garden in the void

These policies can help to improve the mental health of students

If the point is for the children to learn, then why wouldn’t you give them as many chances as it takes? What is the benefit of telling a child “you failed and that’s the end of it”?

I’m 25, and in my trade school, our tests aren’t judgement, they’re testing to see what we’ve retained, and identify what we’re missing.

If I weld a joint, and the CWI comes up behind me with a radiographic test for it and finds that I just laid hot metal on cold metal or it looks like a sponge inside, you know what’s gonna happen? You think they’re gonna give me a low score and tell me to move on? Fuck no. They’re gonna hand me a grinder and tell me to take it out and put it in right.

When there’s actual work to be done, we don’t leave it at the first attempt if that attempt was shit. We don’t leave a trail of “what’s done is done.” If it takes you four attempts, that’s what it takes, and next time it’ll take fewer because you learned how to do it right after the third time.

School, as it’s set up, with unforgiving deadlines and single attempt high stakes tests are building a shitty work ethic. It says “I tried once, and that’s all you’re getting.” It sets you up to leave a trail of cut losses and barely or unfinished projects as you scramble to get something, anything, turned in before the deadline.

And we wonder now why nothing works at launch.

From galwednesday

College is wild because it really isn’t about intelligence or the ability to understand the material at all. It’s literally just a test of executive function and abled-ness. I had good attendance. I participated in class discussions…possibly to an annoying extent, I got A’s on my tests. When we did group work in classes, it was usually me knowing the answers and everyone else just writing them down from my paper.

But I watched those same people who copied my in-class work and who barely passed tests and who only understood the material enough to regurgitate it, not to expand on it, graduate while I flunked out. Why? Because I didn’t have the executive function to do homework outside of class. That’s it.

when I was a teen dealing with chronic illness, I was just abled enough to go to school and do the work in class. I got As on all my in-class work and tests. I understood the material. when I got home everyday, I was so exhausted I went straight to bed and didn’t get up until it was time to go to school the next morning. I stopped hanging out with friends or having any free time, and I dedicated every ounce of energy to school. but, on the basis of needing to pass out as soon as I got home everyday, I was unable to do homework (I also had missed more days that I was supposed to, but again, I passed every test and hadn’t fallen behind in the material). despite having As in everything except homework, I failed every class and had to drop out of high school.

our education system is structured less around an actually well-rounded education (which would look different for different people depending on their needs) and more around conformity to neuro-typical, abled standards that prepare you for being a worker under capitalism, which itself enforces these standards in the attempt to drain as much profit from the individual as possible. even people who are “lucky” enough to be NT and abled enough to survive in these environments deserve more than to be treated like a renewable resource.

Solidarity with children is often neglected or even made a joke of, so I wanna take a second and tell y'all what I wish I could go back in time and tell myself:

You're right. School is bullshit, homework is bullshit, waking up early is bullshit, going to bed early is bullshit. Some adults are just pointlessly cruel, even those in positions of authority over you. Sometimes adults are wrong, and, in fact, sometimes you are right

You were born with an innate sense of justice and fairness and adults have spent your entire life trying to beat it out of you so you'll shut up and do what you're told in an unjust and unfair society. Don't let them. Many of us have to take effort to relearn the wisdom you have right now, the ability to tell when something is bullshit even if you can't articulate why yet

You deserve happiness, fulfillment, and liberation just as much as any adult. Those first 18 years are just as important as any other time in your life, and it's time you'll never get back. Don't let anyone take them from you just because you're too young to fight back

Question everything, and never take "that's just the way it is" as an answer. Sometimes when things don't make sense to you it's because they just don't make any goddamn sense

Pick your battles, and be strategic. Don't take this post as permission to go starting fights for no reason. But remember that you have worth, and our society tends to not respect that. And you're right: that is bullshit

(also, read Anarchy Works)

people misunderstand what ‘gifted kid’ actually means but it’s ok it’s fine it’s cool it’s good

it’s not about actually being gifted, it’s about an initial higher scoring on standardized testing that means little to nothing or being good at learning in the way elementary and middle school wants you to, so you get marked as ‘advanced’. in reality, maybe you had faster development in certain areas, but the issue with being a gifted kid isn’t that “everyone told me I was so cool and special for reading and then I actually wasn’t :(” it’s “I wasn’t properly taught to handle things not coming easily to me, but the adults around me were counting on me not being a ‘difficult’ child in school.”

people who use it as some weird bragging method or interpret it that way are ignoring the way a lot of school systems force certain roles on students to simplify the learning process. If your kid doesn’t need to take notes to understand a science concept bc they get it naturally, well that’s good, but now you’re not teaching them how to take notes and they’re not learning that important soft skill. but because ‘gifted’ kids are easy and don’t show that they’re falling behind in learning in other categories that are harder to quantify, they eventually fall behind after that catches up to them. It’s about the failures of a one size fits all school system trying to compensate in the worst way possible.

And also the thing where ‘gifted’ kids are super likely to also be neuroatypical, which they don’t get screened for because they appear to be doing well in school. Or “You can’t be ADHD/autistic/etc, because you’re doing so well in school!”. Or being shamed for developing mental health issues/generally not being able to keep up with school work later, because you USED TO BE able to do it just fine.

Or the assumption that just because you can read well or you like math class, you’re somehow more EMOTIONALLY mature than your little kid brain is actually capable of being.

Or gifted kids whose parents and teachers put immense pressure on them to Do Great Things and Save The World and you’re like. “I’m 10 and I have no idea how to do that, but everyone is saying that’s my job?”.

This is the best “gifted kid” post out there. I never took notes until college because I didn’t have to, snd when it got challenging I had to literally teach myself note taking at age 18. It also fucks with your perception of asking for help - you’re advanced, you’re competent, you should be able to understand every topic easily. Asking for help/going to office hours/asking for a tutor feels like failing when you were praised in your early years for not needing to do that.

School being so traumatic people have anxiety dreams about it for life sure doesn't seem uh. Normal

I didn't even have a particularly bad experience at school outside unmedicated ADHD stress but I get school nightmares constantly

I feel like so many people accept this as a quirky fun shared experience. But it's pretty alarming that such a huge chunk of people have RECURRING dreams about forgetting to take a class or complete a project DECADES after leaving the school system

God, I remember when I started sixth form (last two years of high school in the UK, seen as a more university style learning environment) and the teachers kept complaining about how quiet we were during lessons.

We wouldn’t talk. They’d tell us to do something and we’d just sit there quietly and do it, until eventually they just said “hey, guys, it’s okay to chat while you work!” and then everybody would start talking.

One teacher described it as creepy.

And I just remember thinking, what the fuck did they expect to happen? We’d all been taught from the age of four or five onwards that talking in class was bad. That if we did it, we’d be told off, or punished, or in some instances maybe the entire class would be punished along with us, just to make sure we really got the idea. It was a whole thing.

But now, because we were sixth-formers and therefore ‘grown ups’, we were suddenly expected to flip a switch and be able to talk as much as we liked? The whole reason we were in sixth-form was because we had worked hard, done well at school, and generally followed the rules— but still the teachers couldn’t understand why we didn’t just talk to each other.

Now I’m at uni, and seminar tutors are having a similar problem. People will talk in seminars, but a lot of them will insist on raising their hands and waiting to be called upon first. “Don’t put your hands up, just shout at me!” the guy keeps saying. But they keep doing it anyway.

Like, I really don’t know how to tell these people that you can’t train somebody to act in one way for over half their lives, and then suddenly expect them to start acting differently just because the expectations have changed.

School being so traumatic people have anxiety dreams about it for life sure doesn't seem uh. Normal

I didn't even have a particularly bad experience at school outside unmedicated ADHD stress but I get school nightmares constantly

I feel like so many people accept this as a quirky fun shared experience. But it's pretty alarming that such a huge chunk of people have RECURRING dreams about forgetting to take a class or complete a project DECADES after leaving the school system

Something needs to be done about teachers who hate kids tbh

My sister is currently getting her doctorate in child psychology & education, but years ago she worked as a substitute english teacher at a high school in nyc. She spent half a year subbing for a woman who was out for surgery, and had been teaching english there for years and years. Most of the kids in this class were remedial; they had failed english before and had to retake it. Most of them hated the class, and they hated literature, because they had been made to feel unintelligent. My sister decided to introduce them to poetry, which was a little easier to digest than long form prose, and had them read Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice." And the kids loved it! They connected with it, they were spirited and engaged in class for the first time all year. They wrote their own poetry! They started seeking out and reading poetry on their own! They were all on track to get a C, B or A in that class. And then the original teacher returned and failed every single student, to "teach them all a lesson". That was the moment my sister decided to go into administration so she could hopefully prevent that sort of thing from happening. But it's difficult. Despite numerous complaints from parents and other teachers, that teacher had a job there for decades. She continued to have a job there. There are a lot of teachers like her, wielding power and taking their frustrations out on kids, especially disabled and remedial kids. And students have so few advocates in the classroom.

i slowly turned from #1 to #2 over the years

education is the domestication of human beings

School dress codes aren’t only sexists, but there’s also racist and islamophobic.

I (First Nations, Mohawk) used to have hair past my chest but my middle school forced me to cut my hair because “boys couldn’t have hair past the tips of the ear” (I’m not a boy either, but they assigned me ‘boy’ as a gender) but even when I begged them to let me keep my hair because of spiritual beliefs, they forced me to cut it. A classic move of the white school system against native children. I got a referral everyday for the 65 days I refused to cut my hair. I cried for two weeks after the principal took scissors to my hair. I’m still growing it back.

My best friend (who is an aboriginal Egyptian) was once told to remove her hijab (also a gift I had given her) because “hats weren’t allowed” (a mixture of racism and islamophobia), she reluctantly took it off.

In middle school again, my friend Nemo ( First Nations, Navajo) was told she couldn’t wear her traditional clothing on her 13 birthday, celebrating her reaching puberty. She was sent home and forced to spend her birthday alone while her parents worked.

Tomorrow is my 18th birthday, an important life event in Mohawk culture (becoming an adult) and I want to wear my traditional clothes to school, especially because I’ll have to celebrate all alone this year since I live far away from my nation. Even though my school doesn’t have uniforms or a strict dress code, I’m afraid they’ll tell me that my clothes or very light face paint are “distracting” and tell me to take off my traditional jewellery (headband, choker, bracelets) or wash off the face paint.

I’m sure these are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to racism in the school dress code, and general school systems. White culture is enforced in everything from the dress code to the curriculum.

many european countries explicitly prohibit wearing headscarves like the hijab in schools, too

#many places in europe ban kippot as well regardless of how small or innocuous#i’ve been asked to remove larger kippot in ‘violation of dress code’ (that doesn’t exist)#if it wasn’t for the one jewish guidance counselor i would have gotten in trouble more than once

Let people wear culturally or religiously significant clothing!!! 

My best/favorite teacher would literally take off the points for a question that the majority of the class got wrong from the total on the test and then hold a lesson on the topic because she realized if 90% of her students didn’t know the answer then she hadn’t done a good job teaching it.

I hate it when teachers take pride in having a large percentage of students get bad grades in their classes. It just means that students aren’t learning from you

God, I remember when I started sixth form (last two years of high school in the UK, seen as a more university style learning environment) and the teachers kept complaining about how quiet we were during lessons.

We wouldn’t talk. They’d tell us to do something and we’d just sit there quietly and do it, until eventually they just said “hey, guys, it’s okay to chat while you work!” and then everybody would start talking.

One teacher described it as creepy.

And I just remember thinking, what the fuck did they expect to happen? We’d all been taught from the age of four or five onwards that talking in class was bad. That if we did it, we’d be told off, or punished, or in some instances maybe the entire class would be punished along with us, just to make sure we really got the idea. It was a whole thing.

But now, because we were sixth-formers and therefore ‘grown ups’, we were suddenly expected to flip a switch and be able to talk as much as we liked? The whole reason we were in sixth-form was because we had worked hard, done well at school, and generally followed the rules— but still the teachers couldn’t understand why we didn’t just talk to each other.

Now I’m at uni, and seminar tutors are having a similar problem. People will talk in seminars, but a lot of them will insist on raising their hands and waiting to be called upon first. “Don’t put your hands up, just shout at me!” the guy keeps saying. But they keep doing it anyway.

Like, I really don’t know how to tell these people that you can’t train somebody to act in one way for over half their lives, and then suddenly expect them to start acting differently just because the expectations have changed.

This is why you gotta treat kids like actual people