• Replies 39 replies
  • Subscribers 96 subscribers
  • Views 5180 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Related
Hints and tips
  • To quote someone's message, first select/highlight the relevant text, and then use the Quote button that appears
  • To "mention" someone, type @ followed by the start of the forum name, and choose from the list; that person will get a notification of being mentioned

Stopping wanting to conform

Billy87

Question, at what point in your life did you stop caring about conforming to what everyone else was. At what point did trying to fit in and be like everyone else stop mattering to you, or is it something you still care about?

Parents

  • Don't think it ever mattered to be.

    My old headmaster did once say to me that it was my fault I was bullied because I wouldn't be like the other children, I should try to fit in more.  Yeah, I took one look at that vile, cruel bunch and decided I was nothing and wanted to be nothing like them at all.  I got the degree, they got pregnant at 15.  Hmmm.... not fitting in did me no harm.

  • in reply to Dawn

    Wow I cant believe a headmaster would say that! Although thinking about it actually I can, thats all school does is brainwash you to try to fit in. I guess in some ways Im glad I never went. 
    I certainly try and help my students to see through it and to realise that they dont have to be part of the system. Schooling in Sweden, Finland etc teaches kids to be individuals, school in the UK teaches them to be clones of each other. 
    Just another brick in the wall as Pink Floyd once said 

    Good for you for not fitting in though! Most of the people who do great things in life are people who refused to fit in with the crowd 

Reply
  • in reply to Dawn

    Wow I cant believe a headmaster would say that! Although thinking about it actually I can, thats all school does is brainwash you to try to fit in. I guess in some ways Im glad I never went. 
    I certainly try and help my students to see through it and to realise that they dont have to be part of the system. Schooling in Sweden, Finland etc teaches kids to be individuals, school in the UK teaches them to be clones of each other. 
    Just another brick in the wall as Pink Floyd once said 

    Good for you for not fitting in though! Most of the people who do great things in life are people who refused to fit in with the crowd 

Children
  • in reply to Dawn

    I looked on PE as a form of regularly repeated ritual humiliation. 

  • in reply to Billy87

    That was the 1970s mind.  

    His comments went right alongside the school games mistress who used to shout at me when I couldn't catch rounders balls and was always last with my pathetic run and used to silently condoned the little despots who captained and picked their teams only to grumble "miss do we have to have herrrrr" and then wrote on my report that "Dawn does not see that PE has any place in school life". ('E' for effort, 'D' for attainment).

    No well, ritually humiliating a kid for failing at tasks their disability will never preclude them from achieving does not have a place in any kid's school life.

    But like I said, it was the 1970s.  They assumed I just didn't try.  It would never have occurred to them that I am unable to judge where moving objects in space are.

    I didn't let it bother me.  I ignored games in favour of French verb conjugations, is all.