My 7 year old son was shot down by his 1st grade teacher
The american public education system in a nutshell tho
My third grade teacher actually had a conversation with my mom that I was reading to well and told her to stop having me read at home
My first grade teacher said that it was problematic that I was reading ahead of the rest of the kids in my grade and asked my parents to stop letting me read Harry Potter.
My fourth grade teacher thought it was wrong for my dad to be teaching me complex math because it fascinated me.
My elementary school music teacher hated the way my piano teacher taught me, and how I was more advanced than many of her students, and so told me, in front of my peers and my mother, that I was not good enough to participate in the state solo festival. She would not give me the form. We had to procure it from the district instead. She also hated how I excelled at reading and playing music for the recorder, and so she refused to give me my “belts” (colored beads to signify our level) and humiliated me in front of the class repeatedly.
My eighth grade algebra teacher used to fail me on take home tests because I didn’t solve problems exactly the way she showed us in class; I used methods that we had learned for other types of problems that also applied to these. She took points off my tests because I didn’t bring a calculator even though I got 100% without it, because I was able to do it by hand. I had to call my father, who is an engineer, down to the school to shout her down and give me back my A in the class.
My 10th grade Spanish teacher yelled at me in front of the class numerous times because she didn’t like the way I took notes; she thought that since I didn’t write every word off the slide, I wasn’t getting it all down. I had to explain to her that people who have taken advanced courses, like AP or IB classes, know that in a fast-paced learning environment you need to take quick shorthand notes that contain the necessary information rather than wasting time writing every word. She almost gave me detention.
My 11th grade English teacher gave me a poor mark on my first short essay because she believed that I was looking up unnecessarily complex words in a thesaurus to try and get better marks. The phrases in question: “laced with expletives” and “bombarded”. She wouldn’t hear any defense from me.
My 11th grade history teacher failed me on an essay about the 1950s because I misread the prompt. Except the prompt wasn’t words; it was a political cartoon. One of the figures was clearly president Eisenhower, but the other I couldn’t place. My teacher would not tell us who it was. I labelled him as the governor of Little Rock Arkansas during the integration period, and wrote an essay about that subject. My teacher said that no, it was Joseph McCarthy, and that there was a small picture of the man in our textbook and therefore I should have recognized him instantly. Half the class, apparently, did not.
The American school system is not here to educate us or to encourage us to learn; it’s here to keep us in line and silent. It’s here to keep us from deviating and being our own people and forming our own ideas. Don’t let it win.
When I was in grade school I wasn’t explicitly told “don’t read higher level books outside class”, but to encourage us to read outside of classes we had to take a reading quiz every week on a book from the library. The books we could choose from had color-coded stickers based on grade level. I was told not to take higher ones because then I’d have nothing to read when I got to that grade, and then got yelled at when the books for first grade that I picked weren’t on my check out record because I could finish them in the hour that we were in the library so had no need to check them out. The teachers didn’t believe I was actually reading them even though I was acing the tests.
We also had these big textbooks full of short stories and excerpts from novels. We would have spelling tests based on each one that we read. In third grade, after each spelling test I would read random ones (jumping to like page 400 when in class we hadn’t broken 100 yet because I knew we wouldn’t get to all of them and I found them interesting), and I got yelled at because “someone might think you’re cheating” when I was clearly in a completely different part of the book.
My 5th grade english teacher got mad at me because I read ahead in The Giver before the others and therefor “would not enjoy the book as much” even though I had told her I like to reread and I would still enjoy it.
It isn’t so much that the American public school system is designed to constantly keep smart kids down; it’s that it’s designed (in a very flawed manner) to basically keep everyone on the same level and by that token, that just happens. That’s how shit like No Child Left Behind ever got implemented in the first place and education is still trying to recover from that.
Because of funding issues, teachers are expected to “teach to the test” and spend most of their efforts on preparing kids for standardized testing. That means a lot of issues come up. You aren’t really taught to learn, just memorize things. You have to stay at the same level as everyone else, basically. Overachieving (or what people consider it) is discouraged because honestly, in the American public school system, there’s no point in it. I mean, I was taught the same math over & over for at least 4 years. We just rehashed things and didn’t learn anything new. Because that’s what was on the test.
I don’t know if I’m reading the tone incorrectly, but I feel this post is blaming teachers directly for a lot of this shit. The public school system has become inherently flawed and it’s almost impossible to change it, let alone challenge it. I’ve had teachers who were just collecting a paycheck (they became teachers when it was either being a teacher or a nurse if they wanted a career) or were jaded by that time and gave up. I’ve also had amazing teachers who tried to push past the barrier that the American government has set up for us and genuinely believed in learning and helping people.
But no matter the reason, it’s not really the teacher’s fault that we don’t really learn anything. It’s not from them not trying. School is just another tax-funded red-tape government sideshow, like everything else regulated federally. It’s not our place to criticize the teachers as a whole because they’re basically just doing the job they’ve been given. We need to blame the programs supported by the government, we need to question stuff from the top down. There’s been a lot of change in education recently but a lot more needs to happen.
So basically my point is, it’s not this big conspiracy to keep special kids from achieving and teachers are some Orwellian figure or character from a Roald Dahl novel who want to oppress the children.
The American Public school system is just fucked up. I know several teachers personally and they don’t want it to be that way anymore than we did or do.