The $%*! frustration thread

[MsBlack]

My frustration is the bigotry and prejudice that’s taking place at my school.

Certainly in my own year, but also in others, there’s this typical ‘adolescent boy’ culture that dominates (the school’s all-boys for my year and all the earlier years than mine).

Girls are sluts (some teachers too, apparently) or ugly and therefore near-worthless pieces of meat whose meagre worth is exactly and only their sexual worth (if they’re ‘fit’—if not, they can just die). It’s cool to make racist jokes because ‘It’s just a joke and we [kids of different races] have an understanding’. It’s cool to pick on people for their height. It’s cool to express bigotry towards people based on their size. It’s cool to act like drunken louts, vandalising and being rowdy. It’s cool to actually get drunk at the weekends and act like one’s not only not even sapient but to act lower than any fucking ‘animal’ possibly could. It’s cool to make fun of people with Down’s syndrome and use it as an insult along with ‘retarded’. It’s cool to disrupt lessons intentionally…just ‘cause, y’know? Chinks all look the same. Blonds are dumb. Gingers are subhuman. Being a bender or a faggot or a homo is the worst possible thing anyone could ever experience. It’s still funny to make fun of Indian accents. Heck, it’s funny in general to make jokes about immigrants and people who aren’t white. But remember that the BNP are bigots—they’re different from us. We’re good people. We don’t deny the Holocaust. Although we do say that Jews are dirty or imply their inferiority. And maybe we did make that ‘Jews in an ashtray’ joke. And, I suppose, that ‘Jews in an oven’ joke. And maybe some gas chamber jokes. Rape’s a joke and girls are ‘asking for it’ if they wear short skirts…

That mentality is mainstream in my year. But it’s nothing surprising and nothing original. What’s most disturbing is that not only does this take place just between the boys, but that it’s thinly veiled and done in front of teachers, who do nothing. Some teachers are apparently so spineless that they’ve learned to tune it out; apparently they don’t hear when kids are shouting this shit in class, calling each other ‘gay’, or ‘retarded’ or laughing when a brown person comes up in a video. All this at ‘one of the best state schools in the country’, whose alumni ‘will be tomorrow’s leaders’.

The Rugby captain and other popular kids walk all over my registration group teacher, so I went to the person next up in the pecking order about this—the person in charge of our year. He told me to note it down over the course of two weeks. Of course, a lot of this requires one to be there to understand, so I only took down the most obvious things (such as one kid seeing a kid in another year and jeering, ‘Ha ha! You’re black!’). I reported back to him and apparently he spoke to the people I told him about. I didn’t hear any talk about it though amongst ‘my peers’, and the same people continue doing it. The school claims to ‘take racism very seriously’, and that ‘If any member of the school is racist they will be expelled immediately.’ And yet, these kids have outright said to each other that they know they have nothing to fear from this because it’s a complete fucking lie. Just like how ‘all racial incidents that come to the school’s attention have to be reported to the borough’.

So I’m continuing with reporting. In all honesty, the person I’ve been reporting to hasn’t done much so far, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up having to submit a report to council myself if nobody else takes it seriously enough; the school’s seeming ever more full of shit on this. If this weren’t in school but were at work or anywhere in the general public, these trash would be taken the fuck out for racism, sexism, sexual harassment, general harassment and anti-Semitism. Maybe also for bigotry towards the mentally impaired. Definitely not for sizeism or rape apologism or any of the ‘subtle’ discrimination, since people of this kind are exactly the ones that stop society from outlawing this shit. The people on the receiving end have been conditioned to accept it or, in the more ‘subtle’ cases, not even recognize it. If this escalates, I’ll probably be ‘found out’ and targeted and I wouldn’t be surprised if I were assaulted or cornered or threatened.

Bleagh.

That’s my frustration!

[ZeaLitY]

And I do all of it without believing in fantasy.

Um, wasn’t it the fictional work called Naruto that you picked up the “Springtime of Youth” concept from?    

It's different where recognized fictional works are involved. People who take inspiration from Christ actually believe in the tenets of Christianity as if they exist, including heaven, hell, the devil, etc. and for some, miracles, visions, and so on. This is nonexistent. If they recognized it as a fictional work and went on to say that the character of Job did have some serious determination, or that the written Jesus was an inspirational non-violence kind of guy, it'd be legitimate. But they actually believe in superstitious gods and demons, and that makes it delusion and, derisively, fantasy.

The springtime of youth is logic. The more I do, and the more possibilities I explore, the more I'll grow and the less I'll regret. There's no believing that divine Christian forces fuel me, or some inner chi is the root of my power, or that I need to balance my masculine yang and feminine yi to unlock my true powers and live a proper life. That I don't believe in an afterlife is effectively even more motivation to be in the springtime of youth, since I'd better achieve my dreams in this life. Humanism is also grounded in reality. I have a tremendous sense of purpose and meaning thinking of humanity's manifest destiny of illumination, but this is all extant; science exists, as does humanity's potential to explore space and pursue higher truths. There's no faith element to it, aside from choosing to desire that humanity has this potential (lacking a crystal ball). There's a strong argument for that (our current civilization, despite its flaws), which is also rooted in reality. This is why I can claim to lack spirituality, which some people often confuse with passion for life.

So I’m continuing with reporting.

Damn; it's like UT in real life.

[FaustWolf]

Ugh, MsBlack, when I read that I realized how "lucky" I am to be further and further removed from the culture prevalent in youth education (I would have said "high school/undergrad" but I'm not sure either term would be reflective of the educational system you're experiencing right now). You'll hopefully find that attitudes are at least more diverse in college, and objectively better in grad school since the focus is just on earning material wealth more than social considerations from my experience (although we could make critiques of that as well).

Glad to hear you're taking direct action on the matter; left alone, a culture like this could spiral into Lord of the Flies proportions. It's good that you've identified Anti-Semitism and are taking a stand against it; that "Jews in the Oven" joke has been uttered in the midwestern United States, so this is still a worldwide concern, and you can take heart that you feel the need to combat something that immense. Are you able to report things anonymously, or is there a significant amount of risk involved for you? I'm really not sure how that works in your neck of the woods. If there's some kind of anonymous reporting system or structure in place, that would be enthusing, and perhaps something we should copy in the US if we don't have it already.

Do keep us updated on your efforts. During my campaign experiences I've found that direct intervention into things like racial tension are less effective than I would have wanted, but there were still a few bittersweet scenes of reconciliation that made the effort worth it.


As for my own frustration, it's actually something I've been quite enthused with: my ability to pull an all-nighter for only the third or fourth time in my life. Damn, SoY is something, isn't it? I've been running into walls and stuff all day though: I just hope other people don't step into cars and trucks before getting some sleep after doing this.

[ZombieBucky]

im still frustrated at my manager at walmart. hes giving me a lot of crap about my preferences. one of the comments he made when i told him that i was good with small children was that he didnt trust me with them because apparently gays like to fuck little kids.
whut.
he only found out about it because it was part of a survey that was supposed to be private. tomorrow im going to bring this up to the main guy... whoever that is.

[Temporal Knight]

Teacher freaking pulled the due date back a bit on a paper I needed to write. I have it written, went to turn it in today, and...what do you know. It's not due until NEXT week now. So I'll be lugging this around for the next week until Friday.

All that hard work, and she won't even let me turn it in. Gosh.

[MsBlack]

(I would have said "high school/undergrad" but I'm not sure either term would be reflective of the educational system you're experiencing right now).

High school.

Are you able to report things anonymously, or is there a significant amount of risk involved for you? I'm really not sure how that works in your neck of the woods. If there's some kind of anonymous reporting system or structure in place, that would be enthusing, and perhaps something we should copy in the US if we don't have it already.

I can speak to various members of staff in private. The thing is that in order to report specific cases, I need to be there. And if I'm there, the others present might work it out after enough cases. Aside from which, some of the others have already labelled me a 'grass' for other things, so I'd probably be a prime suspect if they tried to figure out who's doing it. But I've considered it and I'm prepared to continue reporting even if I am identified. Or at least, I say I am now. We'll see how much steel I actually have. If I do keep going, something will have to give eventually, because I intend to keep going up the pecking order until something substantive is done. But we'll see; hopefully the person I'm reporting this to at the moment is simply building up the evidence and warnings and will eventually make a bigger impact if I keep reporting.

im still frustrated at my manager at walmart. hes giving me a lot of crap about my preferences. one of the comments he made when i told him that i was good with small children was that he didnt trust me with them because apparently gays like to fuck little kids.
whut.
he only found out about it because it was part of a survey that was supposed to be private. tomorrow im going to bring this up to the main guy... whoever that is.

I don't know whether you could get him pulled up by the law for homophobia, but if it was a private internal survey, hopefully you can get him busted by Walmart for violating company policy or something. If not, maybe report him for general inappropriate remarks or something?

[Thought]

Some teachers are apparently so spineless that they’ve learned to tune it out; apparently they don’t hear when kids are shouting this shit in class, calling each other ‘gay’, or ‘retarded’ or laughing when a brown person comes up in a video.

I'm not sure how it is across the pond, but here at least teachers have no authority; lack of authority also means lack of power. Youths are more astute than we old'uns give them credit for. Students recognize that a teacher is not an authority figure and they purposely point this out in their behavior. Students engaging in bigoted behavior in front of a teacher not only insults the target of the behavior but the teacher as well. It's a challenge; they are essentially asking "what are you going to do about it?"

Indeed, what can a teacher do? Physical punishment is out of the question in most modern societies. Detention is a joke (speaking from experience) and is about as much of a punishment as the room being two degrees too cold. Expulsion? Pfft, few students take schooling serious enough for that to be a punishment. Indeed, among a group of likeminded individuals, being punished in these manners is a bit of a prestige; you actually ruffled the feathers of the adults.

To quote Monty Python, "supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony." Schools are self-contained societies and the power, unfortunately, rests with the students. They are the most numerous, therefore they set the social norms.

It is certainly regrettable that teachers are unable to do anything, but they also have no real power with these sorts of individuals. What are they to do? Society has stripped them of the power of enforcing a top-down reform.

You'll hopefully find that attitudes are at least more diverse in college, and objectively better in grad school since the focus is just on earning material wealth more than social considerations from my experience (although we could make critiques of that as well).

I would recommend reading "My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student." It is an incredibly fascinating work, and though it is slightly depressing. Bowling for Soup got it right when they said that High School never ends; it just becomes more subtle.

[GenesisOne]

I agree, Thought. In my opinion, teachers have the most difficult and (at the same time) most underappreciated job in the world.  If society were a pyramid constituting the hierarchy of life-time occupations, teachers should be at the apex, not near the base. 

The responsibility of passing on the knowledge of your generation to the next should be a privilige reserved for the most responsible, most disciplined, and most assertive individuals out there, not just for any John Doe or Jane Doe who just graduated with a BA and just got their teaching certificate. 

You rarely see a venerable teacher nowadays because such teachers are the few and far between who had the patience and courage to stick to their job and not let the harassment and disrespect for their pursuit from the students get to them. 

The number one reason that teachers quit when in they're in their 30s and 40s?  Because they're burnt out.  But that's just my way of seeing the current educational environment.  What says you?

[Truthordeal]

As someone who's been keeping up with the educational profession for a while now, I'd have to say that I like the ideas of charter schools to remedy this ailment. A few Compendiumites have mentioned in the past that a lot of the hardship that comes from being a teacher is due to answering to not just his superiors, but the entire Department of Education. Charter schools alleviate this problem.

Furthermore, its not the teacher's job to discipline students; it's the parents. The DoE has held up to one half of this standard by restricting corporeal punishment, but completely ignored the other half by not holding the parents responsible for discipline. I take this to what is probably an extreme position, that if a child skips classes, the parents should be fined. Make it their responsibility, and they will make sure that their child gets to class.

[Radical_Dreamer]

And in so doing teach teens that others are responsible for their actions. It's a bad lesson that will have unintended consequences, both in the immediate application, and in the long term from ingraining that troublesome message. Come on, Truthordeal; you're a libertarian. Shouldn't you be for individual responsibility?

[Truthordeal]

As Thought mentioned RD, there's no reasonable way for schools to make students be responsible. Teacher's can't do it, even if some type of corporeal punishment was reinstated; they simply don't have enough one on one time with the students. Moreover, as I mentioned before, it's not their responsibility, nor should it be. They don't get paid enough for it.

It's the parent's responsibility. They made the investment, they have to see it through. 18's the legal age of adulthood, and that's when the parents have the authority, and that includes their public education. I'm optimistic enough to think that most parents out there continue to make that investment throughout their child's school years, but there are a lot that aren't. It is a busy job raising kids and handling a full time job, I know, and I understand that, I saw it secondhand through my parents. That's an explanation for the borderline apathy, but it's not an excuse. They made a deal with society when they had their child that they were going to bring up a respectful member of society, and an essential part of that is a general secondary education.

Perhaps my stance is fairly reactionary on my part, but with time I'll fine-tune it into something a bit more reasonable and efficient. Until then, parents have the ultimate authority over their kids, and some of them need to be coaxed into using it when the time comes. A swift kick to the pocket book is the best way I know how.

But I'll be fair here, and point out that sometimes its the school or the district's fault that a child is failing. I'll figure out the best way to deal with that with time.

[Lord J Esq]

You can't force a person to be passionate. It's one of the few areas in the human condition where force is inherently unusable. My take is that we probably need a tiered education system. Maybe I'll make a thread about that. In any case, the "public / private" thing is a red herring. Oh, and Thought is mistaken about one thing: Schools are not democracies. Children as a body are incapable of exercising democratic authority. They're a mob, not democrats.

[Thought]

As Thought mentioned RD, there's no reasonable way for schools to make students be responsible.

Nope, I didn't say that. I just said that currently teachers have no way of doing so. This is a difference between there currently being no way, and there being no reasonable way. I would argue that there is a reasonable way, just not the current way.

Which leads me into what Josh said:

Oh, and Thought is mistaken about one thing: Schools are not democracies. Children as a body are incapable of exercising democratic authority. They're a mob, not democrats.

You will note that I did not say that schools are democracies. Merely that the children are the most numerous and in the current system therefore have the most power to set social norms.

There are, of course, other ways besides physical punishment, detention, and expulsion to punish someone. There is social embarrassment. This isn't to say that teachers should be pantsing students in front of the class, but there are more insidious means. If someone acts up in class, send them to another classroom. Misbehavior is reinforced by the social structure that the students have created. Therefore, disrupting that social structure will also disrupt the behavior.

The problem is what to do when things are so bad that even that will not work. In general, school authority needs to be established at a young age, so that one doesn't have high school students refusing to obey.

There are similarities between education and training a dog. In training a dog, there are three basic forms of punishment. A well trained dog will react immediately to a simple but stern "no." When verbal punishment doesn't work (as it does not currently work in schools, since a level of trust has not been developed between the teacher and the student), social punishments are a good alternative. Remove the dog from the rest of society (a classic "time out"). This is where schools currently need to focus; students have set up a society that reinforces bad behavior, so the teachers (and other school officials) need to work on setting up a society that dissuades it.

Now you might say: "But thought, you said there were three forms of punishment." Well right you are (or would be, if you said that). The first is verbal, which relies on the bond between you and the other. The second is social, which relies on the bond between the individual and the pack. The third is physical. If nothing else works, a swift switch is then the only recourse for restoring order. It is crude, it is far more ineffective than the other forms of punishment, but when there is chaos all about, one must start somewhere.

A well trained dog will never need to be physically punished, and indeed, rarely punished at all. Punishment often (but not always) is necessary to correct training defects. A trainer usually needs to resort to punishments because they have not properly trained in the first place.

[Lord J Esq]

I thought your home computer was broken. =P

First the whole "oven-baked steak" thing, and now this. Tsk tsk! You're getting a Christmas card with only one side on it this year.

[Uboa]

I have an anecdote and a suggestion to add to the current conversation.

One very profound memory I have of elementary school, the fifth or sixth grade I believe, is of the time that one girl spoke out passionately against the bullying of a boy in our class.  For reasons which I cannot exactly discern the boy had become an almost constant target of jokes and put-downs.  It just seems like it was an unfortunate case of bad luck for him, but in the mob world of elementary schoolchildren it was apparent that his luck would not get better without intervention.  I still am amazed by how that intervention came about.  We were sitting in music class after a lunch in which the poor kid had been picked on particularly badly, and one girl raised her hand and told our teacher that she would like to say something.  The teacher gave her permission, and she immediately stood up with such gusto and, in no uncertain terms, vehemently condemned the bullying and the bullies and stood up for the boy, reminding everybody that he did not deserve the unfortunate treatment which was being doled out so continuously and that he was a good person.  I think in that moment the entire class was shocked into serious personal reflection, and after that class those who had bullied the boy shook his hand and apologized.  Sadly, he was still the target of some jokes, but it was not nearly so bad as it was before the girl stood up for him.

Sometimes, even these situations which resemble mob rule, it just takes one action to shock everybody into reflection and serious consideration of their actions.  Granted, the actions of one girl were enough to move a class of fifteen to consideration.  I do not know what it will take to move, say, a middle school or high school class to consideration.  I wish that I did.  I realize that I was lucky in that my high school class was, on the whole, pretty civil and considerate.

With regard to a tiered school system, I think that the best way to "tier" a school system is to offer various levels of all subjects at every school.  That way, students are able to choose to take more involved courses in the subjects they feel most passionate about.  In that kind of system, you also have more intermingling of very passionate students and not-so-passionate students, which is a good way to perhaps inspire the not-so-passionate students to adopt a more enthusiastic outlook about subjects they did not previously consider to be important, or in many cases within their grasp.  I get the impression that not-so-passionate students probably do not have the resources at home that more passionate students often have, and instead of permanently placing them in a lower "tier" it would be better to place them in a situation where they have have opportunity and incentive to improve from their peers.