#also it wasnt that our room didnt HAVE asbestos | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

swampgallows · 4 years

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like man i specifically remember what our “funding” was, it went to a fucking air-compression weights room, like it used concentrations of air instead of physical weights, and the whole school got to use it, so that was good. and we got a giant fucking mural on the side of our gym for no fucking reason. but the ‘gifted kids’ and the homeschool took a lot of the same classes together, used the same resources and materials, still had bungalow ‘classrooms’ with no a/c where it got up to 105 F in the summer and we had wildfires every year, still rode the school buses together. the only difference was that for two out of the six periods a day i had to take graduate thesis-level courses and was assigned way more work that i ever got in college.

for my gifted classes we had to buy our own books, and this was the pre-amazon era so that meant i had to go to a store to physically buy a copy, unless someone from the previous class donated theirs. this was generally not the case considering we took so many notes in our books that they were practically illegible; for instance my own copy of hamlet from senior year of high school looks like a journal from se7en. i dont think i could even read my own handwriting now.

my art history teacher also taught a university course and gave us the exact same curriculum, minus a handful of pieces. so tenth graders were getting the same course material as university graduates working on their master’s. our test would just be a couple of sheets of paper with black and white print-outs of the pieces on them, and we were required to explain everything about the piece: artist, title, date, medium, cultural impact. i remember in comparing the kritios and kouros figures we had to know at least 15 differences between them, one of which was the notch in the collarbone.

our written tests compiled the semester’s information between the four gifted courses (2 per quarter) and were essay questions. like the art history test, there were multiple questions, so you had to prepare outlines for each. whichever question you got the day of the test was random.

here was one of the questions for the midterm in ninth grade. this was a copy of the question to study a week beforehand which is why i doodled all over it.

Colonization in South Africa took a different form than in the rest of Africa, in particular because large numbers of Europeans settled and stayed. Begin your essay with the history of how the Dutch and British colonized South Africa. Next, discuss the purpose of apartheid and the nature of violent and non-violent resistance to it, including Steve Biko’s ideas, Amandla, and Nelson Mandela. Then cover the role of the Trials of Truth and Reconciliation. Conclude your essay with a reflection on how your views have changed as a result of our study of Africa.

we had two hours. the majority of the class—handwritten, of course—wrote anywhere in the realm of 8-16 pages. again, this was ninth grade. I couldn’t begin to answer this question now, let alone write 12 pages on it.

meanwhile, i was still taking standard courses for science, math, p.e., and so on. in fact, i had to re-take geometry because i was being raped every day by an adult student in the class, and nobody noticed until my grades started falling. you know, because i was miss smart gifted student, and so everyone assumed that as long as my grades were good that i wasnt struggling.

by 11th grade my nightmares had gotten so bad that i was sleeping in class and having daytime walking hallucinations. that’s when i saw shadow people the most, and the shadow people i saw scared me so bad that i, cyclically, got even less sleep. so i hallucinated more, and so on, struggling to stay awake in class. once i fell asleep in class and i went up to the teacher afterward, so guilt-ridden that i apologized and hoped she’d be able to help me catch up on notes (since i didnt have any friends in my gifted classes; they were all in the homeschool).she looked me in the eye and said “I don’t give a shit.” i had never had a teacher so point-blank speak to me that way before. i was sheltered, sure. teachers say worse shit all the time. didnt change the fact that i kept having persistent nightmares and fucked up sleep patterns well into my 20s, and lasting even til today. i’m still terrified to go to bed at night, even though i dont get the nightmares as often anymore. i had first started getting nightmares after the first time i was raped when i was 12, but they got so exponentially worse in 11th grade.

i mean, yeah. kids who ate in the cafeteria didnt get spoiled milk or moldy bread, and most of our bathrooms were clean and stayed clean, and we didnt have asbestos in our ceilings. so yeah, there was privilege there, and i dont deny that. but that’s why i also think it’s a stupid fucking argument to say that people cant lament their stolen childhoods to a bunch of rigorous academic bullshit that ultimately amounted to nothing, didn’t make us employable, didn’t make our teachers care about us more, utterly annihilated any of our leisure time and quashed our hobbies (had a teacher pull a sheet i was doodling on from me and rip it up announcing THIS ISNT ART CLASS but i digress), and resulted in overwhelmingly asynchronous development from our peers. me being told i was ‘so smart’ and ‘so mature’ made me a target for groomers and pedophiles, me having zero time or accessibility to hang with real life friends planted me online and had all my social interaction come from socially-exiled freaks on world of warcraft and deviantart and 4chan, having hours upon hours of homework and studying every night and every summer break gave me little to no leisure time or even time to do something like get a job afterschool or over the summer to build real-world experience. yes i am grateful i didnt have to be the breadwinner of my family at 16 years old; yes i am still traumatized by the amount of stress and busywork and isolation that has left me still estranged from my peers and in arrested development even at age 30.

no career or job prospects, sitting on a worthless degree with a pitiful gpa. but hey at least my high school has a mural or whatever

#blathering

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