Things were this bad when I was in school, I graduated high school in '86. Actually, High School wasn't that bad, a 5 on a scale of 1-10, unpleasant, creating a lot of resentment, but tolerable. Now junior high was a consistent 8+; bad, really bad, every single day for three years.
High school was helped by the fact that 3 or 4 junior highs spilled into my high school, so there was a decent dilution factor there, plus the teachers and principal were competent (the only good teacher I had in junior high was a student teacher who taught my 8th grade English class for a quarter - pathetic, huh?) and I didn't have to deal with that god-awful and, as far as I can tell, totally incompetent social worker any more.
Things aren't any worse today, you just got lucky.
Well, if you want to be technical, having real tastes, and interests, is a sure sign of non-confirmity/geekness. It's been a dozen years, but as I recall the members of the social butterfly cliques in my high school were conspicuous for their lack of any tastes of any kind whatsoever, a lack of any interests except sports (the males) and gossip (the females), and a lack of any semblance of anything which could be referred to as an individual personality. The best word to describe these people would have been: "interchangeable."
You're dead on. If anything, I'm disappointed and pissed at them for doing this, but I'm not surprised. Something in their experience made them cross their braking points. Different people have different breaking points, obviously, which is why, by some miracle, this hasn't happened more often. What scares the piss out of me is that the Geek Profiling going on in so many schools is going to push more over the edge. What is going through the minds of these administrators? Are they trying to produce another Littleton with only weeks left in the school year?
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Things were this bad when I was in school, I graduated high school in '86. Actually, High School wasn't that bad, a 5 on a scale of 1-10, unpleasant, creating a lot of resentment, but tolerable. Now junior high was a consistent 8+; bad, really bad, every single day for three years.
High school was helped by the fact that 3 or 4 junior highs spilled into my high school, so there was a decent dilution factor there, plus the teachers and principal were competent (the only good teacher I had in junior high was a student teacher who taught my 8th grade English class for a quarter - pathetic, huh?) and I didn't have to deal with that god-awful and, as far as I can tell, totally incompetent social worker any more.
Things aren't any worse today, you just got lucky.
Well, if you want to be technical, having real tastes, and interests, is a sure sign of non-confirmity/geekness. It's been a dozen years, but as I recall the members of the social butterfly cliques in my high school were conspicuous for their lack of any tastes of any kind whatsoever, a lack of any interests except sports (the males) and gossip (the females), and a lack of any semblance of anything which could be referred to as an individual personality. The best word to describe these people would have been: "interchangeable."
You're dead on. If anything, I'm disappointed and pissed at them for doing this, but I'm not surprised. Something in their experience made them cross their braking points. Different people have different breaking points, obviously, which is why, by some miracle, this hasn't happened more often. What scares the piss out of me is that the Geek Profiling going on in so many schools is going to push more over the edge. What is going through the minds of these administrators? Are they trying to produce another Littleton with only weeks left in the school year?