#tagging my hometown because i'm petty

[arctic-hands]

Picture it: sophomore American history. The year is two thousand and eight. The teacher is known for passing out jolly ranchers, one per student per day, when a kid does a good job. One day, she wants us to list every state in the country. Kids start listing them off in unison, mostly alphabetically, but falter around the I states (this is in Indiana, mind). Except one triumphant voice lingers as every other voice trails off in doubt and consternation. This voice flawlessly recites every state in these United States* as the class and teacher stare in awe, and at the very end the resounding voice makes mention of Puerto Rico and Guam as territories. The teacher wordlessly hands over two jolly ranchers.

A new day. List the presidents. Nobody knows beyond Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Clinton, George W. Bush–the incumbent finishing up his final term in a few months. Except. One voice–just as triumphant–recites every president, in order, even making mention of Grover Cleveland's non-consecutive second term. Everyone–teacher and student alike–stares again, this time almost in horror. The voice, embarrassed and blushing at the stares this time, finishes the forty-three chronologically, and this time as the teacher hands over another two jolly ranchers she overcomes her shock to ask "How did you know that??"

At which the body that contains the voice shrugs sheepishly, pops a blue raspberry in their mouth, and makes a vague "I 'unno" sound–unwilling to admit that the Fifty Nifty song they sang with their class in a third grade recital had permanently seared itself into their brain, as did the Nickelodeon presidents song that aired during the Oh Four election between Bush and Kerry

*I realized after while at dinner that evening when I told my parents about it that I had completely skipped Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, but the listing was so smooth and confident that no one noticed. I never made that mistake again regardless

[arctic-hands]

The galling thing about being forced to drop out by the school itself was that even with all the school I missed being out sick, I was a damn good test taker, and in the No Child Left Behind Years that meant I was funding the school, but for some reason that was lesser priority than the attendance record

[arctic-hands]

Oh my high school would have absolutely believed this. My sophomore year, a very strict dress code went out two weeks before school started, when most kids had already bought their new clothes, with rules saying things like no stripes, plaid, patterns, mixed colors of any kind. All clothes must be solid color with no decoration of any kind. I was "lucky" to have been in summer school that year so I got advanced notice before I did my clothes shopping, and the experience was entirely frustrating (more than usual, seeing as I was a "tomboy"– i.e. trans–and clothes shopping with my grandmother who desperately wanted me to dress in feminine clothing like I did when I was eight), because my grandmother kept holding up clothes that were seemingly innocuous, like a blue shirt with slightly darker blue sleeves, and I had to keep telling her it would get me in trouble, and she didn't believe me and just thought I was being difficult.

Anyway, come to the start of the year where there was a one day "grace period" where it would be pointed out to students why their clothes were in violation but they wouldn't get in trouble the first day, as long as they wear appropriate clothes after. I must emphasize that most of the kids–in a public school with a sixty percent poverty rate–had already bought their clothes and couldn't afford to get new ones, especially within a day.

Come second day, where my high school suspended over two hundred students for dress code violations, some as small as having a tiny embroidered logo on your otherwise plain polo shirt, or having a jeans back pocket that had diagonal stitching going across it. I saw one kid walking out of school with a suspension slip wearing the exact same blue shirt with slightly darker sleeves that my grandmother tried to buy for me. Kids lost their scholarships after being suspended. The news got involved. Parents and suspended students picketed the school for the duration of the suspensions (I wanna say a week, maybe two). It was so bad the state launched an investigation and I think the school was fined (this was fifteen years ago so I don't remember all the details of what was going on with the admin side of things). It was awful and ridiculous.

And the school's rational for all of this? They truly believed, with all of their abundance of critical thinking skills, that drug deals were being conducted based on the pattern of shirts kids were wearing. That plaid meant they were looking for/selling cocaine, that a floral print meant marijuana, that this pattern meant that drug, and so on. They were completely convinced that all of us students were either looking for drugs or selling them, and they were willing to disrupt everyone's education, ruin scholarships (in many, many cases, the only way students in a very poor public school could have gone to college), be fined by the state, and have the administration blasted by not only the Indiana news media but by nearby Ohio too, than stop for a moment to consider that it's very unlikely that ninety-nine percent of the student body were dealing in drugs.

The kicker? The students that were actually known or suspected to be drug dealers started (jokingly, fueled by the irritation we were real feeling) spreading the rumors that the admins were the ones doing drugs themselves, because it was completely outlandish to think a floral print shirt meant any kind of drug use.

The school never apologized for this, even after the state investigation. The rules stayed in place for as long as I was in high school, which meant every year there were always freshmen being suspended because they didn't understand the very strict rules.

the brightly coloured skinny jeans that Teens wore in the late '00s and early '10s were meant to denote where you stood in gang hierarchy. salmon was the highest rank and meant you had killed someone.

I think the funniest part of this is that, if you'd floated this idea at the time, at least some parents would have believed you.

[arctic-hands]

I can neither read the words "amino acids" nor watch "All Good Things..." without remembering being in my eighth grade science class during an open book trivia competition, and the final question was "what are the building blocks of life?" at which point I smiled, closed my science book while everyone else was frantically rifling thru theirs, calmly raised my hand, and confidently said "amino acids", which gave me enough points to win, and the whole class (all whom refused to partner with me for the game, leaving me to compete alone) to scream about how I cheated somehow by not having to search the book for it, all of which made the cheesequake blizzard my teacher bought me as my prize all the more sweeter 😋

[arctic-hands]

I think I knew Indiana–even my liberal enclave of a hometown–was a completely lost cause way back in like two thousand and six, when I did an eighth grade report trying to bring attention to the Darfur genocide, which at that point was three years into it's seventeen year ordeal (officially. It's starting back up after the civil war in Khartoum), and had already killed thousands, and left tens of thousands in refugee and IDP camps. Things I spoke about, pictures I showed, stories from refugees that I spread to them. I was thirteen.

And when I when I made mention of how some Darfuri rebels had attacked Sudanese government installations at the start of the conflict, one boy interrupted me and said "So they attacked the government. They deserve it then." Which led to almost the entire class nodding and chiming in with the same as I stood by the PowerPoint projector in shock.

Like was I a perfect, perfectly "woke" teenager? Fuck no. I did and said things as a teenager and even as a younger adult that make me want to turn my skin inside out in shame. But did I at thirteen years old also still have a few ounces of compassion in me, enough to know that an entire population of people shouldn't been genocided because of the actions of a few, however right or wrong those actions may have been? Yes.

I couldn't get out of that shithole state fast enough

[arctic-hands]

I'm just remembering a jackass classmate I had at my first-thru-eighth grade knockoff of a Montessori school. The one who in eighth grade demanded--red in the face--why I didn't drop out already after being out sick again for two weeks, as if my health and education were any of his business

Anyway, he was always going on about what proud Sicilians he and his family were, but then in seventh grade geography we were looking at a map of Europe and he threw a fit demanding to know why Sicily wasn't labeled, and I had to be the one to break it to him that Sicily was part of the country of Italy and had been for over a century by that point. He was close to tears.

Also he had been looking at Corsica

[arctic-hands]

Actually that anecdote in my notes needs to be mentioned here given the rampant book and history banning sweeping America.

If I hadn't independently read a book about the Holocaust at age nine, I would have believed my dumbass fourth grade teacher when she tried teaching the class that hitler died in World War One, that World War Two was solely about Pearl Harbor, and no mention of the Holocaust at all. That's what my classmates and I would have learned and internalized because we had been conditioned to believe what our teachers said unquestioningly. God only knows what we would have done with that (lack of) information. At the very least, we would have all been proven to be fools in high school, and we very well could have ended up Holocaust deniers.

But because I, on my own at nine years old, read a book about the Holocaust–something no doubt the book banners/burners believe to be "too inappropriate" for (white, gentile) nine-year-olds to read–I was able to challenge that unquestionable "lesson", and was able to back it up when my teacher tried to say I was completely wrong and just being difficult.

Was my teacher just an incompetent who had no business being in education? Had she been taught the exact same thing but lacked the capacity to question critically, and didn't belong in education? Or was she intentionally twisting a lesson to further her own agenda, and had no business being in education? She certainly had the capacity to be cruel. She zeroed in on me immediately after that, and sent me home crying many, many times. Even other kids were commenting how she had it in for me, specifically.

Conservativism in these days believes and teaches that children should not question authority. Conservatism these days believes that books about history, social sciences, the world at large are inappropriate for children to learn. Surely anyone can see how this will lead to incompetent teaching at best and active, malicious, twisting of the historical truth and truth of the community and world.

It's a cliché, but books really are a ticket to new ways of thinking, of broadening your mind, and of accepting those whose stories differ from yours. And that's why books are so dangerous to conservatives, because if I hadn't read a book about the Holocaust at age nine, I would have believed that authority without question

This isn't an attempt at a flex I swear and I recognize people can have different learning experience and still be intelligent even if they don't/can't read, but given my abysmal education growing up I have to wonder what would have happened to my brain if I wasn't such a voracious reader as a kid

[arctic-hands]

Damn. To be in middle school again but with the wisdom, speech skills, and power to advocate for myself that I have now, so that when I'm told I'm just not applying myself in math when I beg for a dyscalculia screening, I can say "bitch I'm excelling at every other class I'm in except gym–which my disabled ass shouldn't even be in in the first place. You've all on multiple occasions said that my writing has brought you to tears, and i can explain a variety of scientific concepts; in particular, anything relating to health and medicine. And do not get me started on my history and social study expertise. Oh, and did i mention I've been reading at a collegiate level since fifth fucking grade? What makes you POSSIBLY think that I randomly chose math to slack off in? Assholes."

[arctic-hands]

Every time I remember a childhood memory I feel the irresistible urge to call out my entire hometown

So thank you, everyone who participated in the very long-running gag in middle school of standing right by my left year and screaming as loud as you can, thank you for making me partially deaf in that ear for a while in eighth grade

[arctic-hands]

Was just comparing my public school sex ed with @thetabirb 's private Catholic School sex ed.

Mine: a two week course taught by my freshmen health teacher who was a church decon (denomination forgotten but definitely a Protestant), was told abstinence is the only way, condoms and birth control don't work so don't bother using them, gay sex (just gay guys, lesbians weren't covered) is unnatural and you will get an STD if you do it, if you're a girl who participates in pre-marital sex you're chewed gum your future husband will not want to chew and also if you get pregnant everyone will abandon you so you'll be on welfare for the rest of your life, abortion is murder and partial birth abortion is totes a thing and they take a chisel to the baby's skull as it's emerging from the vaginal canal, let's write to our congressmen to make sure it's banned (can't remember if the Partial Birth Abortion Act was already in effect by this point)

Theta's: No sex before marriage but we know you're going to do it anyway so use a condom don't tell the Pope we said that

[arctic-hands]

Everyone in high school thought I was insane. Not because of my undiagnosed bipolar or paranoia, but because I rebelled against my Christian surroundings by proclaiming I worshipped the Flying Spaghetti Monster

And everyone. Thought. I. Was. Literal.

They were so heads-in-asses deeply entrenched in their own fanatically Hoosier evangelical upbringings that they thought everyone had the same level of faith in something, and mine was the a mass of pasta with eyeballs, which was so ridiculous so therefore I must be insane. I was literally bullied for this. You know, like Jesus would have done.

TL:DR poked fun at rabid evangelicalism but the jokes didn't land by a mile because I was surrounded by rabid evangelicals

[arctic-hands]

Shout-out to my bitchy high school nurse whose only offered solution to my complaints about my stomachaches was to hand me a peppermint, but then couldn't conceive that student with Crohn's disease would have frequent stomachaches and told me she wasn't giving me any more because I was just faking it for the candy

[arctic-hands]

Oh hey I just unlocked another memory from my shitty school

I horribly sprained my ankle in the mandatory gym class I wasn't allowed a medical exemption from, needed an air cast and crutches for like two months, and I still wasn't allowed a key to use the elevator, which means for two months I had to inch my way up three flights of stairs to get to all my classes and my locker while managing two crutches and a heavy backpack and nearly falling many times and being consistently late to my classes and being reprimanded for that

[arctic-hands]

Anyway shout out to the Primordial Goo, so glad one Jean-Luc Picard was able to avert cosmic disaster and let you form nucleic acids within yourself 🤜

I can neither read the words "amino acids" nor watch "All Good Things..." without remembering being in my eighth grade science class during an open book trivia competition, and the final question was "what are the building blocks of life?" at which point I smiled, closed my science book while everyone else was frantically rifling thru theirs, calmly raised my hand, and confidently said "amino acids", which gave me enough points to win, and the whole class (all whom refused to partner with me for the game, leaving me to compete alone) to scream about how I cheated somehow by not having to search the book for it, all of which made the cheesequake blizzard my teacher bought me as my prize all the more sweeter 😋

[arctic-hands]

Also I had the realization that he had the same last name as the family that killed my great-x-uncle in a "Bloody Breathitt" Appalachian feud back in the eighteen nineties, so I think if I ever see J.J. again it's my blood kin obligation to punch him in the face

I'm just remembering a jackass classmate I had at my first-thru-eighth grade knockoff of a Montessori school. The one who in eighth grade demanded--red in the face--why I didn't drop out already after being out sick again for two weeks, as if my health and education were any of his business

Anyway, he was always going on about what proud Sicilians he and his family were, but then in seventh grade geography we were looking at a map of Europe and he threw a fit demanding to know why Sicily wasn't labeled, and I had to be the one to break it to him that Sicily was part of the country of Italy and had been for over a century by that point. He was close to tears.

Also he had been looking at Corsica