my calculus teacher did little senior year jokey biographies of people as a big powerpoint on the last day. he was well loved, venerable, yet also slightly … odd. sharp, but vaguely weird. he separated people into basically informal friend groups [with multiple people on the same slide] and people who were the sort of weird alone people. i was one of the alone people. and he said i slept all the time for some reason, i was very sleep deprived but very anxious.
i was sleep deprived all of school really, it started so fucking early, terribly unfair to anybody’s sleep schedule
upon typing this I suppose it isn’t the Worst but it’s still not a fun way to end
I’ve raised a 13 year old, I was a 13 year old, I mentored 13 year olds for my job. No 13 year old just does that without existing problems or behavioral issues already present. Maybe not none, but the number is ridiculously small, I just don’t want to deal in absolutes. Teenagers can be mean, they can be weird, they can be vindictive, but they’re not so stupid or under developed that they can’t think through the logic of hitting an authority figure with food or that it’s potentially a protected action due to their age.
My solution has more to do with “no person should be made to do X job”. Sewer workers, absolutely shitty job, necessary, no abuse though so it’s okay. Lawyer? Guaranteed immunity to abuse from clients because you can easily say “fuck it” and drop their case. Teachers are stuck, they can’t even stage a walk-out or protest without being threatened by the federal government. Kids can hit you, they can belittle you, they can be as mean as they’d like with no recourse because of shifting opinions about teachers’ role in society. What’s worse, they know it, and they abuse it. A lot of the kids I dealt with were through social services, so I get that some of them are almost doomed before they start because of how they were raised or what necessities they were struggling with at home. But that doesn’t make their bad behavior the responsibility of someone who’s just trying to get a paycheck and health insurance. Bad behavior shouldn’t be on teachers or schools to solve/correct/plan around, it should be the parents (and don’t get me started on how parents don’t have the time to rear their kids properly due to the death of the single parent income model. With that in mind, correction of those behaviors should be dropped squarely at the parent/students’ feet. If alternative school scares a kid, I hope it gives them a safe enough glimpse into what society is like when you can’t operate within it.