Middle school was brutal for me. Very traumatic and still stress-inducing when I think of the things I went through. Those are the years I skipped school a lot. Luckily, I found my niche in drama club and journalism in high school and it made it much more fun. I was never fully comfortable in my own skin and always felt as though I was on the outside of any group of friends I had, but I still somehow had fun a lot of the time. Plus, that's where I met my husband of almost 30 years so I have to give it some credit. But I never want to go back to feeling so unsure about myself. I'm not a confident person as it is, but I no longer hesitate to speak my mind. (And go home and shake and cry and get a headache and stomachache after. But damn it, I don't back down in the moment!) I'm so proud of how much more open-minded my kids (24 & 28) and their classmates were, but there are still all the same problems (bullies, drugs, peer pressure) plus more than we ever had to worry about.
You know, I really marvel sometimes at the similarities between us, Cheri. Opposite ends of the country, sure, but we led some interestingly parallel lives. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE that you met your hubby in high school!
I know we would have been tight friends if we'd grown up together.
I endured high school because it was what I had to do in order to get the Hell out of St. Cloud, MN and away from my parents. I never fit into any one clique, which never particularly bothered me, because I never wanted to. I was a decent long-distance runner and a very good student- National Honor Society. I got by quite nicely without studying and by putting out comparatively little effort.
When I graduated, it felt like my "Get Out of Jail Free" card, and I treated it accordingly. I never hated high school, but I never really loved it, either. I put in my time, had what fun there was to be had, and left when my time was up.
I can't imagine ever going back for a reunion, though. Ugh.
One technical cavil about economics: technically, what we are seeing is NOT a housing bubble. Such bubbles are easy to discern based on econ principles. Mortgages and rents typically move in lockstep with one another; a bubble occurs when mortgages race uncontrollably out of pace to rents. This is what happened in '02, became unambiguously obvious by '04, and finally imploded in '07 -- '08. But what we are seeing now is not following that pattern at all. Rather, it is the normal lockstep behavior it typically follows since they began tracking things over a century ago. If anything, this is much, much worse, because there are no market forces (within housing, at least) that will work "naturally" to correct the situation.
I'm a boomer, and not just "technically": I was born 1957, so even though line runs up to like 1965 (which is absolute bullshit; it should stop at 1960) I'm "the real deal." High school was relatively mild compared to Junior high, where I was singled out for recreational humiliation on a daily basis. I guarantee you, I wasn't dating anyone at age 15 or many years after. Like I said, high school proper wasn't so horrible, but I realized that my life was broken and the only hope (I thought at the time) of making things better was breaking with my past. So I joined the army 5 days after graduation. (I chose the army because they had no installations near San Diego. Even the air force had a radar installation in the mountains outside of the city.)
(Joining the army didn't work, I might add. I was the same broken person coming out that I was going in. That realization led to some pretty dark moment.)
By the bye, the mania for testing in schools goes back to the Vietnam era, rather literally I regret to say. A colleague & friend of mine has studied these shifts in considerable detail and I am inclined to trust his scholarship. People may not know this, but there was a real mania for "empirically verifiable metrics", during that war, to demonstrate that American intervention was "working." So the sincere scientific managers of the MacNamera defense dept. lit upon the brilliant idea of the "body count." If we were killing more of them than they were of us, then that meant we were "winning." People on the ground, however, were then under pressure to prove that we were really, REALLY winning, and so the "body count" became the "body (part) count." Oh look! An ear! That's one VC. And over here is a nose! That's a second VC. Etc. Only a highly paid consultant from the RAND corporation could fail to miss the fallacy of such "thinking."
How is this relevant to education? Well, when the conflict in Vietnam finally shut down, all of those sincere scientific managers had to go *somewhere*. And a veritable shittonne of them went over to the DoE (that's *education*, not energy), where they decided that schooling required some "empirically verifiable metrics" so that we could tell that we were "winning." Enter the standardized test ...
It took a number of years for that horror story to fully roll out, and roll over students. But that is where it came from.
(By the way, the Errol Morris documentary on Robert MacNamara, "The Fog of War," is really worth seeing. It becomes especially poignant when viewed immediately prior to Morris' documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, "The Unknown Knowns." MacNamara was clearly a man who came to realize that he fucked up big time and is haunted at an existential level by that realization, while Rumsfeld is a smug animal who remains perfectly happy with the knowledge that he directed the murders of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for no reason what so ever.)
We watched that just last month! How brilliant that you should bring it up here. And yes, I do realize that our mania for testing has its roots in the far past, but it is at the level now that can only be described as psychotic. The SAT has its own lobby on Capitol Hill. The way we teach young people is by setting them on a sacrificial stone and then slicing them open for our own amusement.
Like you, I was bullied. "Different" people usually are.
Middle school was brutal for me. Very traumatic and still stress-inducing when I think of the things I went through. Those are the years I skipped school a lot. Luckily, I found my niche in drama club and journalism in high school and it made it much more fun. I was never fully comfortable in my own skin and always felt as though I was on the outside of any group of friends I had, but I still somehow had fun a lot of the time. Plus, that's where I met my husband of almost 30 years so I have to give it some credit. But I never want to go back to feeling so unsure about myself. I'm not a confident person as it is, but I no longer hesitate to speak my mind. (And go home and shake and cry and get a headache and stomachache after. But damn it, I don't back down in the moment!) I'm so proud of how much more open-minded my kids (24 & 28) and their classmates were, but there are still all the same problems (bullies, drugs, peer pressure) plus more than we ever had to worry about.
You know, I really marvel sometimes at the similarities between us, Cheri. Opposite ends of the country, sure, but we led some interestingly parallel lives. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE that you met your hubby in high school!
I know we would have been tight friends if we'd grown up together.
Agree! I could have used a friend like you back then. It does amaze me how alike we are, but also so different. That's what makes life so interesting.
I endured high school because it was what I had to do in order to get the Hell out of St. Cloud, MN and away from my parents. I never fit into any one clique, which never particularly bothered me, because I never wanted to. I was a decent long-distance runner and a very good student- National Honor Society. I got by quite nicely without studying and by putting out comparatively little effort.
When I graduated, it felt like my "Get Out of Jail Free" card, and I treated it accordingly. I never hated high school, but I never really loved it, either. I put in my time, had what fun there was to be had, and left when my time was up.
I can't imagine ever going back for a reunion, though. Ugh.
Right? Not even if I were drunk off my butt could I dream of going to such a thing. But I'm impressed by your scholastic achievements~
Thanks, but I always felt it was my only option. I didn't want to spend my life working dead-end jobs in northern Minnesota.
One technical cavil about economics: technically, what we are seeing is NOT a housing bubble. Such bubbles are easy to discern based on econ principles. Mortgages and rents typically move in lockstep with one another; a bubble occurs when mortgages race uncontrollably out of pace to rents. This is what happened in '02, became unambiguously obvious by '04, and finally imploded in '07 -- '08. But what we are seeing now is not following that pattern at all. Rather, it is the normal lockstep behavior it typically follows since they began tracking things over a century ago. If anything, this is much, much worse, because there are no market forces (within housing, at least) that will work "naturally" to correct the situation.
I'm a boomer, and not just "technically": I was born 1957, so even though line runs up to like 1965 (which is absolute bullshit; it should stop at 1960) I'm "the real deal." High school was relatively mild compared to Junior high, where I was singled out for recreational humiliation on a daily basis. I guarantee you, I wasn't dating anyone at age 15 or many years after. Like I said, high school proper wasn't so horrible, but I realized that my life was broken and the only hope (I thought at the time) of making things better was breaking with my past. So I joined the army 5 days after graduation. (I chose the army because they had no installations near San Diego. Even the air force had a radar installation in the mountains outside of the city.)
(Joining the army didn't work, I might add. I was the same broken person coming out that I was going in. That realization led to some pretty dark moment.)
By the bye, the mania for testing in schools goes back to the Vietnam era, rather literally I regret to say. A colleague & friend of mine has studied these shifts in considerable detail and I am inclined to trust his scholarship. People may not know this, but there was a real mania for "empirically verifiable metrics", during that war, to demonstrate that American intervention was "working." So the sincere scientific managers of the MacNamera defense dept. lit upon the brilliant idea of the "body count." If we were killing more of them than they were of us, then that meant we were "winning." People on the ground, however, were then under pressure to prove that we were really, REALLY winning, and so the "body count" became the "body (part) count." Oh look! An ear! That's one VC. And over here is a nose! That's a second VC. Etc. Only a highly paid consultant from the RAND corporation could fail to miss the fallacy of such "thinking."
How is this relevant to education? Well, when the conflict in Vietnam finally shut down, all of those sincere scientific managers had to go *somewhere*. And a veritable shittonne of them went over to the DoE (that's *education*, not energy), where they decided that schooling required some "empirically verifiable metrics" so that we could tell that we were "winning." Enter the standardized test ...
It took a number of years for that horror story to fully roll out, and roll over students. But that is where it came from.
(By the way, the Errol Morris documentary on Robert MacNamara, "The Fog of War," is really worth seeing. It becomes especially poignant when viewed immediately prior to Morris' documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, "The Unknown Knowns." MacNamara was clearly a man who came to realize that he fucked up big time and is haunted at an existential level by that realization, while Rumsfeld is a smug animal who remains perfectly happy with the knowledge that he directed the murders of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for no reason what so ever.)
We watched that just last month! How brilliant that you should bring it up here. And yes, I do realize that our mania for testing has its roots in the far past, but it is at the level now that can only be described as psychotic. The SAT has its own lobby on Capitol Hill. The way we teach young people is by setting them on a sacrificial stone and then slicing them open for our own amusement.
Like you, I was bullied. "Different" people usually are.