I'd like to talk about the education system here in Ontario. Someone got me thinking about it last week and now that I have the time you're all going to suffer.
It's no secret that I have A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. which, if you didn't know, is part of why my posting is sporadic. When I was diagnosed with them as a child they moved me in to a Learning Disabled program. While I can't speak to the current state of those programs when I was there it was not tailored to help me. It was a place to keep me away from the children who were easy to teach, since a ten year-old with the attention span of a gnat can be quite disruptive.
The class was filled primarily with children who were struggling to read and write at "their" level, and the program was structured to help them. I'm happy to say that of the classmates I've made contact with over the years they all seem to have gone on to be, at least moderately, successful adults. The system is not useless, not for them. I wasn't there to improve my reading and writing, I got bored, fast, and while I'm not above bragging about my intelligence what's important is that I didn't need help in the areas the class offered. The class had one exercise that I got anything from, everyday we would come in and there would be a poem on the board. Not always a whole poem, but enough that double spaced, in childishly large printing, it took up half a page in our notebooks. For the rest of the class it was about reading, writing, and repetition. To me it was about the power of words. I'd always loved to read and write, but this was the most recurring example in my early life that words could be beautiful and powerful. Some days I would do it twice, the only thing I liked more was my "30 minutes" of reading. While the rest of the class was working on their "chapter books" I was cracking away at Dracula, Animal Farm, and 1984(Thanks Mom), or if I was feeling un-ambitious a young adult book. My teachers always seemed hesitant to ask me to stop reading, I suspect that was because it kept me quiet and occupied. I spent three years in that class, because it wasn't broken up by grade level. Half my day was spent in normal level classes, but I walked in and out of those classes as "the L.D. kid" I was the guy who "needed" help. Not many of the other kids would let me forget that. Most of the teachers weren't much better, I was a handful and time I wasn't in their class was time I wasn't being a distraction.
What's the point of all this? The system is not designed to make it easy for people like me to be successful. It would be paranoid fantasy to say it was built to make me fail, but it didn't know what to do with me. I was strange, I asked odd questions, I got bored and frustrated easily. Those things together say trouble maker. Was I a bad kid? Sometimes. It felt like the world was stacked against me a lot of days. As an adult I see that the world is against us all, really, but as an eleven year-old I felt like it was just me. The daily reminder that everyone else seemed to fit in just fine is what I single out as the likely source.
When I moved on to middle school I entered an alternative program. A lot of my time there was spent wrapping myself in the fashionable alienation that my new peers were all already sporting. Black and military green, leather boots and silver chains. By high school I'd added electric blue hair, which I still dearly miss now that I've got a "grown-up" job, and my ubiquitous goatee, which is so 90's it hurts.
My time at school only ever really taught me that the world at large just wants the homogeneous bits. That I'd be welcome if I was willing to do and say the right things, even if they ground against the bits of myself that were precious to me. Smarten up. Dumb it down. Cut your hair. Keep the questions tame. Watch your language. Read a book. Not that book. Wear different clothes. Don't stand out. Stand up for yourself. Tattle on people. Get a job. Get a NORMAL job. Be a role model. Not that kind of role model.
I'm proud of the person my life has made me, even when I don't particularly like myself. Even if I'm never successful in the slightest.
-James
1 comment:
You're selling yourself short James.
You are successful even though you don't know it. Success may be known as 'make it big and be recognized by the masses' but you've done that in small ways. Look at all the little victories you've accomplished and the people who know you because of those victories. Most of the people you know are those molded homogeneous bits, hell I was molded into one of those things, and although you have whatever you have, you are no different than the person on the streetcar who sits beside you. I know I'm rambling but you being different is better than you being the same as everyone else. You'd be boring as hell if you were like us. :)
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