I frequently find myself questioning the teaching population lately, even with my parents being part of this population. Yes, there may be thousands of rules against them punishing students now-a-days, but that still shouldn't fog their judgement. They can still punish students in a sense.
Being part of the more "nerdly" clique of sorts, I have a pretty good rep with teachers, as do my friends. There are the perks; teachers never asking you if you've done your homework (just assuming you've done it), doing special tasks in class, getting special exceptions and extentions on projects... the list conintues. Yet, despite the people they learned to trust, the "nerdly" types, screaming in their faces, they still can't see the discrimination we recieve nearly daily within the classroom. And sometimes it's even the teacher doing the discriminating.
Just to show you just how much this bothers me (and us) I'll give you today's example.
Welcome to our civics class. As most of our classes are, there's two sides. The preppy kids, the kids who goof off and get away with it, and the suck-ups (wanna-bes) [here out known collectively as the "preps"] vs. the Nerds and those who are wise enough to side with us. And let me tell you, the people who side with us get some of those perks too! :)
Now, you might say, that's kind of discriminatory of you to label them all like that, but now, I don't have a choice. That's what they call themselves, we call ourselves Nerds, and that's the way it's always been. It's the only way I can indentify them to you.
Anyways, we're doing an "diplomat" activity to renforce our knowledge of International Governing, and, as usual, the class divides itself as the Nerds and the preps. Also as usual, the everyone cheats, only this time, to the point where us Nerds had no choice but to cheat too. After the activity had ended and we were discussing which what was "fair" and should be "counted", we had agreed with one side of the preps who had had an issue with the other side. I thought just for a brief second that people might actually not dis us in the end like they had during the activity.
I was wrong. When our turn came up to voice an issue, and we voiced the same issue as half the prep group had, and suddenly, it was fine to break that rule. We had lost it by that point. We all had our hands up to speak. But the teacher completely ignored us and devoted her attention to the other side who spoke out of turn, taking in all their sides and only giving one of us the chance to speak in defense. We lost all of the things our team had "counted". Why? Because the teacher decided to side with the backstabbing group.
And if that's not enough evidence to prove they were discriminating against us, from there on out every issue had to do with one of OUR broken rules, even though the other teams had broken exactly the same rules. They had no reason to pick on us besides the fact that we were, well frankly, Nerds. That was it.
And the teacher REFUSED to enforce a rule against them when I pointed out that one of their claims went against the ORIGINAL laid out rules. Yet she was so keen to enforce rules against us. When we stopped raising our hands and just spoke out, she glared at us and all but told us to shut up. Being the goody twoshoes that we are, we just dropped it. But not without burning rage inside.
This is just one of the things that happens nearly everyday. And it doesn't make sense to me.
Here you have a group of born leaders, people who catch on quick and are more than willing to help their peers. Yet, almost everyday, we're brought down by incompetent fools. Not because they out wit us, in fact it's quite the opposite, but because they out number us. For our own safety, we can only reach our full potential through written assignments. And even then sometimes we aren't rewarded for what we deserve.
It also shocks me how teachers get confused at how much poorer we do academically at group work when we don't work together. We can't trust our peers.
It's a cold world for us. We are shown very little mercy from the people we care about feeling accepted from. And though we may one day get our justice during post-secondary education, we make no promises we won't come back to haunt them when we become their bosses.
That was a sad ending. Epic fail. :P
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