Students memories or public school
As described in your reading I (Duffy) asked students in my community psychology classes to record their most memorable experience in school No other instructions were given for example I did not tell them to think of a positive or negative experience most incidents recalled by the students were negative and almost all pertained to nonacademic events such as fights disagreements between teachers and students bombs and so on Here are some randomly selected noes
In tenth grade I had a chemistry teacher who enjoyed belittling students one girl was the brunt of almost every joke she was overweight and the called her a whale and would make comments like Nuke the whales Not surprisingly she dropped out of the class but joking didn’t stop One day disgusted with my teacher I raised my hand in the middle of one of his rampages when he called on me I proceeded to tell him that I thought he was the most immature cruel vindictive and irresponsible teacher I’d ever met… He that since I fell I had to come to (this overweight girl’s) rescue that he ‘d just pick on me from then on his teasing of me became nastier than it had been before Four honor students planted a bomb in my high school one night attempting to blow up the school They were all caught tried and sentenced One culprit would have probably been salutatorian The administration hush-hushed the incident so I don’t know why they did it or how long their sentences were
It was the last day of school and my teacher was in the process of distributing our report cards After he had done about three-fourths of the class he announced that any one he hadn’t given on to had to line up at his desk and get their birthday spanking from him before they got the report card (their birthdays were in the summer , so everyone else had gotten their (spanking during the course of the school year) …. Three years later my teacher was convicted of over 100 counts of child moles tation involving his step-daughter I guess these spankings meant a lot more to him than we could have ever known
I had a (Black) friend who got into an argument with a white kid The white kid called (him) a Nigger at one point (big mistake) (My friend ) punched the kid once square in the nose The kid wobbled around for a second or two before he fell unconscious on the floor His nose had a metal plate on it for about a month (My friend ) had to pay medical expenses… A day without a physical fight was very rare
Schools are indeed places of learning but not just of reading writing and arithmetic the whole school environment is a learning experience that can sometimes place the students at risk