Category: Health and Wellness
I went to a residential school for high school and graduated when I was 20. I hardly ever went home besides holidays and vacations and always did summer programs. Now, rather than having big dreams of going away to college, studying abroad, and living out of state, I'm content living at home and doing a work program or online classes or commutind to college.I'm not even aging yet! Where has that oomph gone? Is it dependent personality or my anxiety disorder or the meds to treat my anxiety, or part of Asperger's or septo optic dysplasia
Hi, I did the same at resadensal school. Now I am at home just going to a local college. Maybe you want to stay at home? I didn't at first but now I just stay at home. Some times meds can make you to tired or anything and sleep all the time. It depends what ones you are taking. I suffered from bad depression and anxiety but wasn't treated until I was 21 years old.
I dono all those psychology shrink medical terms but I think that to send one's kids away to a boarding school for years must somehow be a damaging thing.
My baby chicklet is now 18 but has lived with me her whole life and can't wait to flap her wings and fly away. What would have happened if she had been shuffled off to some boarding school? People say all the time it's the blind this, or maybe now these shrink terms for things, but I'd say maybe you were wrongfully booted from the nest, not slighting your parents here just sayin', so you have not experienced the natural things and neither did your parents.
I had to learn as much as the daughter did, only my learning has been learning how to let go.
I don't know how to tell you where to go from here, but if the shrinks are any good they should know this. I am just a guy and I seem to have figured at least that part of it out, so the professionals should know better and maybe help you retrofit for whatever natural events failed to happen. My baby girl isn't blind, but I am, and I was when I was your age. Only I had not done the boarding school thing, so nature just took its normal course and I pretty well jetted at age 18 like most my peers. Hope this is something of an insight as to maybe how the problem happened, I don't know. But at least you should not feel guilty or ashamed. Hell, even baby birds are never able to be truly wild if pulled from the nest early, not without some form of wildlife interventions. This I know from experience being a bird guy. Nature is nature, but hopefully the shrinks who gave you all those words for what's going on could help you compensate.
No, it was a school for the blind because the high school was wicked overcrowded and kids were starting to do things like say "quiet down" to my aide when she was describing something and I had a hard time following along using headphones and my books on tape.
Leo, I think you have a valid point there. From my own experience, I can say that the kids who went to the school for the blind since they were old enough to start going to school had little concept that the rest of the world wasn't blind, that they wouldn't have everything handed to them whenever they said jump, and a lot of other things. I have no idea whether this mentality spreads to other boarding school environments, or just ones where disabilities are involved, but I think you're right in saying that growing up in a closed environment does trap you and stunt your growth a bit. At the school for the blind I attended, it was pretty much expected that you would graduate at the age of 21. If you wanted to leave at 18 like a normal person who attended public school, they gave you all kinds of crap about it, saying you weren't prepared for the world and that you would undoubtedly fail. Well, whose fault is that?
I was lucky in that I did attend public school until ninth grade, but a lot of circumstances in that school forced me to leave. I'm glad that I had that experience to fall back on, though, when considering the social environment, or perhaps confines would be a more appropriate word.
To the OP, all I can tell you is that you shouldn't get so bogged down in terminology. I know it's tempting to label every trait you have, I've done it myself when trying to figure out who I was. The thing was, I found myself going around and around in endless circles in my head, never coming up with a satisfactory answer, never being able to settle on a description of myself that I found fitting. Labels have a tendency to bring us down rather than increase understanding. As a society, we're all overly obsessed with placing names on things, grouping people, and deciding if those names and groups are desirable, acceptable, attractive, etc. It's a really depressing way to live, because just when you think you've shed one negative connotation, it comes back to bite you in the ass when someone decides you haven't at all, and often without knowing a thing about you. They just think, in their not-so-professional opinion because they heard Dr. Phil use a specific term, which somehow makes them qualified to spout bullshit, that they can go around clucking their tongues and saying, "my, people today are just so fill in your favorite term here." So, what it all boils down to is, just try to accept the traits you have, and try not to let other people decide whether they're good or bad. You should be the only judge of that.
Wait. These schools, which are probably more expensive than regular schools, actually claim that they cannot produce results in the ordinary time frame? What kind of sweat off a monkey's nuts is that! So what is said is, invest in this special bond whose return will be less and in a greater amount of time? Hmmm, this is starting to make less sense to me the more I know about it.
And how would you keep a pack of school-skippin' fools in school till 21? It's hard enough to keep 'em in till they graduate at 18. Anyway sounds like a lot of really rather dark social engineering at our expense is going on over there. The one here in Oregon wasn't even accreditted, apparently, since the 90s. How a public institution gets to stay open and not be accreditted, again, boggles me mind. Now the land is at least earning its keep in local property taxes being in use by a private company.
All I could think of was how pissed I would be as a dad to find out the daughter had gone to a unaccreditted school, done all the homework and class time, only to have a diploma worth nothing probably. I dono: what do you do with a situation like that?
Anyway that's terrifying that an expensive institution can't do what normal schools do with 12 years. Wow! Speaking of things that should be noted by those making budget cuts in our current crisis ... but who are we, but just a bunch of human appliance working stiff tax payers, so according to them, what would we know? Haha
Oh, it's easier than you might think. For the students who live in the dorm, they can't skip school, let alone go anywhere without permission, which was almost unattainable. I suspect the ones who commuted probably had such an emotional attachment to the place that they actually wanted to go, or maybe they wouldn't know what to do with the extra time on their hands. The few, like me, who actually had real-world experience, did whatever normal teenagers do, and graduated when we wanted to. Now, I did graduate at 19, but that was because I was held back a year in public school, but they tried their hardest to keep me there until I was 21. Luckily, for all the faults my parents have, they saw sense when it came to that. They knew that keeping me in school until I was 21 would be of no benefit to me, and would probably look pretty bad when it came to getting accepted into colleges and stuff.
I heard about the Oregon school not being accredited. I was pretty shocked. I knew there was a lot of corruption and bullshit that went on in schools for the blind that gets swept under the rug, since the public opinion seems to be that they must be doing an honorable service, but actually keeping a school open that wasn't accredited, and doing such a disservice to all the students who attended there? I really wasn't expecting that.
CsDB was hell. Six years of it, only went home on weekends and holiday breaks. I still have nightmares all the damn time about the dorms and the food, if you can call it food. We used to joke that the dining hall was a portal to hell.
Lol, that's how it was at my school, too. Needless to say, I didn't eat much. People thought I was anorexic, but I would sneak real food in when I went home on the weekends when I could.
I ordered pizza quite a lot, and kept a footlocker filled with cookies and chips and other such things in my room. By my junior year I also had a mini fridge and a coffee maker.
as one who has also attended a school for the blind, I have a lot to say.
from the time I was 8, till sometime in my teens, I was a residential student. sadly, what shattered sanity and impricator are saying about the staff being discouraging, not preparing their students for the real world, and advocating getting their special diploma, that means nothing, is true. however, as SS also said, some of us learn to grow from that, and integrate into the real world, much to their dismay.
in fact, when I was in high school and told them I was ready to graduate before I reached 21, they of course had a fit. not only were they pushing the afore mentioned diploma on me to no end, but they told me how I wouldn't be successful in life, much less graduate early. I was even humiliated at graduation practice, over the PA system, being told what a dunce I was for thinking I'd actually graduate. however, instead of allowing it to hurt me, I stood there, pointing to those staff members, saying, "really? watch me. just watch me!"
so, I fought like hell to attain the regular diploma...and I got it. needless to say, everytime most staff members saw me after that, in addition to countless other times I fought for things, they'd cringe whenever they saw me.
Yeah, I said fuck off to them and graduated at 18.
Luckily, they didn't try to hold a real diploma over my head. They knew damn well that I had enough credits to graduate, and that I was going to do it whether they liked it or not. I saw what a couple of other people went through in trying to prove themselves worthy, and being allowed to get their diplomas, though. It pisses me off just thinking about it.
I was on the honor roll several times there. Then again, it's not difficult because they lower their standards, right?
I went to a blindy school for a while and have some different but the same points. Coming from a small backwoods town with one vision teacher for the whole county I was amazed and happy when I went to the blind school in 3rd grade. I even told my mom see you while she stood there crying when she left me for my first day. My mother was a single parent who worked 16 hours each day to feed her and I. Before I went to the blind school I couldn't read and did not even know really how to interact with other children because my puclic school system treated me like I was handicapped. So the first 4 years at the school for the blind were great. Now here is where I agree with what others here have said. I found the more I went there and came back home the more I couldn't and didn't know how to communicate with sighted people that lived in my neighborhood. By the time I was in the 8th grade I was losing my mind with all the bullcrap that went on that the Florida Prison For the blind I call it that my mom let me go to public school for high school. By that time I could fight for my rights and boy did I. Those people probably still hate my name.
Right on, Impricator. I barely had to lift a finger to get straight A's.
To the poster about the food at the blind school, I didn't eat much iether. but then again, I am a fussy eater. Of course I am from the UK so a different blind school. By the time I went to college people thought I wasn't eating properly. The food at college made me fel sick. Back at the blind school the staff said I was loosing weight fast. They said I was to thin. I wasn't. I was just right. But at the time I believed them. I am over weight now though.
Oh how I miss the sugary-tasting chili and the sour milk. Not. Oh, and the pizza with ketchup instead of tomato sauce.
Did you have spaghetti that tasted like they put water with red food coloring on it instead of sauce? How about grilled chicken that was literally just that, grilled chicken, with no spices or seasonings whatsoever? And, of course, it was undercooked.
Hmm can't quite remember. But I swear the lasagna had fucking American cheese in it. That should be made a capitol crime.
Wait this started out a topic about people inhumanely sent off to boarding schools and it devolved into a discussion of institutional / school / prison food? Sorry, institution food is what it is. I got lucky I'll admit: mainly brought the lunch from home. But the poor suckers stuck with the canned spinach every day ... that and some of the other things, was a mess. At least till junior high / high school where you got what you wanted to eat. But that seems rather a trivial issue in comparison to lots of other stuff this started out with. Strange.
Hey, the food constitutes as inhumane as any treatment that went on in these boarding schools, lol.
I met people that went to these schools. They are thirty and still child like and it saddens me how they treat them in these schools.
Yeah, it is sad. Although my experiences in public school were far from perfect, which was the reason I switched to the school for the blind in the first place, I'm blad that I had those experiences, harsh as most of them were, to balance me and show me how sighted people interacted with each other, what kinds of assignments the average person was expected to do in school, etc.