4:16am October 25, 2014

Memory from sixth grade

On the first day of sixth grade, we were all brought into a room by… I forget the guy’s title. Our little private school was always trying to emulate far fancier private schools, the ones on the East Coast, and had aspirations of becoming a prep school. (They did, eventually, add on a high school that was a prep school, but that was long after I left. When I went there it was preschool through eighth grade and decidedly not a prep school. I was one of a few middle or working class people who actually went there. Most people were upper middle class or rich (and honestly the two were so far above me I drew no distinctions. My parents put themselves into debt sending me there.)

So there were titles like Dean, Principal, Headmaster, Associate Head, and so forth, and I never could keep straight who they were or what their jobs were suposed to be. Aside from showing off their expensive ‘environmentally friendly’ technology at every turn and encouraging people to see them as amazing eco-responsible people just because they could afford an electric car, for instance, back when nobody could. So I know whic guy took us into the assembly and gave the spech, but I don’t know his name, his face, or his job description.

The very first thing he said is “It’s very important to remember you are not junior high students yet.” I guess he thought we needed reminding because we’d gotten the nifty new uniforms that the sixth grade shared with the junior high. No more ugly plaid jumpers, just dark blue skirts, polo shirts, and dark blue sweaters. I really liked the new uniforms, as uniforms go, and was rather excited about the change. In the same way that you get excited in an institution about gaining a level and getting more “privileges”. Each year at this school, you would get new privileges, like the ability to eat lunch in certain areas, etc. And I was especially prone to getting excited about these things.

One of the saddest things I ever read was by an autistic woman in a nursing home who had written to the MAAP newsletter. (More Advanced Autistic People – it was written back when being thought high functioning was considered a rarity. The autistic self-advocacy movement in the form of ANI has had very rocky relations with MAAP over MAAP’s insistence that ANI not bring any nonverbal “LFA” people to their conference. ANI of course did not comply with this demand.) Anyway, the woman was living in a nursing home that also took people with psychiatric or developmental problems. And she was thinking of leaving. But then she said “But I’m not sure I should leave, because there’s some realy exciting stuff coming up on my level…”

And that broke my heart. Because if she left, she could do those exciting things witout needing to “gain a level” to do them. But she was too trapped in the institutional mindset to see it. I almost cried when I read it. I hope she is out of there by now. And by choice, not by having died or been transferred to another institution. Because she deserved freedom (with whatever support she needed to survive). And she deserved to never have to think of herself as part of a level system. I was part of a level system in most institutions I was at. Some of them I utterly refused, seeing it as the mind and behavioral control tactic it was. Other times I went along with it because you can easily get sucked in by promises of being able to go off the locked unit for 5-minute supervised walks and stuff. Anyway.

All of which is why I always say schools are a good training ground for institutional life, and I mean it. People think I’m trivializing institutions when I say stuff like that. I think they’re trivializing the damage that schools do to children. Just because, by this generation, practically everyone in the USA has been through formal mass schooling doesn’t make it a good thing. Just because, for some people, school is the only refuge from an abusive home environment, doesn’t make it a good thing, it means we need better refuges. But school is basically a place where people are thrown in with kids their own age, expected to learn good social skills (as in, not bullying) from people as immature as they are, and not taught to interact with people from a variety of ages and backgrounds. In the USA, most learning is competitive rather than cooperative.

My mother found my brother this amazing classroom that shouldn’t have been amazing, but that I wish I’d had growing up. In this class, each child was known to have strengths and weaknesses. Each child helped teach their strength to all the other kids. For instance, a kid really good at the alphabet would teach other kids the alphabet, paying closer attention to people for whom learnin the alphabet is harder. In this way, every student learned, and every student taught, and the goal was to bring every student up to speed on what the other students were doing, rather than to compete to see who could out-learn each other. If I had to go to school, I would choose a school like that class.

Ideally though, I’d want the entire system overhauled. I would want places where anyone of any age could come to learn any subject from anyone willing and able to teach that subject. Sort of a cross between a school and a library. You could have a 90-year-old learning to read alongside a 2-year-old and a 10-year-old if that’s what they all wanted to learn. And in addition to learning (in groups, or one on one, whichever worked best) from the teachers alone, it would be like that school my brother went to – students learning from students. (My father also had some of that going on by default – he started school in a one-room schoolhouse. HIs one-room schoolhouse was much better than mine, though, because mine was special ed and it sucked. He describes experiencing culture shock when he first had to go to a regular school, where you had hall monitors (“Hall monitors!” he still says with incredulity) and couldn’t go to the bathroom without a pass, and things like that.)

Anyway, back to the lecture the guy was giving us on how to be sixth graders. Anyway, after informing us we were not, definitely not, junior high kids yet, he got very serious and started talking about maturity. He said something like, “You’re going to find some of you are growing up faster than others. Some of you are going to want to still play like you did at recess in your earlier grades. And some of you are going to want to read, or talk about serious things.” And literally every single person seated near me, when faced with the description of the kid who wasn’t maturing fast enough, turned around their heads and openly stared at me for quite some time. Like you could hear them all turning around in their seats to look at me. I felt horrible. I knew it was true, that I wasn’t catching up with anyone socially, not even after repeating a grade, but there was no need to humiliate me about it.