One of the biggest problems that I had was with the kids who went there. A lot of them acted like…read morelittle children (in the same manner a lower schooler would act) and were extremely immature and annoying. I remember the teacher telling students to walk down a hallway without acting out, which we had to redo. At lunch period during my senior year, they were running around & were completely out of control. When we read Shakespeare, some of the kids in my class would read it in a Jamaican accent & they would start laughing. Almost everybody would constantly laugh at things that were said & certain words in Hamlet which weren't funny. I don't think it was fair that I had to be in the same classroom as the rest of them. One of the most embarrassing things to deal with was at my time at KTHS was going to field trips. Some people would laugh at us because of the way some people acted. They also seemed to have never grown up. A lot of them liked to talk about things that I stopped being interested in when I was 11 or 12. When I was waiting at the bus stop, my classmates would throw Cheetos & sticks on the road & laugh when somebody ran over it. And don't get me started on the outbursts during class. I gave specific examples of what I had to deal with, but it was all day, every day, a lot all the time. For most of my day I had to deal with either somebody acting out, being disrespectful & rude, or just being annoying.
The staff were almost as bad because they were unable to properly discipline students. I don't remember kids being kicked out of class, which should have happened all the time. Sometimes support staff came into our classroom to support other students & would sit there & stare at me. They & other teaching assistants would go around the classroom & look over my shoulder at what I was working on & make sure I was doing it correctly, as if I was too stupid to do work by myself & was a little. My math teacher would yell & get angry for getting a question wrong, for not understanding something, or for other things without good cause. Everybody got very little out of math classes due to the way we were taught. During classes, I was pulled out to speak with a therapist even though I didn't want to. One of them came up to me out of the blue and angrily told me that it was my fault for my social situation because I didn't interact with the students enough. I was also taken out of the class with another student to watch tv shows to comment on what was going on as if I was too stupid to understand what was happening and one semester, most the class was taken out for speech class. During my last year, I was taken out of lunch once a week to participate in an awkward group therapy session, which was almost as bad as dealing with the students at lunch.
The academics were a complete joke. A lot of the work was the same type of work that I did when I was in middle & lower school & was completely dumbed down. For instance, in my health class, the teacher gave us a paper with a human body & 4 major organs and our assignment was to label the major organs. A couple of years before when I was at a different school, I had a health teacher who taught us at a high school level, & it was extremely frustrating to go from a high school level of being taught at a lower school level. In English class we barely wrote anything and in my government class, everything was too simplified. For my history exam & quizzes there were questions such as "find California on the map" and "who made the I had a dream speech". I did not do any studying for exams. In some instances, I received high grades without trying. I remember getting a 99 percent on one of my history exams. The only exception was my math exam, which isn't surprising since I wasn't properly taught math & felt uncomfortable all of class. BTW, I really enjoyed taking Geometry & Algebra II while my younger brother (who was in middle school at the same time) was doing the exact same thing as I was. The only class that I felt was somewhat at my grade level was chemistry. I remember getting a B on my exam without studying but I don't think I received a decent chemistry education. I studied so little at KTHS that I felt guilty I passed without doing any work. I had to take a math test to graduate high school and while I was taking it, I was angry & stressed out about what was going on around me & was unable to focus and think properly. I ended up failing & had to retake the test.
Thanks to KTHS, I was robbed of a high school education & a high school experience. I do not believe that I deserved to have graduated from high school because I didn't do the proper work. When I look back & think about my time at KTHS, I regret that I didn't quit high school. I now know that quitting high school would have been a better route for me, because there was no point in sitting there & not learning anything while dealing with annoying students & staff.
