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Found 12 results

  1. We see it on the news practically every week. Another teacher who has raped a child in public school, only it's not called "rape" because the perpetrator is a woman. I know Stef has alluded to the data before, but I haven't seen it laid out. Does anyone know where to find the rape rates for public schools that INCLUDE female teachers raping students?
  2. So apparently this is a test that can determine if you are racist. http://www.understandingprejudice.org/iat/racframe.htm I figured I might as well try it.. Oh boy. My results: Welp, looks like I'll have to cut ties with all my black friends No but in all seriousness, it seems like the way the test is done is biased. It's a reaction based test, and on the second half it switches the controls around so that I went through much slower. Is this really a valid test as the site claims? I have a feeling if it were to reverse the order of races in the test it would show me as a strong automatic preference for "African Americans".. I wasn't very surprised with those results honestly. What really bothered me is the fact that a tool is on a website supposedly for "students, teachers, and others interested in the causes and consequences of prejudice.". Yeah it's been 5 years since I was in public school, but damn, indoctrinating students into feeling guilt by using pseudo tests? Seems they've really ramped up the propaganda. Apparently there are even textbooks conforming to the narrative of social justice in the USA.. http://www.understandingprejudice.org/anthol.htm
  3. http://www.ijreview.com/2016/05/597758-high-school-student-faces-grown-up-felony-charges-after-yearbook-prank-goes-to-press/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=owned&utm_campaign=ods&utm_term=ijamerica&utm_content=life Ok let's look at the charges at hand. 1. 69 counts of indecent exposure (a misdemeanor) This seems like a reasonable charge at first, yet he only exposed himself ONE time. That is double jeopardy, sixty nine eight times over. 2. class 4 felony count of furnishing harmful items to minors. The problem here is, he did NOT furnish any harmful item to minors. The school did. Everyone involved with the yearbook staff did. Why are they all not being charged? The offense is not "posed in a picture indecently that was then furnished to minors by some other party". Why does the school have absolutely no responsibility to vet the yearbook contents before releasing it? If I distributed an anarchist information booklet without reading the entire thing to a school full of minors and it turned out that there had in fact been nudity in the booklet, I would certainly be jailed for decades. What are your thoughts on this? Am I off base?
  4. This video claims (NOT inclusive): "The government doing nothing causes booms and busts""The reason the great depression happened was because of Andrew Jacksons hatred for central banks, and that the government did not take absolute control of the situation" "Getting off the gold standard was a heroic move" "Food prices dropping due to excess is a sign of market weakness" "The stock market crash and the great depression were not the same thing" "Margin buying was not nearly enough stimulation to fix the economy" "Deflation is much worse than inflation" All I can say is.. Jesus christ, these kids don't stand a chance in these hell holes. It's no wonder we have such an economically illiterate populace.
  5. Hello, FDR community, I'm an American working as an English teacher a French high school. I started listening to FDR podcasts last year and for a long time have had problems with the public school system but after listening to a lot of various podcasts around here (I just recently found schoolsucks, and have to run through their content now too). Being a foreigner, I have an extremely privileged position in the educational community here. My job is to work with students' speaking and listening skills. We practice to make our English more "authentic" and to improve casual fluency. A lot of what I do everyday is conversation in small groups, We talk a lot about current events or discussing what they're doing in their other classes/practicing things from other teachers' lessons. When I don't have to practice specific topics, I've taken to asking them what they want to do. I'm trying to get my classes of students to take the reigns and steer the class to where they want it to be. I'm just a tiny blip in their lives of people that isn't trying to force them to do things, but I want to believe that I'm not wasting my time. I'm certainly getting current value out of this job, at least for the moment. I don't intend to be here forever (I can't even if I wanted to), but while I am here, I want to try and to the best I can. All of that said, I'll now list some problems I've encountered that I'd like advice with. First of all, I'm living in the heart of the socialist France. The country's politics are slowly changing (VERY SLOWLY), but I live in one of the few regions where the socialist party is the only game in town and nobody even thinks about voting for anything different. I'm not trying to make this about politics, and I haven't had the opportunity to talk about philosophy in regards to socialism. I'm only mentioning this to describe the environment I'm currently in, and what my kids have grown up in. It has influenced their thinking. Because of the above issue, I have some students that to me seem completely broken. They don't know what they want anymore. They just want to be led around, and they freeze when given the chance to have a little blip of freedom in what they want to do with their time with me. I always tell them that we can do anything at all as long as we talk in English. I've been asking some classes since the year started in September to tell me what they want to do and I still haven't gotten clear ideas. When I do get topics, it's often that they want to talk about entertainment and sports. I let them do it because it's what they want, but it does tend to get stale, and I can see that often they just bring up these kinds of topics because they don't know any better. I have one class that I've fallen in love with. They're in an advanced program and they came to me and complained that my classes didn't have enough structure and that they wanted to learn about american government. I lament that I can't have them more than once a week. That said, we've gotten to discuss lots of meaningful topics like small government and gun control, which is another topic that fascinates them. You know, when I began typing all of this out it seemed like I had more problems than students having their passion circumcised. It's a huge problem, but at least it's only one. What can I do to help my dispassionate students? Is the system actively sabotaging my efforts and is the situation hopeless? I don't expect to change their lives or be revolutionary, but if I can demonstrate some good ideas, maybe I can make a tiny difference to them.
  6. Hi everyone, As the topic title indicates, I'm a student at a public high school. When I first discovered anarchism and voluntarism, I was so excited to share my enthusiasm with my classmates! I was met with some pretty harsh resistance. Nobody wanted to talk with me on an intellectual level; they were much more concerned with trying to provoke me emotionally, through name calling or insulting dismissal. But this is what depresses me: Whenever I do engage intellectually with someone, I invest my time and energy into tearing down their arguments for the state, until finally, they have nothing left and it's just me staring at them and them staring back, and they still accept the state as a moral institution and hate me for arguing my position effectively. It depresses me that in a student body a few thousand strong, nobody cares about the evil that's being inflicted on them. If I ask my classmates a question like, "Are morals objective?" a wave of contemptuous ridicule explodes in my face. It depresses me to watch the real-time brainwashing of my classmates as it is repeatedly drilled into their head in every humanities class that "capitalism is unstable." Anything resembling a spine has long since been extracted from them and they offer no resistance to even the most outrageously false bits of propaganda. This environment of total apathy is slowly sapping my fighting spirit. When I think about the soul destruction of my classmates, I alternate between anger and total apathy. When it comes right down to it, there's just not much I can do but watch. How can I possibly have hope for the future when I'm surrounded by it, and it looks pretty fucking grim from right here?
  7. http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/04/25/1-13-schoolkids-takes-psych-meds/
  8. I did a quick search and didn't find any threads on this topic so I figured I'd start one myself. As the title suggests, this is a thread to share any traumatic experiences you experienced in public schools, though obviously if you saw bad things in a private school, it's totally appropriate to share those here as well. The transition between elementary school and junior high (which started at 7th grade) was really mindblowing in retrospect. There were 4 elementary schools in my city, and only one junior high school, so there were essentially 4x the kids going to the same school in grade 7 as were in grade 6. I hung out with nice kids in elementary school - we played videogames, joked around, imitated cartoon characters, the usual stuff for kids our age. This all changed when I got to junior high. The amount of kids who dressed and acted like thugs was exponentially higher - there were only a few kids like that in my elementary school and they only dressed the part. I never once saw a fight in elementary school, but saw 5 or 6 during the 2 years of junior high school. Looking back, I believe I stopped hanging out with my previous friends because I perceived the junior high environment to be dangerous and violent - and the kids I was hanging out with before were not the "cool kids." They would've been classified as nerds and I had been told scare stories by a "friend" of mine who was in 8th grade at the time about kids getting trash-canned (which is being thrown in a trash can by a bigger kid), and that it was really only the nerdy kids who got bullied. Again, looking back, the label of "cool" was actually just an ex-post facto label for kids who had a high capacity for verbal and physical abuse. In fear of being bullied, as I was not only a year younger, but far shorter and weaker than 99% of the other kids, I did anything I possibly could to prevent being bullied. This meant changing my speech patterns to sound less intelligent - I always had a gift for verbal communication and was well above my peers in that regard (credit goes to my mom for homeschooling me) but since that was not valued in my environment any longer, I stopped enunciating clearly, stopped using "big words," and started swearing frequently. There was a very distinct way that the "tough" kids carried themselves through their body language that I also adapted. Head held high, eyes downcast.....jaw clenched, a hateful look in the eyes which was a warning for people not to mess with you.....I picked up that you're not supposed to show enthusiasm for ANYTHING. By the way, pretty much all of these characteristics are symptoms of PTSD. I saw opposing anyone else's viewpoint as dangerous, as there was never anything positive to be gained from it (in my mind), and only potential negative repercussions. Once, me and two of my "friends" were walking to our next class and they were arguing with each other (I of course stayed silent). One of them had a large, hairy mole on his face as a birthmark and the other guy made a hurtful remark involving that mole. They dropped their backpacks and the kid with the mole hit him in the face. It was over quickly. On another incident, I was with a guy who I was friends with in elementary (really great guy) and another kid who I'd befriended in junior high (loudmouth asshole) called out the first guy for a fight in front of a crowd of kids as we were all headed to our next class. Apparently my real friend had called his girlfriend a bitch (from what I remember that wasn't an inaccurate statement), and he wanted to fight. My friend continued walking and essentially told him to fuck off and he wasn't going to fight him. As he continued walking I was thinking, "What the hell are you doing! Everyone's going to see you as weak now! What you're doing is dangerous!" Nothing violent ended up happening, but my friend asked me "Why do you even hang out with that kid?" and that was the first time I was really confronted with the fact that I was fundamentally weak and broken and an empty receptacle to be filled up by the narcissists around me. But this was too much for me to process without significant help, and I never shared this story with anyone until now. The kid from my first story who got hit in the face ended up getting in a fight with someone else in 8th grade and I held his glasses. He ended up winning the fight, and I'll never forget the other kid screaming "Fuck you, I'll fucking kill you!" as his sweatshirt was over his head and he was being pummeled. Another time in 8th grade, a "friend" of mine got into an argument with some kid who was much bigger than him. They agreed to fight outside the cafeteria. My friend ended up getting beat up by the other kid....and few things are worse than seeing someone you know get hurt and not having the power to do anything about it, even if it's someone you have a dysfunctional relationship with. I'll never forget that morning - the song that was playing on the radio on my way to school was Westside Connection's Gangster Nation - a song which played over and over and over in my head as I recalled my friend getting beat up. Fast-forward to high school, there were less fights per year, but I still saw some extremely disturbing things. There was this kid named Denim who hung out with the "UFC crowd" and he was like a entrepreneur of violence. Rather than fight on campus where it would get broken up, kids would go to his house after school to fight and it would often be videotaped. These fights weren't always out of disagreements - sometimes it was just kids wanting to box. Anyways, me and many other kids had to walk (about 1.5 miles) from the high school to the junior high to catch our buses. Denim and his circle of fight enthusiasts also took the bus. One day on my way over, I saw Denim point out a kid and tell one of his younger "groupies" to pick a fight with him. This poor kid was minding his own business and he was pushed by the groupie and called a pussy and a faggot until finally he tried to defend himself. He ended up getting hit a couple of times and eventually picked his backpack back up and walked away. One time in my junior year of high school, I was waiting in the cafeteria line and it was just me and the kid in front of me. Denim and one of his friends (his friend was 6'4" at least 220) came to the line and walked right in front of me. I didn't say anything. The cafeteria door was about to open and Denim and the giant guy were about to move to the very front of the line but the kid in front objected. He told the two guys they couldn't cut and stood in the middle of the path. The giant guy said "You believe this kid?!" and looked towards Denim for approval. Again, the giant tried to move to the front but this time the kid pushed him back (by the way, this kid was maybe 5'8" 130) so it wasn't exactly threatening to the giant. The giant guy said "Don't fucking touch me" and hit the kid once in the face, giving him a black eye and bruise which instantly covered half his face. I'll never forget the look of pure rage and hatred on that kid's face as he pointed out the giant to campus security. It was the look I imagine someone would have before going on a killing spree. It's important to note that I did not live in a city with gang violence or a city which has a lot of crime (average 1 murder per year in a city of 30,000), and it was a middle-class to lower-middle class city. These were all "good" schools which I witnessed all these terrible things. What I must also note is that I was attracted to all this violence, which normalized the abuse I suffered at the hands of my parents. I could have walked away and not watched people getting beat up but I chose not to. My strategy was to stay as close to the violent people as possible so I wouldn't be victimized by them and so I could normalize their behavior.
  9. Hi everyone, Years ago, after building up a major amount of debt, I succeeded at getting a general arts degree in music. Yay!! I took a bank loan to learn how to shake a tambourine better than most people. The only way to pay that loan back was to find a job, I was told, by my very controlling parents. (They co-signed for the debt load). I got a job teaching public school music. I've been doing it for the past 7 years and I absolutely hate my job, and do not believe the in the public school system anymore. This has "inspired" me to turn a new corner. I'm filing my papers to resign for the end of the year and going back to school to learn about internet marketing and SEO. I can't believe how much is resources are just wasted. A man, who is the head of my board, makes well over the 100,000 mark, just to sign off on a new board slogan, "Inspire Learning." Inspired bullshit! I'm afraid to make the switch for a few reasons. 1. I know that I will forever have a job as a teacher in the public school system. 2. My pay will increase and I do not have to increase the quality of my work, in fact I can actually lower the quality of my work now that I've had my assessment. 3. My colleagues and parents think that I am insane for wanting to leave this world and tell me on a regular basis that I am throwing away my golden ticket. 4. I am going to lose my health benefits. What I realized today, was that none of the fears really outbalance the benefits of true freedom. Has anyone else made this giant leap into the unknown? Into the world where you can truly become a self made person? If so, I'd appreciate any advice you might have on the subject. Thank you for reading. C
  10. I am currently devising my master's thesis study, in which I'll look at whether people's attitudes towards public schooling and unschooling are correlated with their level of general empathy and their level of empathy towards children. To look at this last piece (level of empathy towards children) I am thinking about presenting people with one or more short vignettes describing a conflict betweena child and an adult (probably, their parent) and asking people to briefly describe how they, if they were the adult in the vignette, would go about resolving that conflict. Afterwards, I will look in the replies for things that suggest that the person is mindful of the child's internal experience (e.g., that they asked about the child's feelings, thoughts, or preferences; or that they attempted to respectfully negotiate with the child). So - I'm trying to create those vignettes, and I'm wondering - what, from your perspective, would be some good parent (or adult) - child conflicts that I could include? Anything goes, I just need help brainstorming Thanks!
  11. So last night I had this dream which has been a recurring one for me, where I find myself walking the halls of high school, or in a classroom, when I remember that I have already graduated high school and have a college degree. But there has been some mistake, and there is a class that I need to retake in order to sort it out. Also, there is usually some embarrassment that I am in my 20's and still in high school, and sometimes some confusion and anxiety when I can't find the class I'm supposed to be in. It's an interesting dream for me, as I am an avid dreamer, and sometimes even lucid dream, but my dreams tend to be visual and fun and carefree, as I am a pretty relaxed person in life. But this particular dream is more cerebral and emotional, and is recurring, which tells me it has some important meaning that I haven't been able to grok. I can't help but think it has something to do with some "lesson" in life that I should have learned, or have to keep revisiting but don't get. I did pretty well in high school, and never got particularly stressed about school in general, so the anxiety is not to do with school itself, I think it's a metaphor for something. Just wanted to share, and hear if anyone has any thoughts, or if you have had similar dreams.
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