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In reply to the discussion: A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School [View all]Rittermeister
(170 posts)I went to school, K-12, in a southern, semi-rural, heavily working class, very conservative, very religious, predominately (80%) white school system composed mostly of ex-mill workers' children (not that there were any mills left).
In elementary school, there were never less than 25 students to a class; usually, it was more like 30. As a result, classes tended to be unruly, and the teachers' time was largely spent playing referee with the more rambunctious (most of whom came from broken and frequently abusive homes) students. Studious kids were mocked and bullied; if one happened to be large, he was pushed to play sports.
The gifted program consisted of spending an hour a week in a special class playing games etc. The rest of the time was largely spent doing busy work. If a student was gifted and or lucky enough to have parents who had prepared him, he or she quickly became bored, and turned to such coping mechanisms as reading in class; teachers took offense at this, and interpreted it as lack of respect, an attention span problem, or even a sign of disability. Attempts to medicate usually ensued. Some of the parents raised hell over this, but most were content to take the pills.
Facilities were constantly decrepit. My elementary school was thirty years old at the time I went to it, and not well-maintained. The middle school was sixty-five, with a leaky roof, bad furnace, and unsafe areas; I once got a concussion from one of several broken auditorium chairs. Last I checked, the county had a $118,000,000 backlog of repairs and improvements they needed to make.
But hell, we won the state football championship.