I went to highschool during the satanic panic years. A friend and I wanted to start an after school DnD club, we pitched it to the principal (and convinced him it was just a dice adventure game and not Satan worship), and he said yeah you can have a club, but you need a teacher to be preaent and run it.
We had mentioned it to the Music/History teacher, and he volunteered. He joined in a game to see what it was all about, but our DM was running us through something with little action so the Teacher was bored with the time between turns, but he stuck it out the whole year. He’d sit in the corner by himself reading a book, for an hour and a half to two hours, while we played DnD.
What a champion.
Back in the satanic panic era, we had a 7th grade math teacher that played dnd, every friday, as the class assignment. He started doing it because he said it was the best way he had found to get his classes to be able to do basic math, quickly, in their heads, with confidence. It worked.
A few years later, when I was in university, I ran into him, and his wife, at a local games shop, and we started playing dnd again, with a mutual friend we realized we both had after meeting again. It always blows my mind he got away with this, because the school he worked at was a conservative nightmare. He said they left it alone because it was really hard to find a primary school math teacher with an actual math degree, as well as academic background on teaching. So he was somewhat untouchable. The sad part was that like 1/2 the class had to hide the fact we did this from their parents.
Wow, so amazing, and sad at the same time.
I think it really depends on the culture of a school. It gets carried from generation to generation more than you think. That freshman saw this and it clearly had a profound impact. Once those seniors are gone the younger teens are still going to want to emulate that. There are plenty of other external factors that play into this as well though.
i think a lot of that comes from the staff and administration as well. if the adults in the room get annoyed or exhausted by someone with special needs it basically gives the kids permission to be mean. and the staff tends to stick around.
i work with high school sports teams a lot. this DEFINITELY holds true for team culture. the number of high school sports teams that just act like teenage versions of their coaches can be unbelievable.
I always know I’m in for a bad day when the coach is a dick.
It was always particularly unbelievable to me, when teachers chose to get in on the bullying, since it improved their standing with the majority of the class. Like, what the fuck, you’re supposed to be the adult in the room. Instead, you’re such a loser that you depend on the validation of bullying teenagers.
I used to hang out in the art room during lunch in high school. There was a big metal hoop in there for some reason, and one day about ten of us kids climbed inside the hoop and went down the hall to the lunch room, spinning inside it the entire way. A teacher stopped us and said “what is this, guys?” We said “it’s a hoop, sir.” He sent us back to the art room.
Flawless logic, I see nothing wrong with this amswer
I’m gonna need more information about this “hoop.” Do you have any pictures or drawings that can show the size of it? Was it like a giant hula hoop and everyone “spun” inside it while standing? Or was it more like a hamster wheel and kids smooshed along the edge as it rolled? I have no idea what I’m supposed to imagine here.
Was it like a giant hula hoop and everyone “spun” inside it while standing?
This.
My experience was the opposite of this unfortunately. Everyone hated me and even the people who didn’t avoided me because I imagine being associated with me devalued their social standing.
I guess that’s what happens to people that don’t like hotwheels. 🏎️🚗🚕
Next time you’re a child, try liking hotwheels.
Finally, some advice everyone can use.
I actually had plenty of model cars, just not hot wheels! :p
Growing up ADHD in the 80’s and 90’s was… Different.
yeah, it was just starting to kind of come around when i went to school. we had one mainstreamed kid with significant special needs, and most everyone loved him. not to the point of making him homecoming king, but we all looked out for him and once you knew his name you were his friend. Every once in a while (like today) I wonder what happened to him.
I grew up in an era where special needs kids were bullied and assaulted daily. I got punished by the principal for defending myself.
Once a kid “beat me up” and then got very protective of me from that moment on. Like I was his property.
Male teenagers are weird
I wasn’t even physically injured. I actually just faked being hurt so he’d stop. He just tried to punch me in the stomach several times. Not a sucker punch. I saw it coming and literally just tensed it so his fists just bounced off.
I heard teachers once saying that they rather deal with boy drama than girl drama. Boys typically fight each other and get over it. You just put them both in detention (or can even leave it, as a detention can cause more animosity). While girls seem to fall out and have grudges.
Should look him up OP or is one of those situation where it’s better not knowing ?
apparently corporal punishment for students was still legal in germany until 1973 and in bavaria until 1979, and still had popular support by then. people can be insane and cruel sometimes.
Bavaria is part of Germany, like Texas is part of the USA.
From my limited understanding Bavaria has some weirdness going on with its autonomy compared to a lot of Germany. It was the biggest kingdom integrated into the German Empire and so it got a lot of concessions if memory serves right, don’t know how much of this is still true but I wouldn’t be surprised if Bavaria enjoyed some special privileges.
That’s like a mirror universe version of my high school. Was this recent? Talking to my nieces, it seems like the public school experience has changed dramatically over the past few decades, and I’m grateful for it.
It’s the people, not the institution. If you have good leaders, you get good results. See: USA for reference.
When I was in primary school, the smart kids were the popular ones and the less so ones weren’t.
Although this is in a class of 20-25 kids, half boys, half girls. So like, the “popular” kids and the other group for each gender was just a friend group of 5 people.
Anyway it wasn’t until the end someone realised the actual meaning of popular and said I was the most popular as I was friends with and hung out with both groups.
That is nice. I wont be able to share any nice autism stories from high school.
Wholesome.
Do people in high school really know when your birthday is and give you gifts?
Sometimes! At my high school, it was a thing for your friends to decorate your locker for your birthday as a surprise. One year my friends covered my locker in Christmas wrapping paper with a giant drawing of a dog on it, because our running gag at the time was that my hairstyle made me look like a spaniel
I think this dates you (as it would me), because kids don’t use their lockers anymore. I think newer schools don’t have them at all, maybe. My kid was in high school ten years ago, and he told me no one used their lockers, everyone just carried everything in their backpacks.
Depends on the people, but sure, sometimes!
not gifts, but i’d throw parties every year with about 50-60 people attending. my 18th had about 100. We had a large yard.
Dayum. I always thought big birthday parties were a Hollywood thing.
Nah, the hollywood portrayal, outside of everyone looking like 25 year old models, and having stylized dialogue, was pretty on point from my experience.
i’m a musician. had several larger social groups, and then there’s the people who haven’t figured out how dorky musicians actually are and think we’re cool.
I’m a musician too but back then all I was was extremely socially awkward (we’re talking Bocchi would look normal next to me).
If people were generally nice to him, I can see someone with autism getting excited for their birthday and announcing it to everyone weeks beforehand…
Nope.
Not me, but my producer, Sendo, as we call him in the Cocules Media sphere.
He’s been making music starting with GarageBand at the age of 10. Mostly, it was hip-hop/rap before he turned to singer/songwriter and maybe a few different genres after that. In that case, as far as I’m aware, he’s been known to perform in front of his class for some events outside his middle school before performing in front of larger crowds on a few different types of music. His biggest musical performance was when he played guitar with a singer/songwriter piece that he no longer remembers (despite writing it himself), and it was in front of some 700+ people (this was, I think, during junior year). Mind you, he had a lot of influence, and it showed in his behavior during sophomore year when he said some things that got him suspended for a week during sophomore year.
He first started it when he sent a song over to a close friend of his back in 2015, when he was 13 (his friend was also 13). One thing led to another, and his two other friends also caught wind of it, and the four of them started writing songs together, though Sendo would produce all of them and perform them. He wasn’t a good producer (like he is nowadays using Ardour and/or Zrythm on the Arch Linux-based CachyOS), but over time, he changed his technique to improve big time. His old music is on SoundCloud on an account that’s inaccessible, but it’s still there regardless.
His music nowadays is insanely talented composition in my eyes, especially since I learned how to produce straight from him (I produced some pieces for a Vtuber group that is on the verge of debuting soon, a group of indies in particular), and I plan on releasing some pieces myself soon once I learn how to verify myself on a few platforms like DistroKid (if that’s even possible for me). Despite that, I still have plans on producing, and even collaborating with him, though he’s currently working on an EP to add to a previous one, of which I didn’t even know about until he told me what he was doing.
That’s what I have on him as of right now.
