The high school system..

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(I have Aspergers and) I feel like as I get closer and closer to graduating I lose more and more of my sanity and my individuality. My Highschool tries to mold you into a total conformist to the system who must solve problems the same way everyone else does, no matter if you solve them faster and/or correctly. I feel like a computer-I have potential but people like teachers only choose to program me with what they want me to do, not with what I want to do. Is it too much to ask to be able to use my own opinion with my own ways of learning and solving problems?
Why do I need a teacher like my school requires-it recently stopped approving self-paced courses for the summer term, which means next year I'll have to sit through multiple classes where I do the equivalent of watching paint dry as teachers list facts that I'll forget a few months later. I do have a couple classes I like... but that's not really enough to justify spending 7 hours there every weekday. YES I TRY to get engaged in the subjects but if a teacher tells instead of explains I can't really get into it..
If I talked to a counselor about it they'd tell me to talk to teachers about it and if I did that the teachers would tell me to talk to a counselor about it, and claim that helping me on a personal level is not part of their job description. It'd become one big circle.

I don't have the motivation to study things I'm interested in after school because I'm so tired of being a square peg forced into a round hole every day. I just do homework, most of it being busywork I don't even need to think to do, and whatever else I need to do before I return to school the next morning.
I'm not sure what I did to deserve this prison sentence, and it's getting more difficult to see how these (especially senior year) are supposed to be 'the best years of your life'.
So,
How can I get through it?

I survived by pointing equal attention towards my friends, both the hooligans I ran around with and the more engaging teachers. I also got my GED, since I'm not sure if you're in the U.S. and I don't know if that's an option, I also recommend caffeine, but in that case, moderation is hugely important; jitters during class really suck. I don't think I'd have a diploma of any kind if I hadn't started every day of my senior year with some good tea.

I completely agree with you. I can't give you any advice on how to cope with it because I find it extremely difficult to cope with. However, I'll be leaving to start college after summer. I don't know where you are, but would you be able to do something similar?

I've managed to survive this long with the help of coffee, doses of kava root (carefully measured to be a fair ammount below a lethal dose) & a complete lack of hesitation to exploit the incompetence of the IT staff in my school district (they think a firewall and some cheap network monitoring software will keep me under their control? Ha!)

With proficiency based grading rapidly gaining prominence here, I've hardly done any homework in the past couple years because I know I'll do well on the test. Like you said, most of it's just busy work. If that isn't an option, some of my teachers just get their homework assignments online. If you can find the website they get them from, you can just copy the answers from the website. That's how I aced my Biology class last year even though I always skipped. Another option would be to get some other students together and share your work "Paper Chase" style.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that you need to do is understand that these are NOT the happiest years of your life. I had to leave the Mormon church because (by their standards) coffee is a drug & my addiction to it made god sad. That was before I started experimenting with other substances to help me get through each day. If in the best years of my life, I had to forsake my god because I can't face life without some kind of chemical enhancement, I'd hate to see the rest.

As a teenager, you're chattle. If you're an american too, you probably see how commonly school staff members violate students' legal rights because of "reasonable suspicion" instead of probable cause. You get arrested if you're out at night no matter what you're doing. If your masters are anything like mine, everything you say is immediately dismissed because you're "just a teenager". The fact of the matter is that you're a second class citizen. Most of my friends are young adults who are either in college or have entered the work force with just a highschool diploma & talking to them, it's abundantly clear that life will be better when I'm a real person.

Right now, we're in purgatory. It's far from good, and it can get so much worse than this. If you can take the harder times, you'll find that life gets a lot better after this. You need to know that or else you just won't be able to keep going.

I'd really appreciate it if you could give me a kind of "play by play" of what a normal school day is like for you. I think that would make it easier to give more relevant, specific advice.

I sometimes feel like this - but mainly with one particular class, Geometry. GOOD RIDDANCE TO THAT CLASS! How come teachers want us all to become multi-million dollar architects by working on confusing, crappy geometry? Geometry should be an elective, and Algebra II should be the class we all should be in. I'm a little better on Algebra stuff than Geometry. A B last year in Algebra I and a pass score on the Algebra EOC here. Geometry is a C and it's slumping even more. At times it has been a D+. Been almost failing because Geometry is a class that I don't get and that's probably not going to change. There are some kids who get 95-100% constantly on tests, and they study at the same rate as me or even *shorter*. I study for about an hour or more the night before a test and it DOESN'T MATTER, I *still* get Ds and last quiz was a 58% F. OH...and they go WAY too fast on the curriculum. Probably a B.S. lie, but "We have to get through what the state tells us to do in the 180 days", yeah right. When I was back in the Seattle area usually 2 days were spent on a lesson. Three on review as well (the third day we got all our questions answered from the review WS and studied up with groups), fourth was the quiz/test. I was getting a B average before I moved here, the lowest performing test was a D+ I think. Here, we have little social interaction in Geometry class, the HW is tough and we are expected to do it mainly on our own, and the last test, only a SINGLE day was spent on review.
I plan to be a teacher later on in life - and likely elementary school. All my 3rd graders need to know in Geometry is what shapes are. Not how to calculate the perimeter of a darn half circle and trapezoid! And *two-column proofs* to boot - ugh.
I do notice some teachers feel like they are talking into a teleprompter. The things they say are right out of the book sometimes, and to my ears, scripted.

The other classes are actually really good. As and Bs and I have a few friends here and there. But it's my math classes that are completely killing my GPA this year. Before I moved to eastern Washington, my GPA was a 3.8. Now it's a 3.1 or 3.2. It's gone down over 1/2 a GPA point, just because of the stupid Geometry class!

I hope being a machine will be worth it in the end

Wait until college. That's all I have to say .

The problem that I see with high school is that they put everyone in the same setting. You have artists and musicians with mathematicians and biologists...you have geniuses in classes with people who can hardly spell their own names. By putting such a wide variety of people with such different interests and skill sets together, it's impossible to adequately cater to everyone. So, in the end, it ends up catering to no-one.

I felt like this to some degree throughout my entire childhood schooling. It definitely got worse in high school though. I always felt a lot more mature than the other kids. I hated being lumped in with all of these other kids whose sole aim was to misbehave and being treated as though I was doing the same thing when my sole aim was to learn and get out quickly. I also resented how students and teachers alike thought that they were entitled to control what I did on campus and tried their hardest to control what I did off campus as well. I just wanted to do my own thing and I wish other people could have seen and respected that. I wanted to go to university so I just grit my teeth and took it as best as I could. Music and photography helped keep me sane as did spending a lot of time by myself outside of school. It won't be the best years of your life but that's okay since the other ones will be. Nothing lasts forever.

Update: I bought a suit, wrote a speech for the school district (citing a couple cases wherein school districts have been sued for doing some of the stuff that happens in my district) and just started working on crowd-sourcing funding & calling lawyers to get estimates on just how much it would cost to get them to represent the student body so that I can threaten the district with a lawsuit if they don't change their policies.

I'm starting with the random drug searches wherein class is interupted while armed officers search every student in the classroom (As previously mentioned, I'm an American and here in America we have the Bill of Rights which applies to all citizens regardless of age) and working my way to some that are less blatantly illegal and more legally questionable.

The entire thing has been quite cathartic.

How are you doing now? Have you found some was of coping (as I have) or are you still in the same state you were in when yoo made the original post?

I am Canadian and never had that happen but you will learn very much that in school you have almost no 'rights' regardless of what a piece of paper says. I am glad I completed my prison... er school experience and will never want to see a Public Junior High/High School for as long as I live. School was like a concentration camp or prison where NOBODY wanted to believe they were in a prison and angrily attacked you if you tried to point out the bars or the jumpsuits or the guards and cameras in the halls. They preferred the certainty prison rather than think for themselves and break out metaphorically. Trust me, they are the WORST years of your life and my only surprise is that there aren't more suicides or shootings in schools.

If you don't believe me think of this: in many schools you can get straight Fs and still pass yet missing too many classes (where I lived it was 6 per semester) meant an automatic fail unless you have a Doctor or parents note. Didn't matter if you got straight As. Lack of attendance was punished but bad grades never were. Ever wonder why? Lest you think I am come conspiracy theorist, I know plenty of prison guards... I mean teachers and principals and off the record they all know how corrupt the system is but would never dare say it out loud. They just try to be as professional and compassionate as they can be given their restrictions.

What was worst of all was that in our school we had 4 80 minute classes a day and those were the only 4 you were allowed to take at a time. Imagine doing 80 minutes of typing practice, 5 days a week for 5 months! On the plus side I am an expert typist but what a waste of time and energy that was! I also had a Geography class where I did the work in 10 minutes. I should have asked to be transferred to a jail cell instead because I could have at least gotten some rest for an hour a day and left alone by the troublemakers! It was PURE torture because I wasn't allowed to leave or do anything else. Some people I know speak fondly of High School and I reply "are you nuts? I would burn the place down if I was legally able to in a heartbeat!" Prisoners have more rights than schoolchildren and I realize it's no accident. Put someone in a cage long enough and when you open the doors, they will never leave.

I agree with you completely on this. There are times where I feel like I'm surrounded by idiots in school, as well as with people who clearly don't give a f***. It seems like there isn't enough in school to cater to everyone, and there are always kids that constantly fool around in class, and make things worse for everyone. School is basically a long, boring death sentence.

My middle school did drug searches all the time- except that they would have us take off our jackets and backpacks and lunchboxes and put them in shopping carts that would be left in the hallway, and then lock us in homeroom- which is just a place to take attendance, so no content or lessons. even worse was that the homerooms were all grey, made of cinder blocks, full of broken furniture and only had one tiny prison window. The searches took always at least one hour, and sometimes 2 or 3 if they suspected anything- by which i mean if they found more than, say, $10 in a kid's belongings if they were on the free or reduced lunch system. And they did this weekly!

High school is smaller (150 students total), but we have government officials stalking the hallways, armed soldiers in the courtyard and government agents following us in white vans to lunch. The principal has absolutely no oversight- or skill- because she is friends with her boss and hired at least one teacher- who is completely incompetent ("I don't know. look it up online!") as a favor, and one administrator PR type person for the same reason.

Sorry have been away from the site for awhile but my feelings haven't changed and I still cannot tolerate being in the jail. I am still in school but I actually contacted the superintendent about the ongoing 30+ year old temperature and plumbing issues and he said he didn't hear much about them before, and would try to review them. The superintendent seems more genuine than most of the teachers, and he asked if I noticed any other problem in the school. I could have spent hours there explaining problems, and I wonder what kinds of excuses he might have come up with, but instead I counted myself lucky just to get to speak to him and I said no.
To name a few of those other problems:
--Student Council Elections == popularity contests
--Gym teachers just order (not tell) you to do a sport and then stare at you for the next 40+ minutes, except when they are being reviewed by a V. Principal, in which case they will go into a lecture about muscles
--School is overcrowded
--Not enough space in library, too many books no one ever checks out, too little computers for the population. (There is a lab of computers in the library but for some reason librarians do not let students use them at lunch/before school) I checked out a book and it was last checked out 25 YEARS AGO.
--Some teachers show movies too much or lecture too much/long and students watch paint dry without getting anything out of those things
--Many classes do not follow course descriptions (In a REQUIRED essay class I did not learn anything in... at all. The teacher made no suggestions...)
--Almost no real life applications in classes I expect them in (like math)
--Way too many tests, quizzes, quests, and tezzes, no time "learning" anything
--Chairs == rocks (normal?)
--Some of the food (meat) == rocks
--Treated like a cog, not person w/ own brain & thoughts (esp. w/ curriculum and graduation reqs)
--Very small amt of creative outlets/classes
--Health class is a req and a memorization fest
--Girls must either wear (short) shorts or yoga-looking pants to gym while boys can wear basically anything "appropriate"
--Barely any (none for me) field trips except for $5k ones to other countries
--Ceiling sin old gym is disgusting and probably do not have healthy materials yet students are forced to be there
--Teachers spend large amts of class time telling kids to put away cellphones... Why not change policy to be as restrictive as all the other policies?


Some of my teachers are getting more and more whiny as the school year ends and one straight out told us that if we didn't know how to do something we should look it up online. THEN WHY CAN'T I JUST LOOK UP EVERYTHING I NEED? (I wish I actually had yelled or said that). Why do I have to sit there for 60 minutes 3-4 times a week watching you write formulas on the board and doing sets of mind-numbing problems. Sorry, but the hypocrisy of the whole system has been seriously ticking me off.

YES I tried to get out of some courses (mainly art since the school doesn't understand that I already took enough art classes at my former private school, and the school offers very basic art courses before you can take anything else) next year by applying for online 'option 2' summer course. They rejected my app with the excuse that I would not be in "constant contact with a teacher", and I wasn't "making a portfolio." WHY would I constantly need a teacher for Art History when all the info can be found on the Internet? And they offer an AP art history course w/ no portfolio at the prison (1 week class of it in summer is enough for someone like me..). When I pointed that out an administrator said "Great point, but it's "too late" to change applications". Yet the summer session was still weeks away! I can't even APPEAL anything in this prison!

In class I saw a kid who looked sick and had a stomachache ask to go to the nurse (on the other side of the highschool) and later he came back and said he needed a "pass". I had to go get something washed out of my eye today and, like a prisoner, I made sure I had a pass slip to go with me to the nurse.

Anyway, I can guarantee you that if you ask, most of the kids in this school a month from now what they 'learned' they would have no response and instead give you a list of all their standardized test scores and extracurriculars like good little prisoners.

By the way, read this: http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/18-signs-that-life-in-u-s-public-schools-is-now-essentially-equivalent-to-life-in-u-s-prisons

I just started summer vacations. Just one more year left in that high-school hellhole.

Christ this entire thread really speaks to me. I'm really glad i'm not alone in how i feel about these soul-crushing establishments.

LAST DAY of official prison was today-only finals left.
Now I'll use the summer to recover and then receive my renewed sentence.

^How much longer do you have left?? ^