imagine – REALLY imagine that there’s someone on the fringes of your friend group who’s kinda glommed onto you because you’re too nice to tell him he’s weird and to fuck off, so you let him follow you around and you invite him to stuff because it seems to make him happy and because no one else really likes him so you feel bad and even though he’s annoying and condescending sometimes you make him feel like he’s your friend, and then he adds you on Facebook and you see this and know it is about you
“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” –Jorie Graham, in a conversation
Capital classes: I wonder why “eat the rich” and guillotine jokes are so popular among millennials?
Also Capitalists:
EAT
THE
RICH
good god
Ew, gross. That sounds like the sort of thing my abusive special ed school would have been glad to put up. They were all about “positive attitude” and otherwise behaving like a shitty corporation. I mean, I’m talking about a school that had a program giving us work experience, but they paid us a joke stipend of 50 cents per session, and as if that wasn’t insult enough, we would be docked two pennies from that pittance of a stipend for every point we didn’t earn. And when I say point we didn’t earn, I mean that those could be lost for things (like being misheard) that are nowhere near the level of offense that would get an employee’s pay docked in any non-toxic company. We sometimes had the option of saving the money, but even for those (like me) who did save it, we got 20 bucks maximum for 4 hours/week of work throughout the school year.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they de facto required us (all the high school students) to attend an event each year that parents signed a permission slip for and had to pay money for. And I saw what happened to a student who didn’t get his permission slip signed (could’ve been any number of reasons, not just forgetfulness but also possibly poverty or something like that). The school gave him back the permission slip (which I’m pretty sure was unsigned as I didn’t see a signature on it), and also docked the cost of the event (a little over eleven bucks, I think) from that already pitiful stipend (which he had saved), with a note telling him that he “needed to fulfill his financial obligations”. Right. Financial obligations that had to do with their work program de facto requiring him to attend the event and get his parents to pay up for it. As in, maybe technically he could have skipped the event, but they still brought him along and deducted the cost of the event from his stipend, even though the permission slip wasn’t signed. Which is shitty on a number of levels – not only the student getting stiffed (in a way that would make him very, very reluctant to ask his parents for the money), but also this – you’d think if a permission slip isn’t signed, that means the student isn’t supposed to attend the event! So the fact that they dragged him along anyway shows that the (corporate-themed) event really was a de facto requirement, and the asking for parental permission was little more than a charade. And if the slip was signed, that means in all likelihood his parents couldn’t afford to give him the money for the trip, and they should have called the parents rather than docking the cost from the boy’s already meager stipend. Seriously.
In other words, this is a case of a school acting exactly like a shitty corporation. A really shitty and toxic one. So shitty and toxic that the supervising teachers in my work placements felt more like bosses than the actual bosses of the place. Actual bosses who often gave us a couple gifts as a special thank-you at the end of the stint (which suggests that those bosses, those real bosses, didn’t agree with that joke of a stipend, either, and they knew they couldn’t afford to pay us because it was an internship of sorts without a salary stipulation, and so they figured that they could use the gifts to make it so we had an overall compensation that was a little better and a little more thoughtful than that pittance of a stipend and that would make it feel like maybe we were able to actually get something out of the work).
•Bringing a student off campus without parental consent is illegal
•Most unpaid internships (in the US) are actually illegal. They’re only legal if they benefit the intern, not the employer (or in this case, the school), don’t replace paid employees and are genuinely educational (most aren’t).
gayfeline 