Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Many United States public schools treat their students more like prisoners.
When I was going to elementary school in Texas, there was a traffic light on the cafeteria wall. If the light was green, we could sit where we liked. If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line. If the light was red, we had to sit in the same order, and also we were not allowed to speak.
The food was terrible. We loved our awful little pizza rectangles because they were the least terrible thing we were served.
It's all corrupt government contracts. Instead of teaching supplies and paying for good teachers, you get free prison slop.
Sports teams and band suspiciously overfunded while everyone else gets garbage.
God, another reason to dislike Texas.
I usually skipped lunch and would pocket the cash my parents gave me to shoot hoops in the gym or play video games or watch TV in one of the computer labs. The only ones who had any sort of lunch restrictions were those in detention and, if I remember correctly, even then there was no specific seating arrangement unless they were associated with someone else as co-troublemakers.
ps edit: what was the point of "yellow"? Didn't you generally go through the line with your friends anyway?
Yes, but that might be difficult if you were in different classes, since we were supposed to go straight from class to cafeteria. It was also like "you were kind of bad today, do better tomorrow." I think at least one time, they even changed it from yellow to red while we were eating because they deemed us too loud or rowdy or something.
Naturally this meant one group of troublemakers could get the whole school in trouble. Collective punishment for individual offenses, just like god does in the bible. They wanted us to live in fear and shame, they were cramming us into an inhuman mold to better serve our corporate overlords.
What does this even mean? Were the chairs numbered?
We had tables with benches iirc. I think whoever came out of the line first would go all the way to the front of the cafeteria and sit down on the side closest to the stage, closest to the door we came in through. Everyone else would fill the rest of that side, then the other side of the table, then the next table, etc. So if you counted it out correctly, you could still sit next to your friends. There were also teachers present to make sure we sat where we were supposed to. I think there was also a guard with a pistol. It was Texas.
Oh god that fucking sucks. I'd ask why, but you alrready said the real reason: it's prison
Holy shit, someone else that had the traffic light! They made us do alphabetical order seating instead of the order you went through line, which sucked because you couldn’t sit with your friends even if you couldn’t talk.
What?? Why? Like what caused the light to change?
For us it was always being ‘too loud’, like a cafeteria full of children 10 and under is ever going to be that quiet. It’s not like kids were shrieking all the time or anything, they just talked excitedly. There weren’t even classrooms near the cafeteria to be bothered by the noise! The more I think about it the more I want to go kick them in the shins about it
So like if it changed mid lunch would you shuffle seats?
This is such an insane thing to do to kids lol I'm so sorry you had a traffic light in the cafeteria
Oh, it was somehow even more convoluted. If the light went to red we had to remain silent the rest of the lunch where we were, and THEN the next lunch was sitting in alphabetical order in complete silence. It might be extended to multiple lunches if people kept trying to talk.
There was one period of time when we had heavy rain, it lasted for what felt like weeks straight, and we weren’t allowed outside. We kind of collectively started going insane from lack of exercise (we had no indoor gym), and then we got multiple days of red light silent lunches.
That is weird as fuck. What a stupid rule. Kids are noisy.
The people who run schools hate kids and want them to suffer
But why ? Sounds like totally absurd as a rule
Control. Punishment and guilt are ingrained in our culture. Abuse has been normalized.
It's a very unsympathetic thing to say but it's also 100% true.