My English Essay (and yes, I turned it like this):
There are so many things wrong the school system today. Unfair and sexist dress codes, projects and papers that limit imagination and creativity, disregards to students with mental disorders, and so much more. What I’m going to do is go through the most recurring matters in detail because I’ve been waiting for years to do something like this. I’m a teenager so obviously I’m all over social media. This morning I asked people on various websites asking them to tell me their school system corruption stories. These include what I’ve said above racism, homophobia, and, again, so much more. Throughout this paper I will share their stories as examples and show my conclusion on them as a whole and individually. I’ve had a lot of coffee so you better get ready for this.
Dress Code is one of the biggest issues. In some places, you can wear a crop top and not get dress coded. In other places, if you don’t wear a bra, you get dress coded. We’ll start with the first one though. One person has told me about a girl who a crop top with only her chest covered and didn’t get dress coded at all the entire day and a boy wore high heels and got dress coded as soon he stepped into the school. That also falls in forced gender roles, but we’ll get back to that in a bit.
That’s the dress code is for some places. This is how it is most other places:
Girls: Tights and leggings are considered skin (obviously, what else would they be, clothing?). Skirts and dresses normally must come down to the knee (can’t have anyone knowing that I have skin covering my thighs). Shirts should cover cleavage (because god forbid anyone know I have boobs). Sleeves should be at least two inches (gotta hide those pesky shoulders so every boy in a five mile radius doesn’t get a boner). Red makes you look like an attention seeker. Don’t wear it. Shorts should pass your fingertips (now I can get heatstroke like I’ve always wanted).
Boys: Noticeable makeup (ex. Eyeshadow, eyeliner, lipstick) is forbidden. No heels. No skirts. No dresses. (Basically anything that gives the school the “right” to tell you that you’re not “masculine enough”, because they can definitely and legally do that). Anything thing else that makes you stand out from the hundreds of mindless clones society has made us into will not be permitted. Please don’t be covered in trash (or do, it’s not like anyone will notice because everyone else is making sure no one knows girls have bodies). Now I know it say that girls can’t show cleavage but you are more than welcomed to sag (especially if you have a belt because those are clearly just for decoration/fashion) and show everyone what color underwear you’re wearing today.
I remember last year, one of my friends got dress coded for having a hole in the knee (nothing in the handbook said that that in violation of the dress code) and had to spend the entire day in ISS since her mother worked out of the city and couldn’t bring her new pants.
The dress code is to force boys to be masculine, and the girls to be as least distracting to boys as possible. It teaches us that our sons’ intelligence and learning environment is not only more important than our draughts’ but also our daughters’ comfort. We’ve walked on the moon but girls can’t wear shorts because some hormonal boy who has never been taught about boundaries will fail all of his classes if he sees legs.
I have seen countless arguments that girls “need to get off their high horses and realize that dress codes are so staff and faculty don’t get sued for sexualizing girls”. Here’s the problem with that, though: staff and faculty are sexualizing girls and nothing is getting done about it. I’ve had women teachers who are attracted/married to other women never once look at my chest. I’ve had grown men teachers with wives and children stare at my chest. It’s not about letting girls wear whatever they want to school, it’s about being forced to wear things that make them uncomfortable and that they should be insecure about their body. I’ve seen pictures of half-naked girls complaining that they got dress coded. Obviously, those girls are not very smart because if a boy had gone to school in just his underwear, he definitely would have been dress coded too. Because that makes sense.
We teach girls that they should feel uncomfortable in school and therefore in public if they wear anything that “shows off” our bodies. That we should smile when a man tells us to. That we should take it as a compliment if a man catcalls us. Because instead of teaching our sons not to be pervy scheeves, we’ve taught our daughters they need to simply cover up and if things like that happen to them, it’s their fault.
That’s enough about dress codes because I’m really angry now and I can’t put half the stuff I want to in words at the moment and I’m so close to screaming, I might break out into tears.
Limiting imagination and intelligence. In third grade, I wrote my name in cursive and my teacher marked it wrong (yes, she marked my name wrong), and told that I had to wait until fourth grade to write in cursive. This has happened several times to so many children. There was a boy who answered to question “If there are eighty veterans, how many legs are there?” with “Not everyone has two legs” then wrote down the website for the Wounded Warrior Project. He got the question wrong. That all I have to say about that considering I can only really provide more examples fairly similar to the ones above.
Students with mental disorders (more or less mainly anxiety disorders). I have avoided doing any type of project where I had to stand up in front of the class and present it. I would take a zero over an anxiety attack any day. I have lost participations grades in classes for not raising my hand, resulting in getting an overall B instead of the A I deserved. Participation grades don’t help people become better at working in groups and presenting things, it forces people with anxiety and depression to hate and dread school. Last year, I had successfully avoided doing any type of project that required me to present anything, except for one. I had apparently missed the part on the information packet where we had to present in PowerPoint part of the essay we had written. I begged my teacher to not make me present and she refused, saying that I had to. She wouldn’t give me a lower grade if I didn’t, I had to present. I went through my presentation in under thirty seconds, I didn’t look at anyone the entire time, and when I got back to my desk, I cried. Earlier in August, I had to attend real school for week until the online school accepted my application. Everybody at that school had to take Career Prep. The only thing I remember clearly about that class is the teacher saying, and I quote, “We’ll be doing a lot of presenting in here, so if you have a problem with presenting, suck it up.”
Homophobia. This one makes me just as angry as unfair dress codes. Here we go. Last year, I wrote a story about a gay couple for my creative writing class. The teacher gave me back to, refusing to grade because it was “inappropriate for school”. It was about a gay teenager coming out to his mother. There wasn’t even a kiss in it. The boy and his boyfriend hugged once for about two seconds. I turned back in saying that I wasn’t rewriting it. A faculty member quickly found out about this and become just as outraged as I was and told the teacher to grade. She finally did, but marked off on things that I followed perfectly on the rubric. My sister did something similar a few weeks ago and almost the exact same thing happened. For the rest of the year, I wrote nothing but stories about gay couples. I even wrote a story where I made it seem like the princess and knight were going to end up together, but in the last paragraph, I had him marry her brother. A girl got suspended for wearing a shirt that says “Nobody know I’m a lesbian”. The teachers said it was an invitation for sex.
Sexual harassment. Last year, right as school had started some guy started trying make me send him naked pictures of my body. He even started trying to blackmail me not to only send him pictures, but to have sex with him too. I told the school counselor about and she told the principal. I had to show both them and several other teachers the texts that had been exchanged. After about a week of “deciding”, the principal told me they couldn’t do anything about it and that I’d have to go to the police. They didn’t even talk to him. He then told everyone he could that I had begged him to me do certain things to him and him do things back. He would tell people he reluctantly agreed because “I asked so nicely”. The school never did anything. So many things like this have happened to other people, but the one thing they all have in common is they school doing nothing and saying it’s out of their hands.
In conclusion, the current school system is beyond screwed up. Students have the same stress levels of 1950’s mental institution patients. Students pray for and fake illnesses so that they won’t have to go to school. You can “my stomach hurts” and stay home but if you say something along the lines of “if I go to school today, I’ll problem have mental break down” and still have to go. I don’t have any citations because I just took all my anger and turned it into and then turned that rant into an essay.
