the real truth about my sisters' school

my sisters both attend a religious school, as i did in grades K-6. the first school, as far as i can remember, had excellent academics, and i had 2 friends. Life was good. Then, in grade 2, we moved. My new school's academics SUCKED. I daydreamed class away and got 100s every time. For 3 and 1/2 out of 4 years. But it seemed to be just me who felt that way. Hell, all the other kids were oh-so-worried whenever an upcoming test was mentioned! There was no brain-work involved, just rote memorization, which doesn't require thinking. The whole social thing didn't work out well either. In grades 2-3, i had friends, but in the 4th grade they mixed the classes. And guess who had all their friends put in the other class?
I eventually left that dead end of a school, and went on to bigger and better things in grade 7. but my 2 younger sisters stayed. And guess what? The little sister right after me is/was bored too! And she was also different from the other kids (by not being brainwashed, not from a combo of AS and not being brainwashed, as had been my case)! Which lead me to the conclusion that it is not I who has the problem, but the school.
I felt liberated.
While I managed to escape relatively unharmed, my sister, who knows there is something better thanks to what I tell her about my school, has attracted the attention of the teachers. Which is a bad thing in that place. My general survival rule for that place would definitely be "Be polite to authority by keeping your views hidden form them." Last year, she had a real dumb ass of a 19-year-old teacher, who felt threatened by my sister's greater intelligence and clarity of mind. She hated my sister. Even my sister's friends agreed with that, and they loved this teacher. So one day when the class Entertainers (haven't you noticed there is always a group of kids in any given class who feel it their duty to shock others with information such as rumors and facts that most don't learn until a few years down the road?) spread the word about what the term "getting married" meant. The horror of fourth graders knowing, oh the horror! I was literally clutching my guts in laughter over the fact that no one knew until the fourth grade! So one really dumb kid mentioned it during class- how can one be that dumb?- and the teacher panicked. Because in this school you weren't supposed to know, and definitely not supposed to talk about it. To her mind there could be only 4 "perpetrators"- the 3 entertainers or my sister.
Of course, having gained some sense- at last!- the entertainers denied it. The problem was that my sister had denied it too. So instead of knowing that people will save their hides in these situations, she decided that Lil Sis had lied.
So she took my sister into this boiler room/closet and said "Tell me everything you know about "getting married."
And my sister said "My mother says not to talk about it in school. And I didn't." but shoe wasn't satisfied and kept on interrogating her in the closet.
When my sister told me about this, I howled with laughter and gasped out "You probably know more about Doing It than she does, and she has a complex about the idea that someone half her age is more knowledgeable than her!" My family agreed.
There was another incident involving those cursing symbols you see in cartoons. My sister hadn't understood the day's math and had drawn some to express her frustration, which I totally support, being all for art therapy. She saw that she would get in trouble for it, and tried to erase it, but the teacher told her "Don't erase it, I want to see it", thus trapping her.
Am I the only one who realized that to notice 1 kid out of 28, you must be paying them more attention than the other kids? My sister isn't a "slow" kid or a behavior issue either- I've met plenty of those folks, and she's not 1 of them. So who does a teacher watch aside from those kids? The ones she views as a threat. And, as I'm proud to say, my sister is a real threat.
The teacher saw the symbols and "spoke" (read: interrogated in the closet) to Sis about them. She said she wouldn't tell the principal about them, and promptly broke her word 2 hr.s later. My sister found herself in the principal's office the following day. And guess who he blamed it on? Her public-school bum of a sister- ME!!!
First of all, while I am many things, I am NOT a bum! This man had interviewed me in the 2nd grade when I'd applied to his school, and the 6th grade teacher had mentioned my stellar behavior to him. I had been the brainy, nice, quiet kid, the one who keeps in the shadows, who people wonder what they're thinking.
And suddenly I was a bum, just because i went to public school. 4 years flushed down the tube because this man was too afraid to admit that the source might be him (indeed, she 1st saw the symbols in Kindergarten in a book in the school library), too stubborn to listen to testimony that I never curse at home (school's another story, but that's for another post).
In the end my parents had to miss half a day of work for that bullshit.
So yeah, that was a messed-up year, but we were still in the dark. We thought it was the teacher that was the issue, not the school. Yeah, the principal had been really immature about confronting the issues. So we settled on the general strategy that if we avoided any problems, all would go well.
Aside from being incompetent and 19, this year's teacher was OK, until last week, when my sister was complaining about the teacher's review games to her friends during Break. These games earn you extra credit points, but you can win if you have a good team and you yourself know nothing about the subject. The teacher then calls her over ad tells her to work on her respect and said that respect comes before everything, "even good grades".
It's called the First Amendment, of our Constitution. What that teacher did was unconstitutional.
The final straw was finally loaded onto this exhausted camel on Monday, when the lunch lady molested Sis by squeezing her chest area and slapping her butt. While that lunch lady had always creeped me out,I hadn't known that she was a freaking pedophile. Pedophiles who act on their urges get a 5-year sentence, in my state anyways.
So our good ol' pal the principal gets a visit from my parents about this rather disturbing incident. And he didn't believe them until my sister testified. Yeah. My parents missed half a day of work so they could upset you and upset your 1984 world. Like they don't have a family of 6 to support. They just told you for kicks, to inconvenience you. GET REAL.
She won't get fired either. My Sister's teacher is going to "keep an eye" on my sister when she washes her hands in the sink, where it happened. Like that's going to do anything. Let me spell it out: The teacher who feels threatened by her is going to protect her against the resident pedophile you refuse to fire unless another incident is reported. As if pedophiles generally strike the same person twice. As if pedophiles who work in schools strike that often. Principal, are you retarded?
Faced with this dark 1984 madness with this Big Brotherly principal (you have to see his walk, talk and office to get it, and I'm too tired to go into detail. Maybe later), my parents are pulling my two sisters from this abyss of cruel irrationality. My other sister, being 5, hasn't yet suffered.
So what can you, the bored/impatient reader, learn from this rant?
1) Do not send your kid/go to a religious private school owned by the principal. If they own their school, they can do what ever they want. And get away with it. My academic knowledge had unforgivable gaps in it, due to not following the government's curriculum.
2) Do not go to a religious school unless you know that they aren't narrow-minded and censoring. You don't want to end up as the entertainers did, with a lowered conduct grade, for discussing basic childhood curiosities. Also, the intellectual/questioning kids will feel stifled.
3) Know your rights. Read up on situations that hopefully won't but might occur in a school system. After I hit the books, I learned that Lunch Lady can get a 5-year sentence, among other things. I have a friend who attended Catholic School for elementary school, and he would read these thick law books (I know. try imagining a tall thin second grade nerd quoting things he could sue the nuns over from a 6-inch-thick book, and you have my friend) and scare those nuns to death. He was treated with a respect stemming from fear throughout elementary school, better than the other kids. If you are in a situation,Try it (without the book, just the terminology)! If nothing better, you'll get a few laughs.
4) BE VOCAL!! No one wants (their kid) to experience any of the above spread of bizarreness. The private school model works both ways- if you supply the dough, you call the shots- and- no higher power is watching the school, so it can get away with murder. Do I need to spell it out? PARENTS, BECOME THAT HIGHER POWER. I wrote a rather, if I may be so presumptuous to say, excellent poem about this school, and am getting it published in the primary vent newspaper of my religion. Only, I won't sign it or write the name of the school. This way, if people relate to my poem (and the few I have felt secure enough to share my work with have had a lot to say, mostly empathy mixed with humor) they will write in to the paper, and thus, every school Orthodox school's issues will come out simultaneously! Then i will write in saying that I am the author.
I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i hope people who read it and don't know me won't wonder about my sanity (the folks who read it already know that I'm craaaaaaaaazzyyy ;)


Thanks, as always, for reading the rants about my bizarre world.