Don't take things personally
Be impeccable with your word
Do your best
Don’t make assumptions
It comes from the classroom experience. Sit still, shut up. The only way anyone knows you is by what the teacher says about you. You have no input. Of course you take it personally. When ordered to speak, you do your best to be impeccable with your words so nobody will find any cause for reproach. That's not resisting negative thinking. It's also wearing a mask. Nobody really knows anybody.
Teachers don't know how well each student has learned a subject. Successful students have a knack for responding to please a teacher, and that requires making assumptions. When in order to please or impress, you say or do what you would not otherwise say or do, that's kissing ass. Sometimes "doing your best" is just kissing ass.
Education generates inequality. In the way they are regarded and treated, some have it made and others are losers. As on the internet, the hope that a judgmental audience will like your remark, and the fear of rejection, generate tremendous anxiety. There's pressure to admire students more fortunate than oneself and disdain those less fortunate. As in American Graffiti, you may end up with only a handful of friends who aren't judging you.
At Parris Island I was delighted when a drill instructor told us they were going to knock that civilian s*it out of us. It worked. For more than a year I shared a bedroom with 60 others. There was a TV room down the hall, but if I peeked in, it was always deserted or nearly deserted. We preferred interacting. There was always music. Sometimes it would be top-40 on a radio. I became familiar with country and motown music that didn't make the top 40 because sometimes a guy would play a country album on a portable record player, or somebody else might play a motown album on another player. Sometimes it was me playing a folk album on the motown guy's player. When 60 guys enjoy having their bedroom flooded with 45 minutes of music somebody happened to choose without consulting anyone, you have a group free of the judgmental attitude instilled by American schools.
For the first 9 years on TV, Gunsmoke was bad in several ways. Marshall Dillon and Doc would sit in the saloon drinking beer and agreeing with each other like a couple of ladies. Ken Curtis knew cowboys and law enforcement. He'd grown up on his father's ranch and as a teen lived at the county jail for the 4 years his father was sheriff. As Festus, he saved the show. For example, he and Doc enjoyed drinking beer and arguing like men. The 60 Marines sharing a squad bay were like that. Members of a judgmental audience are likely to take sides and gang up on one of the parties. We weren't judgmental. We enjoyed it in silence. There was no malice because participants felt no need to vindicate themselves by discrediting their opponent.
By the time I was 35, I noticed how I loved to pick fights with little kids. That is, I'd start arguments I couldn't win. I was looking at it from the perspective of the kid, always expected to accept what an adult claimed. Faced with the truth, I'd have to back down. That set an example. A kid who isn't afraid to object or to back down is a kid who is easy to deal with.
www.infinitescroll.us
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