#the education system is fucked

[duck-in-a-thrift-store]

I try not to post much in the ways of politics or real life heavy shit not directly from my own life, but I heard about this from my roommate the other night and it really pissed me off and it's really important to me that people are aware of it

Nex Benedict was a nonbinary teen who was recently beaten to death in a high school bathroom in Oklahoma

Nex was ambushed by three fellow students (children! children who have been so thoroughly brainwashed by hate that they fatally injured a classmate!) and died the next day

The school didn't even call a fucking ambulance

Furthermore, someone who's been called into question about this tragedy: Chaya Raichik, who has a history of involvement in queerphobic attacks and bomb threats and yet who somehow holds a position in Oklahoma's department of education???

AND, during the moment of silence held in Nex's honor, some of the members of the house of representatives present just kept fucking talking

The disrespect, the lack of giving a fuck on the school's part, it makes me so angry, and it should make you angry too

[merriadoc-brandyfuck]

Ok so, I just moved to my city’s Quiet High Program (for the mentally ill) and I seriously think that their policies and procedures should be implemented everywhere!

9am start time, free lunch, 5-10 minute breaks at the start of every hour, small classes, ends at 2:15pm, teacher’s assistants to help, NOTHING IS MANDATORY (You literally don’t have to show up to PAA classes as long as you’re with another teacher), one on one help from the teachers!!

This would have helped me and other people so much if regular high school was like this

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[l-herz]

Adaine and Aelwyn: Bite the Hand

[aurae-rori]

i fucking love slandering the american education system with ratio

so im writing for csm aventio au right.. and aventios first proper conversation.. is.. about the american education system...

[silence-between-seconds]

I don't think education was supposed to be about students breaking down and having bad mental breakdowns and panic attacks about submissions and exams. I don't think school was supposed to be about ranks and cutthroat competition and bad mental health.

[fru1typunch]

Here's a little post ranting about the Floridian education system and how it fucked over public school librarians this year, from the adult child of one who spent his whole summer helping his poor mom try and keep up with Desantis's ridiculous requests.

Every school year, the librarian always gets a couple weeks with a "closed" library to take inventory of the school's stock at the end. Normal stuff, y'know, if a bit tedious and boring. Scan every. Single. Thing. See what you have and figure out who last checked out what you should have, that sort of thing.

Well, Ron Desantis, in his genius, decided that concept had to be applied to all the books in the entire school to determine if they're "appropriate" (by his batshit conservative standards).

My mom didn't JUST have to do the usual inventory thing for her own library. She ALSO had to do something similar but far WORSE for her entire school's personal classroom libraries.

The objective of this SCHOOL WIDE requirement was to "approve" every book in the school as "appropriate". Every. Single. Book. In. The. School. Not the school library, no, the SCHOOL. All classrooms.

My mom's an elementary school librarian. There's around 1000 students at her school, give or take, and around 50 or so classroom libraries to sort through. And this was supposed to be done over summer, before the kids came back in the fall. Entirely unpaid.

She had to personally approve around 25,000-30,000 books school wide based on whether or not they're "appropriate for kids" (again, by Desantis standards), entirely unpaid, in about 2 months. Keep in mind these classroom libraries had been pre-existing for many years or even decades in most cases, so it's kinda useless to just now care about whether the books are "appropriate".

Mind you, you can't read that many individual books in under two months and then approve them in the system if you tried, even if most were children's books. She spent every single day of her summer, her only real time off each year, logging into the online portal and manually approving books from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, looking them up and trying to determine if they might be okay by the new standards since she couldn't possibly have the time to read them all and check, and again, entirely unpaid on her own. Teachers were scanning in their classroom's books to the system to be approved by her in real time, so she really never could get very far ahead. At most she'd knock out a few hundred a day, which I think is wildly impressive given the circumstances.

Even with all that work, she couldn't open her library for nearly a month into the new school year this August because she spent every school day finishing that approval thing for the classroom libraries for teachers. At least by that point she got paid for it. She was also way behind on getting her library ready for the school year, she really hadn't had time to prepare like normal. It was a crazy stressful time for her all around, moreso than back-to-school time normally is each year.

I helped as much as I knew how to, which mostly just meant looking books up for her or texting back and forth with my friends that work at Barnes and Noble or Books A Million asking if they could skim through certain books that might pose a threat at times, and coming up to the school with her sometimes while she worked on approving books and I worked on preparing her library for "business" again.

My mom was upset because she didn't have time for a real summer vacation, the most she got to do was occasionally visit the beach a few hours away for a day trip. (On one of the beach days, she even took her blessed laptop with her to work on it in the car ride over.) She was in the thick of it neck deep all on her own for months with hardly any time off and no pay to show for it.

It's frustrating because if she were to have approved a book that a parent later complains about, it could mean bad news for her. Again, no way in hell would she have been able to both read every single book, determine if she thought it was okay by Desantis's standards, and then approve every single book within the system. She did her best, but she's still nervous someone will complain.

All this conservative bullshit around books is hurting so many kinds of librarians and educators in so many ways, so just take a moment sometime soon to appreciate your local librarians and public school teachers putting up with this crap. They could use the love. Maybe some strong alcohol. And a big wad of cash, they do a lot of shit unpaid.

And do vote these assholes out of office that are making these poor librarians' and teachers' jobs harder with no additional support or pay.

[chilli-talks-a-lot]

romanticize learning, not school

The education system (in the U.S. at least) sucks! School sucks!

High expectations get set on you and you exhaust yourself trying to achieve them

Often, it promotes unhealthy competition and causes you to compare yourself to other students, even though everyone has different skill sets and circumstances

Being neurodivergent makes it HELL

School doesn't DESERVE to be romanticized. Burnout sucks. You're not going "above and beyond," you're trying to push yourself into unbreathable altitudes.

Rather, consider romanticizing learning:

Researching because gaining knowledge is fun, you like how it feels to understand the world around you

Teaching because you want to spread that knowledge to others

Finding your own engaging methods

Giving yourself control. Learning because you want to.

[softwaring]

this is so disgusting i dont even have words... rest in paradise nex

[reality-detective]

[imsilay]

missing your Konig a lot queen, you write desperate and horny but still terrifying Konig SO well

no stop ( ; _ ; ) don’t make me cry in library T-T

i will be back with yandere!König can’t have my delulu

bbgs starving ( T_T)＼(^-^ )

ily anon <3 im afraid that my followers will forget me lmao

[solreefs]

“oh I never learned about colonialism and racism :( american education system bad :( I’m so helpless” read James Loewen. please read anything by James Loewen. especially Lies My Teacher Told Me. it is literally about the fallacies promoted by American history textbooks and gives you lots of things to do more research into. there is an easier to read edition (young readers’ edition, but anyone can read it! the intro is very clear about that!). there are audiobooks. there are pdfs. you can get his books from the library probably, Lies especially is widely circulated!

Loewen is far from the only author to write about this. but he is an excellent starting point and is specifically writing for people wanting to learn about history beyond what textbooks teach.

kill the American exceptionalism in your brain.

[free-range-tiddies]

I wish Christians were actually being attacked the way they say they are. They're pushing America further into hell, and it's Bible Thumpers creating the laws that endorse it. You are not being attacked. You are winning at every single turn, bro.

[uncanny-tranny]

By implying that children are too stupid and rude to learn about the world and learn how the world works and how to interact with others, you are casting responsibility away from the people who are responsible for that child's upbringing and placing the blame on the children (who don't have the autonomy given to them to be allowed to decide what they want) who can't help what they do and do not learn, often.

If the children aren't okay, then investigate why before turning to thought-terminating clichés of, "Well, the kids are just stupid and dumb and aren't even worth the effort because they're lazy!"

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

Hey students everywhere, I'm proud of you. You are so much more than enough.

Hey my maggots who're stuck in the education system right now. This is a long post but... but I know how many of you need to hear this, so please do. I just want you to know...

I'm proud of you. I'm so, so proud of you.

For continuing to survive in a system that's so bullshit that it can fail you at art, give you a grade for composing music, decide your seat in a medical college based on multiple choice questions about obscure ecology statistics (that are probably outdated), and decide whether or not you should study literature based on your summary of a pre-approved book.

I'm so proud of you.

i see you, I know you're exhausted, you're losing the love for subjects that were once your passion but now are ruined, you're burnt out and scared, you're studying things you don't even care about.

I know there are some of you who feel guilty even taking the time to read these words. I know, because I was there.

I'm proud of you for every second you spend doing the things you love, for every second you've spent trying so hard, for every second you've spent resting, for every second you've spent doing ridiculous things that made you smile and laugh and cry, for every second you studied and every second that you didn't, for every second you've spent wasting time because hey the point is that you lived that time and that's amazing in itself.

It's a fucked up system. It's broken and deeply flawed on every level, from the administration to the teaching to the budget to the students' mentality to the politics to the inclusivity... it's all fucked.

The more you recognise that, the closer you'll get to maybe realising that truth. That your talent and love for a subject, for an art form, for a branch of science or mathematics or a language, cannot possibly be measured in fucking numbers or alphabets from A to F.

The very idea is ridiculous, yet here we are, believing it.

Let's not anymore. It'll take a while to push it out of our head. But we can do it.

Yeah?

Tell yourself, and the people you know who are at any stage of education right now, all of this. It's not your fault. You're doing so well. I'm proud of you. So much of this is out of your control, with factors that shouldn't matter affecting your grade, with things happening that you can't help. So I'm proud of you. For being you and living. I'm sorry if you don't hear it enough, because you should.

I'm so, so proud of you.

[spongebob-connoisseur]

""#girlmath""