r/Teachers

I teach 8th grade, I’m in my 4th year. I’m jewish, I wear a star of David necklace everyday and I’m open about it when students ask.

My students are currently reading the diary of Anne Frank in their ELA classes, and the curriculum included a lot of information on the rise of antisemitism leading to the holocaust.

I have a student who likes to challenge me on everything I say every single day. It’s exhausting. She’s been written up more than I can recall, we’ve had meetings with mom and admin, but it never changes. Today, she would not sit in her assigned seat. She wanted to sit with her friends and told me it wasn’t fair. I told her she could sit in her assigned seat or sit in the front office. She got up to go to her seat, and loudly said, “No wonder everyone hates jews.”

I was so shocked and the class just went dead silent. I asked her if she understood what she just said, and she said yes. I was so shocked that I asked her if she REALLY understood what she just said to me. She said yes again, so I kicked her out of class and sent her to the office.

That class was great for the rest of the day. One of them left me a note that had a star of David inside of a heart drawn on the outside, I got lots of hugs at the end of class, it was very sweet.

I’m just sitting in my classroom very sad.

As the title says, teacher license reciprocity needs to happen for all the states. Going through college and getting an undergraduate and graduate degree to teach but being limited to your state only is wild to me. We hold a masters degree, and the reasoning of “the curriculum varies by state” is nonsensical as I can open the pacing guides and subject curriculum and read whats happening. I mean isn’t that what the purpose of getting the Masters degree…

I get you can get an emergency cert and then work on your permanent one in another state, but its stupid to me. I get its a money maker for the state. So just keep the licensing fees for a new state but adopt license reciprocity. Would make things a whole lot easier for a lot of us.

I’m not sure why FB is acting like Instagram and showing me people I’m not even friends with. Regardless. Been seeing a LOT of random- ass parents basically saying how school is being ridiculous and they can’t tell them when to go on a vacation.

You’re right. The school can’t tell you shit when it comes to how you’re raising your own child. If you want to go on a 2 week cruise, go for it.

But let’s keep a couple things in mind:

1. no, we are NOT going to give your child the work ahead of time

2. we are not catching your child up to speed on the material they missed. Go to tutoring or stay for your teacher’s after school hours (if the they offer it)

3. take your child on as many vacations as you want. But more than likely your child is severely behind grade level anyway so… you do you. Priorities

Let me explain . . . if I say to a student "Johnny, have a seat please," the inevitable response (in 99% of cases it seems) is "But I had to [sharpen pencil, give Susie her notebook, etc] and on and on and on. Everything is a discussion and the default position to any redirection, however mild, is to make excuses or deflect. It's exhausting.

Basically all school admin, as well as parents and society at large, suffer from the shared delusion that if a teacher makes the right choices, he can "make" a student behave. This is not true. Students are autonomous and cannot be forced to do anything aside from what they choose to do.

In the past, teachers handled this by threatening the student in various ways. "You can do whatever you want, but so can I, and if you do something wrong, I will react." In the distant past, that reaction was beating the student. When that became unacceptable, it shifted into sending the student to the office, suspending the student, giving him detention, and so on. There was also the natural consequence that the student who misbehaves will almost certainly perform poorly in class and get a bad grade.

Over time, however, these threats lost their potency. Using violence is now (rightfully) banned. Consequences like detention and suspension have grown much rarer, and in my experience students don't care whether they get punished; at least, they don't care nearly enough to change their behavior. Grades also don't matter to them at all. They get passed on no matter what they do, and even if they don't, few of my students express any concern for failing or being unable to graduate.

Further complicating matters is the fact that a teacher has many responsibilities, and punishing an individual student takes a lot of time that may be better spent elsewhere. In my experience, entire classes typically misbehave at once, and in the time I spend misdirecting or punishing a particular student, the rest of the class grows much noisier. The consequence for me is that there is always a base level of noise in my classroom because students refuse to shut up, and at every moment of my lesson I have to decide whether to teach or to pause class to give a whole group reminder, which they ignore anyway. Sometimes I choose to teach, and as a result, I'm not choosing to punish, which means the students don't face any consequences for their misbehavior. But the only alternative is to stop teaching altogether and spend the entire class trying to quiet the students.

I'm really tired of evaluations that punish me for the choices my students make. I love teaching, but I spend very little classtime teaching, because all of my time goes towards managing behavior, which is fully ineffective anyway. I sometimes hear other teachers discuss the strategies they use for classroom management. I see this as missing the forest for the trees. A teacher's job is to help people learn, not control their behavior, and I don't think that should be a consideration in the first place.

tl;dr teachers can't force students to behave, and let's stop pretending they can

Saw this in a post by Greg Ashman and it resonated. The squeaky wheels on my staff often get pushed out even if they are excellent teachers, while other teachers who have been phoning it in for years but who dont make waves get top marks from admin. To what extent is this true at your school?

So they are eliminating many of the lowest paid positions that I already have the health plans that cost the school of the least. Many of these positions are really important, the special ed aides, tech department, teaching assistants, Library staff….

They could make far more money for the budget by reducing the top five salaries to $120,000 a year, which is a perfectly comfortable living in my state, and by making those top five salary earners actually pay into the healthcare system, which they currently don’t because their healthcare is fully covered by the district.

I get it search things are perks of top admin positions, but I feel like those things should be first on the chopping block before getting rid of the lowest paid employees, especially when it stands to save you significantly more money.

Our school is gonna feel the loss of the positions hard. But hey, I guess it’s all good as long as our top five salary earners can afford a vacation home and another boat.

I was just wondering about this. A fellow teacher (white) told me that she’s hearing a lot of blatantly racist stuff coming from students and it’s a big problem. White students and nonwhites too. I was in another teacher‘s classroom today and saw a student had started to carve “WHITE POWER” into their desk.

The thing is, I haven’t heard ANY of this from my students. At all. I’m wondering if it’s because I’m very obviously *not* white and they wouldn’t feel comfortable expressing those views around me. Or maybe I’m just lucky?

I am a 27-year-old female who has been teaching for 3 years. I have been making teacher-related content on TikTok and Instagram for a few months now. My content includes setting up my classroom, story times, and DIML. Yesterday we found out that next year we are getting a new principal for the next school year.  Our Current principal was telling me about how she also makes school-related content, so during lunch, me and one of my colleagues and I looked her up on social media, found her account, and saw she posted a lot of negative stuff towards teachers making content and how they should focus on teaching.  After I saw this, I blocked her. My coworkers told me I need to unlock her and get her permission to post, which she will definitely not allow (as she said in one of her videos), even though I already have permission from the superintendent.

What should I do, unblock her and ask to post, or keep it the way it is? My content is clean, doesn’t show my students’ faces or information, and the school district I teach at is not known to the public. 

UPDATE: CALLING CPS IN THE AM, THANK YOU FOR THE QUICK RESPONSES

TLDR: Admin’s failure to communicate or respond to sexual assault allegations, should I call CPS?

Recently approached a female student of mine who has been skipping my homeroom. We have a pretty decent relationship and didn’t want to write her up for it. Ask her what’s up and why she’s avoiding my class.

This student reports to me that a boy ,who is also in my homeroom, groped her and touched her inappropriately several weeks ago underneath the desk. She said she went to her admin the day of or day after it happened.

I was shocked to hear this because no one communicated anything about potentially keeping these students apart or anything else. I immediately email my school principal that the student relied that they reported the incident and that neither the boy’s admin or the girl’s admin communicated anything, leading me to believe that no incident report was completed.

Brought this up with one of my coworkers who stated that she also reported the same boy for a similar incident. Again radio silence from admins, counselors, etc. Boy has been in school like normal. My principal simply replied saying that admin was only aware of one issue and that the boy had a talking too.

ive been back and forth about this, but I’m pretty close to calling CPS. I’ve never had to report my school, does this warrant a call??

For the first time in my 11 years of teaching, I just had a student have a tonic-clonic seizure. It was intense. Out of nowhere, the student threw themselves out of their chair like the girl in the exorcism, slammed their head on the hard ground, chomped on their tongue, and began slamming their head into the ground while spewing tons of blood and face turning blue due to not being able to breath. It was traumatizing for both the kids and myself. I kicked the kids into the classroom next door and tried putting the student in the recovery position, but their arm was locked in place and they seized onto their belly no matter how many times I rolled them on their side. I called for the nurse, but they only arrived minutes later after the seizure had subsided (their room is like 3 doors down). I was shaken to say the least. After the nurse wheeled the student out of the room, the principal who was the first to arrive on the scene but only sat back and monitored the whole thing told me that I needed to head into the room next door and resumed my math lesson. Neither I nor the students were in the right mind to continue our math lesson (there was only 15 minutes left in class). I ignored the principal and had a discussion with the students on their feelings and thoughts on what they’d witnessed. I’m debating taking a mental health day tomorrow to process what just happened. Anyway, this was my rant. You all have a nice day.

I (24M) am a first year elementary SPED teacher and was notified today by my district that I have been accused of “child abuse” (Put in quotes because that’s all they would tell me) and that a notification was sent to TEA and SBEC! They wouldn’t even tell me who accused or what I have been accused of and I honestly have no idea what it could be. Thankfully I am never alone in the classroom since I have a co-teacher and TA and I am meticulous in documenting any incidents for this exact reason. I cannot believe this is happening to me, in my first year teaching nonetheless. Will this make me unemployable since even when I’m found innocent the allegation will still be on my record??? Does this happen often, this is actually insane? This is honestly really upsetting me, I love being a teacher and I work so hard for the kids and I can’t believe that I might lose my dream job and all the hard work and money it took to get here because of some random crazy report

My school told us last week that our school was losing massive amounts of funding. Our student population is going down from 2300 to 1700 due to things like FL’s “school choice” and a new HS in the county taking a lot of kids from our school. Today I learned I was 1 of 30 teachers getting the boot as I am only a 2nd year teacher and seniority rules. Thankfully I have a masters degree in my field of research so I should be able to get a job elsewhere in the county or leave teaching altogether and go to private sector jobs. I’m just still in shock about it all.

Our principal informed the art, PE, library, band, and choir teachers that we will be covering 2 hours of classes for EVERY grade during teacher appreciation week for a “relaxation experience.” Doing the math quickly, I asked if we would get the same time we’re covering covered for us. We will only get 2 hours covered as well by admin, but what about the 10+ hours of time we will spend covering classes for other teachers and our schedules being thrown out of whack? On teacher appreciation week. It’s vile.

Today in a staff meeting we were told that we should be using AI to create lessons, generate content for these lessons, mark work, differentiate content for learners and set further learning goals based on this differentiated learning goals. I honestly despair... 😬

Returned from FMLA leave last week and here I am at 3:30 AM contemplating whether I should walk into traffic just so I won’t have to go in

I feel so trapped - I don’t have any other skills that would help me in a job other than teaching. I’ve invested thousands in a career I thought I’d love but ended up hating

Today was the first day back after spring break and a student brought in mini cupcakes for his birthday.

While I was facilitating passing them out at the end of the day, a student stomped across the yard from where the action was and sat on a bench. Two friends followed him.

The bell rang, they still sat there.

What did the issue turn out to be?

The angry kid wanted a chocolate cupcake and there were only vanilla ones.

These are not kindergarteners. They are fourth graders.

The uncontrolled emotions in my boys this year are making me crazy.

I grade everyone fairly and give everyone the same standards. the difference is that for my higher achieving well behaved students, they never if ever get into any trouble and get really good grades. This has made it easier for me to have more friendly conversations with them. I have one student who always finishes all his work in class fast but he gets all perfect scores, he never misbehaves but doesn't really talk to other classmates. since he had nothing to do in class, I had a conversation with him about video games and things i can relate to him which was highly unprofessional of me since other students could hear our conversation. he could also be teased for being a teachers pet if I keep doing this.

how do i show more empathy towards more challenging students? i admit I get annoyed by my students who have misbehavior issues while also failing in school or barely passing but I understand as a teacher, part of our job is to care for challenging underachieving students.