The Effects of my 9th grade

Eight days ago from the initial publishing date, I turned 17 years old. However, my days have been of much more value to me than year, and that’s because a crazy timeline of events occured. Moving from Canada to the United States when I was 11 has been a mistake made the start of a much more independent risk-taking life style. School Switches, Discord Server Management, Gaining a new family and quite a deep depression period occurred, but most of these events have thankfully had a safe recovery.

This is the last year of being in High School, yet I feel like I already ended my teenager phase in 8th grade. Whereas most of my friends were going through the social media phase in their rebelious attitude, I had already made 3 rap songs, built a solid online network and told my school principal off for their mistreatment. My 9th grade onwards was spent trying to show people that I was not like the people in my surroundings. At first though, I tried to blend in with the crowd.

RAP wars & the fate of my math education

Spitting out straight fire and acting rebellious seems to be “cool” and “popular”, even when it amounts to literally nothing. Add in a math teacher that officially endorsed it and the time spent in class would contain 25% of actual rapping and the other 75% being overly hyped for these (mediocre) battles. While it was limited to that one class (other teachers being too kind and the ultimate edge-lord teacher found rapping to be “low-level edge”), these songs struct the ears of the passerby students.

By this point, my creative talents have moved onto doing things for the Super Mario Maker modding community and as such, rapping was not something I was too good at. This did not stop the class from summoning me and my ultimately edgy roasts (which were just stolen from Infinite’s theme) to go up against the teacher and the rapping throne he sat on. I complied from peer-pressure, hoping that this would earn me a level of acceptance amongst my peers.

Unfortunately, the one thing I seeked to obtain was the one thing I ended up losing from this event. The people I actually looked up who already knew of this event viewed me as immature and my rules were dismissed from the peeers I was aiming to impress. My event was recorded for the entire Instagram world to see, which is not something I want poping up when I am trying to build a serious record. I place little faith in people for proper online-identity management, and this event further confirmed my fears.

Even if it were to be removed from the public wall, there will always be a copy of it. The person who recorded the video could have shared the original file on class group chats, or keep backups of it on iCloud. If they didn’t have access to the original file, they could download the version uploaded to instagram. While a built-in screen recorder wasn’t created in iOS at this point in time, it was on Windows 10’s Xbox Bar (Windows Key + G). Personally, I even use NewPipe to download .mp3 files for YouTube videos I like. In other words, I hoped this would be a simple memory but it ended up lasting longer.

Source: Sephiroth Reveal for Super Smash Bros Ultimate (converted to GIF by tee)

Clearly, a simple takedown on the official public location wasn’t enough and a confrontation was needed. My confrontation consisted of two complaints; how dare they record me and how dare no one tell me. The confrontation took place on the last day that I stayed in this Algebra 1 math class. In this debate, I was the only one on my side, as the class has openly admitted to not caring about my feelings and only used me just so that they can have their fun.

Fun was not to be had in a math class though, and clearly the teacher was trying to appeal to students request rather than focus on actual teachings. My bags were packed and my class was switched into the 9th grade honors math class, where we were taught Geometry instead of Algebra 1. I dismissed the lack of Algebra 1 knowledge as “record does not affect actual class”, and tried my age old tactic of jumping into things rather than giving proper analysis.

This was not the first time I had jumped straight into the deep end without going through the initial steps. It is a common thing to do in our society, seeing as how we have an over-reliance on luck and ego, while thinking that we know everything. There’s a reason “I have read and agree’d to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy” is the biggest lie told in our modern history. For me, it’s in programming when I try to apply what I know in one language to another with completely different syntax. My PHP code is often missing semicolons due to JS automatically inserting it for us, and it’s how I learned that C++ switch cases can only switch integer values (instead of normal languages like JS and PHP, where they can also contain strings). Of course, I always get errors and fix it up, but that’s in a world where I can go back and realize my mistake.

I was frequently behind, often times requiring individual lessons on Algebra concepts from the Geometry teacher. Even then, my buddy trainboy2019 ended up helping me with my homework and taught concepts I was too afraid to ask. I ended up barely scraping a good grade in the class, which is a far contrast to what happened the following year.

Graduation requirements hold me accountable for taking Alegbra 1, Geometry & Algebra 2. I was hoping to stay in this group for the rest of my math career by taking Algebra 1 during the summer online. Unfortunately, software errors occured which meant I had to take it with the school itself. They do not offer a 10th grade Alegbra 1 class, so I officially became a 10th grader in 2 9th grade classes. The other class was 9th grade gym due to time conflict, which ended up working in my favor as they didn’t want a 10th grader to play with those on a lower skill level. I received extra-credit too, so I got 103% percent (higher than my actual 9th grade gym class). My math teacher also took pity on me, but for an unrelated reason.

Beeing the “boomer” of the class, I was often the target for harassment. While not as bad as my original 9th grade class, I still felt like a victim. Combine this with my other class stories (Art class that I’ll talk about in an upcoming article, English class mentioned below), my anger had exploded in this class. My teacher took pity on me, and let me walk out of class when I noticed things were getting too heated. Sometimes, I took this for granted and went to Gym class with my other 10th graders (I was never called off for it, so I don’t mind). One time, I even took a week break, but that was too long as when I returned, I got a welcome back from my teacher (implying that he noticed). Overall, he didn’t seem to mind it, which was helpful because I knew I had him on my side.

Unfortunately, the school in general was not on my side, prompting me to switch schools. I went to a public school with different level classes for the same subject. Since I was on track in terms of graduation requirements, I was able to keep up with my class mates and went into an Algebra 2 honors class. For the part I was there, we were reviewing our Algebra 1 skills. I ended up barely scrapping a good grade, due to my lackluster skills as a result of the pityness my previous teacher shown me. The second semester was when the school realized that on their mistaken transcript, it said I did Algebra 2 the previous year. They didn’t want a repeat of the same class twice so I was placed in a class that gave me Algebra 2 credits but not Algebra 2 itself; Intro to Data Science.

The R programming language class taught an interesting language in one of worst ways, due to a teacher that did not understand fundamentals. The code was unnecessarily bloated, but we were forced to type in that way if we didn’t want to fail. Our teacher was also going on and on about how we make his life so depressing by being smarter than him, but that was to be expected from a class containing “Algebra 2-rejects”. My rebellious attitude developed later in this article came into play, and I wrote a 2 page essay describing my frustrations. On Valentines Day, I read mine to him which prompted others to also rant about him. The following week, he was under investigation for physically pushing another student out of the class. I was called into the Principal’s office, getting asked if I noticed anything odd. He was later in the clear, but the week following, the entire school followed in his footsteps and went into quarantine, but for a different reason (COVID-19 was declaired a national emergency).

So, what started off as a simple harmless RAP battle ended up destroying my math. I often ask Evie to help me out with certain concepts (like how to remove percentages from a number), which feels embarrassing when I used to consider math to be my specialty back in elementary. To reflect on this, I should have never aimed for popularity in the first place. I also should have stood my ground initially, not give into their desires to make me immature again. I suppose for the younger folk reading this, please do start worrying about your future from this early age.

Anti-iPhone gone legal

The RAP battles brought my status to the school as a much more popular student, as the story was told over that a challenger has topped the king of rapping. This was combined with the fact that people know how technologically advanced I am as I started a programming club + my popular sister went to the school (which I have reasons to suspect most of the followers are bots omegalul). The responsibility had to be handled quite well, since people looked up to me as an example of “cool kid yet not a jerk”. However, combine that with the behavior typically held by 17 year olds (which is to get vengeance every time someone does even the slightest mistake) and a manipulative online friend in a school where online interactions with strangers are considered dangerous by the staff (even though everyone has a social media account) and you get the title of responsibility lost. Although I proved my point about iProducts being iCrap, it made my reputation turn into iCrap too 😛

A former online friend of mine was going through rough times, which lead them to tweeting “I will kill myself in 24 hours”. After no update was given in the 24 hour time span they gave themselves, my real-life self was found crying in the school halls due to the thought that this person ended up dead. This caught the attention of the school administration, which sent me home for the day. My class’ WhatsApp group chat was filled with messages saying that I’m only doing this for attention, which had officially crossed the line.

Permanent revenge was not my plan (I didn’t want to get thrown out of the school or get people in higher rankings involved) but they needed to be learnt a lesson on how to treat someone with an experience like this. Tech Twitter came to the rescue, documenting a new iOS 11 bug that would kill whatever process the bug found itself on. Website tabs would no longer become accessible, chat tabs could no longer have communications, but what if it were on a system process, like Notifications? What if you blow that up to 26 notifications, one for each member of the class groupchat? I first experimented with 4 different iPhones, to make sure it wasn’t permanent. All four phones responded in the same way; power off, power back on and just unable to access iMessage until I sent a new message. When I saw it’s lack of permanent harm in my tests, I sent it to my class.

The mess that followed was surprising. First off, some kids with iPhones texted “huh?” implying that their phone didn’t break. Some kids were like “that’s cool” implying that the phone crashed but recovered on its own and got “immune”. At that point, I thought “huh, didn’t work” and went to sleep not thinking of what I’ve done. What I should have figured was that a) not everyone who was on the groupchat and had an apple device should have gotten their phone broken and b) not everyone knows the trick to recover. The Apple Store was contacted, the night was spent trying to recover, but some just gave up. The next morning was spent trying to fix everyone’s phone, and almost all were fixed. Keyword: almost.

A student had a completely different outcome from his classmates, one which I was not expecting to happen. Loss of Cellular Service and frequent crashes quickly turned into a permanent boot-loop. Not wanting to waste the $950 he spent on the phone, entire class periods were wasted on our argument, going as far as to bring in an attorney. He was in the right to try and make me pay originally (and hey, I ended up giving 50$) but the weird thing is that 2 months following, he dropped the charges. To this day, I still wonder how I was able to walk my way out of that situation I was 100% in the wrong in. Okay, maybe I debated some things he said, but at the end of the day, I was the instigator. This kid is my good friend, and he even bought me cupcakes on my birthday. Though, my fears have never been solved since then.

I have lost my ability to be comfortable with people I know in real life over text. I’ve also started to separate more of my online life and my human life, making me even more fearful to be on group chats. Android has a “frequently contact” section on their share page, which I can’t seem to disable for some reason. I’m always scared that I would end up showing my online self to people who could view it wrongly, and I’m also fearful that I could accidentally leak my address and such.
Please keep events where it’s relevant, and don’t try to get revenge. Consequences will occur and they might not be so kind. Although, if people you are trying to get revenge are all Nintendo 3DS users, keep them on the non-latest firmware

Mario Making Mods Hack of April Fools

So what happened with the bastard that faked their suicide and got me into this huge mess that almost lost me around 1K? The quote of “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” applied quite a bit to her, as she tried to re-friend me as if nothing happened. A true friend, though, would never act the way they did:

• Friends would never put others in a situation where they’re bashed for simply being next to them.
• Friends would never try to run away (not just this event; I’ve counted each time they made a new discord account and each time they changed their personality, and the answer turned out to be at least 89 times that I’m aware of) and abandon everyone.

Most importantly though, friends would never take advantage of someone for their entertainment, to mock their history. My foot was set down this time, and I decided not to accept the latest friend request they sent me. My suspicions about him not growing up and just taking advantage were confirmed, as his response was “oh, we can stop fake being his friend, now we can make fun of him openly”

Back in 2015, a website of mine titled “Super All Stars Gaming” was hacked and turned into the now infamous “Maor Circus”. It featured circus music, epileptic colors and a whole load of mean comments. Him and his friend were obsessed with it, mentioning it about once a week every day behind my back (despite me clearly getting frustrated when they brought it up to my face). They even called me by my IRL name when I had already switched to another name (that being NightYoshi370). I blocked both of them and took them both out of my life. It was, after all, my decision and it didn’t affect anyone else personally.

But who cares about not punishing everyone for one man’s mistakes when you can out them out as a clown, right?
That’s what they ended up thinking, as the day I end up going offline, Maor Circus was revived from its cursed grave. The additional bonus was that it was on a website people actually knew about and wasn’t just my own personal segregated community, so the exposure was much grander. This led to a lot of questions and a lot of harassment when I realized my DB backup was old. I was irresponsible, and thought I already made a backup, yet the one I actually found was a month old. I almost gave up on getting the site back, but thankfully one of the attackers thought of taking a backup beforehand. After needlessly arguing, I finally got my own data back and Mario Making Mods was back online. Funny thing was, I predicted that I would come back online to find my site hacked, the exact day I was gone. The Discord Server didn’t suffer any losses, and tried to host their own event titled “Wario’s Washing Woods”. Obviously questions were asked on there but people were mainly on discord.

I suppose in Mario Making Mods’ current direction of having a Discord-only community, this event could be largely overlooked. However, this taught me a couple of lessons:

1. If you see an unhealthy relationship, break it down as early as possible.
   Continuing to be friend with those who take advantage of you leads you to getting taken advantage of even more. If someone's a bad friend at the start, it's rare they'll change by the end.
2. Separate person from group
   You don't like someone? Good. That doesn't have everyone has to pay. Acknoledge that some people might not agree with all of that single person's actions. For example, just because a classmate is a Biden supporter doesn't mean everyone in the class hates Trump. Everyone has the right to their own personal opinion.
3. NEVER publicly humiliate someone
   Public humiliation (especially when they've only done something to you and not to the public) is a quick way to ruin someone in front of people they might have had a close relationship with. Plus, what about the people that do not care what they've done and instead just came somewhere for that one purpose?

The way the attacker got access to the DB was my own fault. I let the attackers friend host something on my server and I never bothered to change the password even when I switched the server. The friend deeply regrets giving over the credentials, but took steps towards improving themself and now is a much better person. They cut off contact with the attacker and after a few months of being lost, the manipulation the attacker put on them became apparent. Unfortunately, the attacker is still out there trying to act over dramatic, talking about how they should kill themselves in the third person and mentioning every friend they had in a reply to a call out post. I am still mentioned by my real name, and the past is brought up way too much, but that’s ok; what they do about us is no longer our concern. We do, however, worry that this person would start acting pedophilic to others and to drag down the maturity level of growing children, ones that are unable to identify they have been manipulated. I created a call-out post on Twitter and they admitted to it, though, so that means that I can now just point to that any time they try to run away.

Since this incident, the attackers friend and I have been accepted back into communities we’ve been kicked out of (because of the attacker’s bad behavior), developing amazing projects and getting attention for something other than pity. Our lives hold large responsibilities, and we can’t be held back by our past.

English Teachers in my old school

I never get to have a break with English teachers, huh? It’s like it’s cursed to specifically have the worst teachers be the teachers of my class.
Right before our school gave us a 2 week break, my English 10A teacher resigned from his job. Looking back at one of the assignments he gave us, I realized that most of the way I think had originated from him. He taught us that writing analysis was the philisophical viewpoints you could interpret rather than the level of interest you had when reading essays. This led me to believe that English classes were about becoming independent thinkers and deep discussions, involving debates and putting yourself in other peoples shoes. If he were still here, I’m sure he would have been proud of the “What is considered Ownership” and “Online School Issues” articles. Unfortunately, we had a teacher who valued English class as a time to play with toy cars.

The class’s tests was moreso about retaining the text in memory and not about anything we can learn from it. The students noticed my teacher’s ignorance as bliss and expressed their wild behavior, which resulted in the bullies rulling the classroom. The assignments handed out were things we already did but with the additional benefit of everyone in the school having the exact same assignment. It resulted in an uneven balance, where 12th graders would receive work that insulted their inteligence level and 9th graders thought they were getting an ancient history paper from Emerson. I viewed this as a serious downgrade and decided to do my own improvement to my English skills, while hopefully bringing everyone out of the mess that is this class.

A seekage for justice was needed, but no one took the time to document the issues and instead just individually brought it up. After interviewing many students and a missed Geometry class (the teacher realized I was doing something important and let me do my own thing), a 10 page essay was written detailing every flaw with him that I noticed during the month of April-May. While not as impressive as my 7 page essay about Edgenuity (which I wrote later and was within a week of using the service), I let out a lot of hatred using it. When the school’s social worker caught wind, she was impressed and decided to bond with me, leading to a brand new relationship. For a while, I was the only student that had her personal phone number (and it would have remained that way if it weren’t for students needed to contact her during the pandemic).

I would like to believe that the school looked at it, but my writing there was awful and way out of line so I suspect they hadn’t. For one, I openly disrespected a staff member to the principal, which I’m surprised didn’t land me several referals. I also wrote for too long, losing most people’s attention span quite quickly. In fact, looking at my faults with that paper led me to realizing how long my articles have become and started to tone them way down. In the long run, this benefited me much more than my cause. Then again, my cause was fulfilled as the teacher ended up not returning for the school year of 2019-2020, when I would be in 11th grade. This meant I had to deal with him for 10th grade, but I was saved midway by my social worker.

After a mishandling of the Frakenstein reading assignments, a new English 10B class was made for students that were either fed up with the old teacher or just had really poor English. I and a friend of mine were the only two that fit into the former category out of a class of 7 students, which led to us overtaking discussions meant for the entire class. Being overqualified also had other disadvantages, being graded way too fairly for what was pretty bad writting just because we were better than everyone else. Still, better to be overqualified and have good grades than being overqualified and have bad grades due to mishandling not on your part. A nitpick I had with this new teacher was that since I talked to her often before, she knew ways of getting me to do work and knew of the skill I had. It was also quite hard to transition from stating her first name to the “Mrs.” pronoun + last name.

A lesson that can be learned from here is that you should know what you’re getting into when you take a class. Consider its courses and determine if you really need it, and if you need to take it there. There are plenty of alternative options you could do, and if there aren’t, the power of speech can make one. However, when you fight for your cause, do it in a way that is concise and respectful. Focus on knocking down their points and building up yours rather than attach feelings to it.

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Ending off my 9th grade as a seekage for a teacher reform, my life was turning quite liberal. My opinion started to become my own rather than a mere representation of what I was fed. The older folk acknowledged me as someone that could have quite interesting debates, something I find myself doing quite often lately due to the Election next week. I might not have handled every situation well, but many of the decisions I have done have stuck with me.

• My limitations in math have allowed me to switch from a fixed mindset to a creative mindset, helping me with writing
• My online life has become rather separate from my real life. My life has become quite secretive in general, like Diavolo’s. No one needs to know what I do at home, unless I have good reason to trust them.
• My sites are now static as opposed to dynamic. I cannot trust someone else not to input shady stuff.
• I still rebel against things I don’t find right, even if people in my social surroundings don’t agree or simply don’t care

This has been a year that put me on my track, a track that I would follow in my 10th grade