one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too
the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”
Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.
when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.
I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.
My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.
“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.
“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.
And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.
YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER. FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.
ANVILS ARE A THING.
From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:
“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”
I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.
Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.
THIS. when i was in first grade i was bored in class a lot. my solution was: finish my work as quickly as possible, then read a book, because teachers said that books were good and i liked to read. except i got in trouble, more than once, for working ahead. because… we were doing it as a class i suppose? but if y’all are gonna take an hour to descirbe how to tell time, why shouldn’t i finish my worksheet? i remember we had these clothespins with our names on them and we had to move them to yellow or red from green if we got into trouble, and because i answered the next three questions ahead (correctly, i might add) i had to move my pin to yellow and miss recess.
and it didn’t stop as i got older. i once had an 8th grade science teacher tell me off for reading in class and said he would throw my library book away, because i had finished my work and the other people in my group, who didn’t want to do their work and were whining to copy off mine, hadn’t finished. because i was expected not to be done until they were, and he refused to believe they wanted to cheat. (of course the solution here was to let them cheat and go back to harry potter, because fuck if i was going to listen to them complain through every single problem they didn’t want to do).
tl;dr: STOP PUNISHING KIDS FOR WANTING TO WORK HARD
in fourth grade we had an end of the trimester pizza party or whatever for the kids that had worked hard enough to read x amount of books. it was like, four books and the only requirement was that it had to be at your reading level or above, so the kids who struggled to read could also get the chance to partake.
well, i had read the third and fourth harry potter books along with some others, and i had one book left. we had to tell our teacher what we were reading so she could keep track. i told her i was reading order of the phoenix and she said no. “you’ve read too many of those.”
YOU REALLY, HONESTLY WANT TO TELL A NINE YEAR OLD THAT WANTS TO READ AN 870 PAGE BOOK TO NOT DO IT?
I said fuck her and read it in two days. she was pissed but she had to count it because i passed the computer test on it so she knew i had actually read it.
don’t tell a kid they can’t read something, for god sakes. don’t punish children for wanting to learn or to do something above the regular level. thats how kids wind up not doing anything.
More recently for myself is when highschool teachers embarrass kids for asking “dumb questions” or asking about things they should “already know.” You’re the teacher???? Teach, maybe????
Censorship of sexuality, especially while simultaneously violence, particularly sexual violence, is left uncensored, and the harmful implication this juxtaposition has on our collective sexual wellness, is something I’ve written a lot about, like here and here. Hell, I’ve even written a book about it.
So when I found out there is a new “kid safe” search engine called Kiddle designed to block adult search returns for children, I feared it had sex-is-bad-and-violence-is-normal disaster written all over it. When I learned the results are handpicked by humans and not a computer broadly banning based on keywords, I was extra curious to see if I was still right. I was.
I typed in a bunch of different searches that a child might reasonably want or *need* to anonymously ask the Internet. Well, I’ll let you see the results for yourself:
“My girlfriend hits me” is also a bad word.
Inquiries about vaginal discharge are, you guessed it, also bad words.
Related bad words: menstrual care, menstrual pads, menstruation, and uterus.
When avoiding a gay dating website in the search results is considered a higher priority of “safety” for children than their homelessness, and you recommend confronting their abusive parents, we have a tish bit of a problem.
If I was 12, typed this into a search engine, and instead of results got
a “bad word” finger wagging, I would take the answer to the “is it ok
to be bisexual” question as a big fat NO :(
But the human censors apparently allows kids to search for this one under their “kid safe” censorship policies:
So questions about puberty, health, identity, and seeking help for sexual abuse is not “safe”, but kids buying guns is. I feel like a broken record, so I’m going to let you all unpack it this time. Discuss:
