The Public School Horror Stories Thread

[Quadrewple]

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.