#keep shop class!!! keep home ec!!! fund the arts!!!

[bombshellsandbluebells]

if schools still taught shop class, I might have figured out I love building things a lot sooner

[cyborg-franky]

Ooooo could you possibly do headcanons of the one piece characters as college students? What type of students would they be, how would they be in class, what are their majors, etc? :D

Ooooh yes, I didn't go to college and UK college is very different from US so here I go.. I dunno if they do majors like this so I generalized them.

Marco

Always late to lessons.

Looks like he isn’t paying attention and is top of the class.

Very social.

He does biology, science, history, and geography.

Ace

Does all his work last minute.

Shows up late.

‘I don’t really need to be here, life teaches us more lessons man’

Here for a good time

Media studies

Thatch

On-time.

Is often teachers' fave.

Flirts too much in class.

Here for home ec, cooking, and business.

Izou

Just wanted to go to make sure his sister was okay.

Scary, teachers are scared of him so he gets away with like, alot.

Beauty, business, law

Deuce

Was made to go by his parents.

Is really unhappy being there.

Lets Ace bring him down.

Flunking biology but doing well in creative writing and literature.

Law

Wanted to get away from overly attached father figure.

Is always on time but looks like he’d rather smoke behind the bike sheds.

Biology, science, chemistry

Kid

Here to party bitches.

Drinks and good times.

Metal shop, engineering.

Killer

His best friend is going so…

On time, keeps hung-over Kid in check

Cooking, home ec, languages.

Sabo

Why not, use government money to fund himself.

Is late.

He Will cut a bitches breaks if they fail him.

Politics, law, psychology.

Vivi

Late to the game because she needed a gap year to find herself.

Always on time, always a goody goody.

World affairs, politics, law

Zoro

Only time he stepped foot on campus was he got lost.

Jokes aside.

Sport

Nami

Already has loads of money, and never has student fees.

Will ruin everyone who looks at her wrong.

Business, agriculture.

Robin

Is that one goth girl that everyone is in love with.

Flawless in class.

Social but people fear her for no reason.

History, creative writing, languages, Latin, literature.

Franky

People kinda think he’s lost.

WHAT’S UP MY DUDES, ARE WE LEARNING? Vibes

Metal work, engineering, travel.

Usopp

incoming nerdy art student who always has the paint-covered overalls.

Big nerdy but has cool friends so everyone knows and likes him.

Art, textiles, drama

Brook

Mature student

Here to vibe.

Music, history

Chopper

Gets carded all the time, why are you here child.

Is scared of everyone.

Does his best

Science, biology, human studies

Luffy

SABO AND ACE ARE DOING IT SO.

Is bad

Just crashes in everyone's dorms and eats everyone's food.

Not dumb just not into learning.

Sanji

“Someone told me I could get laid in college.”

Wishes he was a party boy.

Nerd

Home ec, cooking, drama

[canon-himbo]

Some Starkid/TCB characters as teachers

So, I had the idea to make a teacher au for SaF, but there’s not enough canon characters for that. So, I decided to make ye olde crossover! 

THE TEACHERS:

TGWDLM:

Paul:

Tech teacher

He’s really bad at it, to be honest

No one has the heart to break it to him

He knows how to work a computer from 1994

But has no clue how to turn off screensaver

Emma:

She’s the one sub that’s always there

She will substitute for every class

She’s even in the school yearbook

It’s always fun to see her flirt with Paul

Some classes have a betting pool on when they’re gonna go out

Spoiler alert, they already are

Ted:

Vice principal

He’s kinda an asshole, but his friends claim he’s got a reason

Will bust your ass if he sees weed

Has been told numerous times not to bring alcohol to class

“Oh, but Mega gets to stumble in with a hangover, yeah?”

His water bottle is filled with vodka

Shh don’t tell Zazz

Charlotte:

The sweetest school counselor you will ever meet

Oliver claims she’s cheating on her husband, but nobody buys it

She’s got every cat poster imaginable in her office

Even the little “hang in there!” one

Bill:

Music teacher

Is begging Keeri to put on Mamma Mia!

She refuses

When Alice transferred to Hatchetfield High he wouldn’t shut up about it

After a trip to Watcher World, they’ve gotten along much better

He plays the violin, and well.

Hidgens:

Biology teacher

He wants to be the theatre teacher and constantly asks to help Keeri

She’s sick of people wanting her job

He’s married to Chad

No one’s met Chad

Considering Hidgens’ track record, he may not be real

FIREBRINGER:

Zazzalil:

The best principal you will ever meet

She’s always down to clown, but still keeps everyone in line

How she does it, no one knows

Jemilla:

Special Ed teacher

Come to her with your problems, she will fix them

She and Zazzalil are married

[Everyone liked that]

Keeri:

Theatre teacher

Choreographs all the dances herself

Has never cooked a meal in her life.

Up is trying to teach her how

Ducker:

Choir teacher

Also does Art when Emberly doesn’t have a class

Is very enthusiastic

All the time

SAF:

Curt:

History teacher

No one would suspect it, he’s the poster child for ADHD

But he actually makes his lessons really fun

When he doesn’t want to teach, he’ll play Bond movies

Curt loves them more than any student

Owen:

English teacher

Gets made fun of because “how typical is it that the ELA teacher is actually English??”

He’s Not Having It

Best friends with Curt (may or may not be pining, who knows)

Cynthia:

Superintendant

Do not cross her. You won’t live to tell the tale.

Barely comes around but when she does you should run

Some teachers know what days she’ll swing by and purposefully call in sick

Barb:

Chemistry teacher

Sponsors the Robotics club

Sweetheart and easy to take advantage of

But if you do end up taking advantage of her the students will avenge her name

Tatiana:

Math teacher

Sponsors the fencing club

She’s very professional, and refuses to tell you anything about her life

BLACK FRIDAY:

McNamera:

Coach as well

He also teaches one calculus class when he has the time.

No one knows why

Left the military on an honorable discharge

He’s a mystery. No one knows anything about him

Tom:

Shop Teacher

Resident Himbo

His wife died, be nice to him

Everyone’s dad

Becky:

School Nurse

Sweetheart

Her and Tom may be dating????

Who knows

Everyone’s mom

STARSHIP:

Taz:

P.E. Coach

Sponsors wrestling club

Scary as fuck but in a supportive way

Up:

Home EC teacher

He used to be the Coach but he got into a car accident so now he’s home ec

He’s surprisingly good at it

cries when he messes up in class

THE STUDENTS:

BLACK FRIDAY:

Lex:

Just transferred to Hatchetfield High

Brought her boyfriend Ethan along

Loves her sister, hates school

It just be like that huh

Ethan:

Best boyfriend

His great uncle is Hidgens

Don’t mention it

He actually shows up to school every day, but he’s never passing his classes

Trying his best

STARSHIP:

Bug:

High Schooler

Trans King

Dating February and Very in love

Aspiring astronaut

February:

Cheerleader

Future scientist (loves chemistry class)

A little bit vapid but nice to everyone  

Junior:

Trust fund kid

Annoying as hell

I think he knows a pot dealer

Don’t ask him though he’ll tell on you for wanting weed

SIS:

Keith:

Overly confident

Dating Gwen

Maybe dating Scrags???

Their friend group is so tight people don’t know who’s dating and who’s just friends

Gwen:

The one girl in school everyone knows

She’s fun when you get to know her

But when you first meet her she’s a bit… much

she’s quite the actress, and she knows it

Scrags:

Wants to be a film noir detective

Turns out that’s not a real thing, so he’s going to join the FBI instead

His dog Cluebert died last year and he’s still not over it

Someone get him therapy

Esther:

Junior’s dealer

Incredibly smart and passing all her classes

But never shows up to any of them

Says she has a girlfriend but no one’s ever seen her

Maybe that girlfriend is Gwen? Who knows

Not the Hatchetfield High students, that’s for sure

[ms-demeanor]

After reading your "ultra-long postivity post", now I have kind of a weird feeling because i relate a lot to pretty much everything you said, but i ended up approaching the "not everyone can x" from the opposite side, being the "gifted kid" teachers used to hold everyone to unrealistic standards (that i knew most couldnt achieve in the given timeframes), and now i get frustrated when i dont develop skills immediately, because i have done it before and feel like i should be able to and aaaaaaaaaa

Funny story: when I was a kid my parents had both my sister and I tested for learning and developmental disabilities. This testing included IQ testing.

It identified that we were both “gifted” kids* and that I’m dyslexic.

It totally missed my ADHD, though!

The problem with that is that my parents. Hm.

Okay my parents both grew up in very poor families. VERY poor. And they both wanted to go to college and knew the only way that they could was through scholarships. So they became debaters. They met at a tournament in high school.

Debaters are weird. You need an efficient working memory and strong recall and the ability to think quickly on your feet. Being witty and kind of an asshole are also good traits for debaters. Basically you’ve either gotta be really fuck-off smart to be a competitive debater or you’ve gotta at least *seem* really fuck-off smart.

And my parents were champion debaters at a national level. The Whittier College debate trophy has my mom’s name written directly under Richard goddamn Nixon. My dad was on the USC debate team and competed against Harvard and won. Not only that but he ended up coaching debate for USC and Cal Tech.

So as kids who grew up in extremely poor families and were able to go to college and get middle-class jobs and buy a house because of intellectual ability my parents placed A LOT of importance on intellectual ability.

So that IQ score became a large part of my life.

First we attacked the dyslexia. The approach was basically teaching me a bunch of sight words because sounding out phonics doesn’t work when the letters get screwed up. And because I was *gifted* we did a lot of really BIG sight words.

It took about six months to get me up to speed from “memorizing the pages of a story to match the pictures because I couldn’t read along in class” to “the first book I read on my own was The Hobbit.” I guess that counted as “cured” because that was the last time I got any kind of educational assistance.

At that time I was at a gifted school, a really tiny private school that was also an after-school daycare where we did full-day classes and then did gymnastics and swim from 3-6pm. I also was there over the summer because my parents worked.

So going from “tiny private school where the teacher has you stand up in class to read your failing grade in front of everyone so that she could shame you into performing better” to “fine public school in a suburb wealthy enough to have arts programs” was a major, major change. They did an aptitude test because I was transferring in from a different district and there was much discussion about whether or not to move me directly from the second to the sixth grade.

The district refused, thank fuck.

The public elementary school didn’t *have* a gifted program so it took very little time for me to become the Certified Weird Kid. My third grade teacher had me read aloud to our class for twenty minutes a day. I taught the class the multiplication table.

When it got to be time to go to the junior high school my mom went to a meeting for the school’s gifted kids program. APPARENTLY one of the kid’s dad’s basically said “I don’t understand why you’re wasting school funds on field trips for the stupid kids, the school should spend more of its resources on kids who have a chance of actually meaning something to the world” and my mom decided that while being gifted was important it was less important than making sure I wasn’t exposed to assholes of that caliber on a regular basis.

(thanks mom, I actually do really appreciate that reprieve)

Several teachers pushed me into advanced classes - my math teacher insisted that I take the advanced algebra classes in the seventh and eighth grade.

The GATE kids *WERE* assholes and were extra bonus special assholes to me because math was the only advanced class that I was in. (At my junior high school you had to pick your elective based on what level of classes you were in - to take the GATE classes you HAD to take a music elective; if you took art, drama, shop, or home ec you couldn’t take the smart kid classes. The algebra class was a new, separate addition to the program so *some* of the kids in the “electives for dropouts” program could take algebra. Schools are really fucked up, guys, in case you didn’t know schools are really fucked up and that was BEFORE No Child Left Behind).

I got a C in that algebra class and sat in my room for literally an hour screaming at myself for being such a selfish, distracted idiot that I let myself read my books instead of studying harder for the class. (clearly very healthy, normal twelve-year-old behavior)

When it was time to go to high school my teachers made a united plea to the district to transfer me into honors/IB/AP classes.

The kids in the honors/IB/AP classes continued to be kind of awful to me. I got extremely depressed and basically started doing the lazy-but-brilliant thing of completely ignoring homework or in-class work but performing spectacularly well on tests or essays in the classes that I wasn’t catastrophically failing

I was the only person at the school who got a perfect score on the vocab part of my SAT. I was the only honors kid who hadn’t been in SAT prep classes. There was only one other kid who graduated with the same number of units as I had, we’d outstripped the valedictorian and salutatorian but three classes each. I only applied to one college - I got accepted for painting but my interviewer urged me to move to the writing program and I got accepted for that too.

My financial aid didn’t come through and my dad wasn’t willing to cosign for loans on “an art program at a trade school.”

I got accepted to Pratt Institute on their Writing for Publication track which included an internship with the New York Times for third-year students in the program.

At that point I had a Columbia Scholastic Press award for my work on my high school yearbook.

Let me tell you, the community college that I went to and spent five years variously failing and succeeding at had a fucking *killer* newspaper and magazine when I was there. The local community newspaper that hired me when I was 21 was also much better designed and edited than it had any right to be for the three years I worked there (getting paid a whole eight dollars an hour and sometimes working 20 hours straight to get it in to the printer on time).

When I transferred to the state school I got perfect grades and worked full time and won every contest offered by the school’s English Honors society (which I couldn’t join because I was a transfer student and hadn’t done honors classes my freshman and sophomore years). I started a literary magazine with some friends when I graduated; we published four full issues online before it fell apart.

You know what’s also funny?

Even the food-service job I had to pay my way though the community college I felt terrible about attending was a skills test. I was a barista, so of course for a while I was a competitive barista.

I disappointed my parents a lot. I heard a lot of “we know you’re better than this.” I got told I was too smart to be screwing up this bad. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but my results from that IQ test got compared to my sister’s and that was the justification for holding me to a higher standard. “You’re measurably brilliant, why aren’t you acting like it?”

Here lies the corpse of a gifted kid. Look on my works ye might and despair.

I am the perfect picture of a twice exceptional gifted kid and the reason I wrote all of this out is to tell you one thing:

“Gifted Kid” is a label that someone applied to you, it has nothing to do with who and what you ARE.

It’s very, very unfair that the adults in your life used you that way. I have an exceptionally terrible memory of being singled out as the only one who passed the first test in my IB World History class; “Why is Alli the only one of all of you who is writing at grade level? You’re supposed to be the smartest kids in the school, why did you all fail?”

That’s awful for the kids around you, that’s awful for you. It doesn’t do anybody any favors if people around you are being informed that you’re setting the curve they’ll be judged against. And it really, really doesn’t do YOU any favors because it doesn’t take long *at all* for your brain to learn that that’s all you’re good for. If you aren’t the best at a thing then what’s the point, you HAVE to be best because they already SAID you were best and if you aren’t then all these other people hate you for setting a standard that even you can’t keep up with.

You end up competing with past versions of yourself and focusing on those things that make the grownups in your life praise you because the grownups in your life has praised you in such a way that it’s turned all the other kids against you.

You know who bullied the fuck out of me? The kids I taught the times tables to, the kids I read to for half an hour a day.

Those kids were MEAN to me but the teacher who told me to read Boxcar Kids to the class after lunch everyday was NICE and she told me not to worry, they were just jealous and I should be proud of my gifts.

“Anon did this in three minutes. What’s taking the rest of you so long?” - what a terrible weight to put on a child. You’re right. Not everyone can do everything.

Fucking hell.

Adults what the everloving shit is wrong with us? Please don’t treat kids like that.

Okay.

Okay.

But here’s the other thing:

If there’s any time in your life that it’s easy to acquire skills with no apparent effort it’s when you’re a child surrounded by a support system that is engaged in making sure that you can acquire those skills.

It took three adults, two dictionaries, and several hours a day to teach me enough sight-words to throw me into “look at baby genius*” territory but from my perspective as a little kid I was just reading cool stories.

I spent four hours a day in the yearbook room and ditched and failed other classes so that I could work on the yearbook. I collected hundreds of magazines to get an eye for layout. But from my perspective as a teenager it was a fun activity that I did with the closest thing I had to friends.

I’m sure that there are some skills that you had a natural aptitude for, some things that came naturally. But I’m also sure that you didn’t learn those skills with no effort, it’s just that now as an adult with a life and other shit going on it takes more effort to learn to do things.

In all likelihood you weren’t a savant who did everything perfectly the first time you tried. It just seems that way because even really smart kids don’t know when they’re bad at things and are mostly being compared against other kids (with the few rare exceptions of music prodigies or math prodigies or those kids who end up in science grad programs at 12 and boy howdy do I think there’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the way child prodigies* interact with the world).

You wanna know what probably saved my life in the last few years?

That “anti-capitalist love notes” tumblr post.

You are worth more than your productivity.

You are worth more than your productivity.

You are worth more than your productivity.

I was actually kind of offended the first time I saw that post on my dash. “No I’m not,” I thought. “You’re only worth what you can do, everyone knows that. People care about what you do for them.”

And why the hell would I think anything else? That’s what I’d learned for pretty much my whole life.

It took me a really long time to understand that I was wrong. I matter outside of what I can do for people or how well I perform. I matter more than being able to perfectly recite poetry from memory or do calculations on command or sit down at a piano and play a piece I’ve never played by sight-reading it.

And you matter outside of that too. You’re more than your performance, you’re better than being gifted. There are people who love you for the way you make them laugh and how you listen to their stories and for the simple joy of your presence.

It’s nice to be clever, it’s handy in a lot of situations even if it does come with a lot of baggage for some people.

But god damn, it’s important to be kind.

* Personally I have issues with the way that society constructs the concepts of giftedness, genius, and prodigies. There are a lot of “gifted” kids who were the kids who scored in the top 5% of their class in school but there are also gifted kids who were doing high-level math or reading novels as toddlers; there are prodigies who showed an aptitude for music young and who were then schooled in that instrument to the exclusion of all other activities (and I bet there are a fair number of kids who might be considered prodigies if they were trained to play flute for nine hours a day and didn’t have friends but thankfully we don’t *do* that to very many people - side note, ask me my opinion about olympic athletes some time). Words like “genius” and “gifted” are very nearly meaningless and almost *never* accurately reflect skills proficiency or long-term success or are reflected in income or respect. People think that geniuses are hypercompetent robots with their shit together but literally every adult I know with a genius-level IQ is some variety or other of total fucking tire fire.

[underwhelmedandoverstimulated]

Like, I know it's all fun and games making fun of the stupid people who don't know anything about anything outside of their small sphere of existence, but my country has very purposefully been sabotaging it's education system in these areas for at least nearly 2 decades.

Like we all talk about how they took away home EC or shop class, or how the art &music funding keeps getting diverted to sports, but like literally when I was in school 15 years ago, we didn't learn anything but the most basic things about countries outside of America until college.

What does the arab in your carrd mean? Is it like afab and amab?

.. i’m palestinian

[sunken-standard]

So much of it comes down to the school boards and budgets. They often don't make the decisions to cut programs for nefarious reasons; the short-sighted boomers on our school board decided to cut home ec and shop shortly after Common Core was introduced. Kids needed more math classes! We can't pay home ec and shop teachers when we need more rent-a-cops and para professionals to keep those classes of 50-60 kids from ripping the teacher apart. How can we pay for the quarter-million dollar renovation of the football stadium if we don't trim the fat? Kids don't need to know this stuff anyway, who even cooks food or sews anymore? Frozen pizzas and Wal-Mart jeans are already there, this is the 21st century not the Great Depression.

Also, think about who's on your local board. Most of my district's board is composed of people who make over $100k/ year (median is like $46k/ household here, or thereabouts), own businesses, and/ or come from a dynasty of local old money that have been in administrative roles in education for at least 3 generations. They don't care about educating the children; they care about securing grant funding to pay for shit that makes us appear state-of-the-art and not the poorest district in the county.