June 21, 2011
(I've written the first part of this on a wordprocessing program first; that's why it looks like this. The publishing function has been really slow or hasn't worked, often, on Weebly lately, so I thought this might be faster. If there are typos, etc., know that I've written this quickly and have a lot to get through tonight.)
--Food Stamps
I don't need to explain my food stamps purchases to anyone. Not only are they meaningless besides being what I felt like having, they are supposed to be private.
--The Hedding Methodist Church
This morning, I went to the Hedding Methodist Church for the 2nd day of classes for Vermont Works for Women. I was early, so I went back to the basement to look at the children's classrooms again, from outside the doors to them.
Room #5, which says on the sign by the door that is also called the “Scout Room,” has a big poster visible on a cabinet that is in the room, directly across from the window in the door that has fish decals on it. (I'm being harassed by the guinea-pig-owning staff/resident of the shelter as I write this; she just walked behing me saying “Gotta clean up the mess.). The poster says:
“Better Flavor. Better For you
Better for Scouts in Your Community.
Made with Canola Oil
Trail's End
trails-end.com
Over 70% goes to local scouting.”
Whatever that means, it's bad; it's bad to have in a classroom.
On the chalkboard on the other side of the classroom, a target was drawn in chalk. Next to the target, it says “American.” There are words in some disarray all over the board. Some that I saw very clearly said:
“Wales Tales Water Park.”
That all seems bad to me, too.
--Vermont Works for Women
For at least 10 minutes before class for VT Works For Women started, there were a few students were talked nonstop about cheese. Cheesecake, cottage cheese, whether it's better to use cottage or ricotta cheese in lasagna or baked ziti, how one of them was going to make lasagna tonight.
The instructor stood there and heard all of it, and said nothing.
There was some coughing throughout class that seemed deliberate, mostly done by the same person or few people.
We did another name game exercise, for which the instructor handed out pieces of paper with “Get To Know You” questions on them. The purpose of the game was to find other people in the classroom who answered the question the same way. There was only one question that said something like:
“.....................is also a cat/dog/fish/not an animal (circle one) person.”
Nobody walked up to me to tell me that she was “a fish person.” One person did walk up to me to say that her favorite ice cream was “Phish food;” I didn't give an answer to the ice cream question, I wrote “n/a” for “not applicable.”
I'm sure that neither the student nor the instructor knows that “ice cream” is one part of the pedophilia situation, for a particular instance that happened last summer. Last summer, in 2010, when I didn't realize that the White House wanted to make pedophilia legal and I thought that maybe the Obamas didn't understand how serious things were going to get, I wrote an angry message on Friendster, which I think used as a blog that I would write things on and then replace with other writing as days went on. I wrote something similar to “The Burlington Free Press has pictures of little kids with ice cream all over their faces, with the captions saying that pictures were taken at “Bay” this and “River” that, and the pictures are surrounded by ads for fish, cheese, wine and everything else. You HAVE to take this seriously.”
The federal government responded by bribing Vermont's public school teachers and administrators with $19 million in “emergency aid” that all went to the teachers and administrators; none of it went to anything for the students. That was decided at the end of August 2010 and announced again in the middle of September, 2010.
Also today, the instructor, who is also the coordinator for Vermont Works for Women, kept saying that she wanted to have a talk with me. I kept refusing to talk to her because I'd already tried to talk to her about her behavior toward me and all she had done was lie and try to bully me more.
At 12:00 p.m., when we took our half-hour break, she called after me as I went toward the door “I need to talk to you for a few minutes.” I turned around and said “I'll be back at 12:30 p.m., and I'll be sitting in that chair for class.” Then I left the room.
When I got back at 12:30 p.m., she again said that she wanted to speak with me. I was already sitting in my chair when she said that. About half the rest of the class was also seated, and the rest was on its way to being so. She was standing a few feet away from me when she said that she wanted to speak with me in private. I said “No. I'm not going to go out there to have a bogus conversation with you when you and I and everyone else here knows what's going on.”
She then asked all of the other students to leave the room so that she could talk to me alone. Then she sat down near me. I got out a few pieces of paper and told her that I was going to write down everything that she said. I got most of the conversation:
Her: I don't think that this program is going to work out for you, if you don't feel that you can communicate with me and trust me. You communicated to me that you thought I was abusing you, and that's not the kind of environment in which you're going to be able to thrive if that's how you feel. So what I'd really like is to be able to sit down and have a conversation with you about it, but you're not willing to do that, so this is where we're going to have to end our time together.
Is there anything you want to say?
Me: I'm not leaving.
Her: You are making this a really difficult environment for me to teach in--
Me: That is a total lie and you know it. I'm writing this down.
Her: What do you think that I'm going to be able to do for you in this program if you can't or won't communicate with me and you think that I'm abusing you? What do you think that I'm going to be able to do for you in this program?
Me: This is a program for women. I'm a woman, and I'm here to move on with my life.
Her: You signed a contract saying that you would respect everyone. I can't work with you like this—I have to contact my supervisor and ask her how to terminate my relationship with you.
(somewhere in the middle of her saying that she didn't know what she had done to upset me I called her a liar again, and when she completed the last sentence I've recorded above, I said:)
Me: I'm not leaving.
Her: You can stay for today.
It is a TOTAL LIE that I have made the class hard for her to teach. She initiated all the bullying with the things she said in the first class last week, and she knows it. It is a program that is supposed to empower women; for her to say during a class exercise in a program that her “dealbreaker” for working somewhere was “cleaning up urine and vomit” is horrible bullying. It's not as if that were the first comment about “cleaning things up” and “mess,” on that day; it was just what she said near the end of class and was the comment that made me angry enough to confront her after class on that day and tell her that I was there to be productive and not to be abused. On that day, last Thursday, when I confronted her, she got a big smile on her face and said “I don't know what you mean.”
She has no right to accuse me of not being willing to communicate with her; I DID try to communicate with her, when I confronted her on that day, immediately after she'd made her worst but not first comment. She knew exactly what she was doing, and when I saw that she was going not only to lie about it when I'd confronted her but that she was going to enjoy lying and turn my attempts to talk to her into more chances to bully me by laughing in my face, I left the room and I didn't bring it up again.
(A male shelter resident is singing “Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fisheads” in the background as I write this. He is, without question, at least in his forties.)
Since Thursday, she's called me twice at the shelter. The first time, she called me to say that she had had no idea what I meant when I confronted her and that she “wanted me to tell her” exactly what I thought she had done to try to upset me. I refused to allow her to try to humiliate me in that phone conversation; I refused to discuss the matter in any detail. I told her that she knew what was going on and that I'd be there on Tuesday.
It would have done nothing for me to say “In addition to having already talked about 'cleaning things up' and 'mess' on that day, you also went out of your way to talk about 'cleaning up urine and vomit.' I know that you know I'm famous. I know that you know that I'm being bullied by a lot of powerful people, and I know that what you were doing was using code to insinuate to me and to all of your other students that I'm a dirty, bad person with a dirty vagina that needs to be 'cleaned up' because it's a 'mess.'”
If I had said all or any of that to her, at any time, she would have smiled throughout my talking, pretended to be shocked if she even has the decency to pretend to be shocked, and then she would have lied MORE. She would have made the same game out of it that everyone else who's harassed me in person has made; she would have said “Why would you think that that was what I meant?” and
“It's just ordinary conversation,” and she most likely would have accused me of there being something wrong with me for having thought that that was what she meant. She would have lied and lied and lied, and then she would have denied that she was lying, and then she would have tried to kick me out of the program anyway.
For a teacher of a classroom to try to upset one of her students, for her to lie about it when confronted, for her to then try to remove the student from the program for the student's having objected to being abused; that is NOT communication from her, and I am NOT the disruptive person in that classroom.
I've shown up on time. I've participated in all of the activities. I've been polite and pleasant to everyone, even to her after she made her first comments last week, until her comments at the end became extra vicious, and even then, all I did with my anger was confront her, with no profanity or insults, and all she did was lie..
When I saw how she planned to be, I said what I had to say about it online, but I didn't bring it up to her again; since last week, she's called me twice at the shelter and then kept class from starting for about 20 minutes past when it was supposed to start after the break so that she could lie to me more and tell me that I couldn't be in the program.
I'm not the one who's disrupting that class; she is.
@7:40 p.m.
I coughed once in class today, this morning, before the break. I couldn't help it, I said “I'm sorry” right away, and then I left the room so that I could cough away from the classroom and nobody would think that I was trying to be offensive.
Even though there were at least 2 students in the room who gave fake coughs throughout the day and who had also made “cheese” and other comments, she said nothing to them. She must have thought I was trying to be harassing with that cough, because after I'd left the room and come back, she started making comments, which she hadn't done up until them. She made comments until the break, such as saying that the (red) marker that she was using on the dry erase board smelled, and that the board, which had a lot of writing on it by then, was “radiating.” She also told someone in the class not to worry about the canolli that another student had brought in “getting soggy.” She made those comments before the conversation that she tried to have with me when she kept all of the other students out of the room so that she could tell me that if I “couldn't communicate with her” that the program “wasn't going to work for me,” and that I was “making it difficult for her to teach.”
As usual, I NEVER initiate any of this kind of thing; I object to it, and I write about it online if my objections get denied or not taken seriously. Not only do I never start it, I try not to respond in kind when other people start it. Sometimes strangers or other harassers who cough at me or make comments can provoke me to cough back or to say something or yell back at them, but I've noticed that they often don't stop unless I do say something. Also, they never succeed in getting me to make comments about their genitals. I swear sometimes, but that's not the same thing as saying or implying to someone “your vagina or your penis is DIRTY.”
I am in that class to be productive. That is what I signed up for, and she has no right to keep me out.
I even try to turn away from people now if I need to scratch my nose.
At 1:03 p.m., she worked the word “wavelength” into the conversation.
At 1:04 p.m., there was another cough from someone in the classroom.
At 1:23 p.m., a student came back to the classroom who'd had an ultrasound and said you could see the baby now. The teacher said “It's not just a little kidney bean floating around in there?” The student has said she's gay, and even though she talks about her girlfriend in class, this morning she said she'd “rather walk through the rain.” She also told another girl in class, who was also making harassing comments, about cheese “You like it creamy.” They knew each other before class; I guess they're friends, but it's disgusting that the teacher tries to accuse me of being disrespectful and tries to kick me out of class for objecting to that kind of thing. The teacher was present for all of it; all of the comments, everything.
I didn't say a word about any of the comments or coughing, or initiate any kind of conversation with the teacher; her trying to kick me out of class was the only discussion made of the situation today.
(There's more coughing by some male residents of the shelter behind me, as I write this.)
The teacher had us doing activities today that involved circling personal characteristics on a list of words. Most of the traits were things such as “friendly,” “determined,” etc,; she started saying things such as “if you're aggressive,” and “if you're stubborn.” I wonder if she was trying to get me to object to it then; that was just after our discussion when she tried to kick me out. I'm not the one who's being aggressive; harassing your student in class and at the shelter where she's staying is aggressive. As far as being stubborn goes; I'm there to be productive, and she has no right to kick me out for objecting to being abused and to misogyny being promoted in a program that's supposed to help women.
One of the other students who's looking as if she's going to be the most persistently harassing of the students talked about how her house “isn't a mess,” how she “shouldn't have chosen salt and vinegar” potato chips at lunch. I also looked up at one point when I realized that she was talking about “deaf and dumb,” Helen Keller and Anne Frank and laughing. She said her best job ever was at “Sugarbush,” where “sometimes you're stocking the cooler, and sometimes you're cleaning up tables.”
The instructor also talked about “cleaning her room.”
The “Resume Worksheet” that she gave us and that she said would be an integral part of the work we did for class has as its example under “Work History”:
“Personal Care Attendant
Sampson Nursing Home
June 2009- June 2010
--Prepared and served nutritious meals
--Cleaned up after meals
--Helped organize daily medication
--Observed patient care”
Other things happened today, before and after she told me that I was “making it difficult” for her to teach and that I'd have to leave. There was a “pizza” comment from the self-identified lesbian....
Why should I leave? I want to be there so that I can help myself get a better job than I have had at other times. It's important
(more fake, loud or exaggerated coughing from a male resident behind me as I write this)
that I finish the program. I'm supposed to leave the shelter on June 29th; 4 months here are supposed to be the limit. Then you have to be out for a month before you can come back.
Applying to this program was one of the first things that I did when I got out of the hospital. It's even supposed to be for women who have had trouble finding employment because of a criminal record, drug problem, or other issues, such as gaps in their employment history due to illness or taking care of other people.
Here's what #2 of the “Classroom Rules” as written on the handout she gave us says:
“2. Keep conversation decent & language clean. We expect behavior that will insure a safe and respectful environment for all involved with the program.”
The coordinator and teacher of the program has NOT been respectful of me, and she hasn't encouraged other students to contribute to making the classroom a “safe and respectful environment.”
She has bullied me, she has lied to me; she has to know what my situation is at the shelter, and that I asked for an extension on living here so that I could finish the program and be ready to move out. I said “I'm here to be productive,” and that's why I'm there.
The entire purpose of the program is to help women who have had a difficult time; bullying women, lying to them, making comments that are sexual innuendos and then trying to throw them out of class for no reason are all exactly against what the program is supposed to do.
The way I presented things to the shelter was that if I was doing something productive, could I get an extension to move out on September 1, 2011; I had no control over when the program started or when it will end. My being in Vermont Works For Women was one of the things that I presented to the shelter as evidence of my being serious about my future and doing things that are worthwhile and goal-oriented. That was received favorably when I brought it up.
I KNOW that the coordinator of Vermont Works For Women is reading my blog, and I'm sure that she read the page when I first wrote about how important it is for me to stay in the program so that I can continue to have a place to live. If she didn't want me there, she needed to tell me that months ago so that I wouldn't have been counting on it and I could have made other plans at least for employment if not for housing, also.
She knows that she is pushing me seriously toward actual homelessness. Life is more than dangerous enough for me already; how long does she think I'd last without even the shelter to live in, outside, all the time, with nothing?
@8:30 p.m.
One of the activities that she had us do was split into groups and pretend to be business owners getting ready to hire someone. One group of students decided to have a “pet grooming” business.
All the groups had to get up and give short presentations. When my group went over to the wall where we had to tape our presentations and then stand next to them, the same student who'd talked about cheese, her favorite job being at Sugarbush where she “cleaned up” tables, making other comments and coughing, coughed loudly when I was standing there a few feet away from her.
(More fake coughing from a male resident in the shelter.)
@8:37 p.m.
--Pepsi
I think that somewhere in the 2010 part of this blog, there is at least one page discussing Pepsi's “Refresh” project and the company's involvement in promoting not only sexual degradation of women all across the United States
(as I've been writing, I've heard someone on a TV show in the background saying “gushed like a teenager”)
but also child abuse. I described the harassment in the Pepsi website's supposed humanitarian involvement in communities all across the country. I also found a link from the Pepsi website, in one of its supposed humanitarian sections, that went to what seemed to be a completely fake website for a non-existent camp for children. The camp website had harassment all over it. It also had an application that said “For returning counselors only.” The application had a section in that asked something like “Have you ever been convicted of the following crimes,” and then listed a bunch of crimes, including child abuse. The list of crimes was presented more as a list of qualifications rather than as things that would prevent someone from being employed by the camp.
@8:45 p.m.
(more fake coughing/sneezing from male resident of shelter.)
--Barre Civic Center
When I left the shelter this morning and walked toward the center of town, I saw that the lettering for the sign whose permanent words say “Barre Civic Center Auditorium—BOR Arena Alumni Hall” had been changed from “Clean Up Your Act Day June 18, 2011” to “Lifeguard Course Barre Pool June 27th to July 1 Hiring Lifeguards. Call 476-0257.”
--Corrupted children
Yesterday, as I walked back to the shelter, I heard a boy who might have been in his very early teens yelling “I went swimming in Casey's pool” after I'd walked by. I looked back and saw him with his father, who had his back to me and was between the boy and me from several yards away as the boy had just called out behind me. I couldn't tell if the father was trying to encourage or discourage the boy from continuing his rant.
--Gannett News Service and what it gives to Vermont
The front pages of the Burlington Free Press and the Times Argus were absolutely horrifying today. It was all about the promotion of pedophilia. The "tritium leak" got mentioned again on the front page.
Maybe other newspapers were like that today, too; I didn't have time to look.
@9:00 p.m.
(I've written the first part of this on a wordprocessing program first; that's why it looks like this. The publishing function has been really slow or hasn't worked, often, on Weebly lately, so I thought this might be faster. If there are typos, etc., know that I've written this quickly and have a lot to get through tonight.)
--Food Stamps
I don't need to explain my food stamps purchases to anyone. Not only are they meaningless besides being what I felt like having, they are supposed to be private.
--The Hedding Methodist Church
This morning, I went to the Hedding Methodist Church for the 2nd day of classes for Vermont Works for Women. I was early, so I went back to the basement to look at the children's classrooms again, from outside the doors to them.
Room #5, which says on the sign by the door that is also called the “Scout Room,” has a big poster visible on a cabinet that is in the room, directly across from the window in the door that has fish decals on it. (I'm being harassed by the guinea-pig-owning staff/resident of the shelter as I write this; she just walked behing me saying “Gotta clean up the mess.). The poster says:
“Better Flavor. Better For you
Better for Scouts in Your Community.
Made with Canola Oil
Trail's End
trails-end.com
Over 70% goes to local scouting.”
Whatever that means, it's bad; it's bad to have in a classroom.
On the chalkboard on the other side of the classroom, a target was drawn in chalk. Next to the target, it says “American.” There are words in some disarray all over the board. Some that I saw very clearly said:
“Wales Tales Water Park.”
That all seems bad to me, too.
--Vermont Works for Women
For at least 10 minutes before class for VT Works For Women started, there were a few students were talked nonstop about cheese. Cheesecake, cottage cheese, whether it's better to use cottage or ricotta cheese in lasagna or baked ziti, how one of them was going to make lasagna tonight.
The instructor stood there and heard all of it, and said nothing.
There was some coughing throughout class that seemed deliberate, mostly done by the same person or few people.
We did another name game exercise, for which the instructor handed out pieces of paper with “Get To Know You” questions on them. The purpose of the game was to find other people in the classroom who answered the question the same way. There was only one question that said something like:
“.....................is also a cat/dog/fish/not an animal (circle one) person.”
Nobody walked up to me to tell me that she was “a fish person.” One person did walk up to me to say that her favorite ice cream was “Phish food;” I didn't give an answer to the ice cream question, I wrote “n/a” for “not applicable.”
I'm sure that neither the student nor the instructor knows that “ice cream” is one part of the pedophilia situation, for a particular instance that happened last summer. Last summer, in 2010, when I didn't realize that the White House wanted to make pedophilia legal and I thought that maybe the Obamas didn't understand how serious things were going to get, I wrote an angry message on Friendster, which I think used as a blog that I would write things on and then replace with other writing as days went on. I wrote something similar to “The Burlington Free Press has pictures of little kids with ice cream all over their faces, with the captions saying that pictures were taken at “Bay” this and “River” that, and the pictures are surrounded by ads for fish, cheese, wine and everything else. You HAVE to take this seriously.”
The federal government responded by bribing Vermont's public school teachers and administrators with $19 million in “emergency aid” that all went to the teachers and administrators; none of it went to anything for the students. That was decided at the end of August 2010 and announced again in the middle of September, 2010.
Also today, the instructor, who is also the coordinator for Vermont Works for Women, kept saying that she wanted to have a talk with me. I kept refusing to talk to her because I'd already tried to talk to her about her behavior toward me and all she had done was lie and try to bully me more.
At 12:00 p.m., when we took our half-hour break, she called after me as I went toward the door “I need to talk to you for a few minutes.” I turned around and said “I'll be back at 12:30 p.m., and I'll be sitting in that chair for class.” Then I left the room.
When I got back at 12:30 p.m., she again said that she wanted to speak with me. I was already sitting in my chair when she said that. About half the rest of the class was also seated, and the rest was on its way to being so. She was standing a few feet away from me when she said that she wanted to speak with me in private. I said “No. I'm not going to go out there to have a bogus conversation with you when you and I and everyone else here knows what's going on.”
She then asked all of the other students to leave the room so that she could talk to me alone. Then she sat down near me. I got out a few pieces of paper and told her that I was going to write down everything that she said. I got most of the conversation:
Her: I don't think that this program is going to work out for you, if you don't feel that you can communicate with me and trust me. You communicated to me that you thought I was abusing you, and that's not the kind of environment in which you're going to be able to thrive if that's how you feel. So what I'd really like is to be able to sit down and have a conversation with you about it, but you're not willing to do that, so this is where we're going to have to end our time together.
Is there anything you want to say?
Me: I'm not leaving.
Her: You are making this a really difficult environment for me to teach in--
Me: That is a total lie and you know it. I'm writing this down.
Her: What do you think that I'm going to be able to do for you in this program if you can't or won't communicate with me and you think that I'm abusing you? What do you think that I'm going to be able to do for you in this program?
Me: This is a program for women. I'm a woman, and I'm here to move on with my life.
Her: You signed a contract saying that you would respect everyone. I can't work with you like this—I have to contact my supervisor and ask her how to terminate my relationship with you.
(somewhere in the middle of her saying that she didn't know what she had done to upset me I called her a liar again, and when she completed the last sentence I've recorded above, I said:)
Me: I'm not leaving.
Her: You can stay for today.
It is a TOTAL LIE that I have made the class hard for her to teach. She initiated all the bullying with the things she said in the first class last week, and she knows it. It is a program that is supposed to empower women; for her to say during a class exercise in a program that her “dealbreaker” for working somewhere was “cleaning up urine and vomit” is horrible bullying. It's not as if that were the first comment about “cleaning things up” and “mess,” on that day; it was just what she said near the end of class and was the comment that made me angry enough to confront her after class on that day and tell her that I was there to be productive and not to be abused. On that day, last Thursday, when I confronted her, she got a big smile on her face and said “I don't know what you mean.”
She has no right to accuse me of not being willing to communicate with her; I DID try to communicate with her, when I confronted her on that day, immediately after she'd made her worst but not first comment. She knew exactly what she was doing, and when I saw that she was going not only to lie about it when I'd confronted her but that she was going to enjoy lying and turn my attempts to talk to her into more chances to bully me by laughing in my face, I left the room and I didn't bring it up again.
(A male shelter resident is singing “Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fisheads” in the background as I write this. He is, without question, at least in his forties.)
Since Thursday, she's called me twice at the shelter. The first time, she called me to say that she had had no idea what I meant when I confronted her and that she “wanted me to tell her” exactly what I thought she had done to try to upset me. I refused to allow her to try to humiliate me in that phone conversation; I refused to discuss the matter in any detail. I told her that she knew what was going on and that I'd be there on Tuesday.
It would have done nothing for me to say “In addition to having already talked about 'cleaning things up' and 'mess' on that day, you also went out of your way to talk about 'cleaning up urine and vomit.' I know that you know I'm famous. I know that you know that I'm being bullied by a lot of powerful people, and I know that what you were doing was using code to insinuate to me and to all of your other students that I'm a dirty, bad person with a dirty vagina that needs to be 'cleaned up' because it's a 'mess.'”
If I had said all or any of that to her, at any time, she would have smiled throughout my talking, pretended to be shocked if she even has the decency to pretend to be shocked, and then she would have lied MORE. She would have made the same game out of it that everyone else who's harassed me in person has made; she would have said “Why would you think that that was what I meant?” and
“It's just ordinary conversation,” and she most likely would have accused me of there being something wrong with me for having thought that that was what she meant. She would have lied and lied and lied, and then she would have denied that she was lying, and then she would have tried to kick me out of the program anyway.
For a teacher of a classroom to try to upset one of her students, for her to lie about it when confronted, for her to then try to remove the student from the program for the student's having objected to being abused; that is NOT communication from her, and I am NOT the disruptive person in that classroom.
I've shown up on time. I've participated in all of the activities. I've been polite and pleasant to everyone, even to her after she made her first comments last week, until her comments at the end became extra vicious, and even then, all I did with my anger was confront her, with no profanity or insults, and all she did was lie..
When I saw how she planned to be, I said what I had to say about it online, but I didn't bring it up to her again; since last week, she's called me twice at the shelter and then kept class from starting for about 20 minutes past when it was supposed to start after the break so that she could lie to me more and tell me that I couldn't be in the program.
I'm not the one who's disrupting that class; she is.
@7:40 p.m.
I coughed once in class today, this morning, before the break. I couldn't help it, I said “I'm sorry” right away, and then I left the room so that I could cough away from the classroom and nobody would think that I was trying to be offensive.
Even though there were at least 2 students in the room who gave fake coughs throughout the day and who had also made “cheese” and other comments, she said nothing to them. She must have thought I was trying to be harassing with that cough, because after I'd left the room and come back, she started making comments, which she hadn't done up until them. She made comments until the break, such as saying that the (red) marker that she was using on the dry erase board smelled, and that the board, which had a lot of writing on it by then, was “radiating.” She also told someone in the class not to worry about the canolli that another student had brought in “getting soggy.” She made those comments before the conversation that she tried to have with me when she kept all of the other students out of the room so that she could tell me that if I “couldn't communicate with her” that the program “wasn't going to work for me,” and that I was “making it difficult for her to teach.”
As usual, I NEVER initiate any of this kind of thing; I object to it, and I write about it online if my objections get denied or not taken seriously. Not only do I never start it, I try not to respond in kind when other people start it. Sometimes strangers or other harassers who cough at me or make comments can provoke me to cough back or to say something or yell back at them, but I've noticed that they often don't stop unless I do say something. Also, they never succeed in getting me to make comments about their genitals. I swear sometimes, but that's not the same thing as saying or implying to someone “your vagina or your penis is DIRTY.”
I am in that class to be productive. That is what I signed up for, and she has no right to keep me out.
I even try to turn away from people now if I need to scratch my nose.
At 1:03 p.m., she worked the word “wavelength” into the conversation.
At 1:04 p.m., there was another cough from someone in the classroom.
At 1:23 p.m., a student came back to the classroom who'd had an ultrasound and said you could see the baby now. The teacher said “It's not just a little kidney bean floating around in there?” The student has said she's gay, and even though she talks about her girlfriend in class, this morning she said she'd “rather walk through the rain.” She also told another girl in class, who was also making harassing comments, about cheese “You like it creamy.” They knew each other before class; I guess they're friends, but it's disgusting that the teacher tries to accuse me of being disrespectful and tries to kick me out of class for objecting to that kind of thing. The teacher was present for all of it; all of the comments, everything.
I didn't say a word about any of the comments or coughing, or initiate any kind of conversation with the teacher; her trying to kick me out of class was the only discussion made of the situation today.
(There's more coughing by some male residents of the shelter behind me, as I write this.)
The teacher had us doing activities today that involved circling personal characteristics on a list of words. Most of the traits were things such as “friendly,” “determined,” etc,; she started saying things such as “if you're aggressive,” and “if you're stubborn.” I wonder if she was trying to get me to object to it then; that was just after our discussion when she tried to kick me out. I'm not the one who's being aggressive; harassing your student in class and at the shelter where she's staying is aggressive. As far as being stubborn goes; I'm there to be productive, and she has no right to kick me out for objecting to being abused and to misogyny being promoted in a program that's supposed to help women.
One of the other students who's looking as if she's going to be the most persistently harassing of the students talked about how her house “isn't a mess,” how she “shouldn't have chosen salt and vinegar” potato chips at lunch. I also looked up at one point when I realized that she was talking about “deaf and dumb,” Helen Keller and Anne Frank and laughing. She said her best job ever was at “Sugarbush,” where “sometimes you're stocking the cooler, and sometimes you're cleaning up tables.”
The instructor also talked about “cleaning her room.”
The “Resume Worksheet” that she gave us and that she said would be an integral part of the work we did for class has as its example under “Work History”:
“Personal Care Attendant
Sampson Nursing Home
June 2009- June 2010
--Prepared and served nutritious meals
--Cleaned up after meals
--Helped organize daily medication
--Observed patient care”
Other things happened today, before and after she told me that I was “making it difficult” for her to teach and that I'd have to leave. There was a “pizza” comment from the self-identified lesbian....
Why should I leave? I want to be there so that I can help myself get a better job than I have had at other times. It's important
(more fake, loud or exaggerated coughing from a male resident behind me as I write this)
that I finish the program. I'm supposed to leave the shelter on June 29th; 4 months here are supposed to be the limit. Then you have to be out for a month before you can come back.
Applying to this program was one of the first things that I did when I got out of the hospital. It's even supposed to be for women who have had trouble finding employment because of a criminal record, drug problem, or other issues, such as gaps in their employment history due to illness or taking care of other people.
Here's what #2 of the “Classroom Rules” as written on the handout she gave us says:
“2. Keep conversation decent & language clean. We expect behavior that will insure a safe and respectful environment for all involved with the program.”
The coordinator and teacher of the program has NOT been respectful of me, and she hasn't encouraged other students to contribute to making the classroom a “safe and respectful environment.”
She has bullied me, she has lied to me; she has to know what my situation is at the shelter, and that I asked for an extension on living here so that I could finish the program and be ready to move out. I said “I'm here to be productive,” and that's why I'm there.
The entire purpose of the program is to help women who have had a difficult time; bullying women, lying to them, making comments that are sexual innuendos and then trying to throw them out of class for no reason are all exactly against what the program is supposed to do.
The way I presented things to the shelter was that if I was doing something productive, could I get an extension to move out on September 1, 2011; I had no control over when the program started or when it will end. My being in Vermont Works For Women was one of the things that I presented to the shelter as evidence of my being serious about my future and doing things that are worthwhile and goal-oriented. That was received favorably when I brought it up.
I KNOW that the coordinator of Vermont Works For Women is reading my blog, and I'm sure that she read the page when I first wrote about how important it is for me to stay in the program so that I can continue to have a place to live. If she didn't want me there, she needed to tell me that months ago so that I wouldn't have been counting on it and I could have made other plans at least for employment if not for housing, also.
She knows that she is pushing me seriously toward actual homelessness. Life is more than dangerous enough for me already; how long does she think I'd last without even the shelter to live in, outside, all the time, with nothing?
@8:30 p.m.
One of the activities that she had us do was split into groups and pretend to be business owners getting ready to hire someone. One group of students decided to have a “pet grooming” business.
All the groups had to get up and give short presentations. When my group went over to the wall where we had to tape our presentations and then stand next to them, the same student who'd talked about cheese, her favorite job being at Sugarbush where she “cleaned up” tables, making other comments and coughing, coughed loudly when I was standing there a few feet away from her.
(More fake coughing from a male resident in the shelter.)
@8:37 p.m.
--Pepsi
I think that somewhere in the 2010 part of this blog, there is at least one page discussing Pepsi's “Refresh” project and the company's involvement in promoting not only sexual degradation of women all across the United States
(as I've been writing, I've heard someone on a TV show in the background saying “gushed like a teenager”)
but also child abuse. I described the harassment in the Pepsi website's supposed humanitarian involvement in communities all across the country. I also found a link from the Pepsi website, in one of its supposed humanitarian sections, that went to what seemed to be a completely fake website for a non-existent camp for children. The camp website had harassment all over it. It also had an application that said “For returning counselors only.” The application had a section in that asked something like “Have you ever been convicted of the following crimes,” and then listed a bunch of crimes, including child abuse. The list of crimes was presented more as a list of qualifications rather than as things that would prevent someone from being employed by the camp.
@8:45 p.m.
(more fake coughing/sneezing from male resident of shelter.)
--Barre Civic Center
When I left the shelter this morning and walked toward the center of town, I saw that the lettering for the sign whose permanent words say “Barre Civic Center Auditorium—BOR Arena Alumni Hall” had been changed from “Clean Up Your Act Day June 18, 2011” to “Lifeguard Course Barre Pool June 27th to July 1 Hiring Lifeguards. Call 476-0257.”
--Corrupted children
Yesterday, as I walked back to the shelter, I heard a boy who might have been in his very early teens yelling “I went swimming in Casey's pool” after I'd walked by. I looked back and saw him with his father, who had his back to me and was between the boy and me from several yards away as the boy had just called out behind me. I couldn't tell if the father was trying to encourage or discourage the boy from continuing his rant.
--Gannett News Service and what it gives to Vermont
The front pages of the Burlington Free Press and the Times Argus were absolutely horrifying today. It was all about the promotion of pedophilia. The "tritium leak" got mentioned again on the front page.
Maybe other newspapers were like that today, too; I didn't have time to look.
@9:00 p.m.