Transcribed by: Saul Romero

Zoe: Hey, everyone. It's Zoe. And today we are doing an after school special.

Bethany: Hey, it's Bethany, Zoe lied. It's not an after school special because this is coming up before  school in session. But other than that, yeah.

Zoe: The before school special.

Bethany: The Before After School Special.

London; The 8 AM special. But the After School.

Bethany: But that after school Special, so yeah, fuck it.

London: Hey, you all. t's London. I'm excited for the... No, it's it. It's London. What's up?

Bethany; Love it. I have nothing quirky to add, sorry.

London: I didn't have anything today. We already did all the after school special jokes. 

Zoe: Okay, So before we get started talking about school things before school starts, wait, why don't we just call it a back to school special?

Bethany: Oh, well, because an after school special is like the episode you have you know. 

Zoe: Fair

Bethany: Back to school is like backpack sales..

Zoe: True,  the Target and all of the summer things have been replaced with notebooks.

Bethany: Yeah, exactly..

London: I felt Traumatized because I worked at Target during that time. But they gave us a bonus. So shoutout to target but also fuck ya.

Bethany: I've got my own Target horror stories. We should do a Target episode one day.  Or they might sue us

Zoe: Um, okay, so before we get started and get into all of the fun school stories that we have, what are y'all smoking?

Bethany: I've got a classic. I have bought, I went out and bought an ounce of OG cush. Ooh, Ooh. And I, I even grounded all up myself and uh, got it in my nice little bong here. It's pretty nice. I've actually been smoking since this morning. Uh, so like even this outline was made while I was already kind of toasted. So if it doesn't make sense, I'm sorry.

London:  Love it. Love to see it. Um, I don't know what I'm smoking as usual, but I got a like nice little bowl packed, you know, ready for the evening. . No, every time we go to record a lemon og it's the exact moment I run outta weed, so I have to like scrape up some random shit from wherever I can find some

Bethany: I've totally been there, but this time I have like, I have like a whole ounce right now. I was like, you know, if we were ever gonna do an episode, now is the time.

Zoe: Yes. Um, I

Bethany: Did you finally go to a dispensary?

Zoe: Nope. <laugh>.

Bethany:Oh My God.

Zoe: But I do have, I do have some Um, Um, it's watermelon wormhole wormwood, watermelon worm something. Um, and I got it from a friend and the cartridge doesn't like fit well on the like battery situation. Um, so it's a little wobbly and it kind of scares me to use but it super watermelon and I like it. And it's also very strong.

Bethany: Oh. Um, I know it doesn't specify in the outline, but in my brain mostly we were talking about like K through 12 school stuff, but obviously we can talk about college stuff Too. 

London: I feel like K through 12 is, yeah, K through 12 is more like ruley and like gross

Zoe: For sure. I have a lot to say. I have a lot of things to shit on. Um, within my school district that I grew up in. Uh, I, if you didn't know, I'm from Iowa, specifically the Cedar Falls Waterloo area. Um, which if you know that place, I'm so sorry. Um, if you grew up in that place, I'm even more sorry. Uh, but yeah, so I went to the Cedar Falls School District. I am absolutely a Cedar Falls kid. Um, 

Bethany: Did you have like a lot of kids at your school or was it like 12 kids out in Iowa? 

Zoe: Um, so I graduated in a class of 500. What was so crazy is that I, all of the surrounding towns were like classes of a hundred kids or less. Like it was, they had some really small schools. Um, a lot of schools or a lot of kids open enrolled into our school. I, it was a public school system. Um, if you went to private, like in our town, you didn't go to private to like flex to say that you went to a private school. It was religion over education. Very much so. So like there was a private school that a lot of kids went to and then transferred in after eighth grade cuz it ended in eighth grade. Uh, and you know, they had some, they had some catching up to do. We, there was a school that closed down when I was going into seventh grade. It was the university in our town, which was actually super connected with our school system. Um, I'll get to this later, but like in, for our high school or like yeah, high school football games. We would play them in the university stadium. But the university STA stadium was like, had like a, they called it the dome. It was a dome on top of the stadium. Um, so it was like heated, it was cooled. And of course Iowa, it's in the Midwest. So like you start off the out or the football, you're really, really hot and you end it when it's freezing cold. Um, so like I never had like the true like Friday night lights experience. It was all like everyone chilling and like their heated or cooled stadium to watch the high school football game. The university in our town had a, had a K through 12, uh, private school that I guess is really good and a lot of kids went there. It was pretty expensive to get in. And I would say that would probably be the only one that was like better than our school district. Um, but our school district actually like ranked really high in our state. Within our district especially. We actually had, yeah, we had some pretty stellar education, which is, which is really cool. And I stayed in the same school district from K through 12. Um, my parents didn't really move around a lot by my parents. It was just my mom . My dad moved a lot. I lived with my mom. Um, it was the same school district that my mom went to that my uncle went to, that my grandmother went to and of later dropped out cuz they were not kind to her. Um, same school district that like my cousins are going to now. So like, it was definitely like a, it's a small town thing. Like everyone goes there. That's just what it was. I know. What was crazy too is that my, going into my senior year again, I graduated in a class of 500 people. They had their first incoming class of over a thousand kids. So in Amir 11 years, um, they had doubled in school size, which I think is crazy. Uh, so yeah, so that's, that's a little bit of my schooling experience. The tip of the iceberg.

Bethany: Yeah. I had a similar one where we started out like a, we weren't even a town when I first started going to school, we were like, I don't know what we were, we were like a community or whatever. We weren't even big enough to be really like a city. Oh my goodness. Um,.

London:  Sorry. No, it's funny cause I'm about to follow up and be like, oh, I went to school in Baltimore City and if, you know, you know.

Bethany: Uh, so like my neighbors were like cows.

Zoe: Yeah. That was not my experience. I still live in the city. 

Bethany: So many cows, uh, horses, lots of horses. And then as time grew on, now it's like the whole population has changed. And like, instead of dirt and cows, like suburban houses are everywhere. Uh, and so that really kind of changed how schooling went. Like I remember when I was younger, like all the kids were broke, so like school was kind of built around that. Um, but by the time I hit eighth grade, I remember having a teacher like tell me I had to print out an essay and bring it in. And I was like, I don't have a printer. And he just went, well why don't you go buy one then? Like, he couldn't, like, he couldn't like process. 

London: How dare you 

Bethany: that I couldn't go. Yes, I know. And I told my mom that and she was fucking livid by the way. Um, how she, but so like the whole thing changed and by the time I got to high school, I'm actually a high school dropout.

London:Yay. Well, yay.

Bethany: I, yeah, no, no. Like it wor it, it worked better for me that way. I had to drop out for various reasons. Do it. I actually, cuz I was uh, only like, I wasn't 18 yet when I dropped out. And to do that you have to like take a little test and everything and get like an equivalency. So I did it that way. So I took my little test and they were like, okay, you can get the fuck outta here. But they still act like you're dropping out even though you get like a diploma equivalent. What? It's like, it's like kind of like the ged Oh yeah. But like my school was like calling my mom and being like, Hey, you know, your child needs social skills and stuff. Right. And my mom was like, you know, she's not a preschooler god. Like

London: People stop school after like eighth grade in some places. Like, you'll be fine.

Bethany: Yeah. And honestly, like I was getting truancy letters anyway. I think I missed like, like almost a hundred days of school or something.

London: Yes, I support.

Bethany: Okay. No, no, no, no. I have a whole conversation to have about that so I know it's, I I know it sounds cool and in theory it's not.

London:  No, it's not cool. I just, I'm very much against the, um, awards for attendance, be at school every day, type.

Bethany:  Yes. That's bullshit. Um, and honestly they shouldn't, they shouldn't get on people legally for not attending school anyway because most of the time if your kid's missing like a hundred days of school, there's like an issue. Okay. Like your kids want to see their friends. Like a kid will miss school and not work. Sure. But they don't wanna hang out at a house all alone all day. You know, like they wanna see their friends. It shouldn't have legal consequences if you can't get to school.Um, but yeah, so I ended up dropping out, uh, which is whatever. So, and then I ended up going to college and I was an honor student in college. So just so you know, my friends, your success in high school does not necessarily dictate your successes later in life.

Zoe: Retweet.

London: Yes. Period. Um, I went to school in Baltimore City. Um, they don't love us. I'll just say that honestly, middle school, I don't remember and I'm kind of fucking high right now.  Shouldn have done last. But high school was a trip. I feel like my education itself was good, but I feel like that's just, cuz I went to a high school that really prioritized that. Mostly because they wanted to fucking show off their numbers. The only thing is Baltimore City is broke and they're leaving kids out there in like, um, in the winter people don't have heat. It's so bad. It's so bad. It's an issue. It's been an issue for years. It's horrible. They don't give any money to the city. They give money to the rich counties if you know, you know, I just, specifically me remember they actually cut our budget in 2016, so of course we had to have a walkout. But was that 20 16, 20 15, 20 17, somewhere around that. And like, that's what I mostly remember and it's such a huge issue because there are people in like, there are like literal children, like five year olds who have to in the winter go to school with fucking coke. So because they don't fucking pay for heat. And like even I heard my aunt talking about it before and she was like, oh yeah, that's been a thing since we were little, since they were fucking little. My aunt is fucking almost 40 you guys. They did not give a shit about us.

Bethany: I feel like we keep talking about schools and institution, but I also kind of wanna talk about just like the way people are in high school. Like I think about being a high schooler, sometimes not just cringe, but just like, what the fuck high schoolers are on a different level for like, you just, you wake up at 6:00 AM just to have people yell at you and you to eat some food out of a cardboard box and you get less, you have like less rights to breaks than like adult employees.

London:  No.Yeah. Its so fucked up.

Bethany: I'm like, wait, why do they get less breaks? Like, like I work at a public school and I still get my legally allotted breaks versus like, kids don't, and you can take away that some of their breaks too.

Zoe: So the high school that I went to and I'm, I'm focusing primarily in high school just because I think high school is when I really started to pay attention to things. I think us as like a, like a school system in general, it's like we all kind of came to the realization that like, this school is not what we think it is. And we were very aware of some of the things that our admin in particular were doing, um, that directly harms students in the most blunt way that I could possibly put it. So basically going back to what you said about like breaks and you can take them away. So I don't know how I did it in high school. I worked a job after school. I was literally putting in 60 hours at this job. There was no reason I should have been doing that. I was fucking 16 and running this goddamn store. Have you heard this? Oay? Fuck you, fuck everyone you care about. Fuck everything. We fucking hate you Oay. That will probably end up getting cut, but just know that I really deeply despise the place that I worked in high school. 

Bethany: I'm not cutting it. Fuck you. Fuck boss. 

Zoe: Uh, so anyways, so you know, I would go to school from like 7:00 AM to three 30, come home, throw on the clothes, like my work clothes as fast as I possibly could. You know, hurry to work, work until clothes, which was like nine. You'd stay there until nine 30, go home, do like a couple hours of homework and go to bed. I don't know how the fuck I like survived that. Um, like warming up food in like the store microwave. That was, that was my dinner. Um, and that was just really hard for me. But I know, so our school had, in high school we had just one big lunch shift. So in the hour or in the middle of our day, everyone had an hour and it was just open. Everyone in the school had lunch at that time. Everyone was open. But the issue was that you could, so like if you were falling behind or if you needed to be seen for something, I was very lucky that it only happened to me a couple times. Mostly because I was so fucking anxiety ridden with like turning in assignments later, like failing that. Like I just never really had to like, redo anything or like seek extra help. But there were kids that definitely needed that extra help and you know, they like were in there all the time. Um, so you could get called in. Every teacher had either like an a shift or a B shift. And it was meant to be that, you know, if you needed extra help, you'd go in to that teacher for either A or B shift depending on what they were assigned. And then you'd have the other half hour to eat, do whatever you needed to do whatever. Um, that was not the case for some, for some kids. Uh, teachers very quickly realized that, oh, well if you're assigned to a lunch with that teacher, well I have B lunch so you can actually come and see me. And there were many kids that just straight up did not have lunch because they were assigned and you had to be there a lunch and b lunch and you had to be there the whole time. You weren't allowed to go and eat and there was no time in between those two sessions to do anything. So you had to go from one teacher to another and then back into school.Um, which I don't know how they just let that slide. I really genuinely don’t, but yea the whole 0 break thing we had 7 periods in a day so we didn’t do

(More to come)