I'm from a small town in BC, Canada, and I would have been in public school from approximately 1995 to 2009 (beginning of kindergarten to end of Grade 12).

I'll write some random memories in point form, in case anyone's interested:

• I remember the teachers being mostly okay. Some were better than others, but I don't remember any teachers being particularly cruel or abusive. Maybe one high school science teacher was a bit of a bully to one student, but she eased off after a while.

• My teachers would definitely fall under the category of "liberal", certainly by the standards of Chapo. Most of them are retired and posting about how Americans need to #Vote. I think there were a few that were probably further left, such as one of my high school librarians, the art teacher, and the history teacher.

• Having said that, I think my math teacher would be considered a bit reactionary -- not in the sense of being politically right-wing necessarily, but he thought that students were coddled and always complained that we were living in a "marshmallow world". I didn't think of him as reactionary at the time -- we liked him, and we just thought of him as a funny cantankerous old guy. We even voted for him to give our graduation speech, and we knew he would bring up the phrase "marshmallow world". I remember when a student brought a skateboard into class, the teacher made the student put it by the teacher's desk -- then, while we were working on our in-class assignment, the teacher took the skateboard out into the hallway. We heard some rolling, followed by a loud thud.

• More memories are coming back and I'm realizing how different the "pre-woke" era was. In one math class, close to graduation or prom or something, there was a row of girls who skipped math class to get hair or dresses or something. They were fashionably skinny girls, and the math teacher commented "Hmm, looks like the 'pencil kids' are gone." In retrospect, that's a bit of a dickish thing for an older male teacher to say about female students, but it just garnered a light chuckle at the time.

• I would say there was some sense of solidarity within my cohort. More than a few of us had been in basically the same classes from kindergarten through grade 12, going to the same elementary school and high school.

• The teachers tended to be older, e.g. the younger ones were in their 40s, and most were in their 50s and maybe 60s. They had been teachers for years, and they knew the community fairly well, so most of them would know who we were even before we attended one of their classes. They would have taught some of our older siblings, and they knew that we all basically knew each other. Even the substitute teachers were usually people we had known for a while as well. I can think of a few cases where a new teacher came along -- for example, our Grade 12 English teacher -- and our class just couldn't take them seriously for the entire semester, because they weren't someone we knew and we didn't hit it off with them right away.

• We didn't have sex ed, but we had "Personal Planning", which included e.g. sex ed, career education, etc. Our personal planning teacher joked that, if he were to teach sex-ed himself, he'd just say "Men are pigs", but for whatever it's worth, the speakers he brought into actually teach us about birth control and barrier methods were a lot better. I remember one day in his class, as part of the "career planning" segment of the course, he showed us a John Stossel video. He said "Take it with a grain of salt, because it's very 'American', but there's some good stuff in there too."

• I remember in History and English classes, the tone from the teachers was less "X is good!" and "X is bad!" and more about considering "different points of view". I realize this can still be used to nudge students in one direction or the other, but I'm just describing it as I remember it. For example, in history class, we talked about a famous Canadian flying ace (Billy Bishop?) and how, although he was celebrated as one of the most successful flying aces, further research showed that his record may not have been as impressive as originally claimed. Our teacher posed the question to the class: Should history books be rewritten to address the newly discovered facts, or should Billy Bishop's legacy be preserved? It seemed obvious to me that history books should do their best to portray the truth, so naturally I came down on the side that the history books should be rewritten based on the most accurate information available. But most of the students in the class disagreed and thought that preserving some guy's heroic legacy was more important. So that was interesting. The teacher said something like "So, according to this class, the history books should stay as they are," then turned to me and said "... but perhaps with a little asterisk next to his name." The same teacher also took a quick poll of the class with regards to Sikh members of the RCMP being allowed to wear turbans instead of the traditional uniform. Most of us answered that yes, they should be allowed to wear turbans. The teacher said "Interesting how times change -- a few years ago, I took the same poll, and the class was livid that they shouldn't be allowed to change the uniform."

• The history teacher also gave a famous lecture about the propaganda used during World War I -- for example, how it was claimed that Germans were parading around with impaled babies on their bayonets. I remember him expressing regret that the semesters were so short that we didn't have time to talk in depth about the Holocaust in our grade 11(?) history class.

• All I remember about Canadian history class is the fact that I don't remember anything about it, because the trading of beaver furs was not interesting to me. For whatever it's worth, I also vaguely remember my teachers talking about residential schools, as well as the use of Chinese immigrant labour to build the railroad, and there was a whole bunch of stuff about indigenous history that I didn't pay attention to at the time. I'm sure it was good stuff, and I can't fault the school for not trying to teach us about the many atrocities in Canadian history -- I just wasn't paying attention at the time.

• In retrospect, I was definitely a nerd. I didn't get bullied much, possibly because I was too mellow (it's no fun to bully someone who doesn't overreact in an entertaining manner). However, my brother (who is on the autism spectrum) was targeted by some kids who would, e.g. follow him on his walk home just because they knew it bothered him, or would whisper at him in class quietly enough that the teacher couldn't hear them, causing my brother to get in trouble when he reacted angrily. My brother talked to my parents and to the school about it, but it was the kind of bullying that a sufficiently stupid or inexperienced teacher is unable to detect. Eventually my brother punched one of them in the face, and got suspended for it. My parents wrote a letter to the school along the lines of "Look, he shouldn't have hit them, but he's reported this bullying repeatedly and the school hasn't done anything about it, so the school has some responsibility in letting the bullying escalate to this level."

• I got along very well with the art teacher, who was also a friend of my mom's (my mom used to be an art teacher and occasionally worked as a substitute teacher). His attitude towards any art project was that he'd rather we take a risk and accidentally mess up the project, than be afraid to take a risk at all. He was also willing to adjust the curriculum on the fly if a student was really excited about working on a specific project that wasn't in the course outline. I remember him telling a story about a student in one of his classes who often fell asleep in class. He asked the student about it, and the student mentioned that he was working part-time to support the family because one of his parents was unable to work, or something like that. The teacher said that, if that's the reason a student needs to sleep in his class, he's willing to let the student sleep in his class. Which seemed like an interesting attitude towards education -- some students have a chaotic life, and they need the school as a source of stability in their lives.