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Our middle school runs from 4-6, then 7-9 is called junior high and that's the really lovely one. Everyone was a complete rear end in a top hat to each other constantly, and there's poo poo I look back on and just wonder what the gently caress we were all thinking. I think probably the worst thing that happened is when this one kid got shut under a giant, hollow box in drama class for the entire period when there was a substitute teacher. I wasn't directly involved, but everyone in the class knew exactly what was going on and none of us did anything to stop it, so I think we all shared some of the blame. The really bad part was that he got marked absent, and everyone blamed him for "hiding under the box" when the normal teacher came back. Of course, this was the kid who came up to my friend when he was on crutches, called him a "loving cripple" and stole one of the crutches. As it turned out, my friend could very accurately throw his remaining crutch, so he didn't get too far before having his legs taken out by a spinning crutch. Both crutches were recovered shortly thereafter without further incident. In Grade 6, I mainly remember getting into a bunch of stupid fights about dumb poo poo. I never really got into actual fights before or after that year, but I guess I was just full of piss and vinegar for that grade.
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Aug 12, 2015 00:38
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:38 |
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letthereberock posted:The main thing I recall about middle school (also grades 6-8 for me) is not any one or few specific horrible incidents, but rather this general, constant state of low-grade terror - the feeling that at any moment, out of nowhere, someone could just start loving with you and there was nothing you could do about it. It seems that in middle school, if you are small, quiet, or awkward (and I was all 3), you were prone to becoming a target at any point, so you just tried to get through each day hoping that it was someone else and not you. As much as there are certain things that will make you more of a target, part of the problem as I see it is that there's no way to avoid being a target. It's just too volatile. Hormones are strong poo poo. Imagine a building with a few hundred people in it all being introduced to a mixture of alcohol and cocaine, all of whom have no experience with it before. Of course it's going to be hosed up, and no one involved gains the self awareness to understand why they're doing these things until much later.
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Aug 13, 2015 03:30
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Riven posted:I'm now a middle school AP, and my career has been centered around school behavior, and I just wanted to chime in that the awful poo poo posted here 100% has to do with adults having ineffective and insufficient systems. Middle school can be a supportive place to go through the roughest period of life, but only if the adults know how to create that environment. This makes good sense, and helps me realize why I was such a little poo poo all the time.
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Aug 24, 2015 00:02
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MoraleHazard posted:I think the best advice is: don't take bullying. If someone hits a kid, that kid should be able to fight back. My kids won't get in trouble even if they hit first, so long as they're truly being bullied by some jerkoff. Sometimes, the bullies aren't horrible people, they just either get bullied at home or just enjoy the power they have over other kids and a bloody nose, stomped toes, whatever reminds them that there are consequences to their actions. I think you're correct about some of the negative influences that zero-tolerance has, but there's another issue that I have with it that I don't see discussed nearly as often. As zero-tolerance rules expand and punishments get harsher, incidents will often be ignored entirely because there's no way to punish a bully beyond a long-term suspension or, in some cases, expulsion. In cases where the bullies are the popular kids, good students, athletes, etc., probably with support from their parents, this can be very dangerous. All of a sudden, these bullies learn that there really are no consequences for their actions until they do something really, really hosed up. You can get away with a lot of low-level poo poo for a long time, because teachers and the administration do not have the tools they need to deal with it appropriately under a zero-tolerance system.
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Aug 24, 2015 16:18
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:parents are why schools have the dumb policies they do, zero tolerance lets them mete out a punishment that'll hopefully deter some low-level shittiness without invoking a campaign of hatred from helicopter parents convinced their precious baby darling is being officially discriminated against I disagree with this. I think parents would be a lot more willing to let the school do its thing if there were disciplinary options between "nothing" and "suspension/expulsion." Say your kid is being a little poo poo (and odds are they will be at some point) and they get caught at it. Are you going to get upset that they got a detention for starting a fight or doing some other stupid poo poo? Probably not. You might even choose to discipline them at home. However, when the only options available to the school at that point are suspension or expulsion, the parents are rightly going to protest that it's a little bit disproportionate to toss a 7th-grader out of school for something that's spawned largely out of a lack of judgement, poor impulse control and hormones that are basically common in all kids that age. Further, under zero-tolerance, if parents want to fight against having their child suspended or expelled, they have no other option but to deny the event happened entirely, because the facts of the situation make no difference to the punishment according to the policy -- that's the point of zero-tolerance in the first place. Zero-tolerance in schools is no different than mandatory minimums in the criminal justice system, except it can be applied with even less oversight. It's simply bad policy.
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Aug 24, 2015 17:31
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I'm really glad my parents made me take an actual cooking course at the college here when I was around middle-school age, instead of consigning me to suffer in a lovely home-ec class with garbage, outdated equipment and no one with professional cooking experience.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:07
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Honestly, if being middle-school-aged were a disease instead of something that everyone goes through, it would be one of those things where you say "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy."
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Aug 30, 2015 16:31
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 07:38 |
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spinst posted:I was pretty much a huge rear end in a top hat in Junior High (grades 7 and 8)... Got bullied, so I decided to be a bully. Got in fights, kicked off my bus, drank, smoked weed, skipped class... An acquaintance of mine was kicked out of school in grade 11, then became a teacher in his 30s. As he was recounting the story, I remember him saying, "that's just the way life goes sometimes." I still get a chuckle out of it. He said it so matter-of-factly.
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Aug 31, 2015 14:52
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