Your Teacher Experiences

gerbil98 · 2017-05-11T16:25:11+00:00

In my experience, teachers peg dudes as troublemakers pretty much right away.

rocelot7 · 2017-05-11T20:43:52+00:00

I'd recommend the works of John Holt and John Taylor Gatto. Two former grad school teachers who grew disillusioned by the system, though not gendered in their complaints. The issues raised would disproportionately affect males since there are numerous programs and outlets to elevate females from the underlining faults of the system. While male programs and outlets are casually being prohibited and dissolved.

thaumoctopus_mimicus · 2017-05-11T21:56:28+00:00

Just an example: the requirements to pass the boy's pacer test are MUCH higher than the girls. One time when I was doing one, the requirement for boys was over 2x as much as the one for girls. About 1/4 of the girls failed their test, and about 1/2 of the guys failed. And the guys and girls were failing at the same rate.

Impacatus · 2017-05-11T22:13:08+00:00

I don't really know how typical my experience was, since a big part of the reason I struggled is because I had an insecure, anxiety-prone emotionally-abusive parent who insisted on micromanaging my schoolwork. Nevertheless, I will share my experience. This is probably going to be a bit incoherent, since it's a broad question. I was one of the kids on ritalin, for the record.

"Fun" projects were the bane of my existence. By this, I mean things like "draw a comic strip about the digestive system" or "make a scrapbook about the holocaust" (the latter was a real assignment I had to do). Any confidence I had in drawing was destroyed by the aforementioned parent, as was any comfort in being creative when it came to schoolwork. But even if that weren't the case, they weren't fun for me and they didn't help me understand the subject.

When it came to history, my guess is that doing scrapbooks and pictures was supposed to make the stories more relatable, but they had the opposite effect for me and some of my friends. We didn't need to make history small and safe and sanitized to understand it. We liked it epic and violent. Also, the school version was distinctly lacking in heroes. If the history classes of yesteryear made the mistake of over-glorifying white conquerors, the history classes of my youth made the mistake of glorifying no one. It's all fine to learn about how the Native Americans were oppressed by white settlers, but the ones who resisted that oppression to the end were left to the imagination (and boy did they capture my imagination; using all their cunning to find ways to learn to fight a more technologically advanced foe, charging guns and cannons to almost certain doom just for a small chance to protect their culture and way of life...)

One last thought. I remember one time in elementary school, I saw a project on the wall of another classroom that someone had done about Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 more generally. It was the first and last time I remember seeing anyone mention video games on a school project. Most of us spent a HUGE amount of time playing video games, talking about them to each other. But it was like an unwritten rule that no matter how much they tell you to write about your personal experiences, you never actually mentioned the things you spent most of your time doing. You talked about the wholesome things they wanted to hear you were doing. I don't know if girls felt this way or not.

Title	Your Teacher Experiences
Author	EducationForHim
Upvotes	15
Comments	7
Date	May 11, 2017 4:05 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/6al2dc/your_teacher_experiences/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/your-teacher-experiences.922927 https://theredarchive.com/post/922927

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