#my sister got a free ipad too and she’s autistic

[drinkjanola]

my ipad time is my enrichment time, there’s a reason why an autism diagnosis might as well be a free ipad redemption card.

love fruit ninja and supernatural and youtube on this 10.9” display of goodness

[cannithebear]

Reasons why I know our education system is shit

- I was told by a teacher and a school counselor that my mother abused me and my siblings because we didn't help enough around the house and needed to be better kids.

- My older sister's nerdy boyfriend used to get beaten up by some boys from the football team over and over. The staff did nothing about this. One day, he had enough and when the football boys came to attack him, he ended up beating the shit out of one of his bullies in the parking lot. He was immediately expelled.

- My class wanted to make a rainbow road themed float for our mario bros themed homecoming parade but wasn't allowed to because "some people might think it's for gay pride and be offended"

- I signed up for Spanish classes in high school two years in a row and they just didn't put it in my schedule. When I asked them to fix it and put me in a Spanish class, they conveniently never got back to me about it.

- I also signed up for welding and never got it. I'm pretty sure it's because I was what they defined as a girl.

- My autistic 8 year old brother was being consistently bullied by a kid in his class. The teachers and staff did nothing to stop this kid from bullying him and left my brother alone with him despite being informed of his neurodivergency and being told that he's easily overstimulated. When my bro (after at least months if not a couple years of being bullied by this kid) turned to his bully and said "if you don't leave me alone I'm gonna kill you", he was immediately expelled.

- Speaking of my little bro, he (understandably) would become overstimulated easily and have what we always called "meltdowns" (idk if there are other words for it, that's what we always called it). Meltdowns are VERY VERY different from tantrums. People throw tantrums when they're mad about not getting their way. People have meltdowns when they become overwhelemed and aren't given space to breathe and calm down, resulting in an emotional explosion that is absolutely NOT their fault. The school's response to these meltdowns (during which my brother made an active effort to not hurt anyone) was to call my mother and tell her to come pick him up instead of calling on the resource people they had AT THE FUCKING READY who were trained to fix these situations and get him back on track. He had an IEP and a person (social worker maybe? I was young when this went down, I don't know all the details) who was specifically assigned to him to help him in these situations and the staff just? Refused to acknowledge any of that?

- ALSO SPEAKING OF MY BRO. The superintendent, in response to one of my brother's meltdowns, told my mother that she needed to "discipline him more at home" (proving that the superintendent knew absolutely fuck all about autism or neurodivergency as a whole)

- That superintendent went on to become the principal of the middle/high school and implemented a rule involving wristbands. There were three wristbands dividing the students into three groups; well behaved, in the middle (? i guess?), and badly behaved. Keep in mind, this guy is a white mormon Trump supporter who is principal of a school consisting of mostly hispanic students. So while I wasn't there for the wristband thing, I can be fairly certain the system was racially biased. I don't know a whole lot about how much the wristband system governed but I do know this: "good" students were free to take bathroom breaks whenever they pleased. "Middle" students (or whatever they were referred to as) had to ask for bathroom breaks (and were often denied). "Bad" students only got bathroom breaks between classes. Gonna piss yourself cause you gotta go in the middle of class? Too bad, guess you gotta deal with it. So needless to say, the wristband thing breaks multiple laws.

- Speaking of that principal, he flat out refused to speak to any parents/family members of students who don't speak english (this area is heavily populated by immigrants) despite having a translator at the ready who showed up to all the school related events and provided wonderful and clear translations.

- The school I went to had a program that was specifically for teaching non English speaking students to speak English. Sounds great right? Well not when you consider that they just listed a bunch of students who already spoke English under that class to make it look like they had done their job. Meanwhile when students didn't speak English, they would pair another student with them and say "teach this kid". Even I (a student who does not speak Spanish because they woULDN'T FUCKING TEACH ME HOW) was told to sit with a student who didn't speak English and told to teach her how to use the school computers.

- My school got the funding for Ipads. For most schools, Ipads/laptops/whatever other electronics they might provide to the students are used as an addition to the classes. In my school, they threw the Ipads at us with some barely followable online classes and said "teach yourselves". Teachers were reprimanded if they were caught you know, teaching? Like? Doing their job? And oftentimes, the tests included things the lessons didn't cover resulting in A+ students dropping to Ds and Fs (and of course the principal and superintendent and shitty teachers played dumb and pretended they couldn't possibly know what was causing the failure)

- With these online classes, students would be given a pretest before starting a new lesson. The pretest would consist of the content of said new lesson. If the student passed the pretest, they could skip the lesson and move on to the next. Now my friend was a real science wiz. It was his favorite subject and he generally knew a lot about it. So when he took the pretests for his science lessons, he would almost always pass them. The science teacher accused him of cheeting because NO KID could POSSIBLY pass these pretests! Just UNTHINKABLE! So if he passed a pretest, she would make him do the lesson anyway. I watched him do at least five of these pretests (probably more) and I can tell you definitively that he did not cheat. I told him he should ask the teacher to sit with him while he does the pretests and then she'll see he's not cheating. He said he had already asked her and multiple other teachers to do so and they all refused without giving him any reason.

- The one positive thing was that I was able to opt out of coming to the school to do my classes and simply used my Ipad at home for the latter half of my 12th grade year. Why was I able to do so you ask? Well, let's get into it. February of 2018. I'm at home sick. At school, a boy who's been harassing my friend for years (my friend and other kids tried to report him multiple times for harassment and the staff never did a damn thing about it) comes up to him in the locker room and says "I've got a bomb in my backpack." So this kid is threatening to blow up the school and my friend of course goes immediately to the principal at the time (another white morman trump supporter homophobic racist and literal puppet of the superintendent turned principal I mentioned earlier) and reported that this kid was claiming to have a bomb. It took half an hour for the principal to believe him and take any kind of action. When action was taken, the kids were evacuated to the old gym/lunch building (a short walk from the middle/high school). You may be wondering "what's the harm in that?" Well none... If you don't count the fact that they evacuated the kid making the bomb threat to the same bulding and put him in the same room with all the other kids. The kid who made the bomb threat then started saying he had a knife and threatening to stab students. They escorted him out. And when I say they, I mean the FUCKING JANITOR. Their reasoning for keeping him in close proximity to all the kids he was threatening to murder and then having a janitor escort him out as opposed to someone with some proper training for this kind of stuff? "We didn't wanna single him out :("

So I was allowed to do my classes at home because I made it clear I was not comfortable coming into a school where it takes half an hour to respond to a bomb threat and then when the response comes, the staff just further endangers the students. When the lady at the desk (who I'd known for six years at that point) asked me why I wanted to work from home, I said "because I don't feel safe here" and she couldn't even look me in the eyes after that.

- Not a story from my school but my grandmother was a special ed teacher in an elementary school. One of the other teachers in that school was racist as hell. This racist teacher had a hispanic student in her class named Jesus. This teacher said it was blasphemous to have the name Jesus and refused to call him that. Instead, she referred to him as "Jose" (not his name??? Tf???) Luckily, that teacher was at least punished in some way and I think fired? Good riddance.

Anyways, there's some of the reasons why I know the education system in this country (and probably almost every other country on Earth) is absolute garbage.