so it is august, i am seeing SO MUCH back to school stuff, and i am slowly realizing that i am about to enter my last year of american public school education in ~4 weeks i am A) terrified because it's the end (senior year baby), also im taking either five or six i forgot AP classes this year which will be Unfun but i will get to that in a moment and B) SO FUCKING PSYCHED BECAUSE HONESTLY the school system has totally Fucked Me Up in All the Worst Ways, i can say that i can blame all of my brain problems on school without feeling like im exaggerating. is it true? no idea. but i can believe it. i am going to put Annoying School Emotions under a cut! Spoiler so i ascribe basically all of my self worth to school lmao.....! i know it's not healthy, but because of being raised in this environment, ive basically grown up feeling like if my grades are Bad then i am Bad. i'm pretty smart, never really needed to study to get really high grades, which is good because ive honestly never had the energy to study because i get really fucked up during the school year. therefore, im able to feel less bad about myself because im really up there in class rankings, have a good gpa, etc..... i never really thought about this until recently, i'll be starting to see a therapist really really soon so ive been starting to think about brain stuff more, and i realized that if my grades or ranking slipped this year i would probably do something really terrible and hurt myself or something, which is! so fucked up!!!! i go to a really high-preforming pressure cooker school district and a ton of kids make ivy league schools every year (we had 10 accepted to cornell this year, 3 to yale, 1 harvard, just for example) and while i know i can definitely make my reach schools (cornell and columbia, i just realized that that sounds really fukin self-absorbed lmao haha whoops) im also concerned about mental health stuff and money (i am in that weird middle class hellzone, i.e. cant afford it but according to colleges my family is making too much to qualify for any aid beyond loans, which i cant take out) so i was thinking about just going to a really good local school just for a year or two, they also take AP credits and its a state school so i can qualify for a bunch of state school-exclusive scholarships, etc. etc. etc. so that is obviously the best choice for me, and if its not i can always transfer! but because of this environment that im in, i feel panicky and terrible for going to a school that is really good but a tier down from the ~*~*hardcore ivy league*~~* because i feel like my peers will look down on me for it, and i will definitely look down on myself for it?? like haha wow lame, you can't handle the pressure, whats even the point of trying anything. which i know is toxic and dumb but its my automatic train of thought because of pressures from other students and teachers and guidance counselors over the course of 13 years of public school and ughghghbglgb i had a discussion with a close friend the other day (who is arguably much worse off than me, her school is on an IB track instead of AP and she's also in her school's research program, which i never qualified for, that also fucked me up but thats another story hhhaha i wont go into it now) about how we kinda hate all that "you are not a number!!! love urself!!!!!" stuff bc like......yes it is true and i appreciate the sentiment but..........we want to do really well in public school, our whole lives are our fucking grades, which yes is unhealthy but when you say that 'you are not those numbers' its like then what am i if NOT my school accomplishments which, again, is fucked up!!!!!! i have a lot of interests, im almost done with a novel that im looking to get published, im a really good artist, i have a good ear for music but at the same time, if my grades drop, if i drop out of the top 20 in rankings, i will probably hate myself a lot more than i already do and spiral into a deep dark abyss and that is So Fucked but im not sure what to do about it besides maybe vent this to a psychologist if i can find the balls to do so sidenote that i wasnt sure how to shoehorn in: i really dont like talking about this stuff. at all. to my mom. because her first reaction is always "well, drop the harder classes!!!!" which is like....yes.....i could...........but then i would be able to coast really easily in the easier classes and possibly hate myself even MORE for proving that im not up to challenging myself, im not as smart as my peers who are taking 8 AP classes, you are never going to amount to anything in life like they are. so ive just stopped talking to her about this hhhha tl;dr: school fucked up my self worth, thank god i have a decent memory and can absorb stuff fairly fast because otherwise my self esteem would be even more in the toilet don't feel the need to cut your complaining, though!! i only did because it is very long because i have a lot of pent up anxiety about it :"D i am making this thread because it seems to not exist yet and honestly, the american school system can be so terrible in so many ways and i will probably use this thread a lot when school starts as an outlet to shout into the void and you are welcome to as well (if you are not american but have bad experiences in school feel free to share too!! its just that i normally dont hear terrible bs about non-american schools, i could be completely wrong tho)
Ahhh yeah, the American school system is bullshit lol. I'm in the same boat as far as college- my family makes too much to qualify me for financial aid, but there's like no way we could actually afford college. So I'm going into my second year of community college in like 3 weeks and after I'm done with this well, who knows. I really really recommend community college though, because you can get in your basic junk and get your associates for way less than it'd cost to go to a big college for the same thing, and community colleges have smaller classes meaning you can get questions in more easily, get more help, etc. I've actually seen somewhere that it's been shown that students who go to community college first actually have a higher level of education than those who go to a big school for their entire college career. So yeah, while it doesn't have the prestige of a big school, you're actually getting the better deal in more ways than one. Regarding hard classes, I totally feel you. Junior year was hell for me because of how many hard classes I took, and because I knew it wasn't going to get better(3rd through 8th grade I was in the gifted program, which sucked balls and only got worse as time went on) so I took easier classes senior year. If I were you I'd go the middle road, maybe take ap classes of only the subjects that you feel will be beneficial to you later on? Like I still took anatomy and physiology senior year because I plan on going into biology and so that was important for me. It /is/ your senior year, and after 4 years of crap, you do deserve something of a break as far as difficulty goes so you can finish strong. Spoiler: My own complaining school sucks. Kindergarten through 2nd grade I fucking breezed through basically and was bored all the fucking time. The school was decent(save for my 1st grade teacher) I just wasn't being challenged. Speaking of 1st grade though, I don't think I really went to much of it at all. The actual teacher was gone half the time, so my dad would wake me in and if there was a substitute he'd just take me home and we'd do something actually interesting and fun. I probably learned a lot more because of that than I would have if I'd actually stayed in the class lol. It's sort of sad really because my kindergarten teacher was a fucking saint, she was a wonderful person who made class really fun and interesting, so the change was such a sharp contrast. After second grade though, I got sent to the gifted class, which was in a different school, in a different district. So I knew NO ONE lol. Not exactly great for someone who was shit at socializing. Plus, it was basically as if I'd skipped a grade but more so, which really fucks you up if you're used to being bored in school. I cried a fuck ton at home because of the stress. And I was never asked if I wanted to stay in the class, nor did I ask if I could go back to the old school because I had no clue that was even an option, I thought I was stuck there. And yeah for the most part it got a little easier over time, but I got really good at procrastinating, especially on big projects. Plus in 6th grade I remember just giving up on math and not really caring because I didn't understand it and the questions I asked didn't help me. 7th and 8th grade we moved from a small, rather nice little middle school, to the junior high that every kid in the district goes to. So like, 800 people there. Major fucking overload walking in the halls there, I would just zone the fuck out. It's lucky that most of the school was just built in a giant square, so four main hallways, and then there was an offshoot bit for like music and the gyms and crap. Very simple, you literally could not get lost. We were still seperated from the rest of the school basically- we had our classroom, where we had all our classes save for gym and one elective, while the rest of the school had 9 different class periods iirc.the only time we were with other kids was lunch, gym, and whatever than one other thing you chose to do was. At this point the class I was in had basically been together since 3rd/4th grade(split grade class so it depended on the year) so we were basically like siblings. No one would have entertained the idea of dating someone else in the class because we knew each other too well XD that was actually probably for the best for me, though being so seperated probably wasn't because after junior high, there was no more gifted program! You got schooled in with the main population basically and took ap classes or whatever. Besides this though, the teacher was probably the worst one I'd had since 1st grade. He was kiiiind of a dick lol. And this is the class where my public speaking issues started lol. But, he gave up on trying to make me do any of the big semester projects. I would basically pretend to work or would read while we were supposed to be doing stuff on the project, and either I'd just turn in something partially done, or just not turn anything in. And I think his reputation must have been on the line or fucking something, because instead of failing me like he should have, I'd get like 80-90% on the projects. Bad thing to teach me, but mostly I was just relieved because otherwise I couldn't have kept up with the class at all. It was shit, I almost failed one semester because I'd missed like 3 days one time and so was behind for the rest of the year. Again, I think he fixed my grades for me and for that I am forever grateful. Probably the best thing he did for me. Highschool was just meh. Moved out to the country, and so to a new district.knew absolutely no one and decided I liked it that way because I figured I'd be gone after that anyway. Really, except for junior year highschool was not horrible just disappointing and boring. The teachers were pretty shit for the most part. Junior year I was ready to kill myself though, because of the stress. Too many hard classes in subjects I didn't understand, with really, really bad teachers. The guy who taught math and science should have been a college professor, not a highschool teacher, tbh. Oh, and fuck drivers Ed, seriously. Fuck it forever. The first instructor guy basically traumatized me and is probably a big part of why I still can't fucking drive. ... And that's about it. This is way too fucking long. You should probably not bother clicking on the spoiler, it is way too long.
I went to one of the academically best schools in my country for all my schooling, grades 2-12. (Back when I started the school didn't have the first grade. They assumed children would go to some other school for Grade 1 and then transfer in. I think there were two schools with that system in the whole country and they basically only stopped doing it because a law was passed to forbid grade shenanigans (so either it's a high school (Grades 10-12) or a middle school (1-9) or integrated one (all of it), but not such weird cream-of-the-crop-robber)). Spoiler: My school It may have been academically best, but it was... not so great for anyone's mental health. A lot of my friends went there. Literally none of us came out with all of our sanity. And the amount of sanity directly correlates with the amount of time spent there: the friend who transferred into 5th grade was somewhat more okay than the ones who did all 12 years (or 11, before the school was made to have Grade 1). The school was habitually in top three schools of the country and we did not have a school counselor. Because the school thought we didn't need it. If you had issues you either got to talk with the headmaster (very eccentric. pretty good administrator. ahahahaha nope at actually handling students, I suspect) or found a way to cope, and most people went the latter route. I think a lot of people were on medication. Some self-harmed. I, personally, had a bad case of Must Be Best, but none of the worse options. The school had a huge collective culture boner. We had mandatory extracurricular tests about the reproductions of famous paintings that hanged on the walls once a year, and mandatory extracurricular tests about various culture/history/religious (because a cultured European knows about bible (we weren't pushed into faith at all, but damn we were supposed to know stories and the related artwork)) tests every quarter. I thought the French Revolution was bad, but then World Museums happened (seventy pages about twelve museums, yes you should know exactly which paintings are housed where; you have one month to learn it on top of ordinary schoolwork) and that is not something I'm likely to forget any time soon. It made me weirdly, internalizedly, unknowingly elitist. I'm still sometimes surprised when people don't know famous paintings or trivia about New Testament or whatever, because isn't that what everyone knows (turns out, most people live good lives without being forcefully introduced to "cultured" stuff). The school also was pretty elitist. We all knew that "our alumni don't become cashiers". A lot of struggling people were told that they either pull up or go elsewhere. I didn't have that problem, but I saw how my brother basically bloomed after fucking out after middle school (turns out, he's not stupid! just not Academically Gifted and also beaten down for years). Sometimes I myself get weird pangs of inferiority. I became a software engineer, but at least one of my classmates works for United Nations and the other one has achieved a noteworthy sports career while getting a degree in law. Like... how do you even compete with that. One of our mandatory final exams was the essay. You were given topics to choose from and four (I think) hours to do it. We had a lot of practice runs, but the final one was officially mandated thing, eg everyone in the country did it and then essays were shipped to other teachers in other schools to grade. Most of my class was used to hovering around 70% result and then we got our official test essays back and they were graded at... over 80 or 90% in a lot of cases. Basically everyone had ascended a grade point. We honestly weren't sure what the grader was smoking. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that we were just graded more demandingly in-school. The school motto should be "You Should Be Better" instead of the actual motto about dignity. I think I got de-brainwashed in two stages. One was in the beginning of high school, with the influx of new students, who tended to be Even More driven and had very good academic record (and more sanity/spoons/whatever than those who had been there since childhood, I suspect). I wasn't the sooper best any more and turned out, being only pretty good didn't actually kill me. The other was going to university, with its mix of actual geniuses and relatively normal people besides people like me. Did I basically have a kismesis crush on the best student of my year for like, a semester? Yeah. But then I realized that I didn't actually have to be the best to learn things, and turned out there were other things besides academic stuff. Getting out of high school was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in school. Currently I have a job and am going back to university to get a Master's (it's going to be a hell of a lot of work, but also a useful thing, so I'm gonna try, at least). I've been getting better about the whole academic stuff. I really liked this book. I recognized a lot of my own experiences there and it would probably be even more familiar for an USian. It's nice to read something that explicitly goes "yes, this is how it is, and what it is is pretty bullshit".
Late Replies are Late @Alska yeah I am definitely planning on going to a state school (it's about 40 minutes from my house too, so I can commute) for basically free because of a state scholarship I qualify for, plus it takes AP credits so. . . yeah, locally for undergrad for sure. But holy shit your experience- if the gifted kids were separated from the major school population like that I probably would've flipped when the re-integration happened in high school, that is seriously awful. Agreed on junior year. That shit was awful. Never again. @Silvereye man that is wild....?? But also very encouraging, a lot of stuff there that I will probably go back and reread this year when the Going Gets Tough :"0 nice to know that crazy schools aren't america-exclusive, in a weird way haha
Awesome! Glad you've got it basically figured out :D I still don't know where I'm going after I get my associates lol. And idk, it wasn't so awful? Like it probably really helped that in junior high we had like two hours a day with other kids, and that it was similar to being moved to the gifted program in the first place- new school, new people, new everything. Like, yeah it probably could have been a lot worse, and probably would have been if I'd stayed in the district because holy fuck so much overload every day with the hallways. At least the highschool I did go to was decent sized school-wise and fairly small student body-wise. And yes, fuck junior year *solidarity fistbumps*
Arbitrarily boosting this for This Thread! which just opened up and is tangentially related, in case you wanted to talk about school destroying your life in a completely different thread haha :D thing i hate most about school in retrospect: Accelerated Reader was the worst because it boosted my ego from the vocab and reading comprehension points but then it asked book questions that were like "what color socks was Jake wearing on page 82?" ...I took a test in french once because my school got the wrong software and then didn't check the test before i took it
Bringing this thread back because I am 10000% panicked and stressed rn because despite sending in score reports via collegeboard to three schools, and using up all my free score sends, THEY ARE NOT SHOWING UP AS SENT. like, the website says "u used up all ur free score sends so now you have to pay" but it's ALSO saying that I haven't sent scores to any schools yet At first I was like "this is probably an error, I definitely sent scores, I have the email confirmations and everything" but then I went and checked the website for one of the schools because they have an application tracking system and according to that they haven't received my scores!!!!! Which I'm using to assume that NONE OF MY SCHOOLS HAVE GOTTEN THE SCORES YET. which is a problem especially for the one that has the application tracker because. . . . .i applied early to that school. It is one of my top choice schools. I know that this is an easy fix probably - all the schools involved generally have a pretty generous amount of leeway with sending in scores - but this involves like. Making phone calls. And fixing things and making sure the application offices are aware of this. And resending stuff. And aughhhHHHHHHH FUCKING COLLEGEBOARD YOU HAVE. LITERALLY ONE JOB. FUCK YOUUUU.
I am so sorry. When I was going for grad school my test scores also got lost and it was the worst thing. Especially since, you know, my grad school was a good school so I thought, it must be my fault, right? They wouldn't lose them, right? Yeah, no. My supposedly better-than-my-undergrad grad school lost my test scores in their office. Like, they were physically delivered in the mail and then they just got buried in a pile of papers or something. I had to call and ask and then they went looking and discovered, "Oh, hey, we do have your scores!" So, yeah, call the school, too, if calling CollegeBoard doesn't work. And if you have guidance counselors that are willing to help you, enlist them; things will be much easier if more than one person is trying to fix this.
