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You know, after this comment has percolated in my mind a bit it suddenly hit me that 'the stacks' in Ready Player One are much closer to reality than I'd ever e

You know, after this comment has percolated in my mind a bit it suddenly hit me that 'the stacks' in Ready Player One are much closer to reality than I'd ever expected. Honestly I had no idea this was the situation in high schools until we started dating. I would have been class of 2003 and sure we had some 'poor' students but we only had a handful of immigrant/refugee kids that you'd see getting the free food (we typed our code into a keypad that carried a balance or paid cash, you could always tell who was on a free lunch though because you were restricted to what you could take and everything was a la carte). Her current school also has some serious drug issues which was quite surprising to me. They had to expel some kids for vaping something other than nicotine in the past 2 months, turns out they were vaping something that contained fentanyl (how they got caught, they kept falling asleep in class and were hard to wake), they regularly have bring in drug dogs for both marijuana plant matter and thc vape cartridges, they recently had to remove two students for having sex on grounds and had to turn them over to the police because the male student was filming it with his phone and they were both underage, etc. It would be amazing if we could just let kids attend from home when sick, during adverse weather, during outbreaks (lice, COVID-19, chicken pox) but the stuff she keeps telling me... A school here has at least 2 students confirmed with COVID-19 (Avon, Indiana schools) that decided to close all of the schools this week and it's almost entirely a solid middle class school and even they've had trouble just this school year with some instances of drugs and a senior committed suicide around the holidays which sent a bunch of kids spiraling. I obviously don't know how things are in Europe but I think schools are between a rock and a hard place here in the United States. In many cases teachers may be the only positive attention kids get in person, and the only one that will notice when something is wrong (at her current school and her previous school cutting has been a very big issue). I'm rambling but the state of schools right now deeply concern me. This up and coming generation seems to have far more problems than mine did.

applecrazy 7y ago
Holy crap. This made me recognize my privilege and the massive gap in facilities between schools. I never thought it was that bad in some American high schools. I went to a pretty high-performing school where the biggest problems were anxiety and depression, not (this still shocks me) actual hard drugs. Thank you for sharing your SO's experience. It's eye-opening to say the least.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Yeah it's been very eye-opening to me too. Prior to this school she was teaching on a Navajo reservation near the Idaho/Utah border. I didn't realize just how bad reservations are. There she said she had students that often only had 1 or 2 outfits and would wear the same clothes to school every day, so she'd find reasons to 'reward' clothing and she'd go to thrift stores and buy a bunch of t-shirts/jackets/hoodies. She also had a lot of students who's parent(s) were in jail/prison and were living with relatives, students that had been sexually assaulted by relatives, students that absolutely did not want to be there but came anyway for the meals. It just blows my mind that even here in the United States you can have kids graduating high school with 2-year Associates degrees as well that have access to 'robotics labs' and the like while you have kids, sometimes in the same city, that have to do laundry at school. If you start massaging reddit and various teacher's forums, you can see this over and over though in apparently every state in the United States. Schools with all the fancy stuff and schools that are basically places for kids to come to eat 2 meals and try and stay out of trouble for a third of the day. What gets me also is the sort of things students write on their papers/tests. She'll show them to me as she grades them and you'll have very nihlistic catoons drawn out as maths answers or "I'm stupid fail me" "I don't get this fail me" type phrases or just complete nonsense written. She showed me one recently where the student had to have spent the entire test writing and stylizing her name in some elaborate work while not answering a single question. I definitely have a lot more respect for teachers now than I did prior to meeting her.

applecrazy 7y ago

Holy crap. This made me recognize my privilege and the massive gap in facilities between schools. I never thought it was that bad in some American high schools. I went to a pretty high-performing school where the biggest problems were anxiety and depression, not (this still shocks me) actual hard drugs. Thank you for sharing your SO's experience. It's eye-opening to say the least.

ryanmercer 7y ago
Yeah it's been very eye-opening to me too. Prior to this school she was teaching on a Navajo reservation near the Idaho/Utah border. I didn't realize just how bad reservations are. There she said she had students that often only had 1 or 2 outfits and would wear the same clothes to school every day, so she'd find reasons to 'reward' clothing and she'd go to thrift stores and buy a bunch of t-shirts/jackets/hoodies. She also had a lot of students who's parent(s) were in jail/prison and were living with relatives, students that had been sexually assaulted by relatives, students that absolutely did not want to be there but came anyway for the meals. It just blows my mind that even here in the United States you can have kids graduating high school with 2-year Associates degrees as well that have access to 'robotics labs' and the like while you have kids, sometimes in the same city, that have to do laundry at school. If you start massaging reddit and various teacher's forums, you can see this over and over though in apparently every state in the United States. Schools with all the fancy stuff and schools that are basically places for kids to come to eat 2 meals and try and stay out of trouble for a third of the day. What gets me also is the sort of things students write on their papers/tests. She'll show them to me as she grades them and you'll have very nihlistic catoons drawn out as maths answers or "I'm stupid fail me" "I don't get this fail me" type phrases or just complete nonsense written. She showed me one recently where the student had to have spent the entire test writing and stylizing her name in some elaborate work while not answering a single question. I definitely have a lot more respect for teachers now than I did prior to meeting her.