before you know it, it's gone and you're dead again...
Here are my thoughts on my secondary school experience. I'm sorry if it's not very coherent, seeing as
I went into middle school with very high expectations. Far, far too high.
My parents pulled my sister and I out of the public school system because of the prevalence of drugs (something that has not let up in the high school, let me tell you) and put us in a charter school that happened to still be in the district. They believed that it would end up being a better and safer educational environment for us, and we were pretty happy with it. We wanted to have fun, we wanted to have friends.
We wanted to have friends. That was our first mistake.
This school was very, very small. By the time we exited the eighth grade, there were nine kids in our class. This meant that, when we entered the system at the beginning of fifth grade, we were dealing with people who had known each other basically all of their pre-adolescent lives. And we were new, something disrupting their perfect little world. I made the unfortunate assumption that they could deal with this transition. I was horribly, horribly wrong.
To this day I remember the first day I walked into the building. The door opened onto a spacious area with two broad sets of stairs that led off in right and left directions - I always turned right, as this was the wing where the fifth through eighth grades had classes. I walked into the furthest classroom on the left. I remember my parents talking with teachers and students in our same grade, and I remember pulling out my sketchbook and letting some of the kids flip through it. I remember the first day of math class - I had been placed in a sixth grade class for that subject - and I remember the problem that we were working on (it had to do with volume, and making boats with weights in them float). I remember the people I sat next to. They are seniors now, and I know where they are going to school next fall. I can't believe how much they've changed.
I can't believe how much some people haven't.
For four years...maybe less...I was under the illusion that those eight other kids were willing to put aside their perfect little utopia and let a mere two other students into their interactions. Oh sure, maybe things had changed when two other students came in seventh grade...wait, what am I saying? They should have dealt with us the moment we stepped into the damn building. But they didn't, and they still haven't. They pretended. They acted like we were friends and they were ours, like our opinions and actions mattered to them.
Things started getting odd when the characteristics of these people became more evident. I have two particular people in mind, and it was these two people who became the impetus for my hatred towards those four years in the first place. One acted like everyone had to do things her way, or else it was incorrect. Her way was the best, superior to everything else. And one was wholely and entirely sarcastic and facetious and downright immature. She didn't cope, she turned negativity dumped on her back on the other person. Of course, these characteristics were evident in only subtle ways at first. They were integral parts of each person, but I believed that they would grow out of it. That was another mistake: putting faith in something unwilling to change.
Oh, and don't get me started on the no offense bullshit. I am not joking when I say that much of my dialogue with these people consisted of them passing subtle insults off on me and on my sister. "No offense, but you guys have never been liked." "That guy was checking us out, but not you. No offense." It's like by saying those two little words they could nullify whatever insult they had backed up.
Then they started being selective in their activities, their conversations, who they told what and when and why. And more often than not, my sister and I were on the excluding end. It soon became apparent to me that a wall was being built up, between the "normal" kids and "us." This is such a common social situation, but it is magnified when your class has nine people in it. You are alone. The message was clear: nobody likes you. I couldn't do anything for fear of offending them and being left with no friends in a class of nine, especially concerning girl-that-thought-she-was-always-right. If you put one toe out of line around her, she was down your throat like it was nobody's business.
In retrospect, it feels like they even became selective in who they hated. I feel like if one of their friends did something that irked them, they wouldn't mind; but if I did the exact same thing under the same circumstances, it's a Let's-All-Hate-Jordan-Fest!
God, I wish they could see this. They don't realize how much it hurts. To this day - more than seven years after first setting foot in that school - they maintain that ignorance. Always-right girl still wants to always be right. Sarcastic-girl is still rude, immature, and cannot properly cope without hurting someone else.
I am a junior in high school. I see them everyday. We've had little to no interactions with each other since entering the high school's system, and for good reason, but now I'm feeling like I just want to punch all of them in the face. Always-right girl is in my art class, and she has hardly changed. Apparently she likes to believe that people make her the center of her universe, or that having a college boyfriend makes her superior to other people. Well let me tell you, hunny, having a significant other who happens to be in college is nothing special. I have no classes with sarcastic-girl this year, but did last year. Insults coming from nowhere galore. She, also, has hardly changed.
I swear, some of the guys who were in my class-of-nine-people have matured better than they have. I went to Chicago for a Model United Nations Conference with one of them. He's smart, mature, and respectful - everything that those little bratty girls have failed to grow into.
I can't get rid of this confusion. What did we do? What did I do? All we wanted was to have friends. All I did was stutter and all my sister did was wear some different makeup or some different clothes. Did that really make us all that different and all that deserving of a brick wall between us and the "normal" kids?
The answer was, is, and will always be no. I know - as a clear, objective fact - that we didn't do shit deserving of their animosity.
Or maybe there is an answer - that we got this because we happened to be there, because they wanted someone to pick on and there we were - but that's hardly sensible. But if these people are as manipulative as I am making them out to be, then I wouldn't put it past them.
But the worst part of this is not that these people have friends, or somehow come off as likable to others, even as they continue to act immature and intolerant - it's that the principal of that school never acknowledged clear cases of students that were not happy in that environment. And I am a living, breathing testament to this fact.
I still can't believe that we didn't bring this up while we were in that school system. It was so prevalent, you could practically taste the fucking hatred.
It's hilariously ironic; that charter school preached that it's students and faculty were tolerant, altrustic, nice. School was family, a community. Hell, that's what the called it: the Community School. A safe, friendly, and fun environment. Full of some of the most talented, open-minded, and tolerant students in the school system. Enroll your child now! It will change their life!
Well it definitely changed mine, because I got a taste of what many probably don't experience until adulthood: nobody really, truly cares about you. They're in it for themselves and what they want. There's no such thing as friendship - it's just a culmination of lies that people build around each other in order to get ahead. Thanks, middle school, for showing me that.
Not edited for spelling or grammar. Blah.
One day, I'm going to look back on all this and laugh, because they're going to be working for me.
I went into middle school with very high expectations. Far, far too high.
My parents pulled my sister and I out of the public school system because of the prevalence of drugs (something that has not let up in the high school, let me tell you) and put us in a charter school that happened to still be in the district. They believed that it would end up being a better and safer educational environment for us, and we were pretty happy with it. We wanted to have fun, we wanted to have friends.
We wanted to have friends. That was our first mistake.
This school was very, very small. By the time we exited the eighth grade, there were nine kids in our class. This meant that, when we entered the system at the beginning of fifth grade, we were dealing with people who had known each other basically all of their pre-adolescent lives. And we were new, something disrupting their perfect little world. I made the unfortunate assumption that they could deal with this transition. I was horribly, horribly wrong.
To this day I remember the first day I walked into the building. The door opened onto a spacious area with two broad sets of stairs that led off in right and left directions - I always turned right, as this was the wing where the fifth through eighth grades had classes. I walked into the furthest classroom on the left. I remember my parents talking with teachers and students in our same grade, and I remember pulling out my sketchbook and letting some of the kids flip through it. I remember the first day of math class - I had been placed in a sixth grade class for that subject - and I remember the problem that we were working on (it had to do with volume, and making boats with weights in them float). I remember the people I sat next to. They are seniors now, and I know where they are going to school next fall. I can't believe how much they've changed.
I can't believe how much some people haven't.
For four years...maybe less...I was under the illusion that those eight other kids were willing to put aside their perfect little utopia and let a mere two other students into their interactions. Oh sure, maybe things had changed when two other students came in seventh grade...wait, what am I saying? They should have dealt with us the moment we stepped into the damn building. But they didn't, and they still haven't. They pretended. They acted like we were friends and they were ours, like our opinions and actions mattered to them.
Things started getting odd when the characteristics of these people became more evident. I have two particular people in mind, and it was these two people who became the impetus for my hatred towards those four years in the first place. One acted like everyone had to do things her way, or else it was incorrect. Her way was the best, superior to everything else. And one was wholely and entirely sarcastic and facetious and downright immature. She didn't cope, she turned negativity dumped on her back on the other person. Of course, these characteristics were evident in only subtle ways at first. They were integral parts of each person, but I believed that they would grow out of it. That was another mistake: putting faith in something unwilling to change.
Oh, and don't get me started on the no offense bullshit. I am not joking when I say that much of my dialogue with these people consisted of them passing subtle insults off on me and on my sister. "No offense, but you guys have never been liked." "That guy was checking us out, but not you. No offense." It's like by saying those two little words they could nullify whatever insult they had backed up.
Then they started being selective in their activities, their conversations, who they told what and when and why. And more often than not, my sister and I were on the excluding end. It soon became apparent to me that a wall was being built up, between the "normal" kids and "us." This is such a common social situation, but it is magnified when your class has nine people in it. You are alone. The message was clear: nobody likes you. I couldn't do anything for fear of offending them and being left with no friends in a class of nine, especially concerning girl-that-thought-she-was-always-right. If you put one toe out of line around her, she was down your throat like it was nobody's business.
In retrospect, it feels like they even became selective in who they hated. I feel like if one of their friends did something that irked them, they wouldn't mind; but if I did the exact same thing under the same circumstances, it's a Let's-All-Hate-Jordan-Fest!
God, I wish they could see this. They don't realize how much it hurts. To this day - more than seven years after first setting foot in that school - they maintain that ignorance. Always-right girl still wants to always be right. Sarcastic-girl is still rude, immature, and cannot properly cope without hurting someone else.
I am a junior in high school. I see them everyday. We've had little to no interactions with each other since entering the high school's system, and for good reason, but now I'm feeling like I just want to punch all of them in the face. Always-right girl is in my art class, and she has hardly changed. Apparently she likes to believe that people make her the center of her universe, or that having a college boyfriend makes her superior to other people. Well let me tell you, hunny, having a significant other who happens to be in college is nothing special. I have no classes with sarcastic-girl this year, but did last year. Insults coming from nowhere galore. She, also, has hardly changed.
I swear, some of the guys who were in my class-of-nine-people have matured better than they have. I went to Chicago for a Model United Nations Conference with one of them. He's smart, mature, and respectful - everything that those little bratty girls have failed to grow into.
I can't get rid of this confusion. What did we do? What did I do? All we wanted was to have friends. All I did was stutter and all my sister did was wear some different makeup or some different clothes. Did that really make us all that different and all that deserving of a brick wall between us and the "normal" kids?
The answer was, is, and will always be no. I know - as a clear, objective fact - that we didn't do shit deserving of their animosity.
Or maybe there is an answer - that we got this because we happened to be there, because they wanted someone to pick on and there we were - but that's hardly sensible. But if these people are as manipulative as I am making them out to be, then I wouldn't put it past them.
But the worst part of this is not that these people have friends, or somehow come off as likable to others, even as they continue to act immature and intolerant - it's that the principal of that school never acknowledged clear cases of students that were not happy in that environment. And I am a living, breathing testament to this fact.
I still can't believe that we didn't bring this up while we were in that school system. It was so prevalent, you could practically taste the fucking hatred.
It's hilariously ironic; that charter school preached that it's students and faculty were tolerant, altrustic, nice. School was family, a community. Hell, that's what the called it: the Community School. A safe, friendly, and fun environment. Full of some of the most talented, open-minded, and tolerant students in the school system. Enroll your child now! It will change their life!
Well it definitely changed mine, because I got a taste of what many probably don't experience until adulthood: nobody really, truly cares about you. They're in it for themselves and what they want. There's no such thing as friendship - it's just a culmination of lies that people build around each other in order to get ahead. Thanks, middle school, for showing me that.
Not edited for spelling or grammar. Blah.
One day, I'm going to look back on all this and laugh, because they're going to be working for me.