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make sure to reblog if you vote please and thank you

There's no agenda here. I was just thinking about how I used to walk 45 minutes to school and 45 minutes back every day (eg. I could listen to two full LP albums of music every day) and that I have no idea how common of an experience that is.

i feel like high school/middle school sitcoms set the unrealistic expectation of being able to have lunch time outside

ok because apparently i'm wrong about this, reblog with where you live and whether you got to eat lunch outside during school or not

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.

Did I ever tell you all about the time my dad was teaching and a student climbed IN the window?

I only got like two responses on this but it’s one of my favorite stories from my dad’s classroom so buckle up.

So my dad taught junior English at a local high school, he taught on the second story of a building that was built back when schools had large windows that opened, and his windows faced the front of the building.

So one day in like April he’s teaching Moby Dick or Gone with the Wind or something with the windows open a crack to allow spring air into the classroom and one of the windows opens further and a kid climbs in through the window.

This kid, who hasn’t been at school since winter break, puts his finger to his lips. crouches for a second under the window, crawls to the classroom door, peaks out the window in the door, opens the door and slips into the hall.

He apparently then dashes down the hall, slips through the door into another junior English class (taught by my dad’s friend), where he again puts his finger to his lips, jogs across the room, climbs out the window (which faced a courtyard on the backside of the front hall) and disappears.

Turns out, the kid had been in a juvenile detention center since Christmas, escaped, and decided no one would look for him in his school. To this day I have no idea what happened after he climbed into the courtyard.

#this kid and the pie kid are my favories

Please tell about the pie kid because this story is hilarious and I want to hear about the pie kid

Ah yes, pie kid. The pie kid is legendary at the school.

So my dad’s school has faculty meetings every Teusday after school, and the teachers would all bring food (because after 7+ hours of school even teachers are hungry then they have to sit in a meeting for at least an hour talking about test scores or whatever).

So this kid, I don’t know what the motivation here was, but he would sneak into the library and take food from the meetings. Usually they just let him because, I mean, he’s not really harming anything. That just made him bolder though. One day he began taking an entire pie from the meetings.

So one day he’s sitting in the hall eating an entire pie because high school, and security took offense at this (because he was in the building after all students were supposed to leave, also he was apparently a trouble maker who security was familiar with) and this is where the story starts getting a little crazy.

Obviously, when security shows up, pie kid runs (carrying the uneaten half of his pie). This becomes a normal Teusday afternoon sight: security chasing pie kid through the halls as he’s eating pie stolen from a faculty meeting. The kid regularly found himself in odd corners of the building, including the roof, the boiler room, the field house, the magnet school behind the high school, etc. hiding from security and eating his pie.

Eventually, security caught up with him and his pie and dragged him to the principal’s office.

Now, the principal at this point is a little.. strict. He runs a tight ship.. or thinks he does.. you know those people who are VERY concerned with their world being EXTREMELY orderly and the world just stares them in the face and refuses? That was this principal’s life. He was trying to make a 2,500 student high school walk in lock step. As shown by the last story, that doesn’t happen at this school.

So the principal is alerted that pie kid, who’s been on the run from security for 2 months, is in his office with today’s pie. So the kid waits in the office finishing his pie and the principal walks in, closes the door, sits down, and says something like “what is going on?”

At this point the kid (who has finished his pie of the day) gets up, calmly walks over to the window, opens it, climbs out, hops the bushes under the window, and runs away.

That was the last anyone at the school saw him.

Well that was unexpected but a lovely tie in and that school needs to have better control of its windows.

This one decision illustrates a brazenness to break another key promise with the East Austin community, Alberta Phillips writes.

Americans please explain why your schools are so wild

high school is just a bunch of people in olive green jackets lying to each other

Shit I’ve Heard High Schoolers Say

i feel like everyone has a teacher from high school that they’d 100% fight

Things overheard in my ap classes:

all this week has been “senior week” at my school only it has been unofficial and was completely orchestrated by the students without permission from administration and each day has had a theme so yesterday was “tourist tuesday” and every senior student dressed up in typical “tourist” outfits like hawaiian shirts and socks with sandals and fanny packs and sunglasses and all that and the administration thought it was funny until they started a “tour group” so the entire senior class didnt attend class at all and wandered the campus as a group with a “tour guide” pointing out and explaining random things to the entire group but it all went downhill when the tour group walked into a classroom and as the guide was giving the group a fake tour of the class one of the kids pointed to a widely hated teacher and asked the tour guide “what animal is that?” and thats the story of how my school issued 84 detentions in one day

american public school gothic