Calling all Parents, Teachers, and School Administrators!

Exploring the Public School Climate: Focus Shift

Schools can not possibly meet and reach the needs of every child. In this day and age, there are too many children-to-teacher and faculty ratios. For years following my college career in Human Development and Family Studies, I keep coming back to the most formidable years of my life, high school. In a quest to explore the depths of what happened and what continues to be perpetuated in public schools today, I have concluded that formal education is unnecessary for many reasons. Though, I recognize that shutting down formal education and shifting to alternative schooling or other forms of learning may not be the best option for every person and family. Therefore, I will be sharing parts of my journey throughout the public school system to support you — a parent, teacher, caregiver, counselor, administrator. Please consider the importance of self-expression, honoring differences, and celebrating uniqueness while reading this excerpt.

From the beginning years: My sense of self-worth

From the age of five, I sat inside a classroom of twenty children. We had one teacher and a few aides who would assist in activities. This pattern continued until I was eighteen years old. I became accustomed to sitting in a chair, around other students of various personalities and those whose thresholds for sitting in one place for long periods were low. I was able to notice which behaviors and actions were being responded to or not. I completely believed that my worth was dependent on what I produced. It was easy for me to stay inside the middle of the road of students. I knew how to avoid trouble well from my teachers and act neutrally with the students in class. My confidence declined when I realized how much slower I was at figuring out answers. I would not raise my hand first because I was afraid I would be selected to answer and respond wrongly. I never went home to my mom to share that I felt nervous to respond and participate in the classroom even though my mother was a school teacher. I always felt a certain level of nerves when entering a day of school.

I remember sharing sentiments with my parents about how I felt around other kids when growing up. When I was in fifth grade, I was taller than all of my peers. It was the time where boys and girls were starting their dance. By dance I mean, whispers about who has a crush on who. There were plenty of songs and gags about boys and girls feuding. When I realized that boys were supposed to be taller than the girls when they dated, I was devastated. It made it worse when every kid on the block would mention how tall I was standing next to me in line. I felt gigantic. I was. I was likely 5 feet and 9 inches at 11 years of age, and, now 14 years later, I am 5 feet and 10 inches. I would lay in my bed and cry to my parents because I hated how tall I was. When I was a child, I was consoled and told to be proud of who I am. To me, the anger that I put on myself, my lineage, my genes for being too tall could have been mitigated by being able to understand the wider lens of many factors that continue these concepts of separation and or the recognization there is not a black and white field between boy versus girl, man versus woman.

While I’d like to say that my parents and other caring figures’ pep talks and consolidations about loving who I am and what I look like evaporated all of my fear and self disdain, I carried self-hate right into the fire pit of high school, dating, and my adult life. We, fifth and sixth graders, were taught how to transition from elementary to middle school. We were taught about switching from classroom to classroom for subject changes to prepare us for movement and how to refocus in a new environment. They felt that that would bring about the most change and disruption to the success of our academics and the future teachers that would teach us. During sex education, in contrast, consisted of splitting boys and girls into two separate classes. I stood in the back of a very packed room and watched an hour-long presentation of the inside anatomy of my organs. I was told how to use period products, things I had been using already and my mom showed me what to wear. The presentation ended and we were told not to discuss what we had talked about with the boys. It was so weird. Relationships with others always felt under-discussed. Our bodies were changing, hormonally, which they briefly touched, yet they barely bothered to discuss other important topics. We had no training to be cognizant and aware of harmful energies that if we are not careful could interfere with our sense of self and well-being, how to protect our bodies and spirits from outside forces, and the physical interactions we would have with others, sexually or otherwise. Instead, we are left to fend and figure it out for ourselves and our peers, who were also trying to figure it out. I watched videos online to find examples, gurus, experts, or whomever to teach and show what they learned or show their lives as they were experiencing to get a better sense.

Reflection:

How much time do you spend with your child talking about how they feel about being in a classroom with their teachers and peers?

What pieces of the school system provide space to self-reflect, express, and talk about how they view themselves and others?

Moving on: Everything hidden coming to light

There was barely a second of middle school that I felt like myself. I was so uncomfortable with how I looked and who I was that I stayed mute for the first year of it, practically. Everyone shared about the middle school years being those awkward years of our lives. I moved onto high school where I was told about horror stories of older students and what they would do to the younger ones. I dreaded the whole thing. Though the parts that I could easily slip into were the patterns I learned in elementary school, I stayed out of the way of the teacher’s punishment and remained neutral so that other kids wouldn’t taunt me or make the end of their jokes. I was very, very good at not rocking the boat until the pot seemed to boil over.

All I seemed to truly crave once I started high school was to date someone, to feel alive, to feel loved, to be desired. When I finally had my first kiss in the first semester of high school, I felt a level of ecstasy I had never experienced in my life. I went straight home that day after kissing him and told my parents and my brother at the dinner table that I loved kissing. After this experience, I wanted that feeling more and more. I daydreamed and went home kissing my poster boards of Taylor Lautner and other icons I had at the time.

When I met my first girlfriend was when things took a turn. I had such an admiration for her. She gave me so much attention, asked to do things with me, and eventually invited the idea that she would like to kiss me. This girl was a bad girl. She told me she went to parties, drank alcohol, and hooked up with guys. I liked her and liked that she seemed to have a lot of experience with what the older kids did.

It was easy for me to get sucked in. I could barely think or concentrate on school and the only thing that kept me in it was how much she cared for school and was willing to put in the time and effort. Otherwise, I could daydream about her for what seemed like forever. Eventually, I got caught cheating on a vocabulary test, strike one. Shortly after I got caught at a party for drinking, strike two. Following that I had a huge blowout fight with my girlfriend, strike three. A clear progression of events, as I look back of a kid feeling completely lost and out of control of their surroundings and how to manage it all.

Reflection:

Are your children hanging with the wrong people and making poor decisions? Have you ever thought about how their sense of self of years of not feeling seen in a system where they figured out how to blend in?

What are ways that your community of parents, teachers, and administrators can cultivate space to explore how they feel about themselves and the world around them before the pot boils over?

How do you speak about children and high schoolers’ behaviors, actions, and trajectories in their stages of life? (hint: they are listening to everything you are saying and may take to heart the path they are going to be going on based upon what has spoken into)

High School: Major grief unexplored

While I have shared and shed light on just some of my stories growing up in the school system, there were many other stories taking place in the shadows of the school. I remember a couple of my peers committing suicide while we were in high school. There may have been a remembrance for the students, but I wouldn’t have known or been a part of it because I didn’t know who they were. We never had an assembly as a school to talk about their passing and honor their life.

We had a school assembly to talk about the Columbine shooting that took place at a nearby high school years before and that conversation started and ended at the assembly. Sometime during this time, there was a school shooting at a nearby high school. The shooter had gone to my middle school and shot and killed one student and himself. After this, there was a shooting at an Aurora movie theatre where many people were shot, injured, and killed. One of the people that was shot, in the head, went to my high school. Talk about trauma. Though, there didn’t seem to be much that changed. They did seem to want the school culture to change where freshmen weren’t taunted as much in assemblies. That to me didn’t seem to be the root of the problem. There was something much bigger screaming and no one was talking about it.

When I graduated high school I started dating a girl again and we developed feelings quickly. Two months later we were getting ready to head to college and I broke up with her. She tried to commit suicide and it was devastating. In the same summer, my father was diagnosed with cancer and moved away to have treatment. My mother moved to the town where I would be going to school. I was alone. I went off to college completely grief-stricken. I had no idea what I was going to school for and flew by the seat of my pants. My father died my sophomore year and my best friend died a month after he did. A year later, a high school volleyball teammate and her best friend were shot by her best friend’s ex-boyfriend. My volleyball teammate survived her injuries though her friend died. The shooter killed himself too. I could hear the gunshots from my bedroom.

As I sit here today at the age of twenty-five processing my grief of losing my father five years ago, I look at the relationships I have had and the dynamics I have played, I have felt completely destitute for answers. Death is a part of life, yet it seems as one layer is healed there is an infinite number of layers of understanding and processing to unleash. And as time goes on, so does life and with that comes more deaths of people, periods, and identity of self. Love has been taken, controlled, misled, constricted, and manipulated in more ways than I could ever count and as I discovered something new about myself this year, I felt the deepest fear I had ever felt, I was choosing to die out many parts of myself and choosing to live with changes, forevermore, to live my most authentic life, free of fear of death and transformation and change.

Reflection:

How do you and your family talk about tragedies?

In what ways does the school system account for the grief happening to themselves, their peers, society, and the world?

How do you process your grief?

Today: My gender exploration

This year I discovered how my gender was not what I was told it was. My identity and existence felt entirely flipped and I couldn’t make sense of who I am. Everything that I had been taught and reinforced over years and years of gender norms was reaching the surface, I didn’t know if I was strong enough to face them. Everything I had learned about myself was about other people’s approval or disapproval of how well I did something, how I looked and other people perceived me, and how I responded to what I was doing and learning in my life. At an early age, I learned so much about how my identity would affect the way others would treat me. Today, those ideas get reinforced by ourselves, loved ones, and society. For better or for worse, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack of questions that never seem to end like… Where did all of the fear start? Who is at fault? How do you heal from it all? What will life be like if I no longer subscribe to every little thing I absorbed and took in along the way?

I am here to share the experiences of my life to show how at a very young age I learned so much from what was underneath the surface. The level of processing, healing, and understanding did not begin until my adult life. I am on another side of a mountain that I have reached and I have many more that I will meet. Though being able to share this with all of you gives me hope that children across the globe will not need to wait to share their hearts until it becomes an erupting volcano and they can feel that they can be in touch with their humanness and the humanness of others much sooner than I.

Reflection:

Have you started healing parts of your life that felt were unjust to you?

Are you feeling worried about all that your child has been exposed to and is going through or may be exposed to later on?

Do you fear that who your child is will make it harder for them later in life?

The School Climate: Future trajectory

Schools focus on the metrics they need to meet. Whether you are high or low income your expectations for success are insurmountable. If you are a minority, it exacerbates that finish line. The more children don’t meet you or the school’s expectations of them, the more that self-hate resides within their bones and soul. While you see their grades as the goal, their lives are the ones who pay the price. While they worry about the way they are being graded and judged, they experience someone they know suffering, killing themselves, or dying. While they deeply care about pleasing you they have run completely away from themselves. They will not know how they ever will be able to find themselves again because they never felt they were here, to begin with. They never knew how much their life mattered. They never knew how much of an impact they have on the world.

There is hope. We can see the world crumbling. We can see how far off the path we have gone. We can see how deeply embedded we are in doing things as they should and as they have been. Though I am here to share my beacon of light as I sit here alive and well to tell my story. I am an adult who has survived and grieved and loved. I am healing parts of myself that I internalized about what has been said about how my life is supposed to look, as a transgender man or otherwise in this world, yet am actively deciding to go my way regardless of what others may think or even I may think at times. I decided that I am way more magnificent than anyone could ever determine. Even myself. I couldn’t begin to quantify my greatness. I am infinite. The world of schooling seemed to have broken down my spirit and I am as determined as a wild horse to learn to fall in love once again, as my 100% true self.

While I am a piece in the larger cog of the system, I hold a great piece. I have experienced what millions of others have, yet my story is unique. Your children do not know why they are important because they believe that what makes them important is how far they will get in life, by how hard they try or what they have to show for it. You are not responsible for everything that happens in their life but know that how you show up greatly affects them and you matter too. You are just as divinely made as they are. You didn’t need to birth them to realize how much you could love a single thing in life and figure out how precious it all is. Show them that their existence is not what holds them together and give them a reason to live. Show them that pure existence is what makes a difference in the world and how they too can realize that in their own, special way. Show them that it is safe for them to be in the world, as themselves, especially when they are in your presence. They care about what you think of them more than anyone else, please remember that.

Reflection:

What do you feel inspired to do since reading and reflecting on this article?

What parts resonated with you and your relationship with your child or inner child?

What is one way you could start a conversation about the current school climate today with someone in your life?

For inquiries on working with me to explore your gender, support a loved one, process grief, and more here is how you can get ahold of me:

Instagram: elliot_mcmonagle

Email: elliotmcmonagle@gmail.com

How my friends and family experience me is “Charismatic, Imaginative, Empathetic, and Perceptive.”

I am a certified Life Coach, energy intuitive, and exceptionally courageous trans person.