When the barometer for schooling, especially in your early education, is either you're dumb, lazy, harboring intellectual or developmental disabilities and homeschooling or private school is simply not in your tax bracket, is it any wonder that so many people spend half of their lives at jobs that demean or discredit their true abilities?
I started exhibiting emotional problems very early on in my life and I know that prevented me from achieving something great in terms of grades- because we all know that is the ONLY thing early education (or at least when I was a kid) cares about-
But, what if you're also trying very hard to learn, are outwardly frustrated to your teachers and intimidated by other students and embarrassed that you just "don't get it"?
It wasn't until my mid-teens that I got one of my first jobs working as a cashier where I realized my problem in school might have been something deeper- and that's that I simply couldn't read numbers correctly.
That it wasn't just test anxiety or the social politik of the classroom- I was literally overwhelmed and confused by adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, fractions, decimals, etc.. And then thinking back, I would get to a certain point in solving a number problem and for some reason instead of carrying the 6, I would carry a 9, or I would move a point to a position where it would literally f*ck up everything RIGHT that I had done up until that particular step.
I could think about things critically and logically but, when you put an equation in front of me, my brain just turned to mush. I literally grew up thinking that I was stupid (I even got sent to the principal's office once by a concerned teacher because I was actually so distressed I was walking around my 4th grade class at that time telling everyone that I probably wouldn't graduate because I was "too stupid") or wasting everyone's time.
I don't know why this particular deficiency went about unnoticed- likely because there was this threat that I would just get sent to the "bad kids" class; which was this like, mark of shame, that I was some failure and would be put where I belonged if I didn't up or something- so instead my agitation turned into anger and emotional outbursts. Often resorting to being the class clown (for a long time I was known as the first kid to use curse words, talk about my dad's weed smoking, and in the 6th grade I had a girlfriend where, by a lot of social pressure, we were the first ones to "make-out" while like 20 of our friends watched) and there were fights- lots of fights.
So what is the solution? I've been saying for awhile that I wish there was a class in those early developmental stages where a teacher would just focus on the care, well-being and emotions of the children they're teaching. In some vague ways, yes, EVERY teacher has that responsibility, but I mean like an hour or 45 minutes for each class where the teacher (or even better, another person perhaps the school counselor actually comes in and talks to the class about how to deal with their emotions.
By the time you're about 8 years old you've really developed your personality quite substantially and if we could somehow have a CURRICULUM that includes a course such as the one I mentioned above, I think eradicating that stigma of openness (instead of automatically diagnosing children and medicating them- which honestly i'm not against in anyway because I think some people absolutely NEED pharmaceuticals to function better) and ensuring children that it doesn't mean your "weak" or a "p*ssy" or whatever wonderful schoolyard talk is prevalent these days, to be in touch with their emotions
perhaps we'd see less maladjusted teenagers and young adults "venting" themselves thru violent means on their classmates and teachers.
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