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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

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.

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.