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Another Victim of the Public Education System.

Early in the morning, probably as I pass through my last rapid eye movement cycle, I often suffer paralysis dreams. Those dreams predetermine my day since after them I awaken with a very painful lower abdomen and colon spasm that may last for several hours.

The nightmares that I see during this strange time in my sleep, early in the morning, are usually related to being in school. There are three types of dreams:

I am either in elementary school in Russia and our teacher is insulting me in front of the whole class for bad behavior or for bad grades. A lot of vivid details that only a child can remember are present. I can remember the faces of my classmates the way they were at seven eight or nine, I can remember the smell of plywood furniture, of school lunches cooking and many other sensations that I hardly come across anymore as my senses are dulled by PTSD and adulthood. (I went to the first three years of school in Russia.)

Another very common theme is that I am sitting in a classroom and taking a test, while wrestling with my test anxiety. I could never prove my intellectual worth because of test anxiety.

Thus I was placed in all the classes with less intelligent children. This further alienated me and eroded my self-esteem, creating another painful cycle that I tried to force myself out of.

The third kind of paralysis nightmare is that for some magical reason I did not complete some credits and I have to go back to school. Usually the setting is in high school and I am surrounded by younger students then myself. There were times when I made desperate attempts to catch up academically and I sat in class with younger students in high school.

This third nightmare visited me so frequently when I was a community college student that I had to quit.

 

My current boss, who is a survivor himself, told me that he occasionally suffers from similar paralysis dreams: he is sitting in a classroom and the school is on fire and there is no escape.

Another survivor and a volunteer at a program where I buy discounted produce told me that she had very similar dreams where she was stuck in school. It turns out that this phenomenon is rather common.

I believe that it is very important to study this phenomenon and to bring more attention in order to improve our school system. Otherwise it would continue to mass-produce trauma as any system without feedback does.

Although it is not the school that traumatized me for the most part, school surrounded me with indifference. My ongoing traumatization was interpreted as my personal problem. I was required to do assignments that were both very boring and useless in the long run, was not given an opportunity to show my real academic abilities because of my severe test anxiety problems. I usually had a sleepless night before and after the test and hours of preparation would yield a predictable result.

It would be very humiliating for adults to be occupied by such burden of work that some indifferent authority composed for them, yet children are not given a choice.

I regret that I did not drop out of school because I had to do mandatory school work and then study what I want on my own time, receiving no credit for what interested me.

In the end I am still living on SSI and food stamps because I had too much trauma as a child and school did not save me from that tauma.

 

Children, before they reach the legal age to drive a car and gain the financial means to obtain one, are very dangerously limited in the American suburbs. Aside from few neighboring children, I was very isolated with my family and my home was the cauldron where my PTSD was brewing.

The only place where I had to go every day and where I was to be provided with the part of life that cannot happen at home, was very indifferent to my ongoing trauma. It obeyed its own metrics.

In high school there was an unspoken connotation that all the privileged middle class students would go to college to finally receive their real education. All the traumatized, impoverished or otherwise "unfit" would just be released into the "wild" and their problems would no longer be a concern of the public school system.

The school system held me in isolation until I was almost 19 years old, it restricted my ability to experience myself in a real world and thus realizing that my future would be predetermined by the abundant trauma of my past and not by my academic dreams and ambitions as it was for many less traumatized young adults.

In turn this delayed my recovery process somewhat and propagated my behaviors that were defined by my unresolved childhood trauma, further into maturity.

This in turn created a very unhealthy delay in my social development and added more trauma and suffering into my adulthood.

I hope that public school system of the future would consider the impact of ACEs on some of the students.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Comments (7)

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Vladimir, I agree with most of your sentiments, although I have an opposite view on teachers and curriculum. I would rather release teachers from a set curriculum. It is suffocating and un-innovative. I would rather a student know one or two things exceptionally well than to skim a lot of material that they don't retain. Your suggestion also tends to make me believe it will only increase boredom in school. I have good kids in school but they are bored a lot of the time. There is just too much "by the book," and not enough inspiration or stimulation. Some of this is of course a lack of teacher ability but I think most of it is too much structure. Some kids crave a lot of structure, some need structure, and some don't. We should be to the point of accommodating all different approaches under one roof.  

2) - applies to the US

Forbid teacher departments from writing their own curriculum in such way that the course skips chapters in the textbook.

Following an order of chapters is important, especially in subjects like chemistry, mathematics and physics.

A Hicksville Middle School math department decided that we begin with Chapter 2 of our algebra textbook and then jump to Chapter 8. In the end, this requires students to memorize more unsystematized data.

Unless this is what educators want, as some conspiracy theorists believe.

There are many things that can be changed about the school systems.

1) - applies to United States, to Russia and probably to many other countries.

Schools need more male teachers and more people with merits in the society, outside of the school system.

Typically, school systems are staffed by women who are attracted by welfare or men and women that are too afraid to face real life. It takes a very special kind of person to graduate from school, then go to college and come back to school. People who can afford to go to college in America are generally privileged, so why not go for more than the school system? Why not go to law school or a medical school?

I believe that it may be worthy to increase the class size, yet to have 50:50 men to women ratio in schools as it is in real life.

Back in high school, we (young men in my class) were taught by one interesting patriarchal figure whom we respected. That was our woodworking teacher. He was a vietnam vet and had an interesting life that was full of adventures. He was somewhat resilient, yet he still had some signs of PTSD. To many of us, who grew up with single mothers or with abusive and otherwise crazy parents, he was like a dim and smoldering beacon in the kingdom of darkness and sterility.

Later I found a more relevant patriarchal figure and some other very inspiring people from older generation, yet none of them would want to work in the sterile school environment for any amount of money.

Why not make teacher an honorable position that one can only be invited to after ten years of doing something else, something interesting?

Otherwise, school systems have to be sterile, keep all distractions away in order to force children to focus on a very boring instructor, whose only merit is that they are now a part of the teachers union and it would be difficult to swap them out for somebody charismatic, whom kids would love.

And you cannot fool children. They instinctively know whats up.

Only trauma makes them less able to see what they want and they become less of children.

It is only after many years of violation that sincere child nature becomes enveloped in a shell, develops a defensive mechanism of pretense in the school system, acquires double nature that we really dislike in teenagers.

Welcome to the world of adults.

 

Would you like me to continue?

Thank you so much for sharing your story. I am in my 30s and to this day continue to have a recurring nightmare that I have to return to high school and complete "missed" coursework even though I am many degrees beyond high school. I always wake up panicked, but never imagined that anyone else could have a similar experience. In school although it was identified that I should take advanced classes, because I was an introvert and it took time for me to process information, my learning environment did not account for that.  Often my teachers would want me to move on quickly from one concept to the next and I needed time to chew on what was being discussed. I graduated high school and entered college feeling like an idiot and fraud.  Now that I know what I know regarding ACES especially with regards to early brain development and how certain coping mechanisms develop in response to one's environment, I have expanded the scope of my work in the field of trauma recovery with children and families to the educational field; starting with early childhood education.  I think one of the biggest challenges I see ahead is getting the systems of care to realize that if each of us took a little bit of the responsibility in ensuring children feel safe and supported to learn as individuals, then every child will get every thing he or she needs.  

Two comments you made me think of. First, I have very similar dreams  now, many years after college, but I have never heard the term paralysis in describing them, though that does seem the proper term. Second, I wonder how many parents have kids who are bored in public high school? We have two who are average grade students and not troublemakers, but they don't get stimulated by their studies. I just find that very odd in today's environment, or has it always been that way?

Vladamir, thanks for sharing your experiences. Quite understand what you must have had to go through at school. It must have been tough dealing with an abusive home and functioning at school without any validation from your teachers.

For many of us, school was traumatizing, not due to any deficiency in the curriculum. It was traumatic because of insensitive educators, bullying by peers and in general not belonging to the culture around. I survived school because of a tight clique of classmates who accepted and loved me.

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