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Last year i transferred to a new school. I had a rough start, i refused to be happy in my new school because i wanted to go back to my old one where my close friends were. But then i met good friends, friends that i learned to love and trust. Things were going great up till this new school year. The two people that i considered my best friends at my new school left. One graduated and one moved. I still have few close friends left but it’s different without them. I was always with them.
This year i dread coming to school more and more because i feel like im losing everything i had last year. I feel like im starting all over again. Sometimes i wonder how some people can make friends easily and instantly have a group of friends while im always just getting left behind. It’s like the universe is against me.
I don’t know what to do because im alone again, i never thought this would happen to me but for the first time today, i stayed in the bathroom during lunch. I have a few friends i could’ve been with but they all have their own group of friends and i’d just feel i don’t belong. I’m not exactly the type of person to just suddenly be friends and comfortable with everyone. I don’t know what to do anymore. I feel so alone again.
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I am so sorry you are struggling with so much. As a former credentialed schoolteacher and education specialist involved heavily in the past with things you present, it always breaks my heart hearing about or seeing a student, for example, at lunchtime eating alone, or seeing a student walking to school without a friend.
Schools really need to do more to ensure ALL students are welcomed, loved, accepted, and have an abundance of good friends and support.
I don't think it's your fault or even your blame. I used to work as a special intervention teacher for a lot of students who dropped out of school, and as a specialist for students facing all sorts of emotional issues. As I spoke with them, I'd often ask "What went wrong?"
I think it's because many schools still today really don't get it how important friendship and even love matters at school. All humans want to feel embraced and accepted, and to be be appreciated and to belong.
I hope you can talk to your school counselor and tell them what is happening. Something is definitely wrong when students are not getting the opportunities daily to interact on a social level with many other classmates and new faces in classrooms, on campus, and in school clubs, sports, before/after school programs, or just other things. It's really your school's and your teachers' jobs as well to ensure you and your classmates are mixing, mingling, always feeling safe and accepted, meeting many new peers, and getting to know your classmates. That's why schools need to modernize and promote more social interactions. The old days of just filling student's heads with information (like "vessels of knowledge") are over; instead, schools today should focus on things like critical thinking, what is called "higher order thinking skills," problem solving, and extremely important, "student collaboration"--students working together. Teams and cooperative learning. If students are not continually interacting, involved, actively participating, and effectively engaged, then it indicates the school is failing the student miserably. Students today cannot be effective leaders and learners, or even instruments for change and progress if the learning programs are just individualized learning, worksheets, "drill and kill" (essentially just dry rote memorization), and self study. Schools that do that should just be handing students textbooks and tell the students to go study at home! Today the richness of student education is also in the socializing aspects of learning--students learning together, sharing and helping one another. Being friends and solving problems together.
If students are not getting these rich processes of socialization, making learning interesting and even fun, I'd encourage you to talk to your school counselor and raise hell. It's not your job as a student to have to go out and be like some salesperson trying to find friends, or try to become popular or accepted. It's the school's role through its daily classes, programs, and other daily student activities to give learners all sorts of times to be interacting with classmates, to develop and encourage the social situations to create and even foster friendships.
I know I am going on a tirade here, but as a professional educator it really gets my goat when students want friends and schools essentially have socialized walls when bridges are needed to create opportunities for an abundance of school friendships to flourish.
Please don't blame yourself. It's sometimes schools are to blame. They don't really understand students, or understand what students desire. It makes me sad when schools fail at a key component of learning: to develop and encourage student socialization skills. Sometimes school principals praise teachers for keeping classrooms quiet, even at a silence level. If isolation and silence was the greatest achievement, we might as well require all students to work in closets and wear earplugs all day!
I hope you tell your school counselor there are definite issues with fostering friendships at your school. If you are experiencing it it indicates other students are similarly facing the same situation too. Your counselor needs to tell the school administration to address. It's not your job as a student to have to fix this matter. It the school's duty to fix.
In closing I am so sorry you have to learn in a school environment not promoting lots of friendships. That must be so extremely painful. My heart feels so sad for you. Something is definitely wrong if students aren't getting the multiple opportunities daily to laugh, have fun, and especially create new friends.
Sorry I rant, but I hate that as a teacher soninvilved in this issue I hear a student feels lonely, unwanted, uninvited, or doesn't feel they belong when they attend school in a mass of other classmates. I never blame the student, as it's typically the adults at the school who need to fix it to instill a new school atmosphere to promote student friendships and support. You sound like a perfectly normal healthy teenager. It's adults at your school who are not doing enough in my professional opinion. It should normally ordinarily be very easy to find friends--even for shy and extremely reserved students!
I'm not the OP, but I've waited for this answer for 12 years.
Thank you.. :)
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