Experience could be better... I graduated 10 years ago, so a lot of things have changed…read more
From the get-go, no one wanted to be friends with me, which made me dread school. In kindergarten, I wanted to play with the building blocks, so I would hang out with the boys, but they would never include me and single me out, so I decided to hang out with the girls, and they would also make fun of me and would not want me to hang out with them because I was different. The PE instructor was mean to me as well and singled me out for a lot of things during first and second grade. On top of that, I was a victim of bullying, and a lot of people thought I was incompetent and worthless, even though I did nothing wrong.
For the most part, the teachers were nice, and I know that some of you all had complaints about this one fourth-grade teacher (ifkyk), but in all honesty, a majority of your complaints are due to you enabling your kids too much. Yes, I do get that they were harsh at times, and they even singled me out for being disorganized, but it was a life lesson for me. I also witnessed them being harsh towards a student, but they were doing their work on a table that had a chair on it, and they were kneeling on the ground, resulting in their inability to concentrate properly, so in that case, they had a right to be harsh. Some of their biggest flaws were singling out students who were ahead or behind, which I was not a fan of. I remember one of my classmates transferred schools because they got singled out for being the "bad" student, which was messed up since if you were worried about their progress, it would be better to talk to the student's parents about it rather than humiliating them in front of the class. That being said, in most cases, they had a right to scold students since the students would be rather mean to the teacher (I witnessed this throughout my whole K-12 education), and they were the most stern about it, which led to parents and students not liking them. I have a feeling that maybe her reputation wouldn't have been so bad if parents didn't constantly enable their kids
I also noticed that the school should do a better job with substitute teachers. During my fifth grade year, my teacher was on maternity leave, so we needed a sub and this led to the class getting out of control and my parents were having complaints about the students not learning and the children behaving badly (bullying, passing mean notes, talking over the teacher, having no regards for the rules, etc) and again, this could have been a result in parents enabling their kids too much. I was more grounded, and this led to me being bullied and singled out, so when graduation came, I felt empty towards everyone. There was this one yard member who would always come to my classroom and yell at everyone for no reason, which got on my nerves and was rather unpleasant to deal with at 8:30 am. I was also not a fan of the fact that some of my classmates were boy crazy in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade since I just wanted to live life.
In all honesty, my experience could have been better, but the end of my fifth-grade year made my experience pretty bad, along with cliquey classmates and bullies.