Jamieson 90 said:
I can go one better, back when I was in university one of my professors actually listed one of their own books as required reading, and the book cost a cool £29.99 and was barely more than 200 pages, seriously I'm not fucking joking. Okay it was a good book and he was one of the best and obviously knew his stuff, but still shamelessly plugging your own book like that....
I'm curious why you expected him to do otherwise; do you think he should have assigned a book from one of his competitors? Writing a textbook is very, very far from trivial. There's no reason why he shouldn't assign it.
If a person is enough of an asshole to derive their greatest pleasure by intimidating and harassing people, but is too cowardly or weak to be a real thug and too stupid to use the Internet, they become a campus supervisor instead. They would stop you on the way to your class if you were 20 seconds late, and make you wait 5 minutes while they filled out a detention form for skipping class. They knew they were the real reason you were missing significant class time too, but it didn't matter. They were having their taste of power and enjoying it.
The punishments weren't really the problem; they were so outrageously and blatantly fabricated that it was easy to get them reversed. Usually all you'd have to do is approach them while they were talking with their boss, ask them why you got a detention for cutting in the lunch line at 8:00 am, and they'd cave in and tear up the form. Really it was the fact that the school hired these guys that most annoyed me.
In my experience, high school is not a worthwhile use of time. It's run like a prison where all the staff are corrupt, some of the lessons that seniors get have no place in any grade above 2nd (one of the days during my last months of English in high school was spent on capitalization), there are no consequences for failure, success in high school has little correlation with success afterwards, and if the English, math, and science illiteracy in the US is any indication (the last Smithsonian poll found that 1 in 4 Americans don't know the earth orbits the sun), none of it makes an impact at all.
I like education and wanted to be a teacher for a long time, but what happens in high school is not education.