[For this
year’s installment in my annual anti-favorites series, I wanted to complicate
things a bit, considering places from across my life with which I have
love/hate relationships. I’d love to hear your own complex (or simple!)
anti-favorites, whether places or anything else, for the crowd-sourced weekend
airing of grievances!]
On
prisons, pains, and promises in a public school.
In lieu of
full paragraphs in today’s post, I’m gonna point you to prior posts where I’ve
thought about these layers of my public high school, Charlottesville High.
First, there’s this
one on how much this first integrated high school in town seems to have been
modeled on a prison.
Second,
there’s this
post, on my own painful high school experiences with hazing.
But third,
there’s this
one on just a handful of the many inspiring and important teachers I was fortunate
enough to learn from in (as well as before and after) that public high school. There
are certainly things I hated about high school (join the club, I know), and
certainly very challenging things about my school in particular. But there were
also powerful positive presences there, ones that have remained with me ever
since.
Next
love/hate place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Anti-favorites you’d share?
