This is today's writers block on Livejournal:
Did you remain at the same school(s) or transfer to a number of different schools growing up? How did your early educational experiences impact your self-esteem and confidence
Here are the list of schools I went to:
1.Kinderwood-preschool
2.Westwood Elementary-kindergarten, 1st grade
3.Cabrillo Elementary- 2nd grade
4.Blackbird Elementary-3rd,4th grade
5.Monroe Middle-half of 5th grade
6.Summerdale Elementary- last half of 5th grade
7.Piedmont Middle-6th, was set for 7th grade but I lived out of the district
8.Peter Burnett Academy(haha!)- 7th grade
9.John Muir Middle- 8th grade
10.San Lorenzo Valley Jr. High-8th x2
11.White Oaks (alternative h.s.)9th
12.Success (alternative h.s.)-?
13.Coast Redwood Charter(half independent studies)
14.Loma Prieta(alternative),Soquel High,The Ark(independent studies)
1. Preschool was great!
2. Kindergarten was pretty great. I remember there were early birds and late birds and I was a late bird. It seems like that would have more to do with the parents schedule, but i remember we switched for 1 day and it seemed like the early birds had to do a lot of work....after working in the school system specifically a kindergarten classroom i think I could have benefited immensely from waiting for Kindergarten till I was 6 since I had just turned 5 before it started.
1st grade was ok, the teacher was a really stern old man. I was already reading in K and now writing but counting exercises were over my head, I remember breaking my pencil over and over to stall. It's weird because it didnt occur to me to ask for help because whatever exercises they were doing just seemed so foreign that I guess i just didnt bother.
3. Good teacher, lots of confidence in spelling and reading i dont remember any math...this is when i started going to the office every lunch to try and go home or just get out of class.
4. this was a good school, nothing too difficult in math still excelling in spelling and reading. I stayed here for 2 years so I actually had friends that I kept for a longer period of time than i was used to. My mom and I lived with my grandpa at this time so i dont think I stayed home too much because anything really would have been better than being there:/
5. Now living with my grandma, starting to get bronchitis and chronic tonsillitis, missing school but I'm actually sick. rarely doing homework, no one notices.
6. I remember being happy at this school, I asked a lot of questions until i understood things...until the teacher told me that i asked too many questions...stopped asking questions and doing homework.
7. Sick all the time. I was seriously harassed by the schools secretary and principal, my grandma wrote a letter to the superintendent. Only after showing a Dr. how many days of school i was missing did he decide to remove my tonsils. I remember my neck always feeling sore and my tonsils were usually always squishing my uvula, fun!
8. started 7th grade THE MORNING I got braces and some crazy thing on the roof of my mouth. It was in the "bad part of town"
I'm living with my mom again. I am 1 of 4 white people in the school, white girl with blonde hair...no one likes me. I dont think they realize i was probably poorer and lived closer to the school than anyone else. I made a few really good friends here, but was harassed to the point of tears all the time, including a boy threatening to stab me, weee! I dont understand math at all, the teacher hates me.
9. Transferred to this school a month late, the principal at the last school said the boy who wanted to stab me was getting expelled, he was there the first day. Ok so over the summer after seeing suburbia i chopped off all my hair. I was the only girl at this school with short spiky hair i also wore ya know black and other colors of lipstick which was CRAZY. Sadly i only fit in with the bad group of kids and everyone else thought i was gay...woulda loved to have seen those kids in high school, ya know once they started forming personalities and identities and getting all gay :D Being accepted by bad kids means being exposed to bad things....enter getting high every day before/after(always) school ,becoming a pack a day smoker and well just use your imagination. I do absolutely no work except for assigned reading, this math teacher truly despised me....there's an assembly about flunking if you get a certain amount of Fs, i think they're bluffing. I flunk 8th grade.
10. We move to Santa Cruz. 8th grade take 2. This school blows the kids are duuumb, they live in the valley, there are way too many white people. I go six months without seeing a black person. The teachers already know i'm "bad" so none of my hi jinks thank you very much. I am bored as shit, I get transferred to the alternative high school.
11. I have no idea what I did here. I had 0 confidence so i was afraid to write even a sentence because i didnt want to look stupid.
12. we moved to Sacramento. Oh god the WORST kids you could imagine. I wore leopard shoes, I was an alien. It got to the point where i would leave, walk to a donut shop and call my mom, the beauty part is you would get suspended for 3 days for leaving campus.
13. I move in with my sister, I'm with Ed, I get pregnant. I did pretty well at this school. Ed believed in me and gave me confidence from the first day i met him, too bad the lady running it was fucking nuts and NO credits were accounted for.
14. God bless Ed's mom for enrolling me in all these schools. But at 15 having been pregnant, being in a serious relationship, having a job and needing to pay rent high school seemed like a huge joke and waste of time. They lost track of me somewhere.
I worked from 15 on i had a job for 3 years where all my co-workers had gone to college...then in 2006 no child left behind happens...oh shit! I have to tell my boss i dont actually have a h.s. diploma. my bosses are super supportive and find me a position that i can work while I take the GED. still not having much confidence at this point i think i wont pass. I totally pass with great scores except for math, i think i made the math portion by like 1 question, which i REALLY tried to study for with my brother in law but it would usually end in tears, so i did a lot of guessing.
It seems funny that i ended up working in the school system, but i guess it makes sense, I was being the person that I really could've used in school, someone to be patient and compassionate with me.
But yeah, i do not miss school. i don't miss being a kid or a teenager, fuck all that! My life is super sweet now. I have 3 genius little bubs who will hopefully have all the confidence in the world, i pray they will get to enjoy being a kid as long as possible and no one will squash their feelings or so help me god Auntie will squash somebody!
There's some history for ya.
