/oat/ - The Serial Box

And I still don’t regret reading My Little Pony fanfiction during math class rather than actually doing math. It was a better use of my time. I’ll remember those fics for years to come, the same can’t be said for 99% of my math class regarding what they did there.

And as I’m pretty sure I said before that I actually did do quite a bit of math work on my last year, but my teacher unironically lost it, and I was like fuck you, I don’t care enough to do that again. I completed like 3/4 of it, and then was told that I had to do it all again.

Had a similar experience in history. Did a test a total of three times. The teacher said that while the first two were “technically correct” I had to phrase my answers in a certain way. I passed the third time only to be told that those were all “practice” tests, so I had to do the same test that I had gotten all the right answers to for the forth time. Asked if I could just copy word for word from my “practice test” onto my “real test”, the teacher said yes. Literally word for word, on the same kind of paper, with the same pen. It would have only taken me half an hour but I failed history because I wasn’t putting up with that shit.

They don’t give a fuck about learning, it’s just about passing tests. That history example was the apex for me. You can get every answer right and know everything, but if you don’t phrase your answers accordingly to test guidelines you fail. In math we literally got more points for doing the “working out” which is explaining how you came up with an answer, than we did for the actual answer. You could get all 100 out of 100 answers right and you’d get the equivalent of a D or an E because you didn’t explain step by step how you got to an answer.

Also how you actually get to an answer doesn’t matter. Whenever I did working out and explained how I got to an answer I was always told that my working out was wrong, and that I had to do it a certain way. I tried to explain that I have autism, so I’m probably going to sort out these problems differently from how most people would, but they didn’t care, even if I got all the answers right and did the working out they didn’t care, I had to do it in a very specific and exact way or else I got no points. The whole point pf doing working out is to explain how YOU get to an answer, and my teachers basically just told me to lie and pretend that I got to it some other way, completely making the whole point of explaining how I got to an answer irrelevant.

It’s like asking a left handed person to paint a picture with their right hand because that’s how “you’re supposed to do it”. I am/was actually quite good at maths and actually enjoyed it in primary school and early high school because I had free reign to answer the questions however I liked. In primary school I finished first or second first and would always ask for more work because I enjoyed it. In high school, especially later I despised maths and couldn’t do basic questions that should have been simple for me, because like someone being forced to draw with the other hand, I was being forced into answering all of the questions in way that was completely unnatural for me.

I fucking despise high school and honestly wish I had just used it as reading time from the start. If my mum or someone had encouraged me to read actual books instead of fanfiction God knows what I could have gotten through. I could have probably read the entire Western Cannon in that time, but instead I had to endure 4 years of art, despite having a disability that impairs my fine motor functions, as well as everything else I explained about math, history, and other classes.

I’m not going to, but if I ever had a kid and they had to go to school I’d tell them to do absolutely no work in school and treat teachers how they treat them. If a teacher gives you no respect give them no respect, if they’re rude to you tell them to fuck off. Treat them no differently than you would any other adult. Instead I’d give them history books to read in history, literature to read in English, etc and tell them to sit at the back of the class and read.

School is like 6 hours a day. Imagine if every kid just read during that time instead of the useless shit they actually do. I legitimately think that reading just one good book on something like the slave trade would be more informative and educational than the 3 something years most kids do on that topic, and that could be done in a week.

Sorry if this is way more than you were expecting, I just despise high school with a passion. They don’t care about education, they don’t care about learning, they don’t care about you or bettering your life, all they care about is tests, which is to say that high school exists for high school’s own sake. The worst part is that those are the years when you’re brain is most flexible and absorbent to learning. You’re never going to get that extremely important part of your life back, it’s wasted.

I almost want to have butt babies with Addy just so I can make the decision not to send my kids to school.