We weren't allowed to read or do anything but sit in boredom during suspension (school rules)
What kind of fucking school discourages people from reading even if they're in detention. Stories like this make me glad I didn't grow up in the USA.
What kind of fucking school discourages people from reading even if they're in detention. Stories like this make me glad I didn't grow up in the USA.
Whoa, come on, taking a turn into national flamewar is the last thing we need here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14190274 and marked it off-topic.
Without further context, I hope you recognize your hypocrisy when you plead with someone asking them not to treat "entertainment" as "Hollywood".
The person above gives an anecdote from an unknown decade, and an unknown city of an unknown part of one of the most diverse countries in the world. And you cast aside the entire American experience because of it. Your comment had no purpose.
I did not. Try again.
(I realize that your broader point is that learning the language made you able to learn, but it's still situationally ironic. Also, from the parent comment, I suspect that you believe that "schools in the US" are somehow inherently worse than other places.)
As far as growing up in a Japanese school, I totally agree. I'd take the American school over that system any day of the week.
Now realize the disciplinarian isn't a teacher but a member of mgmt paid by beancounters to get the lowest measurement of skipping classes. He's not paid to make sure the kid learns calculus or becomes self actualized.
Under that criteria the logical response is "OK if you think school is boring, try sitting and doing nothing for a week".
Now if the kid had told the vice principal the problem was his dad beats him too much to walk, or he's too poor to afford bus fare, an entirely different response would likely occur. But you tell someone paid to punish you that you don't like being bored, well take one wild guess what your punishment will be?
Its kind of culturally insensitive BTW to go around saying something like a Zen experience is a useless waste of time or as others have claimed, is a form of torture. A second issue is you can go thru life the hard way or the easy way, and there's nothing inherently wrong with a kid willfully choosing the hard way to try it out and see how he likes it for awhile; someone having defined the ethical and moral right choices and wrong choices and a kid willfully tries the wrong to see how it feels, the judgment should end at the point of definition not be continued into implementation; nobody did anything "wrong"; its like talking about the morals and ethics of a physical nerve reflex response from a doctor hitting a knee with a hammer or touching a hot stove with a finger-tip and reflexively snapping back.