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Notes -
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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