It’s a IRL mupppet!
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I was in the school’s TAG program. I got a mix of As and Fs. I got held back a year, skipped forward a year twice, and spent a lot of time in the principal’s office, ISS, or detention. They didn’t know what to do with people like me. One teacher had a separate hall pass printed and told me to just go to the library or whatever I wanted to do for the rest of the year, as long as I passed the tests and didn’t disrupt the class. (I skipped the rest of the year except test days and aced that class.) At the start of the year they gave us each a copy of the school handbook with the rules in it and out of boredom I would use it as a checklist of things to try to get away with.
Towards the end, I would smoke right outside the office in order to get caught and suspended so I could stay home for a few days. In Chemistry, I skipped the first 12 chapters and had an F when I finally decided it sounded interesting. Did all 12 chapters of homework during the two weeks we were on chapter 13, asked the teacher if I could make up the tests, and brought my grade up to an A. Then I turned in my textbook and told him I was dropping out. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone look that sad and disappointed. I had no idea that he cared, but he did. He had seen me turn around and take interest and then to see me drop out was a huge hit to him.
In adult ed, they did a placement test to see what you still needed to learn to be able to get a GED. I tested as second-year college level, so they didn’t know what to do with me either. Some of them assigned me to tutor the other dropouts, which was good. Helped someone go from arithmetic level “I hate math!” to able to ace an algebra/geometry/trigonometry test and ready for precalculus in just a few months. But some of the teachers didn’t have anything for me, so I hung out with the kids who drank and did drugs a lot, and did my share. Got in a bit of trouble.
College was a little better; there were some interesting, challenging classes with involved professors, and I could at least drop the ones that weren’t. Unfortunately, a bunch of those were required courses in my major, so I ended up dropping out of college and not getting my degree. But it wasn’t a total waste.
One of my favorite memories was of a non-major elective, where a bunch of us were struggling and started meeting up and doing study sessions and discussions in an empty hallway before class and collectively brought our grades way up. The professor was late one day and happened through us all sprawled around having an impassioned discussion about the topic and he looked genuinely puzzled. Told us to just continue but come on in and start the test whenever we were done. 
Some of the kids thought he was a hardass and were talking about what professor they should try to get for the next semester. I think I convinced at least a few to stick with him, because although he did grade hard, he actually made us think and told us how we were wrong or insufficient in presenting our ideas and how we could improve. I got a lot out of that class. I also got the hardest math professor and made sure to get her again for the next class when other students were making sure to avoid her. I talked at least one of our study group into joining me in that too.
My memories of the TAG program aren’t all that great. It was a mix of a few of us weirdos and several upper-middle-class kids who were doing just fine with the normal school structure (mixing oil and water). Mostly playing puzzle games, mock UN debates, and mock trials; things like that. Nothing to really prepare us for how college would be different than high school, let alone how different a career would be. Once out of school, you can’t succeed by picking which things you’re interested in and just going in once a month (hungover or still high) to ace a test. It probably should’ve had more of a counseling component, and some way to find and plug the interest gaps.
One thing I noticed was that, at least for people like me, when we weren’t interested in something we wouldn’t waste our time on it, but when we did find something interesting, then we’d dive all-in and that’s how we went from Fs to As by doing a year’s worth of study (or more) in a short time. I saw several people do that. Finding what triggers that kind of interest in people isn’t easy. Maybe that is what they were trying to do, and I was just unlucky in that none of it happened to click with me at the right time. But in retrospect, maybe what we needed most of all was for someone to teach us coping mechanisms for how to adapt to the daily grind of boring stuff and get through it even when you’re not interested.
ETA: Apologies for wall of text due to walk down memory lane. Last line of last paragraph is effectively the TLDR.
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I read the whole thing, and found your story fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
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I ended up in special ed, too, mainly because the grade 1 teacher blew it in diagnosing my learning disability. She zeroed in on me spacing out in the reading portion of class (when we were restricted to grade-level reading texts) and informed my parents that I couldn’t read, and that they were in denial.
I was bored as fuck because I was at a grade 5 reading level. I can (and could even then) read an upside down book almost as fast as I can the right way. What it did do was gloss over the fact that I genuinely do have attention issues. And organisational issues and fine motor skills deficits (I worked hard to get my handwriting up to snuff). Fun fact: AD(H)D (did I mention that I was hyperactive as fuck, but I was a girl, so I learned not to act out like boys did) means your brain can just switch between foreground and background sounds? So one second the teacher is talking about 3+5, the next all you can hear is the kids outside playing kickball. It’s not a drift or daydream, your brain simply switches over. When it switches back, you’ve missed half of what the teacher said. I did (and still do) get accused of being inappropriately loud, because I think I have to talk over a room that isn’t anywhere near as noisy to those I am talking to.
Long story short (too late!), I learned early on that special ed wasn’t just for the “slow” kids. It was for anyone who didn’t fit the mold.
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My First Grade teacher was pissed at my mom that I was already reading and already at Fifth\Sixth grade level.
That teacher had issues.
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I have a similar problem with background noise drowning out voices, or even drowning out my thoughts. It’s one of the reasons I have so much trouble with phones. And with policies which mandate phones.
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I realize this is going to be a controversial opinion…
These are men who have committed terrible crimes and hurt many people. They’ve been sentenced to federal prison for a reason.
But I’m actually heartened to hear that this particular place exists, and I would hope (but doubt) that there could be similar places for other minority religions as well.
Rehabilitation needs to be a goal, and one of the ways to support that goal is to support people’s faith.
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On the one hand, cool. On the other hand, as is vaguely pointed out in the interview, this is highly simplistic.
The most glaring point is that “selfishness” was and is one of the worst things you can fling at a woman. Women, especially wives and mothers, are supposed to be infinitely selfless and self-sacrificing. That’s an attitude that goes back to before the Enlightenment but really hits its stride in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not to mention how “pleasure-seeking” women are still viewed in society to this day.
Every time they mentioned “people” or “humans” in the article, I kept thinking about how women had to be legally declared people by an act of Parliament in Canada.
Also love how they didn’t even mention modern slavery and how it was at its height right smack in the middle of the time period being discussed.
“People” are selfish and pleasure-seeking, sure – if their society deems them to be of the demographic permitted to be so.
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This is just another way for the apologists for greedy, thieving scumbags to deflect responsibility. It is indeed a very simplistic story of the Enlightenment.
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It talks about how the Enlightenment chose to go down one path, causing all the issues mentioned, instead of another. I haven’t read the book that the interview was about, but basically it sounds like the argument is that all the problems we’ve been seeing are fruit of the poison tree.
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For sure. That’s cropping up all over. Descartes was wrong about the mind/body split. Adam Smith was wrong about most of the things he’s remembered for.
The only Enlightment thinkers who are doing well right now are the satirists like Pope and Swift, and even then it seems nobody remembers the Modest Proposal was not sincere.
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Not true. Smith is selectively remembered by greedy, thieving scumbags when giving themselves cover for being greedy thieving scumbags. Adam Smith argued pretty strongly against laissez-faire and the wealthy in general. “The invisible hand” of the market only shows up once in his work. Most of the remembered economists of the Enlightenment and the 19th century were reacting against some specific branch of greedy thieving scumbags. Bankers, conspicuous consumers, fashions of reactionary academia. I think of Veblen as being one of the last of these.
Malthus is more truly cited by greedy thieving scumbags. He gives cover to genocide and established a tradition of moralizing commentators making sweeping statements without testing the data in good faith. As a bonus he’s been thoroughly debunked, also a hallmark of the justifications made by greedy thieving scumbags.
The main arguments for selfishness were inspired in the 20th century as a kind of Romantic embrace of Marxism, inverted and called “Capitalism”.
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I agree with the premise of the book. I haven’t read the book but when I was in college, and a Philosophy major, we had to read all the major philosophers in historical order. I also had a really wonderful Plato professor - she was the one who taught one of the two semesters of the overview course on philosophy.
I had read the Enlightenment philosophers before, but I hadn’t read them in that kind of context before. When I read Descartes, it hit me how huge the impact of his philosophy had been - and how wrong his philosophy was, how it immediately goes off the rails, and how it was just a gigantic dead end of a philosopher. Like, Hume and Locke, so much of modern cognitive studies builds on their ideas. But no one is building on Descartes because there was no truth in it.
It was shock to me to realize how much of an influence he still had on modern ideas of cognition; the mind-body split has been so damaging to our society.
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Curiously, I recently listened to this:
It might be relavent.
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This could also go in Intoxithread…
Made with:
&
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A.k.a. Cyriak?
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