Stronger Than You

POV: you just moved to a new country and an enthusiastic classmate walks you through the morning routine

I'm still weirded out that y'all weren't joking about that daily pledge thing that is the most like dystopian thing I've heard of

had to do something very similar as a kid in a literal totalitarian regime that usamerica was very keen on denouncing as terrible and barbaric once we dealt with it. honest to god no joke for years i thought the pledge of allegiance was some type of metaphor they put in movies to stand for 'haha it's kind of nuts over here' and not something people actually did.

People have this weird belief that if you're critical of a system or tradition, then it must be because you failed to live up to that system or tradition. The idea of having a principled stance, regardless of whether or not *you* personally benefit from society accepting that stance, is foreign to so many people. And this belief is really fucking important for and beneficial to the elites of this country. If you can get the masses to equate criticizing you and the institutions you control with abject personal failure, congratulations, you've just made yourself immune to accountability

Also, as a failure of the education system: we need to spend more time listening to the people our systems leave behind. "Well of course you're critical of this; you failed" should not be a conversation-ender even if it is true.

I don’t understand american school years what the fuck is a freshman or a sophomore why do you have these words instead of the numbers

what why would you use numbers

so IT FUCKING MAKES SENSE WHAT THE HELL IS A SOFT MOORE OR A FRESH MAN WHY ARE THE MEN FRESH

America makes no sense, as usual.

bless the person that actually made the chart

laughter from France

France what the fuck

France you had one job

I’m crying

This is hilarious

wtf are bathroom passes

In American schools, if students move from one classroom to another during the day, which is the norm in middle and high schools (roughly age 11 to completion of school), the whole school does so at the same set times during the day.  Being in the hallways at these times is Passing Classes, which is fine; being in the hallways at any other time is Roaming the Halls.  A student who is Roaming the Halls is presumed to be Up To Something, and may be stopped and interrogated by any member of staff who witnesses said Roaming.

Of course, it does occasionally happen that a student has a legitimate reason to be in the hallways outside of designated passing times.  In those situations, the student carries a pass (”hall pass”) which can be presented to any member of staff who stops and interrogates said student.  Usually, the pass is written on a form that is signed by the teacher who authorized the student’s presence in the halls:  at my school, the form had spaces for student’s name, date, time, where the student is going, and from whence the student is leaving.  

Filling out the entire form every time a student wants to go to the toilet is a pain in the ass, so some teachers use some other form of pass.  In my day, it was either just a regular pass that was pre-filled and laminated, or a block of wood with the classroom number and “Bathroom” written on it.  Apparently nowadays, using some cumbersome and humorous object as the bathroom pass is A Thing.  

This is all regarded as completely normal, so much so that I have explained it in what may be a tedious amount of detail, because I’m unsure what part of it strikes you as unusual.  How is this situation handled where you went to school?

By raising your hand, saying you need to use the bathroom, teacher saying okay and you going. Nothing else.

So if another teacher sees you on your way there, they just…mind their own business?  

That would never work here.  

Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?

Over here if a teacher sees you (they’re all in class anyway too so it’s unlikely anyone would be in the hallway during class unless they have a reason) they mind their own business, unless you’re dicking around or actually doing something troublesome or loud, or if they know you and know you’re supposed to be somewhere else, and you’re clearly not going to the bathroom. Or if they’re in a shitty mood and wanna yell at you for sitting on the windowsill which was forbidden in my school but nobody cared anyway.

Otherwise, no, no one’s gonna care. Not in high school, anyway- but in lower grades yeah because the kids are younger, but elementary schools will usually have a custodian walking around the halls. They’re still not gonna question kids going to the loo.

Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?

Short answer is, the second one.  Long answer is, the American school system is permeated with a sense that teenagers are this chaotic force that must be contained at all costs.  (I’m right now having this very clear sense-memory of a hall monitor * saying “You can’t just roam the halls any time you feel like it!”** in the same sort of tone in which one might say, “You can’t just stab people any time you feel like it!”)  It’s not even so much a matter of what you might do while out in the halls unsupervised; the very idea of teenagers Roaming the Halls (of a school, which is full of both teenagers and halls) is understood as being inherently contradictory to the purpose of a school.  It isn’t even that you might go somewhere you’re not supposed to be; it’s that at any given time, there is only one place any given student is supposed to be.  A hall pass creates a temporary change in your prescribed location, without undercutting the fundamental principle that your location should always be prescribed.  

(*My school had professional hall monitors–grown adults who were paid a salary to keep order in the halls.)

(**At one point one teacher issued me a Permanent Hall Pass, for Reasons, essentially licensing me to roam the halls whenever I felt like it.   I forget how long that lasted, but eventually a hall monitor stopped me with it and was, naturally, convinced it was fake.  They hauled me to the office and were like, “We’re going to call down TeacherName and show her this,” and I was like, “Please do.”  So finally they did, and she was like yes, that’s my signature, yes, I wrote that; what are we doing here?”  I ended up getting detention anyway, “because the policy is that if a hall monitor brings you to the office, you get detention.”  The teacher was also instructed to never issue an open-ended hall pass again.)

Today’s question: is the USA actually a giant prison?

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WHAT THE HELL????????? What if you have no class in the middle of the day? We’d just hang out in the halls. Not everybody went to the library or sth. I probably spent a year of my life in the halls. It was actually kind of a way to socialise with people.

Yeah, there’s even a stock phrase as Gaeilige which is about the first thing you learn in school (my dad taught it to me before I started Big School, i.e. age of five) asking for permission to go to the bathroom.

If a teacher sees a kid hanging around the corridors instead of being in class, they may ask them what they’re doing and wait to see if they head off to where they say they’re going (the usual dodge is “Miss/Sir, I have to get my books out of my locker”) but there’s no Hall Pass or any of the rest of this.

Dear America, why is your education system so strange?  

Well for one, there’s never supposed to be a period where kids aren’t in class. There’s no study hall period, no free period, and you’re carefully monitored when you go to and from class as well as to and from lunch period. The idea is that, if kids are free-roaming, they’re going To Do Something like leave school (truancy) or cause some sort of problem. 

But really, its more about training children for future jobs where their employers will treat them exactly the same way. If you are not in class/working, then you are doing something wrong. 

You’ve also got to understand that, in American schools, not only is there a serious lack of trust between teachers and students, but also that the school systems will try to cram AS MUCH CLASSES into one day at a time to “maximize learning.” This includes having extremely short lunch breaks and hall passing times (I swear lunch breaks in my elementary school were like ten minutes long, which contributed to how fast I wolf down my food to this day. I also distinctly remember passing time being only three minutes at my middle school and having a panic attack on the third day of school because i couldn’t get my locker open and I was that afraid of being caught skipping class). Oh, and by the way, we watched a documentary in high school that took place in a prison once, and I was shocked at how much the prison in question actually DID look like a high school.

schools operate on the premise that All Teenagers Are Inherently Criminals

Added to this, since the late 90s, teachers and administrators also have to know who is out of their classrooms and why and for approximately how long, so they can make an accounting of which kids might be in the path of a random shooter.

Because it’s more important for adults to have the FREEDOM to amass huge arsenals of guns than it is to protect the physical and emotional safety of children.

My daughter has been in school for six years (she’s 10), and she and her classmates have had to practice hiding in the classroom corner in silence with the lights off about twice a year.

American students and teachers now go about their business every day with the background knowledge that at any moment, a kid with his dad’s guns can show up and try to slaughter them all.

Tell me that doesn’t do something to your psyche.

To give you an idea of US schools.

My school started at 7 am. It got out at 2 pm. Our day was broken in to six periods and a lunch.

For those keeping track, that is seven hours in school.

In my school district periods were fifty-five minutes long with ten minutes to pass in the halls. Our schedule looked something like this:

7:00 am - First Period 8:05 am - Second Period 9:10 am - Third Period 10:15 am - Fourth Period 11:20 am - Lunch 12:00 pm - Fifth Period 1:05 pm - Sixth Period 2:00 pm - School gets out

Seems reasonable, right? Except that the bus ride was an hour and a half long. To be at school by 6:50 (the latest a bus could arrive - we have to have our ten minutes after all) I had to catch the bus at about 5:20. Most people allowed an hour to get up in the morning. So now our schedule includes waking up at 4:20.

This, by the way, is in fact when I woke up every morning to go to high school.

It gets better though. Our teachers? They are allowed to assign an hour of homework every day. That is in addition to any in-class work that you didn’t finish. If you were in an Honors or AP class, the teachers were expected to assign an hour of homework every day.

I assure you. Teachers did this, especially for grades 10, 11, and 12.

That’s six hours of homework a day that I was expected to do. And I got six hours of homework a day on a regular basis. Easily three out of the five school days. This is district policy by the way. They think it is perfectly acceptable.

To be clear, that means waking up at 4:20 in the morning. Getting to school at 7 am. Spending roughly six hours in class. Getting out of class at 2pm. The bus left at 2:30, got me home at about 4:00 pm.

By the time I walk from the bus stop to home, get out of my school clothes, get stuff sorted for homework, etc., it has been roughly twelve hours. I am still expected to do six hours of homework.

And here’s the thing… this was just for the required courses to graduate. If I want to get into college? If I want to stand out? That means extra curricular activities.

Those take place at two times; the Zero Period, and Seventh Period. That is, from 5:55 am to 6:60 am I had the option of orchestra, band, jazz band, choir, jazz choir, and a few others. Seventh hour was of course from 2:10 to 3:05. This was all the sports, cheer leading, student government, gay straight alliance, chess club, whatever.

We are taught, by the way, that if we do not take at least one 0 or 7 period class every semester that we will not get into college.

And you can bet your ass there was homework in those “optional” classes. Want to be in orchestra? You better be practicing on your own time. Drama club? Learn your lines on your own time. GSA? Bet you sure as shit are making posters and flyers and all that on your own time.

This is what high school looks like in the US. There are days where you are literally expected to do 20 hours of school related stuff and that is normal.

Of course, you point out how that leaves only four hours to sleep and the answer you get is, “Well, that’s what weekends are for.”

They tell us that high school is to prepare you for the “real world.” It’s not. It is about teaching you to accept unrealistic expectations as normal so that you will be a good worker.

Taking out the passing periods and the bus rides, I put more hours into school in a week than my parents worked. My mother worked 40 hours a week. My father worked about 55 hours a week. Between lectures, in class work, homework, I regularly had 80 hour weeks.

20 hours a day with only four hours to sleep sounds ridiculous - and it should! But my junior year? I almost failed because I was averaging less than 4 hours of sleep a night.

Welcome to the United States of Public Education.

This is all true. What was great was when my friends and I would use our hour lunch break to go to Taco Bell in my friend’s car (which he owned, was insured, had a license, and had a permit to have at school) as 18 year olds who were LEGALLY permitted to sign ourselves out of school and leave at will would be detained by security and punished for not being in class, despite us playing by the rules. I literally was threatened with expulsion for this

I almost dropped out of highschool because it was so damn stressful. I had several orthopedic surgeries in my teens, and I partly blame highschool for making my health problems worse.

We had 4 mins to make it between classes, no matter how far apart your classes were on campus. No one could make it to their lockers on time, so if you didnt want to get detention you carried all of your books in your bag. You needed the text book for each class, so I carried about 5-6 books in my bag daily. No one was allowed to keep their books in the classroom because “kids would steal them” (no one wants to steal a fucking math book. They probably just get lost and the school cant shellout any cash to buy new ones.) The bag was so heavy that it frequently ripped and I had to buy new ones (probably 40lbs). In highschool I was about 100 lbs soaking wet.

This made my hips and knees hurt like a bitch and killed my back, but hey, at least I was on time to my 7 overcrowded classes where we didnt even have time to learn anything and were given an average of 2 hours of homework per class.

At least during our half hour lunch we got a wholesome meal of 4 chicken nuggets, a pear, and a bread roll with milk.

We had 3 minutes to get to class and for some teachers, if you were even a second over, they would make you walk all the way down to the disciplinarian’s office to get a late slip and then walk all the way back, which made you miss valuable class time. And the homework thing is absolutely true; I have vivid memories of being up past midnight breaking down from the stress of my math homework. Some teachers even assigned work on the weekends, and work to do over the holiday breaks. Some teachers were better than others, and I actually did manage to have good relationships with them. But overall high school was often an environment of immense stress for me, especially as someone who has adhd and autism.