Justin Chavez6
Newcomer
7 messages
joined Apr 2016
I've read through this whole thread. I have the title of "teacher," but definitely not the actual job, thank God. I only ever did one single hour of student teaching with a group of fifth graders. Do you want to know what the very first thing I heard was when I walked into that classroom and caught a comment drifting in from the back row?
“Man, I’m gonna screw this up!”
Fifth grade.
Just a few minutes before that, I was standing outside the faculty lounge with some colleagues, just waiting for our mentor to assign us to our specific classrooms. In those five minutes, a couple of eighth graders drifted by with cigarettes in their hands; one kid was actually so bored he just swung open the door to a classroom where a lesson was already in progress. There was this teacher, probably in his sixties, standing there by a map of the world, and this kid just bursts in and yells, “Hey, Piksi, Piksi... how's it going today?”
The teacher politely asked him to close the door, but the kid thought it was hilarious and wouldn't budge. The teacher just looked exhausted—he basically gave up and just endured it until the kid got bored.
My lesson actually went pretty smoothly after that initial "greeting." Once my practicum was over, we sat down in my mentor's office to chat. She told me that when she was young, she used to cry a lot. Like, crying at night kind of a lot. She said she could always pick out the most problematic kids after class and would try to talk things through with them, but honestly, it rarely did anything. She mentioned that nowadays she’s tougher and just doesn't let it get to her as much.
A friend of mine from college is teaching in a school right now. She says it isn't terrible; she can manage the students well enough, but it's the parents that are the real headache. Someone else mentioned this earlier, too—how at the end of the school year, parents come storming in demanding better grades. She usually just gives them the grade they want because she honestly can't be bothered to argue, especially if the kid actually tried but the results just weren't great.
She told me about this one time a parent contacted the homeroom teacher accusing a specific instructor of not liking their son. The teacher basically had to explain that his job isn't to "like" the kid.
I could go on about pedagogical methods. Back in college, I sat through all these pedagogy lectures. While things like didactics are actually super helpful when working with kids, pedagogy felt like a joke to me even back then. All that stuff like, “If a student is restless during class, give them a task to redirect their attention toward something constructive, blah blah blah...” At the time, I seriously wondered if the author of that textbook had ever even stepped foot in a real school, let alone taught in one.
Someone asked why people in the profession seem to feel more empathy for the teachers than the children in cases like this. For me, my sympathy shifted toward the teacher the second I read that a mother wasn't just looking for an apology, but was actually looking for revenge.
Then you have people calling for private schools, imagining this fantasy where they’ll finally be the bosses of the teachers. Sure, but have you actually considered if you could afford that? You might end up in a situation where, due to lack of funds, you're sending your kids to public schools staffed by people who are way less creative and have zero drive.
All these insults claiming that people only end up in teaching because they aren't good at anything else are just nasty and completely untrue. It's mostly just shots in the dark from people who can't make a real argument. Look, not everyone who majors in English wants to be a novelist, and not everyone who studies Art History wants to be a museum curator. It's not like you don't realize how life works once you graduate and start hunting for a job. Some people find other opportunities and move on, some start as substitutes and eventually land a permanent spot, and others finish a totally different degree and just take a teaching certification course to get into the field.
My impression—and I'm not saying this is an objective fact—is that college doesn't really teach you how to be a good educator. They try, but I think it's something you either have or you don't. Knowledge and techniques are two different things. That's just how it is.
I really think funding is a massive issue in education. It's not just about teacher salaries; it's about having the resources to actually run a quality classroom. One of my colleagues literally buys supplies for her lessons out of her own pocket.
And finally, a story from my college days. We had this one professor who everyone called a dragon. She would absolutely shred you during an exam, often accompanied by insults. The material was huge, so the exam was split into four parts. Like everyone else, I thought passing this exam would be the end of my life. But you know what happened? Nothing. You just had to learn the material deeply. Since a few of us were always in her office, I had the chance to hear what other students were saying. Believe me, some of them were truly bottom-of-the-barrel. And yeah, she was cruel and bitter. She knew exactly how to make a student cry, and occasionally a mother would show up at the college too. “She was always such a perfect student, the professor must be the problem.” By the way, in terms of teaching quality, she was actually the best professor I had. Years after I graduated, I saw her in the news. A group of former students had banded together to try and get her fired because they claimed she was mistreating them.
See, the thing is, those teachers teaching your kids are someone else's children too, and their parents probably raised them to be precious little angels who can never be criticized, so if that means lowering the bar just to keep everyone happy, then that’s what happens, and now they’re the ones standing at the front of the classroom because nobody was ever allowed to tell them they were being slow or making mistakes.
P.S. Just to be clear, my comment about people being called stupid isn't meant to target the specific situation this mom described here, since I think we can all agree the teacher handled herself poorly, the mom did the right thing by going to the principal, and the teacher actually did the decent thing by apologizing publicly, so really the only debate left is whether an apology is enough or if she deserves to get kicked to the curb, but personally, I think the apology settled it.
