"This is useless!"

When someone on my feed is excited about their kid getting some paper 'award' thing, it can be difficult for me to muster any kind of enthusiasm because some of the things schools "reward" kids with are just kind of... meh. Like attendance and citizenship. I was an absolutely wretched student, for reasons that boil down to me being autistic and ADHD, and yet I would always get attendance awards because my parents wouldn't let me avoid school despite it being Hell for me on basically every level, unless I was genuinely too sick to attend. And the worst part was, since I was constantly sick with colds (like seriously, it never let up) I technically was always too sick for school. I was 100% too sick to have gone to work if I'd been that sick as an adult. Yet I was still forced to go anyway. It's a wonder all the other kids didn't get sick from me, too.

And attendance awards were basically just, to me, pieces of paper saying "C o n g r a t s on not being too sick for school this quarter, according to us adults who don't have enough sense to fill a thimble! You're being given this useless award for being forced to go somewhere you're constantly being bullied, somewhere where there are too many people in one place, where it's such a sensory nightmare and nightmare in general that you have to dissociate and live in your own imaginary world cut off from reality just to get through the day! A place that can't even deliver on the promise of being able to teach you!" (Seriously, I learned more from a single week of PBS than I learned in five YEARS of school.)

Citizenship awards were even more pointless than attendance awards, in my experience. On the surface of it, you'd think this would be a good award. Sounds like something you get for helping old ladies cross the street, picking up litter in the neighborhood, or feeding homeless people. But no. At least in the schools I went to, they were code for "you're well behaved." I kept getting them just for being a quiet kid who wasn't a dick to other people and in fact barely socialized with anyone because socializing for me is already exhausting, socializing with people I don't like is even more exhausting and isn't even rewarding to compensate for the exhaustion, and socializing with people I don't like while immersed in the ND equivalent of WW1 trench warfare every weekday was just one more thing chipping away at my energy and sanity.

And what kind of reward is a piece of paper anyway? At least stickers were cool and pretty and could be stuck to fun places.

So yeah, really hard for me to muster even a semblance of enthusiasm for people when they post about these stupid paper awards that schools give to kids. Especially when the award in question isn't one I'm familiar with, and/or has a nebulous description. Even if I want to be supportive, I can't help thinking "So is this something they *should* celebrate, like 'you've made real progress learning math,' or is it something pointless and stupid like attendance or citizenship?"

Oh yeah and even before the pandemic I've always thought it stupid that we basically send our walking petri dishes to spend time around hundreds of other walking petri dishes just so they can try and fail to learn from a bunch of people who suck massively at teaching. Instead of doing that, we should just let neighborhood kids exist together in an environment where they're learning the natural way kids do, with a few adults around to supervise and help the kids find the answers to their questions, rather than trying to program them like robots on an assembly line.

Powdered milk makes a horrible sound.

Hey so you know the sound that powdered milk makes when it's compressed in the bag or when it moves? Yeah that sound makes my skin crawl worse than the crunch of snow. Unfortunately, as someone who uses milk so infrequently that a quart of milk will go bad in the fridge before I use it all, powdered milk is useful to have around. But oh gods oh gods the horror of that sound! My skin crawls even remembering it.