My School Might Hate Me

We went into the city, which is a minimum 45 minute drive on winding roads of supreme nausea and groaning, to get my school books. It did not end well.

By the time we got down the mountain, I was already ill. My period started the day before and I'd had to take ibuprofen for some awful cramps (I was hoping yogurt would be safe. It's not.) and it had brought on some very intense and thankfully short-lived depression that pretty much sucked my soul out. I would have loved to lay around and rest, but I needed my books. So, I dragged myself into the car, suffered the motion sickness, and was sloughing off the rest of my depression by crying most of the trip.

We got to my school, went in and waited for the woman at the front desk to free up. When she no longer had students in front of her, I asked if she had a book voucher for me. She said no.

I was baffled. I'd signed it digitally several days ago, and my new counselor was supposed to be on top of things. She stonewalled me, my counselor wasn't available, and there was nothing she could do, even though I'd traveled all this way and was falling to pieces before her eyes.

This woman showed no sympathy. She couldn't have cared less. And when I started crying, her face slipped into a disturbing smile of smug detachment, and I pretty much ran out of there. People like that scare the hell out of me. Not that I think my tears should change everything, but a word of commiseration, or any effort at all to rectify the situation would have meant a lot in my fragile state of mind. But she did nothing, just smiled at my sobbing face and repeated that there was nothing to be done.

So, we drove all the way back home, bookless.

My boyfriend called my counselor a few times while we were still in town, hoping he'd be able to change something, but he didn't call back until we were home. He apologized, which I'm sure made him feel better. I'm just pissed off and tired and I feel humiliated and disrespected. I understand that mistakes happen, but why do they keep happening to me, EVERY quarter?

I went back on Monday after verifying with both my counselor and the horrible woman at the front desk that the voucher was actually there. So, it was another torturous drive to the city, on close to the hottest day of the year, AWESOME.

And then, the bookstore only had one book for one of my classes, and it's the class I picked up "just in case" and was hoping to drop once we (hopefully) got my captions straightened out. (I'll get to that.) So, I have to get at least two books online, out of my own pretty-much-empty pocket, and I'm SO FRUSTRATED I COULD SPIT. Why would teachers assign a text and then not have it available in the bookstore?

One of my teachers scanned the relevant pages of the assigned text and posted the pdfs online to save us money. Unfortunately, I can't read pdfs online (OW) and printing them out is costing us money in ink. I also looked for this text in the store, hoping it would be assigned for another class, but it's not there and it's at least $43 w/ shipping on amazon. I already have to buy another book for this class online, at $10, which isn't terrible, but combined with my other required and not available text, which runs at least $34, I'm digging into the necessities budget.

And captions are still up in the air. The teacher with video content told my counselor that there isn't any, but the entire discussion forum, that I'm expected to participate in at least weekly, is based on audio and video! We can respond in text, but to know what I'm responding to, I have to watch a video that my teacher uploads, and it's HORRIBLE quality video and audio, so I start twitching within moments of it autoplaying. UGH. It's not good.

So, after going back and forth with my counselor a few times, I finally emailed my teacher directly and she said she'd caption the videos herself. WHY couldn't my counselor have just found that out/told me that?

She also has a few youtube videos up this week, and when I brought them to the attention of my counselor, he said that they were captioned (by youtube's auto-captioning) and I'd be fine. One of them was ok, but the other is a man who speaks quickly and had a thick british accent, so the captions are hilariously WRONG WRONG WRONG all the way through. I emailed my counselor with the link two days ago and haven't heard anything yet.

I just need a new school, this one is obviously inadequate for my needs, but I don't even know where to start with that. I chose this school because it was the one I went to when I was actually college-aged, and I have no idea what I based my decision on back then, school ratings in the state, maybe. What I need is a not-for-profit school with a huge online program and decent disability support and financial aid departments. There has to be one, somewhere.