Schooling

[mrissa]

E-mail conversation with columbina has me wondering about a lot of things. I'm going to write more about some of them in a bit (that is, not today), but until then I'd like to ask a slew of questions. Answer some, all, or none of them, as you like.

Did you have a good high school experience? (For those of you outside the US, this question applies to your schooling in your late teen years, somewhere between 14 and 18 for the typical student.) What do you think is most wrong with the way your schooling at that age was conducted? Do you have anything you think was institutionally most right with how your schooling was conducted? (By institutionally, I mean that "Ron Gabriel, my ninth and twelfth grade English teacher, is so awesome" doesn't count unless the school specifically nurtured his awesomeness. Which it didn't. Rotten bastards. You do not use a person's disability against him. This is not acceptable human behavior.)

Do you have stronger, less strong, or similar feelings towards grade school? Junior high/middle school? If you went to college, college? If you went to grad school, grad school? If someone says "your school," which one do you think of? (That presumes that you're not currently working in any capacity at a school that's becoming "yours.")

Did you have one best year of your schooling, where you were learning the most and figuring out the most about yourself? Did you have more than one? Did you have one worst year? Did they correspond with best/worst years otherwise, or did you separate out your school life and your outside/home life?

Was there a time in your schooling when you really enjoyed the books assigned to you to read? What kind of books were they, or, if you remember, what books? Did you otherwise manage to find good books to read, mostly, or did you go through dry spells in your reading life when you were younger?


My high school was a wretched experience, as growing numbers of you on the friendslist know firsthand. I think the most offensively wrong thing about it is that no one in charge actually seemed to care whether individual students were learning anything or not. There were a lot of wrong things competing for the honor of most wrong, though, and total orderings etc. etc. I don't think RHS did a lot right, institutionally, although there were individual teachers who did their best in a very flawed system.

I have stronger feelings towards college because my alma mater, for all its flaws, was mine: I chose it, and I chose my major. I was stuck with Blumfield Elementary, Ralston Middle School, and RHS. Gustavus I chose. If you separate out Gustavus Physics from Gustavus Adolphus College, it is the closest thing I have to blind patriotism. markgritter and timprov are still bringing me out of "My Department, Right Or Wrong," ("My Professors, Drunk Or Sober" actually might have applied from time to time -- certainly more often than that general sentiment applies to my mother). Whenever I'm reading something where people give their countrymen sanctuary just for being fellow exiles or what have you, the way I get into the mindset is to imagine that it's some Gustie physics geek. Or maybe a Gustie gamer geek. Just a Gustie isn't enough. Aaaaaanyway, I have pretty vivid memories of grade school and junior high, but it's not as much a hot button as high school is. And grad school sucked but is not a very important chapter in my life: I forgive people who don't know me very well for forgetting I was ever in it.

My seventh grade year was probably my best year of schooling, but I've had better years of learning or of personal growth. I had Marylyn Bremmer and Mr. Lesch and Mr. Fishhead Troutman, and scottjames and I were doing all kinds of geeky fun stuff that actually had something to do with school and not just, y'know, making our own geeky fun. My middle year of high school -- since I skipped one and clearly had a freshman year and a senior year, you can call the middle one sophomore or junior, as you like -- was probably my worst. Other years have had their low spots, to be sure, but the middle year of high school was the most consistently bad. Well...my grad school year was bad, too, but I did quit, and I wrote Fortress of Thorns in the meantime, and I think I learned quite a lot of unrelated stuff.

It occurs to me that 12 and 15 are my "resonant ages" for writing YAs. Huh. I'd known 12 -- 12 is my year, my mental age and all that. (Making me, from my understanding of previous con panels and conversations, younger than pameladean but older than sdn.) But I hadn't spotted 15 as my worst year, which it was. Huh.

I enjoyed the books Marylyn assigned my seventh grade class. Mythology. Ray Bradbury. Mark Twain. "Julius Caesar" with Marylyn doing recitations for us. I'm not sure how much of that was Marylyn herself -- I might fling myself into who knows what, for her sake -- I'd give the woman a kidney, heaven knows I could give her a bit of Sylvia Plath if it would make her happy -- but part of Marylyn being Marylyn herself was that she had us reading The Illustrated Man and not some illustrated abridged nonsense. I never really had a gap in finding books I wanted to read. Seventh grade was also a year in which books I wanted to read totally exploded, because I heard the news that there were genre labels that would give me a much higher probability of giving a damn, and off I went. No wonder I reach for 12 when I want to write books.

But 15 has its promising bits, too; I'll have to think on that.

Anyway. You?

Comments

[pameladean]

Right in the middle of ninth grade, my family moved from Creve Coeur, Missouri, to Omaha. I hated this a lot. I had my equivalent of the Giant Ants and I really loved them. The new school was actually much better than my old school. People did care if you learned anything, they even liked you if you learned stuff, but you had to learn it in a rigid framework. I was either a very acquiescent child or a stealth rebel, probably both at once, but I recall clearly that my brother, who got straight A's on every project one semester of history because he already knew more about World War II than the teacher did, was given a C because he didn't actually read the textbook. Also, in gym they never tried to teach you anything. They assumed you knew it already and punished you if you didn't. How I hated those teachers.

That attitude, and a lot of similar creepy restrictive stuff about what you couldn't wear and how cheeky you could be and what order things had to happen in, was rampant at my school. You could learn if you were quiet, and obedient, and answered questions the right way. Also, if you were a victim of harrassment rather than an instigator, you were still one of the bad guys for the moment. It wasn't so much implied that you had asked for it as it was that you should have figured out how to settle things before the teacher had to notice -- rather like gym class, only without a schedule.

In twelfth grade they got rid of the dress code and I got to take both Creative Writing and AP English. I felt much happier and better able to concentrate when I wasn't strangling in horrible clothing, and that English class was the first time I enjoyed anything that was assigned to me to read. Also I was lucky in that the people who had been trying to bully me since ninth grade were not very academically gifted, so once the class was getting more split up by interests, they basically just weren't around any more. I learned more that year than in all the others put together, though I did have a shining ninth-grade English class where I actually learned grammar. I didn't get an A, though, because I wouldn't participate in class discussions. After that I never participated in class discussions no matter how much I was cajoled or threatened. In general, actions taken in order to "show THEM" don't work out so well, but I have to say, thinking over my life, that really, I have, the autocratic automatic unthinking bastards.

For college, see, well, you know.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also I was lucky in that the people who had been trying to bully me since ninth grade were not very academically gifted

Is that luck? I suppose it is, since there are plenty of genius assholes, but in my experience honors classes were a million and one miles better than the regular kind. I was "safe" in honors classes.

And I think "show THEM" is not sufficient motivation for doing something...but if it also happens to be something you'd otherwise like, the added bonus is not at all a bad thing.

[pameladean]

I was in the "smart class" in elementary and junior high school, and all those classes had their share of genius assholes. Misogynist genius assholes. Bleah.

I forgot to answer your question about reading. I never had any trouble at all finding good things to read. I never had a reading dry spell. Class assignments were mostly just orthogonal to my ongoing immersion in words.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We had a gifted program in grade school, but it was an occasional enrichment thing, not so much a separate class for 95% of the time. It was still rather short on geniuses, I'm afraid. They kept trying to redefine it to make the greatest number of parents happy.