Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Tag: education

• School Wisdom

  Posted at 1:20 pm by kayewer, on February 23, 2025

  (Originally Published September 03, 2017)

  Take it from somebody who has been there: if you get to school and wind up getting bullied, it’s not about you, but them. I lived through some powerful antagonism when I was in school, and my future came out okay.

  School is not really about who you are now, but what you need to build now to be better later. The truth is that you are all learning together, and you rise or fall differently all the time. Some days you sail through everything, but the next day nothing is right, and you may wind up walking through those doors and finding everybody else seems to be up while you’re down. It’s okay. It happens that way. Just heave a sigh and make it through one day, and the next day will change. It always does.

  The bullies always make it seem as if they are in the know and you are not. How do they know anything? Did they take a smart pill? Are they on a fast track to rushing through life without knowing what they’re doing? You’re all on the same track, but while some folks know some things about a lot of things, others know a lot about one or two things. That’s all okay: that’s what makes us individuals.

  Somebody may pick on you and say you’re ugly. The truth is, they’re probably feeling kind of ugly, and that is scary for everybody your age. You’re all changing so fast, it’s hard to look great every day, but your folks still make you go to school. So you woke up on the right side of the bed that morning, and they didn’t, or vice versa. They have the issues, not you.

  They may hate your clothes, or your accessories, because theirs are “better,” but that’s their opinion. Clothes get outgrown, break zippers or get stains that don’t come out, whether they cost $10.99 or $1,099.00. The difference is that you can replace the $10.99 ones easier, and the folks who spend $1,099.00 are simply broker faster.

  When a bully picks on something about you, have you ever noticed that they look a little nervous or scared? That’s because they’re having issues, and they’re taking it out on you. They don’t know you, or why you are yourself and not like them. They wonder if what you are is okay, just like they wonder if what they are is okay. Insecurity is part of anger, and it’s powerful. You really have nothing to do with their problems. They never come out and offer you a way to get their better clothes or accessories or beauty secrets to lend you a hand up to where they are in their lofty superiority, do they? So it’s not about that at all. They will get where they need to be, and it won’t be because they had to walk over you to get there, but because they applied themselves, just as you will.

  It’s been a long time since I got out of school, and some of the people who were bound to come out this way or that are nowhere to be found today. They’re not on magazine covers, that’s for sure. That’s because it’s all just about building yourself when you’re in school. When it’s over, you’ll be moving on to better things. Don’t pay the bullies any mind. We all get where we are destined to go, in much the same way. Your parents will tell you about the school bullies, the nerds, the unpopular ones, the beauties and the wallflowers they knew. This has gone on for ages. The bad ones get theirs, and the good ones still reach their goals.

  You won’t be this version of you forever. Look at the goal; that’s nothing to be afraid of.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged bullying, education, life, mental-health, writing

• Do You Read Me? Over

  Posted at 3:19 pm by kayewer, on February 1, 2025

  Success is often measured by whether you were among the many to attain it. High school graduation is one example, as a steady line of older teenagers walk in procession to shake the hands of the school executives and obtain their diplomas.

  Occasionally, however, the measure of true success comes from what you did that was different from the masses. For a high school graduate named Aleysha Ortiz, her diploma meant something much more than surviving twelve years of a public school education system.

  Aleysha came into the Hartford, Connecticut schools after her family moved stateside from Puerto Rico when she was only six years old. She had no English skills at all. The education system apparently didn’t have or offer ESL (English as a Second Language) courses to young elementary school students. Words meant nothing to her because she couldn’t decipher them. The few she managed to reason out came from association, such as through subtitles on television or karaoke lyrics.

  She struggled with classes, not just due to the lack of attention, but her diagnosis of ADHD, problems involving her being able to handle writing tools such as pencils, speech issues and the language barrier. Realize that she was in school in 2012, with fewer resources than are available today, but with lesson plans individualized to each student, and which were generally ignored by the faculty.

  Once Aleysha was able to utilize text-to-speech, she dedicated herself to spending her evenings bringing her grades up. Google became her educator.

  She graduated high school unable to read or write English, and with little to no math skills. Legal processes are being started against the system for not only their neglect, but their ignorance of Aleysha’s needs. If they didn’t understand her spoken communication, they simply shrugged it off without taking the extra step to find a speech therapist for her. She would be punished instead of redirected when things became difficult for the teachers or principal. Staff even laughed at her.

  Through her efforts and perseverance, Aleysha became an honor student eligible for graduation with some conditions, including deferring her diploma for more focused remedial instruction. Deciding that was too little too late, Aleysha began taking part-time college classes last August and, while the legal investigation continues, she is determined to help others like her who are not given the boost they need to catch up within the public school system.

  Public schools do not want to individualize the students’ needs. They want to crank every student through the system just like a car is built on a production line. This is why cars are recalled after leaving the plant; when there is a defect, the car still gets delivered and the company decides to deal with problems later.

  A person unable to read or write standard English at age 19 is not a problem to deal with later. It’s an opportunity to take a detour with the usual assembly line education system and give the attention needed to the problem. Parents should also be on board with this philosophy. Your child is not like one hundred others, nor should they be treated like one. This also means that, when something is short of what is expected, time to fix it before moving on is vital.

  Many schools from other countries do not take summer breaks. This doesn’t mean the families don’t take vacations, but life and school are treated the same way; as a part of everyday growth. Children learn daily, and not by taking one straight road, but by detouring to where the language skills get tweaked or the math abilities get reinforced, and then resuming the main road to becoming a fully educated young adult.

  The system failed Aleysha. How are they failing, or have they already failed, your children?

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged college, education, learning, news, teaching

• Getting the Message

  Posted at 7:14 pm by kayewer, on November 23, 2024

  Before a certain illness sent the world workforce home, we employees operated in huge buildings with cubicles, phones, computers, printers, drawers filled with paper plates and napkins, and cabinets for smoker’s coats and non-smoker’s coats.

  My office also had huge screens hanging throughout the department, and on which our call center statistics were displayed. In addition, we had slides relevent to our jobs and designed to bring us together as a department. I was in charge of preparing those slides.

  We were preparing to go with a new vendor, and training had barely begun back in March 2020 when we were exiled to our houses to work. Ultimately the building I worked in was shut down, mothballed and vacated, but we learned that our displays could be accomplished on our computers, so the process began to license individual viewers, train us in producing and editing the boards, and finally testing the program.

  My former boss and I were the two trainees for the system, so after the duo became a solo, I was left with the responsibility of working with the boards’ production company and a few selected test subjects from our department to see how the system worked. It took a few weeks to work out the kinks. Nobody could actually summon the system, including me. The IT staff were boggled, but then when dealing with strings of computer commands, IT’s mission is to be boggled. Finally the coding was completed, the errors fixed and we began the odyssey of producing message boards for users in two departments. We have used the system for a year already.

  I have found joy in assembling the slides for the project. Once a month, I put together visual guides to our co-workers’ birthdays and anniversaries, as well as monthly scrolling text, ego-boosters and more. Overall, our departments enjoyed about two minutes of content each month, all lovingly assembled by yours truly.

  During a lull in the usual reporting and other duties I normally do when I’m not enjoying putting together board content, I assembled what I would need for 2025 in terms of positive messages from corporate icons such as CEOs and specialist speakers on topics of interest to workers. I had a rhythm going with the slide content, and the harmony of it was good for the soul. It’s wonderful when things work.

  Occasionally the network would need a reboot, and I would send word out to the users that it would be restored soon. I would get a polite thank you, and soon the system would be updating data and entertaining the masses.

  Then I was present at a management and supervisory meeting as notetaker this past week, and the subject of disseminating information came up. I piped up and volunteered to add content to our message boards so it would be accessible to us, since the department took up the majority of licensed viewers.

  The department manager then said simply, “Oh, the boards are dead. We didn’t renew the contract.”

  There is no moment so embarassing than when you are the first line on a project, but the last to know the latest about it. I sat there on Zoom, in front of about a dozen participants, and I didn’t even have a certain lower body part to have in my hand (to coin a phrase) and complete the humiliation. Fortunately I did not have my video on, or I would’ve looked like a fish on land breathing its last.

  So when I had the chance to talk to my direct manager, I found out the horrible truth. Back when the boards were on overhead monitors, they were a constant presence that one could see or ignore. Once the information was placed onscreen on monitors, it was an annoyance which could be completely ignored by not signing into it at all. With all the applications our agents were already using, the display took last place. After reviewing the usage data, the only regular viewers were my manager and myself.

  It’s a case of holding a party that nobody attended.

  The experience was great while it lasted, and at least part of my efforts–the birthdays and anniversaries–still appear on another platform. And I know for a fact that people see them, because the slides are copied to at least one department at the start of each month.

  I also enjoyed the work involved. It will be replaced by other tasks, which are already pending training for me and a few others. I guess when one monitor goes off, another one comes on.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Tagged community, digital-marketing, education, humor, news

• Not Where We’re From

  Posted at 7:56 pm by kayewer, on February 24, 2024

  American schools are catching a lot of grief these days. It seems the young people we’re handing a diploma don’t know half as much as their parents or grandparents did. College is now the equivalent of high school in some cases, at least in terms of educational level. Today’s graduates don’t know what continents are, how to make change at the cashier, or even how to spell or write their own names.

  That’s why an article about other countries’ schools and their impression of our educational system caught my attention.

  The first subject brought up was how early we begin classes. In England, children enter schooling full-time starting as young as age four, and it’s mandatory at age five. The school day begins at 8:30 and ends at 4:00 or earlier.

  Another question is about the yellow school buses. Other countries have them to some degree, but many kids take public transit. Oh, for those of you with an eye for detail: the black lines on the sides of our school buses are indicators of the locations of the floor and tops of the seats (in general). Those are known as “rub rails” and also provide structural support for the length of the bus.

  Another bone of contention for folks outside the US are our use of hall passes for students to leave the classroom to use the restroom. Other countries’ students are permitted to take that break without carrying around a token which must be returned, but then those other places don’t have folks who sneak outside to smoke at the tender age of nine, and they don’t deal with deranged invaders bursting into our educational buildings ready to make a last stand. By the way, in my office we needed a key for the restroom, so as the admin I had to come up with a way to keep track of them. I used a bungee keyring and a foam flower sponge which could be hung on the supervisors’ desks for easy access. Never lost one.

  Apparently students abroad don’t all do any sort of ritual morning exercise such as saluting the flag, recitations or singing. Some Asian countries do, such as Singapore and South Korea. I suppose a pause to play “God Save the King” would be the equivalent in Britain if such a thing were done, but we were raised on the ideals of remembering we’re in a unique country, and our loyalty to what it represents just happens to come in the form of this daily reminder.

  Apparently students also don’t use lockers in other countries. Folks abroad see these in movies and are intrigued by the idea. They never had to remember the combination, obviously. Other amazing things to outsiders are cafeterias (with several different shifts), and milk cartons with school meals.

  The idea of naming each school year’s students as Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors is unheard of as well. Just like in Harry Potter movies, students abroad are just in their tenth year or whatever. And the term “Frosh” never sat right with me when I was in ninth grade, anyway.

  Other schools have fewer classes in the curriculum, fewer hours and smarter students. Our schools have a variety of choices, and students are worn out and less educated. Maybe there is a reason for this.

  Gym classes: why on God’s green earth did we have to climb a rope suspended from the ceiling? Why was I a failure just because I could not swing around the uneven bars? I never had to do either of these in over four decades, and if the requirement were on a job application, I’d make for the door. Even the Navy didn’t ask these of me, so why require it of little kids?

  Student parking. The pinacle of teen superiority is the privilege of simultaneously getting your driving permit, a new car and a parking spot near school. You’ve got it at 17. It’s all downhill from there when your college degree won’t let you drive a pre-owned clunker and everybody takes up the good parking spaces in the neighborhood before you get home from your burger-flipping job.

  Sorry, my high school didn’t get parking for seniors until years after I left, and I gratefully got handed down and drove around in my father’s old car when he bought a new one. I missed out, and I live here.

  Amazingly, other countries’ schools have more windows, fewer or no vending machines, no swimming pools (no swim teams or swim clubs, either) and no drinking fountains.

  Pep ralllies are also strange to folks not from these here parts. The high school system seems to be rallied around the fall/winter ritual of football, with posters encouraging young athletes to win and school colors all over the halls and on the student bodies. The band plays the fight song, the cheer squad works the students in the crowd into a frenzy, and it’s time off from class.

  Which is possibly why our system isn’t working as well as it could.

  Interesting to see how others see us. We could learn a thing or two from them.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged education, news, scholarship, scholarships, school

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  	Eden on Getting the Message
  	Eden on The Unasked Questions
  	Eden on And Her Shoes Were #9
  	Eden on The Poison Field
  	Eden on Final Tally