I Really, Really Hated School
Maybe I was just too sensitive. Maybe I just wasn't cut out for a series of carefully regulated and scheduled fast paced demanding activities. Maybe there were a lot of reasons I hated school. I have a feeling I may have to continue to update this story because, when I think about it and remember, there were many, many things I hated about school, from major things to petty, silly things.
Someone once said, "School is 10% about learning and 90% about finding one's place in the pecking order." I couldn't agree more. That was what school felt like for me....or maybe I felt it because I was the one who always seemed to wind up at the bottom of that pecking order and I got a lot of pecks.
I hated so much about school that it is hard to find words for it all. Actually, I liked the learning part. That was the best part. And I liked most of the teachers I had as well. It was everything else I could not stand.
First, I was sent to school a very short time after my parents divorced and my mother went out into the world to work for a living. So I felt completely abandoned. First my father left. Then my mother announced she was going to be working and would not be around the house anymore. Then I was told that I would be going to school the next day. It all seemed to be happening way too fast. I felt as if I were being tossed out alone to face the world, with no one to come home to.
Then there were the bullies. Since I was scared and insecure and my overworked overstressed mother had now turned into a major bully at home, I was a perfect target. On my first day in nursery school, two big girls attacked me, held me over a sink backwards and forced library paste down my throat, I was terrified, struggling and screaming and choking. Of course, a teacher came by and stopped them, telling me with a laugh that library paste was a harmless substance which would not poison me so I had no reason to be upset. My terror at being held down and having something forced down my throat was ignored, my dignity or sense of safety did not matter. Lesson One about school: Forget safety, you're on your own.
I was different. I was a child of divorce, which back when I was a kid in the 1950s, was very rare. Many magazines stated quite plainly that children of divorce automatically became juvenile delinquents. Sometimes adults would scold me before I even did anything and I would be warned about punishment if I misbehaved no matter how well behaved I was. And I was adopted as well and there was a stigma about that, too. People who found out saw me as different and inferior and would ask me questions like, "You mean you don't even know who your parents are?" This seemed silly to me since I was adopted at birth. Yet people often saw me as different and potentially bad.
Let's see...what else did I hate about school?
The smells! Most schools smelled like a nauseating combination of lysol, urine, vomit, peanut butter, tuna, sweat and chalk dust. It is still the most depressing smell in the world to me, right up there with the smell of alcohol in a doctor's office right before you have to have a painful medical procedure.
Then there were the petty authority figures, the people who felt it was their duty to paddle kids or otherwise intimidate them. These people did everything they could to frighten kids into obedience. It worked, to some extent, at least until the authority's back was turned. Kids did learn stuff back then because of the intimidation factor and maybe that is better than the total and complete lack of all discipline in schools today (mainly fueled by fear of lawsuits and policies based on fear of lawsuits) but I don't think all of that physical intimidation brought forth any real love of learning. I had to develop that by myself.
Then there were the academics....I was bad at everything. I was even bad at PE! I was shy, self-conscious, depressed about my home life and my school life, lonely and often scared. I still remember how embarrassed I was when I had to answer a question by the teacher and I got it wrong. The teachers back then would be very sarcastic and punitive and when the other kids laughed at you for getting it wrong, the teacher did not discourage it. I lived in fear of tests. Since I did not always do well at various subjects, especially math, I knew that every single summer, when my school mates and friends found fun things to do, I would be, as per usual, going to summer school. My mother loved to see the look on my face as, once again, I begged not to have to go to summer school.
One summer, just to make it even harder for me, I had to spend the whole summer with a tutor because my grade In French had fallen from an A to a C due to having a temporary teacher who was very intimidating, so much so that I actually developed psychosomatic laryngytis and could not speak; I got As on all the tests because I did study but I could not speak in class because when I struggled to speak, the snotty girls in the class would laugh at me and ridicule me. When I was eventually back with my original teacher, my grades went back to being As because I found I could speak again. But that summer I spent the whole summer, all day long, with a tutor and my mother insisted that the tutoring take place in our dining room, the only room in the house that was not air conditioned and had a series of windows all around it on three sides so I could sit and watch all of my friends waving to me as they walked to the bus to go to the beach each day. I'd still be there when they came back home, tanned and happy, laughing and waving.
I remember how I would walk around and around our block before I went home when I had to show my mother my report card. I knew that unless I had straight As, she was going to be very angry and find many ways to punish me, starting with a long screaming session. She never really tried to understand why I might be having trouble with a subject. And she never even came close to understanding why I never sought her help when I was failing or doing poorly at something. Could it be because I knew she would only get angry and punish me? Maybe that was it! I remember the times I DID get straight As and how my mother would force her mouth into a smile that did not reach her eyes and tell me that I had done well. Then she would quickly change the subject. I got the impression that she actually resented me then because she could not come up with something to punish me over.
When I was 18 and graduated from high school (3.8 grade average), my mother went crazy on the telephone with the school system in our area trying to get them to take me into summer school! They kept explaining that I had already graduated and was now of age. She was furious that she could not make me a prisoner one more summer. That summer, the summer of 1963, was a wonderful summer for me. Little did I know that by the late fall of that year, President Kennedy would be dead and the whole country would change. An innocent summer,for sure.
Like I said, I will probably have to consider adding updates to this because there were so many things I hated about schools; pep rallies, long assemblies, being punished for things I had never done and having no one believe me, the marching in lines, the long boring lessons I could barely stand to live through as I watched those slow, slow clocks, the constant criticism ("Stand up straight, young lady!"), the uncomfortable clothing I had to wear including heavy corrective shoes that corrected nothing, the feeling that life just wasn't worth very much....School. Today I am glad to learn that more than half of the incoming classes at Ivy League colleges (Yale, Harvard, etc) are home schooled. A great trend, even though it is not possible for most parents to do that.
The history of schooling, at least public schooling, has been to try and contain and control the masses by giving them just enough knowledge to function as peons in society but not enough so that they would question their place in society. It works all too well.
Someone once said, "School is 10% about learning and 90% about finding one's place in the pecking order." I couldn't agree more. That was what school felt like for me....or maybe I felt it because I was the one who always seemed to wind up at the bottom of that pecking order and I got a lot of pecks.
I hated so much about school that it is hard to find words for it all. Actually, I liked the learning part. That was the best part. And I liked most of the teachers I had as well. It was everything else I could not stand.
First, I was sent to school a very short time after my parents divorced and my mother went out into the world to work for a living. So I felt completely abandoned. First my father left. Then my mother announced she was going to be working and would not be around the house anymore. Then I was told that I would be going to school the next day. It all seemed to be happening way too fast. I felt as if I were being tossed out alone to face the world, with no one to come home to.
Then there were the bullies. Since I was scared and insecure and my overworked overstressed mother had now turned into a major bully at home, I was a perfect target. On my first day in nursery school, two big girls attacked me, held me over a sink backwards and forced library paste down my throat, I was terrified, struggling and screaming and choking. Of course, a teacher came by and stopped them, telling me with a laugh that library paste was a harmless substance which would not poison me so I had no reason to be upset. My terror at being held down and having something forced down my throat was ignored, my dignity or sense of safety did not matter. Lesson One about school: Forget safety, you're on your own.
I was different. I was a child of divorce, which back when I was a kid in the 1950s, was very rare. Many magazines stated quite plainly that children of divorce automatically became juvenile delinquents. Sometimes adults would scold me before I even did anything and I would be warned about punishment if I misbehaved no matter how well behaved I was. And I was adopted as well and there was a stigma about that, too. People who found out saw me as different and inferior and would ask me questions like, "You mean you don't even know who your parents are?" This seemed silly to me since I was adopted at birth. Yet people often saw me as different and potentially bad.
Let's see...what else did I hate about school?
The smells! Most schools smelled like a nauseating combination of lysol, urine, vomit, peanut butter, tuna, sweat and chalk dust. It is still the most depressing smell in the world to me, right up there with the smell of alcohol in a doctor's office right before you have to have a painful medical procedure.
Then there were the petty authority figures, the people who felt it was their duty to paddle kids or otherwise intimidate them. These people did everything they could to frighten kids into obedience. It worked, to some extent, at least until the authority's back was turned. Kids did learn stuff back then because of the intimidation factor and maybe that is better than the total and complete lack of all discipline in schools today (mainly fueled by fear of lawsuits and policies ba
Then there were the academics....I was bad at everything. I was even bad at PE! I was shy, self-conscious, depressed about my home life and my school life, lonely and often scared. I still remember how embarrassed I was when I had to answer a question by the teacher and I got it wrong. The teachers back then would be very sarcastic and punitive and when the other kids laughed at you for getting it wrong, the teacher did not discourage it. I lived in fear of tests. Since I did not always do well at various subjects, especially math, I knew that every single summer, when my school mates and friends found fun things to do, I would be, as per usual, going to summer school. My mother loved to see the look on my face as, once again, I begged not to have to go to summer school.
One summer, just to make it even harder for me, I had to spend the whole summer with a tutor because my grade In French had fallen from an A to a C due to having a temporary teacher who was very intimidating, so much so that I actually developed psychosomatic laryngytis and could not speak; I got As on all the tests because I did study but I could not speak in class because when I struggled to speak, the snotty girls in the class would laugh at me and ridicule me. When I was eventually back with my original teacher, my grades went back to being As because I found I could speak again. But that summer I spent the whole summer, all day long, with a tutor and my mother insisted that the tutoring take place in our dining room, the only room in the house that was not air conditioned and had a series of windows all around it on three sides so I could sit and watch all of my friends waving to me as they walked to the bus to go to the beach each day. I'd still be there when they came back home, tanned and happy, laughing and waving.
I remember how I would walk around and around our block before I went home when I had to show my mother my report card. I knew that unless I had straight As, she was going to be very angry and find many ways to punish me, starting with a long screaming session. She never really tried to understand why I might be having trouble with a subject. And she never even came close to understanding why I never sought her help when I was failing or doing poorly at something. Could it be because I knew she would only get angry and punish me? Maybe that was it! I remember the times I DID get straight As and how my mother would force her mouth into a smile that did not reach her eyes and tell me that I had done well. Then she would quickly change the subject. I got the impression that she actually resented me then because she could not come up with something to punish me over.
When I was 18 and graduated from high school (3.8 grade average), my mother went crazy on the telephone with the school system in our area trying to get them to take me into summer school! They kept explaining that I had already graduated and was now of age. She was furious that she could not make me a prisoner one more summer. That summer, the summer of 1963, was a wonderful summer for me. Little did I know that by the late fall of that year, President Kennedy would be dead and the whole country would change. An innocent summer,for sure.
Like I said, I will probably have to consider adding updates to this because there were so many things I hated about schools; pep rallies, long assemblies, being punished for things I had never done and having no one believe me, the marching in lines, the long boring lessons I could barely stand to live through as I watched those slow, slow clocks, the constant criticism ("Stand up straight, young lady!"), the uncomfortable clothing I had to wear including heavy corrective shoes that corrected nothing, the feeling that life just wasn't worth very much....School. Today I am glad to learn that more than half of the incoming classes at Ivy League colleges (Yale, Harvard, etc) are home schooled. A great trend, even though it is not possible for most parents to do that.
The history of schooling, at least public schooling, has been to try and contain and control the masses by giving them just enough knowledge to function as peons in society but not enough so that they would question their place in society. It works all too well.
By:
Brainyblonde
Age:
66-70
,
Female
4
responses
