc you basically already know this stuff about me. But not everyone on my friendslist has that, so I’m doing some get-to-know-me type memes, and on the lookout for others responses.

And if I answered no to most of the questions, bc of how crappy I perceive my schooling to have been, I don’t think yours was any better over a decade beforehand, in a geographically similar locale, but I could be wrong about that. You never know.

Re: Not All Times Are Equal

[nyyki]

My statements weren't about you -- I think you tend to miss the objective focus of my thinking. I'm not questioning this set of questions as they relate to you, I'm questioning this set of questions as they relate to a large sector of the population. I get the value for specific individuals as an assessment tool, but the web tends to trivialize and overspread things like this.

And yes, my school life was horrible. Reading wasn't so much a concern -- in third grade I was reading on a college freshman level and I taught myself to speed read, so I was flying through books. I did okay in science, but social studies and math were struggles, and it's clear to me that the latter was due to weakness in my math teachers. Socially it was a total crazy nightmare, thanks to the chaos of bussing, homelife difficulties I didn't handle well at all, and the realization that made me a permanent outsider at risk to my health and well-being if any word got out. Depression sucks, and pre-teen and teen depression is often life threatening. So this was a set of added complications to what others in my generation faced, and we're thought of as a generation of survivors of fear, neglect, and the failure of social support systems -- those of us who survived, of course, because many didn't; we have a generational reputation for being mentally and emotionally tough because of what we went through, but I remember and honor those I knew who didn't make it through

Re: Not All Times Are Equal

[flamingsword]

You did say, “I also question some of the value in this woolgathering unless it's for psychological assessment and learning deficiency reasons …” and I was responding to that bit. Because I do see value in comparing and contrasting unlike things, it’s one of the ways some folks sort information and recognize patterns. Is it divisive and limiting or is it acknowledging divisions and limitations as they exist? I think we need to know where those are so that we can bridge those divides.

And yeah, lots of folks have a survivorship bias towards Gen Xers and Xennials. I know a few who didn’t make it, and I am grateful that they spent any of this one wild and precious life with me.

The failures of our education systems to treat kids as fully human along with our exposure to learning and curiosity contributed to a lot of deaths and other negative outcomes. You say you responded poorly to the stresses in your home life, but did anyone in the education system or your home ever model for you the skills you would have needed to deal with those particular stresses in a constructive and helpful manner? I am somewhat skeptical of that possibility.

[gingicat]

Where on earth did this come from? High school in the 80s was where I learned that White people were totally ignoring the extremely obvious (to me, a relatively-oblivious White kid!) existence of institutional racism.