Re: Your WSB Arkansas Stories
I was there in 2014. I left because I didn't feel like I was learning anything and also that time I tried to ask a question and accidentally got a staff member to rant about how blind people can't go to Wal-mart without meticulous planning and handlers was a special kind of suicidally depressing.
(It turns out that blind people can, in fact, go to Wal-mart whenever they feel like it, although the whole having someone around to identify things visually thing is muy helpful.)
Also-also the people were above average in terms of being completely uninteresting, which is quite impressive, considering how I feel about most people in general. The two people who were not so drifty were the tech guy and an LCB grad. The latter was only there for a few days after I arrived.
One thing I do want to compare to LCB, because my reactions confuse me, are the Large Group (WSB) vs Seminar (LCB). The former was mostly just gathering and talking about whatever the person leading that day thought we should talk about, which was usually either generic "if you could x" stuff, or political topics just old enough to no longer be fronts in the Culture War. The latter were entirely about blindness (at a place where we were supposed to be NOT! defining ourselves by blindness...). So why under the light did I hate the former, and not feel all that negatively about the latter? I suppose the latter was a mix of too over-the-top to take seriously, combined with occasionally asking questions people would have experiences to answer with? And the former was so generic and impersonal and presumptuous and all the doll people around a table in a tiny library taking turns replying to generic with generic to be good citizens or something? It kinda felt like the WSB version was soul-sucking, and the LCB version was either amusing or a waste of time, and also was being treated like people gathered for a casual but structured meeting? And also I could sit in the corner and no one would complain if I'd just grab a book or start writing something, other people fell asleep, the people were, on the whole, more engaging ... IDK, I'm just speculating, because this one really confuses me.
Maybe WSB wouldn't be so terrible post LCB, but pre-LCB, it just made me want to die.
Herseth's points 5 and 6 are particularly interesting. I never felt like I had even that much freedom at WSB, but even then, it sounds terrible, like something you'd apply to a residential high school, and then only because of modern paranoia and liability around minors. And, uh, actually, I think that might border on more restrictive than the residential high school where I spent my jr/sr years. True, the HS required checking out / in with time and destination, with weekends having fewer restrictions. And there were specific places unenforceably forbidden by the school, primarily because of the one icecream shop being run by a rapist. Yet, somehow, trying to go anywhere at WSB felt dangerous and patronizing in a way that stopping at the RLO on the way out didn't. Also there was that time we got an exception during the most hardcore day of the year (Science Fair was the biggest deal at this school) because someone wanted to take me somewhere for my birthday.
So, uh, I think I'd describe WSB as everything negative about a boarding school and a school for the blind, without many of the positives.
Oh, and the WSB cafeteria served Veal, often. Veal, the type of meat that even anti-vegetarian South Park agrees is absurdly cruel. At least they had a vending machine with braille on it. ... That was nice.
It sounds like WSB improves over time. The tales from 2006-2010 were much worse than what I experienced, and what I experienced seems marginally worse than what Herseth and Chris experienced. Nevertheless, every point of comparison I have puts WSB on my crap list.
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