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Can anyone here who had an overall happy experience during their primary and secondary schooling comment as to what your experience was like? What type of schools did you attend? How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? How involved were your parents in your schooling?
Primary was meh, very disorganized state schools.
Secondary was excellent, went to an expensive private boys school. Nearly everyone was very clever and most were very rich, getting dropped off in Porsches or BMWs by their lawyer-doctor parents. A small fraction got in via networking and were more interested in rugby than academics. We had big exams for every subject twice a year, everyone took them quite seriously. The classes for each subject were sorted from A to F or H based on the results from the exams, there was a very clear and objective hierarchy. I think this was a great source of male motivation: competition and prestige. Latin and Ancient Greek were offered, the teachers were paid as if they were university professors (and some had been). It was like a trip to an alternate dimension, we sang patriotic hymns in assembly. At one point the sports reports were read out as (quite good) poems. At one point they brought in a leading quantum physicist to deliver a speech about their work in quantum computing, it went right over 99% of our heads, faculty included. One boy asked a pretty incisive question, he managed to understand the content.
But you could tell that corrosive modernity was digging into the heart of oak and sandstone. A lot of kids cultivated imaginary mental disorders that got them more time in the important state exams for university entry. The younger generation of teachers were much more wishy-washy and progressive. We started getting land acknowledgements and denunciations of Pizzagate where we used to get hyper-abstract philosophical speeches in Assembly. Rumours abounded that they'd try to bring in girls at some point, though I've seen no evidence that they are. There was female-teacher-on-boy sexual abuse (I got a look at the teacher, definitely not the 'I wish that was me!' physiognomy) going on 2 years above me, they snuffed that story out of the media with a lot of skill.
I got along pretty well with people. Teachers were fine but some took themselves overly seriously, like it was their solemn duty to teach us music, languages or geography we had no particular interest in. Met some great, fun, smart people with the same exotic interests as me - friends for life hopefully. Some people, myself included, got pretty arrogant when comparing ourselves to ordinary kids. Arrogance has its virtues when you are indeed right and everyone else is wrong but it also has social pitfalls.
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American, fwiw, but elementary was without exaggeration the best period of my life and not a day goes by that I don't grieve its being in the ever-more-distant past. Most of the negative things I could say about the experience come from the benefit of hindsight, ex, I got away with far more than I should have, but conversely wasn't well included or socialized and was one weird hat away from being the class Luna Lovegood.
But, regarding peers, teachers, and family, and what roles they played? I am struggling to come up with a meaningful description. It wasn't until I was 11 that I actually picked up any grievances toward teachers (mostly just one cranky old math teacher who was probably just getting too old to put up with my bullcrap). The most stressful year was probably grade 4 (age 9), mostly because homework went from "I guess that counts as homework" to "when did finishing a chapter and several dozen math problems become a Herculean labor of focus?". Also I thinkt's the year my backpack ripped from all the books and papers I had to carry around.
7th-8th grades and high school ... weren't as miserable as college, but very little short of watching loved ones die has been as miserable as college, so not a high bar. Mostly, the majority of what made elementary great was replaced with having to listen to tryhard teenagers call everything gay / skanky, trying to actively resist the cultureshift resulting in getting sent off to summer camp, so I just gave up and avoided people for the rest of hs. I got into the state's math and science school for the last two years, and that was a huge improvement, though by then my sleep cycle was all out of whack and I had been able to half-ass everything to the point that I had like no study skills, so I kinda oscillated between successfully half-assing and getting destroyed until I somehow graduated on time (basically one of two non-terrible days that year), only for things to immediately get far worse thereafter.
SO basically, the polar opposite of what seems to be the norm, from the general vibes I've gotten from online discussions. Each phase was worse than its predecessor by quite a lot. It was usually because of a change in peer behavior most of all, but also me never having to learn how to try until I got to college, and discovered that absolutely nobody had the vocabulary to talk about soul-crushing akrasia or the neurological underpinnings and everyone just going on about choice and distraction and other irrelevant concepts. But mostly the alienation only started around age 12-13, kinda backed off a bit in high school, then came back with avengance when college began. Teachers were mostly fine. Parents were mostly fine. Peers were fine until they got to the age where they had to start signalling how mature they were by immaturely sexualizing absolutely everything, usually insultingly, like that would prove how totally not the thing they were saying they were.
I'm going to go imagine going back in time and yelling at 11-year-old me with all the hindsight-powered "how to be better" type wisdom I can unfairly foist onto an obnoxious 11-year-old again. 😔
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Went to an Irish-language primary school, a Gaelscoil (though I've got terrible Irish these days). We went to church a lot and started every day off with a prayer. The local priest used to come in and give talks and he was very entertaining, he went off to Rome and the next priest wasn't as entertaining but was also a nice fellow. There was a big focus on music which I unfortunately didn't take advantage of so I just did the mandatory tin-whistle playing and singing (the whole class was a church choir). Sports were soccer, handball and (not competitively) rounders though almost everyone was involved in GAA outside of school, I never got the hang of a hurl so I stuck to handball. Nearly all the teachers were female, there were three very strict ones I didn't like and the rest were very friendly. For the final two years we got a male teacher and he was well liked by everyone, our rowdy stage hit around age 12 and we eventually betrayed him on the last day of school by pretending one kid was hurt and showering the teacher in water when he ran over to help.
My main trouble was not having the in-group status most of the other kids shared, I'm Irish but everyone's else's family knew and lived beside everyone else's family for decades and my parents not being locals meant I had to hang out with the Welsh kid, the Scottish kid and the slow kid from Kerry. Eventually I was told I was now part of the cool group, I made one years long friendship out of that and the others I lost contact with as they went to the Irish language secondary school.
My parents made a lot of effort to get me into different secondary schools but left the choice up to me, the school I picked had the worst reputation out of the three but the friend I mentioned was going there and it wasn't on the other side of town so I was happy to go. The new principle was quickly cleaning the place up but there was still a rowdiness among the students that we feared as first years, learned to enjoy in second year and did our best to instill into the younger students in the following years. First years would be thrown into bins, shirt pockets would be torn off and kept as trophies and we had a version of rugby that had no teams and consisted of everyone chasing and throwing rocks at whoever had the ball. Some classes had their disruptive students but as time went on the school did a decent job of separating people into honours and ordinary level classes. I remember voluntarily spending 2 weeks in the ordinary level maths class because I was pessimistic about my upcoming exam results and it's hard to see how anyone could do any learning there, luckily I actually did well on the exam and I quickly got put back into the honours class.
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I guess I had an happy childhood and my schooling was fine. I went to a local primary school, close enough to home that I could walk to school every day (including walking back home for lunch). My mother was working part time while I was in primary school, so she could be home on most days for my lunch and when I came back from school. In 6th grade I had the option to take a special program of intensive english, but opted not to because I figured my english was already way above average for my age (I was close to bilingual then, thanks to exposure to english language media). For secondary school I followed in the footstep of my brother and went to an elite International Bachelorate affiliated magnet school. I did fairly well in my first year there, but after my grades went steadily down as I figured out I was able to just coast by with no effort. I stopped doing homework past what I was absolutely forced to, stopped studying for exams, barely paid attention in class. I'd read my textbooks and that's pretty much it. By the end I was barely passing. Teachers didn't seem to mind because I was passing, when they checked up on me it seemed as if I didn't need help and I wasn't bothering anyone. My parents were concerned by my grades, but again, I wasn't a problem child or teen in any way. I'd say my teachers were for the most part very competent. I always managed to find peer groups to hang out with; in the first year of high school with people coming from different cities and with fixed groups through every class, I ended up hanging out with a quite random group of people, but as things settled, I found myself hanging out with groups that were neither losers nor winners in the social hierarchy. It's important to note that due to this being a "gifted" kid school, the social hierarchy was a bit different; everyone was a form of nerd to begin with, even the "jocks".
Anyway, as that ended and I went to college, I quickly found that I was overprepared by that school for college, exams and classes that people from "normal" schools found tough in college were at a level I had already done in high school. This had a perverse effect in that it lowered the effort I was willing to put in even more, to the point where I wasn't showing up to classes any more, I was even missing exams and ended up just dropped out of college. Turned out that was a good decision, I managed to build myself a career out of the IT skills I had build in my free time, when I was supposed to be studying.
Our biographies sound eerily similar, I also took the IB, gave up on college, built a career partly out of programming. I tried harder in highschool though, and IT isn't quite what I do.
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I did not enjoy my childhood, but school was at most a minor contributing factor to the suck.
I went to Catholic schools for 12 years. Education was generally very high quality, except for religion specific classes which varied from a grandma rambling about how daily mass is important to her all the way to a hippie introducing us to whatever woo and pop psychology seemed appropriate. This on more than one occasion included a guest lecture from an ancient astronaut theorist, but it more frequently was ‘sit in a circle and talk about what myers-brigs does in your faith life’. Plenty of teachers just gave a final essay(‘pick a sacrament’ ‘history lesson on X in the church’) and had us watch something unobjectionable(movies about saints were common) for half the semester, with a talk about considering the religious life sprinkled in.
My peers were a broad cross section of the population; the überreligious Catholics whose parents felt incompetent to homeschool were there, but generally eyepoppingly wealthy because tuition for that many kids ain’t cheap. There were ghetto kids recruited for sports, but most people were normal suburbanites who probably went to church but expected not to worry about it until next Sunday. I don’t recall bullying being a serious issue; certainly I heard about a case or two of it, but I never saw any. Rules were general enforced very strictly and behavior tended to be just a bit better as a result.
My parents were very involved in my schooling, and no other part of my life. Until I had a nervous breakdown resulting in hospitalization my senior year, my mother woke me up every night to scream about the need for higher grades. What my grades actually were did not affect this except for the possibility of them being used as evidence.
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I attended public schools in wealthy districts, then a magnet school whose admissions policies are occasionally a matter of public controversy (yes, that one). My high school classmates were without a doubt the smartest people I've ever met, and I say this after having spent years around STEM graduates of elite universities. There was no shortage of advanced coursework to keep us nerds from getting bored, and we were given more freedom than we would have had at a typical school e.g. we could eat lunch anywhere, including off-campus, free periods were provided during the day for clubs and activities, and an independent research project was expected of all students. The teachers were generally competent and reasonable, and a decent fraction of them had PhD's in scientific disciplines.
When I was there the demographics were about 50/50 white/Jewish and south/east Asian, with every other group a rounding error. There was a clear divide between kids with tiger parents who had been pressured into attending and those like me who wanted to be there and whose parents were comparatively uninvolved, with the former having an overall negative experience and the latter loving it. I did not witness a single fight throughout my schooling, which I think would come as a shock to older generations or people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Some kids drank or did drugs (weed and LSD, mostly) but my friends and I were squares even by that school's standards, so I don't know the details. Everyone in my graduating class went to college, so even kids whose parents weren't able to help much with the application process obtained the requisite knowledge from their teachers or peers.
TJ?
Got it, thanks.
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Are you saying it is typical in the US to restrict where students can eat lunch?
So typical that reading this comment made me go "wait, it's not like that in Europe?" For a country whose selling point has supposedly always been freedom, I had so little that, when that technically changed after high school, it was like one of those wild animals bred in captivity with no concept of how to live in the wild. The most freedom I got was on that one high school band trip to Universal Studios Orlando, in which I was the goody two-shoes stopping my 16-17 year-old companions from trying to order alcohol from a restaurant that seemed more than willing to believe that the tall guy in the group was actually 21.
... Wait, what freedoms do I have that Europeans lack? I guess I could get a weapon if I wanted?
I'm Canadian and grew up in the central part of a mid-sized city. Only my high school had a cafeteria and I was far enough that I while I walked to school, I didn't have enough time to walk home, eat lunch, and walk back. So I would either eat a packed lunch or go somewhere else for lunch. Some people took the bus, but I think the vast majority walked, especially in elementary and junior high when people lived a closer on average. There were probably some cases, but I don't remember anyone being driven to school by their parents.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the concept of not being allowed to leave at lunchtime. Did this apply to the students who lived near the school? How do they even stop you or know what you're doing? What is even the point of this? Why do they care where you eat lunch?
I think the best freedom you have that I lack as a Canadian is the freedom to live in any climate. Our choices are between cold and extremely cold.
Not only is the idea of students leaving for lunch unheard of, but using devices was strictly limited until I got to high school. It was a revelation actually being able to use my iPod at lunchtime when I entered high school. Maybe it's different now.
And once you were old enough to drive, you could technically schedule your classes with free periods at least in my area and leave during those, although it's strongly discouraged to leave gaps in the schedule. In my senior year of high school I had a free period in the morning and got to sleep in part of the week, which was heaven for a night owl like me.
Public schools are incredibly liability-averse and letting kids loose just isn't in their vocabulary. The US values freedom, but is terrified about children's safety to the point of neurosis. To some extent this reflects the safety profile of the US being different than Europe, to some extent it reflects the lower density and car-dependence of the US, to some extent it reflects our tortious legal system, but to a great extent I think it just reflects the neurotic substrate within American society.
Once the school day starts, almost no one is allowed in or out except in specific circumstances and those who are allowed have to be screened. In that way, schools are kind of run like airports.
They care because between the hours of 7am and 3pm, they're responsible for your welfare and if they let you leave and something happens to you, there might be civil or criminal liability. Parents would also be pissed, because the primary function of public schooling isn't education but daycare.
There's also the fact that if they let you out they'd also have to let you back in, and that opens a whole can of worms about random people strolling into the school or setting up a huge infrastructure to screen students returning from lunch.
Canada is a less litigious country than the US, and awards for successful lawsuits are much smaller and often capped by law. But there are still a lot of rules due to people being afraid of liability. But my high school's solution to that was that you were not allowed to hang around the school when you weren't in class. You were free to leave the property though and once you did, they were not responsible for anything that happened.
By the way, 7am? Wtf? Our school started at around 8:30 (in high school) or 9?
What do you mean when you say they screened people going in like an airport? Is there some kind of security or someone watching the door? We had nothing like that in high school. You could come and go freely and no one was tracking who was in the building. In elementary school, it was a little different, in that you'd line up once the bell rang and the teacher would escort you in, and then once inside, they'd take attendance.
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You can own a weapon. Attitudes towards recreational drug use are far more liberal. You have less concern over police brutality and the justice system needs a warrant to surveil you. You have far greater freedom of speech. You can hire and fire notionally who you please, and it’s easier to get a job because of it too. Religious freedom laws are much more comprehensive. If you are a parent, you are allowed much more latitude in deciding what is best for your child, even if not in agreement with the government.
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Yes, at most public schools in my area you would be restricted to the cafeteria except as a special privilege awarded to certain classes or individuals. Another notable fact about my school was that students could leave class without a hall pass to go to the bathroom and would not be met with instant suspicion if spotted walking in the hallway, something that was touted as a major selling point during our orientation. I understand that to Europeans this all sounds horribly dystopian and to Asians this sounds like a marvel of liberty and independence.
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In the US public schools I attended, we were restricted to eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were only granted liberty to leave the campus for lunch during our senior year. In suburban/rural districts most students are bussed and walking home and back within a 45 minute period isn't practicable (and at many schools, walking isn't an option at all).
OK, at every school I attended in Canada, it would have been unusual for a student not to walk to school. There must be some students that live nearby and walk though. Are they forced to eat at school?
In my primary school a minority of students walked to school. None were permitted to leave school during the day and all ate in the cafeteria during lunch. In senior high it was a similar situation to primary and only 12th Graders were permitted to leave. At my middle school no one was permitted to walk as the school was only accessible via a road with heavy traffic traveling at 45mph+.
That's so strange. Why would they design it that way? Is the school not in a residential neighbourhood?
No, it is in the middle of what used to be a cow pasture (and was still surrounded by it when I went there). The school (built on a 60+ acre property in the '70s) is centralized to serve a group of exurban communities to ensure kids don't have a long commute time.
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I believe that the idea is that rather than trying to draw a boundary between who is or isn't allowed to leave based on where they live, a blanket policy is applied to everyone.
The other aspect here is one of liability. I'm not sure how legally liable the school would be for anything that would happen to a student who is allowed to leave the school during the school day, but it would probably be bad optics for the school if a student got injured/arrested/pregnant during school hours because they were allowed to leave the school grounds unsupervised, so "even students who could physically go home for lunch aren't allowed to leave" is probably considered a feature rather than a bug.
This doesn't make sense to me. The school isn't responsible for what happens to the students after school or on the weekends. Why would it be any different at lunchtime?
I'd say that the difference would that lunchtime is a small break during a time in which the school is otherwise responsible for the students, as opposed to the weekends and after school.
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A private hippie school, then prep school. Somewhere people who grew up in Manhattan private school circles would have heard of, but not like Dalton or Trinity. My school was coed; both my brother and sister went to single-sex schools, for no particular reason.
Some people are interested in demographics. The school was perhaps 5% black, 5% visibly Latino (hard to tell, could have been more), 30% Asian (two thirds east, one third south, a couple of southeast here and there) and 60% white, including Arabs. Of the whites, maybe half were Jewish or half-Jewish and most of the rest were Italian, mixed-white (like, Brazilian mom, Swiss dad, or blonde mom from the Midwest and Italian dad, that kind of thing). Perhaps 10% of the student body, maybe a little less, were the predominantly but not entirely white kids of European or Canadian expats in NYC. I had more Catholic background friends from before prep school and from our local neighbourhood, but wealthy people who have those backgrounds in NYC tended, in my experience, to prefer to send their children to the Catholic private schools even though they were personally largely secular (I don’t think any remained or became religious). There were some WASPs of the regatta sort, but not many; again in my experience most of the very old family WASPish people I grew up around knew what schools they were sending their kids to from birth, and it wasn’t ours. A lot of those people I knew as a kid went to tier-1 schools or to boarding school.
The school was relatively academic. Probably not as much as my dad would have liked. College admissions stats were mostly impressive except for the occasional off year, but again more like tier-2 than tier-1 of Manhattan prep schools. Because the demographics of the school were less old money than some other Manhattan prep schools there was less of an Ivy at all costs bias for the smartest kids, so people went all over the country, except for those of us who stayed in the city, of course. There were some super rich kids, and some poorer kids (in truth middle class), but most parents were upper middle class by general standards, including mine for the majority of my time there until maybe the last year.
Pretty good. Friend groups formed at fell apart pretty quickly. As in every school there were social hierarchies, but bullying was relatively rare and the school was very tough on it when it happened. I remember my teachers being nice, kind people who with a few exceptions mostly cared. Classes were always full of a lot of intellectual debate among the ~30% of people who cared. We had many clubs and activities, ran mock presidential debates and elections, played sports semi-locally, boring normal high school stuff. I was extremely successful in one activity, participated in a few others. If you wanted to do something weird or different that few or no other kids did they would help you find whatever league/organization/etc you needed in the city, or would have a relationship with other prep schools where you could do it.
The salacious stuff happened, people (a small minority of people) started doing coke in school bathrooms when we were maybe 14 or 15, threw huge parties when their parents were away on weeknights, sometimes stuff would go down and the teachers would try to figure out what happened. The Euro expats were always the most into that because their parents often seemed to leave them for long periods.
I started high school at the zenith of Gossip Girl’s popularity, and while that was based loosely on Brearley/Collegiate there were definitely a lot of people at our school who felt that should be their life and wanted to LARP as if it was. The reality was much more lame since the vast majority of us really did have parents who cared, but there were moments that stick with me like an indoor pool party where we probably drank $50,000 of someone’s parents’ vintage champagne, finding (bad) clubs only happy to let dumb rich kids in to spend thousands of dollars on bottle service with suspicious fake IDs and so on.
Sexually it was pretty prudish for a liberal elite school. I wonder if this was already zillennial sexual conservatism beginning in earnest but I remember my ex-hippie parents being mildly surprised that all three of their children waited until they were in long term relationships in their senior year or in college. (Yes, this was a topic of conversation in our household; if you’ve ever watched Easy A, my parents are Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson in that movie, they watched it and agree.) There were a couple of hot teachers in their twenties who were known for hitting up former female students after they graduated, I remember that not seeming a big deal to me at the time, but again it didn’t happen to anyone in my social circle.
Not hugely involved? They came to parent teacher meetings two or three times a year (whenever they happened). They had an additional meeting when I started applying to college, then one more that also had me in it. That was pretty much it. There were some helicopter moms who could be found in the lobby every other day waiting to speak to one teacher or another, but I don’t think it did them much good.
I wish my parents had been slightly more involved because I was very shy and unconfident but could probably have made a valiant-if-unlikely attempt at HYPS (never applied) if really pushed, but I got into a very good college anyway and it hasn’t damaged my life in any way.
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I would say I had an overall "happy" experience, but not necessarily one that was good for me or prepared me very well for college/life.
I grew up in a rust-belt exurb of about 20k people in the 80s/90s. The economy of the area was more of less fully gutted by the time I started school. There were very few issues with class distinctions as the families in the area ranged from working class to extremely poor. There were a handful of what would now be considered lower middle-class kids: this children of accountants or managers of some sort. Anyone who could at all afford it sent their kids to private school 15 miles away, or just moved. The town is presently at about 7k population, from a high of 35k in 1950. There are entirely residential blocks that once had 15-25 houses on either side that now have 5-10, and sometimes none, with brown-fields where there houses used to be. In the last decade they've managed to plant grass and make decent fields out of them that the residents can use for various recreational activities. Things probably reached rock bottom around 1994 or so, its actually a lot nicer now than when I lived there. Clever local politicians managed to secure a good amount of money from the state and feds in the late 90s through various schemes. Recently boomers from all over the country have started to retire there, its on the coast of a Great Lake where they are building retirement mansions, the cost of living is very low, and its 99% white with virtually no Jews. I mention this last point as its been surfaced by the retirees I've spoken to about why they chose to move there, repeatedly, without prompting.
The school district itself was dirt poor. In retrospect this is at least part of what made the experience not so bad; low expectations. There was almost never any homework b/c we couldn't afford to take the books out of the classroom and many times two kids would have to share a single text book while in class. Most of the types of study that are now assigned as homework we just did during normal class hours, as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day were were free. The material was very basic reading/writing/math based stuff up through 8th grade. There was no real tracking or dividing of the kids by ability at all; everyone had the exact same experiences. Dividing the kids started in highschool with a few options for more advanced math and science. I first heard the term "Advanced Placement" as a freshman in college.
There was no art until 9th grade and students families needed to pay for all the supplies. Music, being band and choir, started in 6th grade at the middle school and the costs were the same as how it worked in art class, which the exception of a number of left over instruments donated by the parents of previous generations in various states of repair. I was very involved in the band from the beginning and was the part I enjoyed the most. At no level anywhere could the district afford anything like shop or home-ec classes. There were a grand total of 2 busses that only collected the kids that lived very far away. I walked about 3 miles to middle school, which was on the edge of town at the time. It was actually a blast; since almost all the kids had to walk there it became a horde of kids all walking together by the time we arrived. I'd wait at the end of my block of the growing mass of students to pass by every morning and fall into line with them. They same thing happened in reverse at the end of the day. This actually caused problems for the town at large to have 150+ 11-13 year olds suddenly unleashed on the town at 3pm every weekday. A police car often shadowed the horde of kids at a distance both coming and going. We had a blast. There was a county wide vocational school option starting in 10th grade for kids who wanted to go in to the trades. The HS sports teams were funded almost entirely by parents and local businesses pooling money.
How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? Not too bad tbh. We'd occasionally get kids who transferred in, or out, who would comment about how there weren't really any cliques in the school. In reality there were two groups with almost no interaction. Roughly 85% of the kids had parent(s) that worked, provided a modest but stable home life, and had roughly similar material conditions. These kids all more of less got along. The remainder were the extremely poor kids who's families were associated with generational welfare/benefits collection. They didn't work and didn't want to. Their kids tended to drop out as soon as they could, some went to the vocational school. They got teenage pregnant more frequently and often expelled for various reasons. These kids were often the grandchildren of people who had migrated north from Appalachia and the US south after WWII for industrial work that was quickly to vanish. They tended to have Irish and Scotts-Irish last names, where the rest of the town were the descendants of German, Italian, English, Northern and Eastern European immigrants from before WWI. So many people were on various forms of gov't assistance that the 1st of the month was basically a local holiday.
I got along with my teachers mostly because I didn't cause problems. If your grades were acceptable, you passed the very low bar of standardized testing, and you didn't make trouble you were generally left alone to goof off after your work was done. I actually did "misbehave" a great deal as a teenager, but was, and still am, extremely careful and circumspect about it. My misdeeds, as they were, always started with how I planned to get away with it.
How involved were your parents in your schooling? As little as possible. I was raised by an alcoholic, mentally ill single mother. Her own problems were so overwhelming to her she had very little mental capacity to be a positive influence on the lives of her children. Once I learned how to reliably stop getting in trouble she had nothing to do with the school anymore. The last time she went to a parent/teacher event or any sort of school function or open house was probably when I was 10. I got straight As from 9th grade one, and was obviously smarter than basically all the adults in my life by 16 or so, which went a long way in this regard. She skipped by graduation so she could sleep in.
Surely there are ‘virtually no Jews’ in the vast majority of the US. What were their negative experiences with Jewish people if you asked?
"Jews" tends to be a proxy for big city businessmen with no connection to the community. A lot of scams and white collar crimes take time to prosecute. Someone from the city can swoop in, do negative things, and be gone before they be stopped or prosecuted. Small town lawyers find themselves having to move against a legal entity that was dissolved before they could make their case.
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They never really elaborated, beyond "how nice" it was. Of note however many of them were moving from either Florida or the greater NYC area. I only mentioned it because of how often I've heard it after asking, somewhat incredulously at first "why would you chose to retire here of all places?" I usually stopped talking to them after something like this to be honest. My wife's family is Jewish and I'm not really interested in that line of conversation.
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I went to Montessori school, and then a regular local public school. I don't know if it was that the Montessori style complemented my natural inclinations or formed some of them, but I was always an independent student. Also weird in a variety of ways, and I think my parents gave up on curbing my eccentricities pretty early (and my teachers were all very accepting). I would have been miserable or rebellious if that wasn't the case, I'm sure. But in terms of school and learning I was always interested and curious, and naturally did well (which is what every parent hopes for, but is entirely unhelpful as advice).
I went to the local grade school by foot every day, and came home for lunch for most of my early school years. It felt like school was just an extension of my backyard. That changed in middle school, which was reached by bus. The only extracaricular activity I was ever part of was band in middle school, and the teacher was great. Most of the teachers I had were good, and a handful were very formatice and memorable. My parents did not push any interests on me and supported my interests when they arose.
My mom went to the local high school as a kid and hated it, and it was known for being even rougher by the time I was set to go. I applied to a few different special programs in the area and ended up going to an arts program a bit further away. The extra expenses (bus transport and material fees) were paid by my parents.
It was a regular local high school for some people, and you could see the difference in investment between students who chose to be there versus the students who were local. The teachers were exceptional, but I think students wanting to be there made their jobs easy. I'm confident that I was much happier going to that school than I would have been at the local school. As you can imagine the music, theatre and art kids in highschool were a pretty open minded crowd. I never felt weird or ostracized, and I was able to focus on learning and making friends. The horror stories from other high schools (fights, bullying, drugs) weren't really an issue at mine.
Thank you for sharing. I have a jaded view of arts magnet schools because my wife attended one where she experienced bullying and a generally poisonous atmosphere. It seemed like each student wanted to undermine the others. It's reassuring to know that this isn't always the case.
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I would say I did. I went to public school in Canada in what was considered the sort of "mid-upper class" suburb outside of a more major city. High school had a population of about 400 people, can't really remember what the size of Jr High or Elementary was. I would say that I got along with all of my teachers - there was one teacher who wore her politics on her sleeve and I do remember butting heads against her quite a bit, but there was another one who was a very vocal avowed feminist type but was also really really good, very fond memories. I guess she always kind of had a self deprecating vibe about the whole thing which made it kind of fun.
I would not consider myself as a "popular" kid, but I was definitely "well liked", I could generally be friendly and interact with most if not all of the various cliques without trouble. I do not think that I was ever bullied - despite being by far the shortest person of my age category, I was able to lean into it and have enough confidence that if that was happening, I just didn't register it.
My parents were deeply involved in my schooling, the expectation was 80% minimum grades. If my grades started to slip then it was discussion about what we could do, did I need a tutor? one on one time with the teacher? did I need to remove any extracurriculars? I don't think I would have had the grades I did if they weren't as involved. I also had the opportunity to be in various musical theater productions, including playing the lead in a school musical which played at the local town 500 seat theater, which was a treasured experience I'm glad I got to have.
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