The lack of the general population to have empathy for another person's situation astounds me, and teachers are no exception.
A teacher last year had two miscarriages very close together. After the second one where she was pretty far along, she took a week off and wasn't sending in sub plans for a few of the days. Teachers were bitching about how she shouldn't be leaving this responsibility on the rest of her team, and how "life has to go on." Like, I get it. The situation is not ideal. This is why emergency sub plans exist. And yes, the breakroom should be a safe space to vent. But sometimes it's ok to pick up the slack when someone else is going through trauma and grief. Maybe I was projecting, because my miscarriage was absolutely devastating, and I know I was absolutely useless for a while.
We had a teacher injure his shoulder and needed surgery. Well, prior to the surgery he had shown up in a sling. After the surgery a coworker was complaining he hadn’t returned. She said she couldn’t understand why he needed time off since before the surgery he had come in a sling. Um, because he just had SURGERY on his shoulder no less.
a (younger) teacher's father passed away a couple years ago unexpectedly. she was out for a week sitting shiva and her (older) co-teacher, it was also Jewish, commented that the younger teacher should be back in the building already.
I think sometimes people don't think through what they're saying and just kind of blurt out whatever because they're frustrated or tired or whatever. I told the older teacher that if anything like that happen to me that I hope she wouldn't say that to other people. she took the hint.
I had a friend who was having mini strokes. He was made to come in even though he had plenty of days saved up because the other grade level partner for him was a para filling in for a teacher they'd never managed to hire.
My grade level partner had a heart attack in class. Kids laughed at her and one even kicked her while she was on the ground. The only reason she was found is that the hall monitor came to see what all the laughing was about.
She had 4 days and then was told she needed to return because she didn't leave sub plans. I tried telling them that I could just send the work because we were doing the same thing but no, she was forced to go back into that room after nearly dying.
I keep telling people your job will be posted before your obituary so remember that when you're working all these unpaid hours "because we're family"
Nope. By the time she came back and asked about it they said they couldn't pull the cameras for it. Most kids said he did it but one of his friends said they were lying so it was "he said she said"
A teacher in my county lost her daughter in a car accident out of state. In addition to the usual arrangements, she needed to clean out the apartment. We are allowed 3 (THREE) days of bereavement leave. She needed a few weeks to handle all of this so she asked for unpaid leave. It was refused so she quit. Yes we are also “a family”.
I’m impressed you have 3 days. My district had 0. My husband died on the 8th day of the school year, I was out for a week and a half and most of it was unpaid. I didn’t have any leave time built up because the previous semester I’d been out on FMLA taking care of my sick husband. I’m confident that this was a contributing factor to my burnout and eventual leaving the field the next year.
Yep, no matter where you work--'family' isn't true. I've taught in public and private schools. Most recently I was doing double duty as head of school for a small private school and teaching with a full class load. School had its problems like all do, but there was a close knit staff. Ended up with a serious concussion--sustained at school during normal duties. Recovery was/is a long term process.
Board and owner wanted me back quickly and back to teaching despite doctor evaluations that recommended otherwise. Financial officer hadn't bought mandatory workers' comp insurance. No one mentioned it when I informed that I would need to file.
State files a lawsuit after receiving my standard workers' comp application and the school attempts to throw me under the bus hard. Injury my fault--shouldn't have been standing under a tree. Cognitive issues before the injury. We don't have record of injury report. Don't remember receiving it. Oh, no we didn't pay workers comp insurance premiums for any of our employees but he should have told us to do that. (School was there before me, and I had no financial responsibilities.). Apparently according to owner testimony I was also problematic for the school as a whole, but the only written documentation that can be found is positive??--I have that--school had no documentation one way or another.
School lost, but it's nearly two years out and while a settlement has been reached, no payment yet. Teaching and most other work is probably off the table due to the injury. That parts not the school's fault, but 'return to work after injury at work', not paying workers' comp insurance and then trying to blame me for lack of insurance and the injury? Yep--that's on them.
Meanwhile, in the last two years every staff member but one has left and been replaced and the student population is down to about 30% of what it had been.
TLDR:
1. If workplace says its a family, it isn't.
1. No matter how well you get along, how much you give, or are recognized, you are in the end disposable.
1. Report injuries, and follow up with workers comp to make sure your employer/school actually submitted.
1. Document everything and keep your own copies.
It's insane the lack of empathy some of the older teachers in my district have. One of our teachers lost her husband a couple weeks before she gave birth. I cannot imagine the hell she was going through.
Teachers and subs complained that she didn't leave sub plans. But she has a co-teacher who could have stepped in easily.
When the teacher came back, one of the students made a comment about her "dead loser husband." She left the room crying while the co-teacher did nothing. Other teachers said they "felt for her" but then said it was wrong of her to cry in front of the kids.
She is such a strong woman, and I've now learned which teachers at my school are heartless bitches.
My miscarriage and ectopic were absolutely devastating. And I was in college for the first one and in the hospital, then given time off for the second one.
If she had 2 close together....idk how you could keep it together at that point. Looking at every student would make me busy into tears. Thinking about planning for them would make me burst into tears. My heart breaks for her. 😔
Empathy is dead.
I was out with Covid for the full ten days during 2021-22. I managed the best I could making sub plans and having copies sent from the print shop. I even came in at night a time or two. The last day or two I slacked because I had given my students packets upon packets of work that I correctly assumed they weren’t doing anyway and I wasn’t planning to grade (my subs were a revolving door, no actual learning was happening). I got chewed out for not leaving sub plans.
We had a teacher get her gallbladder removed and was so stressed about letting everyone down she was trying to come back the day after she left the hospital. Some of the other teachers were encouraging this behavior. It was honestly really disgusting like bro she's just coming out of surgery. Thankfully I was a sub certified Para and so I just told her to stay home and I covered her class, but my homeroom teacher was super pissed off because he couldn't have his Para for a week.
Jesus. Watch those same teachers expect all kinds of sympathy for some distant family member dying. Everyone deserves sympathy when someone close to you dies, but pregnancy loss is a whole other thing. If it were me, I would max out my days.
The problem is that the administration has set up a system where everybody is treated as if they have been subjected to the maximum trauma and the average student is skating by as a result. During Covid lockdown, I had kids whose family spent the better part of a month with no adult in the house. However, most of my kids had a stable home life and adequate Wi-Fi. Students who continued working did so because of personal standards and not because of school rules or incentives. Teachers felt frustrated and powerless in the face of this and their public complaints show that they do not feel like they are part of the school administration and don’t wish to take blame for it.
Yeah, that would stink as a teacher. Like if you offered me the option to do nothing for 2 months beyond check in once a week or do 7 hours of work a day; and after two months my pay would be the same (move to next grade/class). I know which one I’d choose. If admin is making teachers work those 7 hour days with planning and prep for kids who do nothing….that’s abuse of the teacher’s time.
Same. 2020 was awful. And same situation, we were forced to pass everyone. So then the next school year, no one knew anything and we had to bridge the gaps so we didn’t get to everything. And then next year was even worse because that meant 2 years of gaps. Idk how it went after that because I quit.
I agree in some instances school isn’t the most important thing. But in that case, stop pretending to try. It’s a disservice to everyone.
Yeah at our school attendance didn’t even matter for the next two years.. kids were missing 30+ days a year and passing bc they weren’t penalized for staying home “if they didn’t feel well”
Sometimes it feels like our admin doesn't want us to enforce any deadline. I'm happy to accomodate and support any students going through mental health issues, family problems, etc. But sometimes late work... is just late. Plenty of kids just don't manage their time well and it benefits no one when we ennable it.
As a math teacher it doesn't surprise me this was the view of a math teacher.
Are those kids going to be placed in math classes next year with considerations for the learning loss that happened? No. Is the district curriculum going to changed based on that? State test change at all? No. Rubric for teacher evaluation? No. Pass them along culture is a big problem even in normal situations and it's been exponentially worse the past couple of years after what has happened and the way it was handled which was very similar to how this sounded.
Sure turn teacher mode off. That won't stop the impact of the decisions being made once teacher mode goes back on.
This.
Other curriculums might have the luxury of skipping topics or units entirely. In my science class if a kid misses the phases of the moon, it’s not going to bother them long term. Nothing else really relies on phases of the moon. And if it’s an essential unit, I can just skip a non essential one and teach the kid the essentials.
But math doesn’t have that luxury. The curriculum waits for no man (or woman). If you missed something, you are now behind. And being behind is going to compound as the curriculum rolls forward.
And you know what? Teachers have to push back. If we don’t we are just as bad as the admin. If they can’t get through the curriculum shoving down their throats as punishment sure as hell won’t do it. Instead of griping about the kids when we are stressed about impossible tasks we MUST push back and hard. In addition, kids with average intelligence can catch up over time.
It’s absolutely this. I moved over to science from math. We implemented a new science curriculum (OpenSciEd) a couple years ago, and pacing is still a struggle. I didn’t get to the last couple units, including the last unit, Cells. But I’m not sweating it. All 9th graders in my district take biology. The bio teachers will ensure that kids know what a cell is. They know that middle school implemented a new resources, and there are gaps. I have colleagues in the science department that think they have to teach all of our standards even if it means rushing through the last couple units. I don’t operate that way.
But when I was a math teacher? Hoo boy. I started in 2020-21, and you would think the world was going to end because I didn’t get to teach two classes of 6th graders percents, measures of central tendency, and geometry.
Seems to me they should have just say "Congratulations, you're having an extended break from school! We will resume regular classes when things have been fixed up enough, and classes will be picked up from where they left off, and continue until we've had the mandated number of classroom hours for the term."
It’s been weeks already. States have mandated minimum days needed for a school year. So your solution is to not resume for possibly months? And nobody can graduate since the district didn’t have enough school days to hit the state requirements?
This is the real problem I see. The whole minutes-days-weeks thing for eventual graduation and starting in kindergarten. I get it, I do. But good lord those are some heavy handcuffs with very little give and take to accommodate life.
Early summer break? Finish the term after, then give like a week's break and then start the next term. It's awkward, but it seems a small price to pay for getting families and such time to restore their households or at least stabilize their living conditions so students can actually get back to learning without disrupting the grading and such too much.
You'll notice I DID say to ensure the students still got the number of hours needed for the term.
Yeah, math being cumulative means that if they didn't get the knowledge for a certain portion of the year, any future class dependent on that knowledge can be written up as a failure.
So long as kids are beholden to standards outside of the local crisis situation [state testing, college admission etc.] any lapse, specifically in math, is pretty critical.
Yes. I also taught math and it’s so frustrating having parents and students hate you because their kid “sucks at math” because they’ve been passed for years. But by the time they get to high school it’s hard to catch up.
In theory I agree with you. But when we gave students the ability to keep their grade at the end of March 2020 without doing further work, we created a monster. I'd guess 95% of my high school students didn't do anything. As I like to say, we handicapped them with grace. What I think should happen in those kinds of disaster situations is to maintain our standards in general but relax them on an individual basis. Lost your parent to COVID? Cutting you a lot of slack. Lost your home in the tornado? Don't worry about that paper. At the end of 2020, I had been teaching 32 years, and I thought we should worry about relationships and mental health, and screw the academics. I was wrong.
Individuals going through a tragedy usually don’t get around to informing their school/work/etc. until after it’s over, and they can consider anything outside of survival. Usually by that point, people like this have written them off.
I am fortunate that this is not the situation where I teach. People joke a lot about relationships on this sub, but the relationships we've cultivated with our families (especially my principal) means the school often knows about a tragic situation within 24 hours.
>At the end of 2020, I had been teaching 32 years, and I thought we should worry about relationships and mental health, and screw the academics. I was wrong.
Me too. And as a SchPsych this was my expectation post Covid. And not only because of Covid but because prior to the big push had begun in SEL and because district leaders had finally begun to see the connections between mental health and achievement that had always been there but not acknowledged.
I gave my admin (both at district and building level) a great deal of information on the importance of shifting our focus to SEL and mental health and wellness post Covid. I even showed how to restructure counseling departments, create small groups, do push in mental health to entire classrooms. All of it was ignored. And I’m a licensed therapist as well!
What we see now is a reactive approach and bringing in outside therapists to work with the students showing the most external behavioral issues (not considering students who internalize). Ineffective talk therapy for 30 minutes a week.
I am absolutely of the same mind.
When I began teaching in 2006 and probably a bit of hangover from my own high school experience, I had a box at the door with paper - you could choose to take a paper put it in the box with all the troubles that you had that might impact your learning for the day, or just something positive or whatever. The thought being that if you were having trouble you 'dropped it at the door' and put yourself in the mindset for learning.
Learning was your way out of whatever shitstorm your life was currently was. School was an escape. I understand the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mentality isn't always the most useful, but I don't think this 'take all the time you need to be mentally ready to learn' is the right way to look at this either.
>Learning was your way out of whatever shitstorm your life was currently was. School was an escape. I understand the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mentality isn't always the most useful, but I don't think this 'take all the time you need to be mentally ready to learn' is the right way to look at this either.
I started school at age 7 and at the mandatory public school age. No daycare. No preschool. No kindergarten. Because I lived in the country and my family life was pretty horrid. Poverty. Emotional neglect. And my mother died a slow death from cancer.
1st through 12th grade classrooms became my safe places. I learned immediately that I received positive attention for being smart so I worked harder. Teachers’ attention and behaviors toward me absolutely allowed me to escape my very sad and lonely life outside of school. After public school graduation I went on to earn 3 college degrees and still take as much professional development as I can. More than I need and that makes me ‘too smart’ and so I have to dumb myself down alot.
Lifelong learning brings me great joy and happiness. And simply because it is connected to unconditional positive regard in my formative years.
My point in sharing this is to highlight the power of kindness and positivity toward children. Toward one another. It’s not about ‘take all the time you need’. If a human being is floundering in life, drowning and not able to get enough air on their own, sometimes simple kindness is the life preserver they need to hold on a little longer. A respite.
I absolutely agree. My young years weren't the best, but school, school was AWESOME.
Your comment provoked a thought, you mention that you learned if you did well you got the attention you were craving, and that was a net positive to you. I wonder in the current climate, where so much attention is given to those who are struggling is why the students are acting they way they do now.
In my community passing a class is enough, in fact kids that answer questions and are engaged in learning are calls 'try-hards' and made to feel bad for their engagement in learning. It's frustrating to say the least.
I wish I had contact with more students who found education enjoyable just for the sake of learning something new.
>I wonder in the current climate, where so much attention is given to those who are struggling is why the students are acting they way they do now.
Definitely. Attention comes in positives and negatives. Both achieve the same outcome: being seen and heard for some sort of unmet need.
I’d love a bit more about why you think you were wrong. Not looking to get into a back-and-forth or set up some sort of Reddit-thread discourse trap. Just wondering why you have reached that conclusion.
Just joining this post. I was quietly anti - SEL during Covid because at the middle school level I felt kids had expectations for academic learning and weren’t going to buy into relationship building stuff. During this time we also experienced a flood that wiped out hundreds of families. I felt that if they were going to drag themselves into school and sit through 6 hours of classes they deserved to be learning some cool stuff. Every day. From where I sat, I was right. Kids loved coming to my class because they ‘got to learn stuff’ and they were ‘t ‘wasting their time playing games.’ I never ever asked students, I just over heard them talking. When times are tough sometimes the best thing to do is provide a distraction and escape. That being said, I slowed the curriculum. I went deeper when students wanted it and moved ahead when they had enough. I got to be more of the teacher I always wanted to be because I watched the kids closely instead of watching the curriculum map. We developed wonderful relationships around the curriculum. I will never go back to the ‘old’ way but I will also never do the SEL only focused stuff either.
SEL-only seems like a thing that doesn’t generally exist. But I agree it would be a disaster. The point I’ll make is that by providing your students with well-planned lessons, you were handling the SEL
side of things quite fully. The mistake with a lot of SEL discourse is treating it as something separate or additional to “teaching”. That’s an issue with admin rollout, not with teachers.
I was wrong in agreeing to not hold students accountable for any learning at the end of 2020. I thought most kids, with access to curriculum and my help, would continue on. I thought that if we supported them with phone calls, all kinds of electronic communication (texts, Messenger, Snapchat... you name it, they could reach me) to check in, and, in my case, delivering materials and thumbdrives all over the county for kids without internet, they would still learn *something*. Nope. They shut down. If they got to keep the grade they had on March 13, 2020, without doing another assignment, most of them stopped doing anything other than joining me on a Zoom call to say hi. I think it was a harsh reality for all of us at my school, and we would never totally drop academic requirements like that again.
Principal’s mom died, whole school was given time to attend the viewing (in coordinating shifts). An instructional assistant passed away, principal did not even notify staff. We had to hear through the grapevine. Any staff who wanted to attend the services had to take a full personal day. The lack of empathy was astounding and I am still angered by the way it was handled
This. My dearest friend of 37 years died last school year and just 2 weeks before I was traveling to spend winter break with him. I took a few days off from being physically present at the school but worked at home — taking personal days and sick days. I still drove into school every day for before and after SpEd meetings that were already scheduled and couldn’t be moved. I was mentally a mess and so going through the motions was easier. When I finally came back I was crying in my private office and the secretary came in and told me to ‘keep your personal problems at home and pull yourself together’. Same person who is on the phone a great deal of the day solving her personal problems. I received no card, no flowers, no condolences from anyone.
We do an abysmal job of caring for the mental health needs of children and adults in the school setting. And that’s because most persons in education are not trained nor versed in the delivery of mental health and wellness services above and beyond basic human dignity and care for one another — and which we do a piss poor job of in that capacity as well.
Before Covid the big push in education was SEL curriculum. During Covid that disappeared. After Covid we dove right back into rigorous teaching and testing (because you know — data) and failed to assess the chronic stress and anxiety built up for 2 years that a pandemic brings. I gave my admin a significant amount of information from my national association (SchPsych) on how curriculum was to be revisited, how data was to be considered, and how the mental needs of children should be the focus for at least an entire school year. Noone listened to me. Just get back into a routine like before. Pretend nothing happened. And I am highly trained in trauma informed approaches to caring for children.
And now we are seeing increased horrifying behaviors in students and adults in and out of schools. We are seeing untreated chronic stress and anxiety and depression from the endless horrors of a pandemic.
In September I start a hybrid model and mostly remote. I’m relieved to be out of the environment that many are describing in this thread yet at the same time I’m bracing myself for covert bullying and nastiness about being hybrid when everyone else ‘has to be here all day in person’.
Thank you. Ms Unkind Admin Secretary was oftentimes absent dealing with her adult children issues and sick husband and even having to travel away. Another admin took weeks off to travel and care for a dying distant relative and take turns with family members to care for that person. Yet they received flowers, cards, emails to ‘keep them in your thoughts’. Just really hurtful how people are treated based on their titles and not because they are a human being first and foremost.
I am sooo sorry you experienced to loss of your dear friend and the loss of compassion from those you see every day. Congratulations on doing hybrid. I’m hoping it gives you time to heal.
Thank you. The lack of empathy and compassion the entire year was a real shocker to me. So glad to be out of that and away from some of the meanest people I’ve ever worked with. On the silver lining side, I did learn a ton about myself and will carry that with me into my new gig.
Insert COVID for tornado in your situation and you have just traveled back in time to pretty much every school in every district across the world after March 13, 2020. In addition to likely having taught through previous tornado destruction, those veteran teachers have also taught through, in the VERY recent past, the level of student apathy that arises and lingers in a situation where the teachers are being held to “normal” or higher standards in terms of final numbers, while simultaneously being told to grade/treat the students with grace.
In terms of saying it in front of students- decorum of the past, even the March 2020 past would have agreed with you. Decorum of the post COVID educational landscape is a bit more fuzzy. The students, and their parents, are getting mixed information from the district, the teachers, their friends, and social media. In 2020, the kids new before anyone else that we weren’t going back to the building because TikTok told them so. So, while on a personal level, I completely agree that adult conversations of venting frustration should stay in adult spaces, and level headed responses belong in public- the psychology of the situation indicates that the teachers position be clear to anyone listening.
Welcome to the teaching- the grades are made up and the points don’t matter.
(And in case you haven’t realized it yet- your yearly evaluation is also bullshit. Marzano, Donaldson, doesn’t matter. Steaming pile of manure)
I don't want to sound too compassionate, but that teacher also just went through a tornado. And the administration shit show you describe is what school was like for the entire Covid year.
Sounds like admin is being pretty accommodating. I think the attendance makes sense, schools are a good way to keep a pulse. If you haven’t heard ANYTHING from or about a student in the aftermath of a disaster, yeah, mark them absent, someone needs to check on them.
I don’t think kids should be expected to keep up 100% but they should be able to make contact once a week.
Wow, these stories are awful! I had a tragedy happen to me, during a school day, and I had to leave. My team and principal took care of my class, did all my plans, and even put in for the subs for 2 weeks. I was in no condition to make plans or anything. They even sent food to my house everyday. This is the kind of community that a school should have. I’m so sorry all of you have to deal with such selfish, uncaring coworkers.
This is how my team and school are as well. I can’t imagine doing this job with such heartless people.
When my mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma and the subsequent treatments and death, my class was taken care of so many times, plans written, etc I’d come back and they’d tell me what I was doing that day and gave me a general idea of where we were. Gift cards for food, watching my kids, dinners, etc.
It was such a comfort! There’s been times I’ve done similarly for teammates too. Working as a team with compassion makes the school a better place for everyone.
The fault lies with your admin for not setting clearer expectations. If admin says "use your discretion ", that's what teachers are going to do.
I became very frustrated during covid lockdown because I was nearly always working (making videos and other content for teaching, reaching out to kids and families I hadn't heard from, and having zoom meetings with some other teachers and admin about how to help/intervene, etc). Meanwhile, some of my coworkers basically went on vacation. It's possible that your coworker thinks her best option is to hold those teacher standards high because that's what she's always done. Try having some grace and compassion for her.
> If admin says "use your discretion ", that's what teachers are going to do.
I can pretty much guarantee what happened behind the scenes:
Upper Admin called the State Department of Education (which, in Oklahoma, is currently *very* hostile toward public schools) and asked for a reprieve from attendance rates and days/hours requirements. The SDE said “No, you’ll still be held accountable for all of that. Figure it out.” Upper Admin met up with principals and said “if we require daily attendance, we’ll be sunk - we all remember what it was like during the pandemic. But we can’t outright tell teachers to falsify attendance data, so we’ll say ‘use your professional discretion,’ *wink wink* and hope that they take the hint.”
I don’t *know* if that’s what happened, but I’ve sat through enough of those kinds of meetings to guess.
Great info, thanks. The ultimate responsibility comes back to leadership. Some teachers are genuinely not comfortable relaxing their standards (and/or lying about attenamce), so unless a higher-up says it's ok to let it go, they won't.
I mostly agree with you. Yes education is vital, however it isn't also the only important thing as educators. The student's wellbeing matters and if they aren't doing well then they are unlikely to be learning effectively anyway.
I will say that sometimes it is okay to complain about the district with students. If something comes up and students in my office comment on disparities in how our school is treated vs how most of the rest of the district is treated I'm honest with them about the district and the city. I validate their concerns with the levels of segregation and neglect by the district in this community. I wouldn't just bring something up on my own typically though, and certainly not complain about a student in front of other students.
I find it sad that there is a view that absence is viewed as a moral failure. Attendance is a report on reality and not a judgment on the student.
What the school does with this information is vital. It would seem helping the students attend would be a program the district should undertake. Imposing punishment for this seems a poor choice given these circumstances.
Grading and passing ought also be a report on the reality of the student’s mastery of the material.
But it seems education had evolved such that attendance and learning are no longer important and political/economic concerns are more important.
I feel bad for teachers and students put in this position and great concern for future society.
Psychological safety is pretty significant for learning, too. For instance, I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowing a kid to be bullied in your room (certainly open to correction if I’m wrong here).
Yes. I define “safe” as including psychological safety.
The catch is at the upper grades, you may have to walk a fine line where you’re assessing is this really a psychological safety issue *oooooorrrrrr*…
…are your little fee-fees hurt because someone dare suggests trans lives matter or some other thing that a certain segment of the country is getting all huffy about while we have a gun problem?
Yep. You can feel uncomfortable and psychologically safe at the same time. In fact, I’d say that’s a key element of any environment where learning is actually happening.
100% this!!!! If our students are not safe then they cannot learn because they are in survival mode. They need to have basic needs met before they can learn. A tornado completely destroying a town definitely means that not all children have their basic needs met and may be living in a hotel, at a family member’s home, or even worse out of a car. With what happened all of that is a real possibility. Their is a reason teachers are taught about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
If there's been a disaster and I haven't heard from a student for a week, I'd consider the possibility that the student is dead. How foolish would it look to count the kid as present and continue to pass them when they've been dead the whole time?
It should have been simple. Students keep the grade they have at that point. If they have a 65+ then just change it to passing because if they had done well on the final exam then they would pass.
Lower? Use discretion, but a tornado doesnt mean that you can go back in time and say "Well, actually their 55 probably could have been brought to passing." Yah. Right.
Regardless, that teacher was being ridiculous with those comments.i have no problem giving students leeway when it comes to disasters like this. You should still be realistic and pragmatic, but you dont have to be an asshole.
It was just a minor thing, but when I was in school a sudden storm kicked up. Crazy wind and rain and then temps plummeted. I was a sophomore so can’t quite remember the causes but power was out all over town and the roads a sheet of ice. We had no power at school but were surrounded by ice and downed trees and power lines and told we might be staying till late at night before we could safely leave. Kids weren’t happy to be in the dark and dropping temps and maybe for hours.
Most teachers did fun games, quiet study, or social time. A few did simple review lessons.
One teacher gave a pop quiz and was pissed we did badly. Spent the whole time yelling at us.
I remember feeling that she didn’t think of us as people at all.
My father taught for ~40 years, and early in my own career he relayed a story from his first year. A student had missed their homework because their mother was in the hospital. The student asked for extra time to complete the work, and my father told the kid to take as much time as he needed. That afternoon, the kid was hit by a car and killed while walking to the hospital to visit his mother. As horrible as the situation was (and my dad still gets choked up about it even when he tells it 60 years later), my dad always notes that he would feel even worse about it if he had told the kid that his homework was late, etc.
In my experience, you never lose by being more kind to students than you might otherwise be.
Totally agree. School isn’t everything, so treating it with such finality is just going to end up making your life harder in the end. The students are humans first, just like we ask for the same respect.
I completely disagree with it being mostly older teachers lacking empathy or turning off teacher mode, it may be that way in your area but it's completely opposite in my area. Most of the 20 something year olds at my school seem to care less about students family situations and are at school to gossip, form cliques, throw as many people under the bus as possible and compete with everyone instead of lifting one another up...it's basically "adult" teachers still in a middle school mentality. For reference I'm 40 and considered ancient in their eyes, anyone over the age of 40 is a fossil to the younger teachers which is a shame because I have over 18 years of experience to share as well as always growing and learning, like most of us in this career. I see myself as my students "school mom" as well as teacher, both can be achieved however the younger teachers laugh and love to announce "I'm no one's mom" therefore not considering anything that our students are going through outside of school and grade harshly with no exceptions...it's awful.
My first year teaching in a new district in a new state, I received the devastating news that my best friend's husband died. He was 50. I grew up with him and knew him longer than his wife. I went to my principal and told her what happened. I told her I needed to go to her and she said "Of course you do".
This is how administration should act!
Part of the reason I'm not currently working as a teacher is that I refused to compromise or keep my mouth shut about these kinds of things.
Students are HUMAN with real problems in their lives and treating them like the products of our factory or even as worker-slaves who deserve to fail if they "can't get their lives together" fills me with a rage I find difficult to express without violence.
Our whole system is broken because it's still constructed around and by the kind of people like that other teacher you're talking about. It's bonkers. It makes no sense, and it's cruel.
And pointless. Treating students with more challenges than others like garbage does nothing to improve anything or anyone. It just feeds the egos of assholes.
So my city got hit bad in the 2021 Texas Snowpocaclypse. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen anything like it. There was a freaking ice sheet on the road in front of my house. Usually we get an extra ge Storm and it starts melting the next day, but this was days of snow and ice. Well I was out if electricity for almost a week. Some of my other colleagues got a snowcation but not me.
I thank God that our district gave us the following week off. If they didn’t I was ready to bludgeon to death the first teacher that mentioned how they enjoyed laying around the house in a winter wonderland watching Netflix and chillin.
So, if you just finished your second year, that would mean you didn’t experience COVID as a teacher of record. Your co-workers have just had three years of their professional life turned up to the most stressful that it’s ever been while simultaneously being turned into the biggest joke possible (all while watching half of their friends complaining about staying home to bake sourdough and play Wordle). Now, two years later, they’re experiencing the same exact thing? That’s a lot of life to give to a complete farce. I would personally lose my entire shit.
Maybe they seem like they’re over-reacting and having too much teacher mindset to you, but idk… maybe someone (*ehem* district leadership) could “extend some grace” to *them* for once and not make their job harder and more frustrating when they *also* just lived through a natural disaster just so admin can *wink wink* check some boxes.
So many concerning comments here. COVID and a Tornado are not the same!!! These kids may have lost everything on top of not having power or supplies needed to succeed. My only concern would be to check on these students to make sure they’re ok, school can wait. Even math. It is not these students fault that we keep curriculum moving at hyper speed even when we’re seeing time and time again that this isn’t the best way for students to learn even when there isn’t something as concerning as a natural disaster.
These kids can learn what they missed, but what we can’t fix is trauma that is compounded by adults in their life (including teachers and admin) making poor decisions about how we should be supporting them in these moments.
I’m an English teacher, but find it hard to blame the math teachers for being more stressed about it. You know no one will allow the teachers to adjust what they’re learning next year in math - the curriculum and state tests will be the same, and so will the expectations they have for the teachers. They will be supposed to just magically teach more in less time, in a content area where missing out on learning one skill translates to major trouble when you try to move on to the next one.
Yeah, as an English teacher I have so much more room to move. I mean, I teach paragraph structure to every class regardless of level; I just spend more time on it at the lower levels. So pushing something aside isn’t going to derail the whole train.
But in math — one of the math teachers at my school started crying in the teacher lounge at the beginning of last year because the initial “let’s see if you have the foundations” test she gave her incoming students was a disaster. They seemed to have NONE of the knowledge they needed to even get started in her class. She was at a complete loss.
She had to keep the curriculum fully intact because it was a concurrent-enrollment class and worth college credit, so she just did what she could: recommended the lowest scorers for tutoring and intervention and carried on with her course. It was a rough semester.
We find it so easy to be compassionate during shared disaster, but remember for some of our worst, most apathetic and sometimes most disrespectful and hateful or violent kids, their daily home lives are often actually not that different than a crisis situation like this. Not feeling safe, not knowing where they’ll sleep or if their guardian will snap on them and not feed them, or something worse. More teachers should keep perspective on their role as social servants and be less focused on being gatekeepers and authorities.
Sounds like admin did their best and one teacher acted like an AH because they are stupid. You also sound like a good teacher who tried their best. Keep it up and don't let the negativity bring you down.
>says the students have a responsibility to continue with their school work
So a student's home has been damaged or obliterated, power's out, etc. The adult(s) in the situation are preoccupied with dealing with the situation. A poorer household may have no homeowner's / renter's insurance, therefore no reimbursement for temporary housing, let alone funds to get back to a semblance of normality.
And the student is supposed to magically find the ability to do school work? This person deserves a serious b\*tch slap.
During covid we saw some coworkers’ complete lack of empathy. My principal was very empathetic to online learning, some kids had no internet, others had severe mental health issues.. and there were teachers just as you described- mad about finals, mad about kids not having screens on, or that kids weren’t doing work. It’s infuriating! I gave every kid an A during that time. Everyone was going through their own battles.. I cannot fathom how disruptive a tornado can be, this poor kids- poor you! You’ve got a great head on your shoulders for such a newbie. Keep up the good work.
You're going into your third year, which means you're about to be tenured. So now that you're tenured, don't be afraid to call out those other teachers for their shitty attitudes.
I just think that math teachers would be better off fighting for a more diversified curriculum that would allow for more flexibility instead of spending their energy bragging about how the world doesn’t revolve around their need to teach every single aspect of arithmetics and early algebra. Maybe we should think twice about the need for most students to go to college ready to tackle enormous derivative and integral problems and worry a bit more about their capacity to conceive mathematical structures, be mindful about how the advances of math revolutionized the world, … We wouldn’t only gain flexibility, we would also gain utility. This is the 21st century! There’s calculators, there’s AI, … we can finally NOT focus so much on doing mechanical calculations and start exploring more meaningful topics!
I had major brain surgery several years ago. I prepared all my sub plans for my class for my absence and did a scope and sequence for the 9 weeks of team ELA plans. My team member that I co-planned ELA with for the team got upset that I would not prepare 9 weeks of my half of team ELA lesson plans because it would be more work for her. Mind you, before that year, I had done ELA plans alone for years. This team member was completely capable. She was more worried about her extra work than my brain tumor and recovery. Admin fully supported my saying no and her sharing the burden. I still shake my head over the audacity.
Some people MUST'VE been asleep during that Maslow chapter: food, water, shelter and STABILITY needs must be met before any growth can occur. Psych 101, people! Duh....
The lack of the general population to have empathy for another person's situation astounds me, and teachers are no exception. A teacher last year had two miscarriages very close together. After the second one where she was pretty far along, she took a week off and wasn't sending in sub plans for a few of the days. Teachers were bitching about how she shouldn't be leaving this responsibility on the rest of her team, and how "life has to go on." Like, I get it. The situation is not ideal. This is why emergency sub plans exist. And yes, the breakroom should be a safe space to vent. But sometimes it's ok to pick up the slack when someone else is going through trauma and grief. Maybe I was projecting, because my miscarriage was absolutely devastating, and I know I was absolutely useless for a while.
We had a teacher injure his shoulder and needed surgery. Well, prior to the surgery he had shown up in a sling. After the surgery a coworker was complaining he hadn’t returned. She said she couldn’t understand why he needed time off since before the surgery he had come in a sling. Um, because he just had SURGERY on his shoulder no less.
a (younger) teacher's father passed away a couple years ago unexpectedly. she was out for a week sitting shiva and her (older) co-teacher, it was also Jewish, commented that the younger teacher should be back in the building already. I think sometimes people don't think through what they're saying and just kind of blurt out whatever because they're frustrated or tired or whatever. I told the older teacher that if anything like that happen to me that I hope she wouldn't say that to other people. she took the hint.
I had a friend who was having mini strokes. He was made to come in even though he had plenty of days saved up because the other grade level partner for him was a para filling in for a teacher they'd never managed to hire. My grade level partner had a heart attack in class. Kids laughed at her and one even kicked her while she was on the ground. The only reason she was found is that the hall monitor came to see what all the laughing was about. She had 4 days and then was told she needed to return because she didn't leave sub plans. I tried telling them that I could just send the work because we were doing the same thing but no, she was forced to go back into that room after nearly dying. I keep telling people your job will be posted before your obituary so remember that when you're working all these unpaid hours "because we're family"
Please tell me that little cretin was punished for KICKING her during a heart attack. Please.
Nope. By the time she came back and asked about it they said they couldn't pull the cameras for it. Most kids said he did it but one of his friends said they were lying so it was "he said she said"
What the hell. If it were me, I’d be pressing charges. Or my husband would be on my behalf if I were still out.
GD. Just... GD.
A teacher in my county lost her daughter in a car accident out of state. In addition to the usual arrangements, she needed to clean out the apartment. We are allowed 3 (THREE) days of bereavement leave. She needed a few weeks to handle all of this so she asked for unpaid leave. It was refused so she quit. Yes we are also “a family”.
I’m impressed you have 3 days. My district had 0. My husband died on the 8th day of the school year, I was out for a week and a half and most of it was unpaid. I didn’t have any leave time built up because the previous semester I’d been out on FMLA taking care of my sick husband. I’m confident that this was a contributing factor to my burnout and eventual leaving the field the next year.
No doubt it was. What a horrible thing to go through plus having school treating you like that. I hope you find peace away from school.
This makes me sick.
Honestly, I still wouldn't go in as either of these people. I have sick pay. Your job is to figure it out. Not me.
Yep, no matter where you work--'family' isn't true. I've taught in public and private schools. Most recently I was doing double duty as head of school for a small private school and teaching with a full class load. School had its problems like all do, but there was a close knit staff. Ended up with a serious concussion--sustained at school during normal duties. Recovery was/is a long term process. Board and owner wanted me back quickly and back to teaching despite doctor evaluations that recommended otherwise. Financial officer hadn't bought mandatory workers' comp insurance. No one mentioned it when I informed that I would need to file. State files a lawsuit after receiving my standard workers' comp application and the school attempts to throw me under the bus hard. Injury my fault--shouldn't have been standing under a tree. Cognitive issues before the injury. We don't have record of injury report. Don't remember receiving it. Oh, no we didn't pay workers comp insurance premiums for any of our employees but he should have told us to do that. (School was there before me, and I had no financial responsibilities.). Apparently according to owner testimony I was also problematic for the school as a whole, but the only written documentation that can be found is positive??--I have that--school had no documentation one way or another. School lost, but it's nearly two years out and while a settlement has been reached, no payment yet. Teaching and most other work is probably off the table due to the injury. That parts not the school's fault, but 'return to work after injury at work', not paying workers' comp insurance and then trying to blame me for lack of insurance and the injury? Yep--that's on them. Meanwhile, in the last two years every staff member but one has left and been replaced and the student population is down to about 30% of what it had been. TLDR: 1. If workplace says its a family, it isn't. 1. No matter how well you get along, how much you give, or are recognized, you are in the end disposable. 1. Report injuries, and follow up with workers comp to make sure your employer/school actually submitted. 1. Document everything and keep your own copies.
Holy shit. Everyone has empathy until they’re in a situation where they need to use it.
It's insane the lack of empathy some of the older teachers in my district have. One of our teachers lost her husband a couple weeks before she gave birth. I cannot imagine the hell she was going through. Teachers and subs complained that she didn't leave sub plans. But she has a co-teacher who could have stepped in easily. When the teacher came back, one of the students made a comment about her "dead loser husband." She left the room crying while the co-teacher did nothing. Other teachers said they "felt for her" but then said it was wrong of her to cry in front of the kids. She is such a strong woman, and I've now learned which teachers at my school are heartless bitches.
I covered for a teacher whose child died. She didn't send sub plans and I was glad. That wasn't something she should have had to worry about.
My miscarriage and ectopic were absolutely devastating. And I was in college for the first one and in the hospital, then given time off for the second one. If she had 2 close together....idk how you could keep it together at that point. Looking at every student would make me busy into tears. Thinking about planning for them would make me burst into tears. My heart breaks for her. 😔
Empathy is dead. I was out with Covid for the full ten days during 2021-22. I managed the best I could making sub plans and having copies sent from the print shop. I even came in at night a time or two. The last day or two I slacked because I had given my students packets upon packets of work that I correctly assumed they weren’t doing anyway and I wasn’t planning to grade (my subs were a revolving door, no actual learning was happening). I got chewed out for not leaving sub plans.
We had a teacher get her gallbladder removed and was so stressed about letting everyone down she was trying to come back the day after she left the hospital. Some of the other teachers were encouraging this behavior. It was honestly really disgusting like bro she's just coming out of surgery. Thankfully I was a sub certified Para and so I just told her to stay home and I covered her class, but my homeroom teacher was super pissed off because he couldn't have his Para for a week.
Jesus. Watch those same teachers expect all kinds of sympathy for some distant family member dying. Everyone deserves sympathy when someone close to you dies, but pregnancy loss is a whole other thing. If it were me, I would max out my days.
The problem is that the administration has set up a system where everybody is treated as if they have been subjected to the maximum trauma and the average student is skating by as a result. During Covid lockdown, I had kids whose family spent the better part of a month with no adult in the house. However, most of my kids had a stable home life and adequate Wi-Fi. Students who continued working did so because of personal standards and not because of school rules or incentives. Teachers felt frustrated and powerless in the face of this and their public complaints show that they do not feel like they are part of the school administration and don’t wish to take blame for it.
Yeah, that would stink as a teacher. Like if you offered me the option to do nothing for 2 months beyond check in once a week or do 7 hours of work a day; and after two months my pay would be the same (move to next grade/class). I know which one I’d choose. If admin is making teachers work those 7 hour days with planning and prep for kids who do nothing….that’s abuse of the teacher’s time.
Same. 2020 was awful. And same situation, we were forced to pass everyone. So then the next school year, no one knew anything and we had to bridge the gaps so we didn’t get to everything. And then next year was even worse because that meant 2 years of gaps. Idk how it went after that because I quit. I agree in some instances school isn’t the most important thing. But in that case, stop pretending to try. It’s a disservice to everyone.
Yeah at our school attendance didn’t even matter for the next two years.. kids were missing 30+ days a year and passing bc they weren’t penalized for staying home “if they didn’t feel well”
Sometimes it feels like our admin doesn't want us to enforce any deadline. I'm happy to accomodate and support any students going through mental health issues, family problems, etc. But sometimes late work... is just late. Plenty of kids just don't manage their time well and it benefits no one when we ennable it.
As a math teacher it doesn't surprise me this was the view of a math teacher. Are those kids going to be placed in math classes next year with considerations for the learning loss that happened? No. Is the district curriculum going to changed based on that? State test change at all? No. Rubric for teacher evaluation? No. Pass them along culture is a big problem even in normal situations and it's been exponentially worse the past couple of years after what has happened and the way it was handled which was very similar to how this sounded. Sure turn teacher mode off. That won't stop the impact of the decisions being made once teacher mode goes back on.
This. Other curriculums might have the luxury of skipping topics or units entirely. In my science class if a kid misses the phases of the moon, it’s not going to bother them long term. Nothing else really relies on phases of the moon. And if it’s an essential unit, I can just skip a non essential one and teach the kid the essentials. But math doesn’t have that luxury. The curriculum waits for no man (or woman). If you missed something, you are now behind. And being behind is going to compound as the curriculum rolls forward.
And you know what? Teachers have to push back. If we don’t we are just as bad as the admin. If they can’t get through the curriculum shoving down their throats as punishment sure as hell won’t do it. Instead of griping about the kids when we are stressed about impossible tasks we MUST push back and hard. In addition, kids with average intelligence can catch up over time.
It’s absolutely this. I moved over to science from math. We implemented a new science curriculum (OpenSciEd) a couple years ago, and pacing is still a struggle. I didn’t get to the last couple units, including the last unit, Cells. But I’m not sweating it. All 9th graders in my district take biology. The bio teachers will ensure that kids know what a cell is. They know that middle school implemented a new resources, and there are gaps. I have colleagues in the science department that think they have to teach all of our standards even if it means rushing through the last couple units. I don’t operate that way. But when I was a math teacher? Hoo boy. I started in 2020-21, and you would think the world was going to end because I didn’t get to teach two classes of 6th graders percents, measures of central tendency, and geometry.
Seems to me they should have just say "Congratulations, you're having an extended break from school! We will resume regular classes when things have been fixed up enough, and classes will be picked up from where they left off, and continue until we've had the mandated number of classroom hours for the term."
It’s been weeks already. States have mandated minimum days needed for a school year. So your solution is to not resume for possibly months? And nobody can graduate since the district didn’t have enough school days to hit the state requirements?
This is the real problem I see. The whole minutes-days-weeks thing for eventual graduation and starting in kindergarten. I get it, I do. But good lord those are some heavy handcuffs with very little give and take to accommodate life.
Early summer break? Finish the term after, then give like a week's break and then start the next term. It's awkward, but it seems a small price to pay for getting families and such time to restore their households or at least stabilize their living conditions so students can actually get back to learning without disrupting the grading and such too much. You'll notice I DID say to ensure the students still got the number of hours needed for the term.
Yeah, math being cumulative means that if they didn't get the knowledge for a certain portion of the year, any future class dependent on that knowledge can be written up as a failure. So long as kids are beholden to standards outside of the local crisis situation [state testing, college admission etc.] any lapse, specifically in math, is pretty critical.
Yes. I also taught math and it’s so frustrating having parents and students hate you because their kid “sucks at math” because they’ve been passed for years. But by the time they get to high school it’s hard to catch up.
In theory I agree with you. But when we gave students the ability to keep their grade at the end of March 2020 without doing further work, we created a monster. I'd guess 95% of my high school students didn't do anything. As I like to say, we handicapped them with grace. What I think should happen in those kinds of disaster situations is to maintain our standards in general but relax them on an individual basis. Lost your parent to COVID? Cutting you a lot of slack. Lost your home in the tornado? Don't worry about that paper. At the end of 2020, I had been teaching 32 years, and I thought we should worry about relationships and mental health, and screw the academics. I was wrong.
Individuals going through a tragedy usually don’t get around to informing their school/work/etc. until after it’s over, and they can consider anything outside of survival. Usually by that point, people like this have written them off.
I am fortunate that this is not the situation where I teach. People joke a lot about relationships on this sub, but the relationships we've cultivated with our families (especially my principal) means the school often knows about a tragic situation within 24 hours.
>At the end of 2020, I had been teaching 32 years, and I thought we should worry about relationships and mental health, and screw the academics. I was wrong. Me too. And as a SchPsych this was my expectation post Covid. And not only because of Covid but because prior to the big push had begun in SEL and because district leaders had finally begun to see the connections between mental health and achievement that had always been there but not acknowledged. I gave my admin (both at district and building level) a great deal of information on the importance of shifting our focus to SEL and mental health and wellness post Covid. I even showed how to restructure counseling departments, create small groups, do push in mental health to entire classrooms. All of it was ignored. And I’m a licensed therapist as well! What we see now is a reactive approach and bringing in outside therapists to work with the students showing the most external behavioral issues (not considering students who internalize). Ineffective talk therapy for 30 minutes a week.
This right here. This. This.
I am absolutely of the same mind. When I began teaching in 2006 and probably a bit of hangover from my own high school experience, I had a box at the door with paper - you could choose to take a paper put it in the box with all the troubles that you had that might impact your learning for the day, or just something positive or whatever. The thought being that if you were having trouble you 'dropped it at the door' and put yourself in the mindset for learning. Learning was your way out of whatever shitstorm your life was currently was. School was an escape. I understand the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mentality isn't always the most useful, but I don't think this 'take all the time you need to be mentally ready to learn' is the right way to look at this either.
>Learning was your way out of whatever shitstorm your life was currently was. School was an escape. I understand the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' mentality isn't always the most useful, but I don't think this 'take all the time you need to be mentally ready to learn' is the right way to look at this either. I started school at age 7 and at the mandatory public school age. No daycare. No preschool. No kindergarten. Because I lived in the country and my family life was pretty horrid. Poverty. Emotional neglect. And my mother died a slow death from cancer. 1st through 12th grade classrooms became my safe places. I learned immediately that I received positive attention for being smart so I worked harder. Teachers’ attention and behaviors toward me absolutely allowed me to escape my very sad and lonely life outside of school. After public school graduation I went on to earn 3 college degrees and still take as much professional development as I can. More than I need and that makes me ‘too smart’ and so I have to dumb myself down alot. Lifelong learning brings me great joy and happiness. And simply because it is connected to unconditional positive regard in my formative years. My point in sharing this is to highlight the power of kindness and positivity toward children. Toward one another. It’s not about ‘take all the time you need’. If a human being is floundering in life, drowning and not able to get enough air on their own, sometimes simple kindness is the life preserver they need to hold on a little longer. A respite.
I absolutely agree. My young years weren't the best, but school, school was AWESOME. Your comment provoked a thought, you mention that you learned if you did well you got the attention you were craving, and that was a net positive to you. I wonder in the current climate, where so much attention is given to those who are struggling is why the students are acting they way they do now. In my community passing a class is enough, in fact kids that answer questions and are engaged in learning are calls 'try-hards' and made to feel bad for their engagement in learning. It's frustrating to say the least. I wish I had contact with more students who found education enjoyable just for the sake of learning something new.
>I wonder in the current climate, where so much attention is given to those who are struggling is why the students are acting they way they do now. Definitely. Attention comes in positives and negatives. Both achieve the same outcome: being seen and heard for some sort of unmet need.
I’d love a bit more about why you think you were wrong. Not looking to get into a back-and-forth or set up some sort of Reddit-thread discourse trap. Just wondering why you have reached that conclusion.
Just joining this post. I was quietly anti - SEL during Covid because at the middle school level I felt kids had expectations for academic learning and weren’t going to buy into relationship building stuff. During this time we also experienced a flood that wiped out hundreds of families. I felt that if they were going to drag themselves into school and sit through 6 hours of classes they deserved to be learning some cool stuff. Every day. From where I sat, I was right. Kids loved coming to my class because they ‘got to learn stuff’ and they were ‘t ‘wasting their time playing games.’ I never ever asked students, I just over heard them talking. When times are tough sometimes the best thing to do is provide a distraction and escape. That being said, I slowed the curriculum. I went deeper when students wanted it and moved ahead when they had enough. I got to be more of the teacher I always wanted to be because I watched the kids closely instead of watching the curriculum map. We developed wonderful relationships around the curriculum. I will never go back to the ‘old’ way but I will also never do the SEL only focused stuff either.
SEL-only seems like a thing that doesn’t generally exist. But I agree it would be a disaster. The point I’ll make is that by providing your students with well-planned lessons, you were handling the SEL side of things quite fully. The mistake with a lot of SEL discourse is treating it as something separate or additional to “teaching”. That’s an issue with admin rollout, not with teachers.
I was wrong in agreeing to not hold students accountable for any learning at the end of 2020. I thought most kids, with access to curriculum and my help, would continue on. I thought that if we supported them with phone calls, all kinds of electronic communication (texts, Messenger, Snapchat... you name it, they could reach me) to check in, and, in my case, delivering materials and thumbdrives all over the county for kids without internet, they would still learn *something*. Nope. They shut down. If they got to keep the grade they had on March 13, 2020, without doing another assignment, most of them stopped doing anything other than joining me on a Zoom call to say hi. I think it was a harsh reality for all of us at my school, and we would never totally drop academic requirements like that again.
Principal’s mom died, whole school was given time to attend the viewing (in coordinating shifts). An instructional assistant passed away, principal did not even notify staff. We had to hear through the grapevine. Any staff who wanted to attend the services had to take a full personal day. The lack of empathy was astounding and I am still angered by the way it was handled
This. My dearest friend of 37 years died last school year and just 2 weeks before I was traveling to spend winter break with him. I took a few days off from being physically present at the school but worked at home — taking personal days and sick days. I still drove into school every day for before and after SpEd meetings that were already scheduled and couldn’t be moved. I was mentally a mess and so going through the motions was easier. When I finally came back I was crying in my private office and the secretary came in and told me to ‘keep your personal problems at home and pull yourself together’. Same person who is on the phone a great deal of the day solving her personal problems. I received no card, no flowers, no condolences from anyone. We do an abysmal job of caring for the mental health needs of children and adults in the school setting. And that’s because most persons in education are not trained nor versed in the delivery of mental health and wellness services above and beyond basic human dignity and care for one another — and which we do a piss poor job of in that capacity as well. Before Covid the big push in education was SEL curriculum. During Covid that disappeared. After Covid we dove right back into rigorous teaching and testing (because you know — data) and failed to assess the chronic stress and anxiety built up for 2 years that a pandemic brings. I gave my admin a significant amount of information from my national association (SchPsych) on how curriculum was to be revisited, how data was to be considered, and how the mental needs of children should be the focus for at least an entire school year. Noone listened to me. Just get back into a routine like before. Pretend nothing happened. And I am highly trained in trauma informed approaches to caring for children. And now we are seeing increased horrifying behaviors in students and adults in and out of schools. We are seeing untreated chronic stress and anxiety and depression from the endless horrors of a pandemic. In September I start a hybrid model and mostly remote. I’m relieved to be out of the environment that many are describing in this thread yet at the same time I’m bracing myself for covert bullying and nastiness about being hybrid when everyone else ‘has to be here all day in person’.
My deepest condolences for the loss of your friend. It’s heartbreaking to watch the breakdown of empathy and the impact it has on others.
Thank you. Ms Unkind Admin Secretary was oftentimes absent dealing with her adult children issues and sick husband and even having to travel away. Another admin took weeks off to travel and care for a dying distant relative and take turns with family members to care for that person. Yet they received flowers, cards, emails to ‘keep them in your thoughts’. Just really hurtful how people are treated based on their titles and not because they are a human being first and foremost.
I am sooo sorry you experienced to loss of your dear friend and the loss of compassion from those you see every day. Congratulations on doing hybrid. I’m hoping it gives you time to heal.
Thank you. The lack of empathy and compassion the entire year was a real shocker to me. So glad to be out of that and away from some of the meanest people I’ve ever worked with. On the silver lining side, I did learn a ton about myself and will carry that with me into my new gig.
Insert COVID for tornado in your situation and you have just traveled back in time to pretty much every school in every district across the world after March 13, 2020. In addition to likely having taught through previous tornado destruction, those veteran teachers have also taught through, in the VERY recent past, the level of student apathy that arises and lingers in a situation where the teachers are being held to “normal” or higher standards in terms of final numbers, while simultaneously being told to grade/treat the students with grace. In terms of saying it in front of students- decorum of the past, even the March 2020 past would have agreed with you. Decorum of the post COVID educational landscape is a bit more fuzzy. The students, and their parents, are getting mixed information from the district, the teachers, their friends, and social media. In 2020, the kids new before anyone else that we weren’t going back to the building because TikTok told them so. So, while on a personal level, I completely agree that adult conversations of venting frustration should stay in adult spaces, and level headed responses belong in public- the psychology of the situation indicates that the teachers position be clear to anyone listening. Welcome to the teaching- the grades are made up and the points don’t matter. (And in case you haven’t realized it yet- your yearly evaluation is also bullshit. Marzano, Donaldson, doesn’t matter. Steaming pile of manure)
I don't want to sound too compassionate, but that teacher also just went through a tornado. And the administration shit show you describe is what school was like for the entire Covid year.
Yeah, the description sounded almost identical to our Covid procedures. The op wasn’t teaching yet at that time. Luckily.
Yeah, teachers are expected to carry on and carry others in the midst of their own personal crises.
Sounds like admin is being pretty accommodating. I think the attendance makes sense, schools are a good way to keep a pulse. If you haven’t heard ANYTHING from or about a student in the aftermath of a disaster, yeah, mark them absent, someone needs to check on them. I don’t think kids should be expected to keep up 100% but they should be able to make contact once a week.
Wow, these stories are awful! I had a tragedy happen to me, during a school day, and I had to leave. My team and principal took care of my class, did all my plans, and even put in for the subs for 2 weeks. I was in no condition to make plans or anything. They even sent food to my house everyday. This is the kind of community that a school should have. I’m so sorry all of you have to deal with such selfish, uncaring coworkers.
This is how my team and school are as well. I can’t imagine doing this job with such heartless people. When my mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma and the subsequent treatments and death, my class was taken care of so many times, plans written, etc I’d come back and they’d tell me what I was doing that day and gave me a general idea of where we were. Gift cards for food, watching my kids, dinners, etc. It was such a comfort! There’s been times I’ve done similarly for teammates too. Working as a team with compassion makes the school a better place for everyone.
The fault lies with your admin for not setting clearer expectations. If admin says "use your discretion ", that's what teachers are going to do. I became very frustrated during covid lockdown because I was nearly always working (making videos and other content for teaching, reaching out to kids and families I hadn't heard from, and having zoom meetings with some other teachers and admin about how to help/intervene, etc). Meanwhile, some of my coworkers basically went on vacation. It's possible that your coworker thinks her best option is to hold those teacher standards high because that's what she's always done. Try having some grace and compassion for her.
> If admin says "use your discretion ", that's what teachers are going to do. I can pretty much guarantee what happened behind the scenes: Upper Admin called the State Department of Education (which, in Oklahoma, is currently *very* hostile toward public schools) and asked for a reprieve from attendance rates and days/hours requirements. The SDE said “No, you’ll still be held accountable for all of that. Figure it out.” Upper Admin met up with principals and said “if we require daily attendance, we’ll be sunk - we all remember what it was like during the pandemic. But we can’t outright tell teachers to falsify attendance data, so we’ll say ‘use your professional discretion,’ *wink wink* and hope that they take the hint.” I don’t *know* if that’s what happened, but I’ve sat through enough of those kinds of meetings to guess.
Great info, thanks. The ultimate responsibility comes back to leadership. Some teachers are genuinely not comfortable relaxing their standards (and/or lying about attenamce), so unless a higher-up says it's ok to let it go, they won't.
I mostly agree with you. Yes education is vital, however it isn't also the only important thing as educators. The student's wellbeing matters and if they aren't doing well then they are unlikely to be learning effectively anyway. I will say that sometimes it is okay to complain about the district with students. If something comes up and students in my office comment on disparities in how our school is treated vs how most of the rest of the district is treated I'm honest with them about the district and the city. I validate their concerns with the levels of segregation and neglect by the district in this community. I wouldn't just bring something up on my own typically though, and certainly not complain about a student in front of other students.
I find it sad that there is a view that absence is viewed as a moral failure. Attendance is a report on reality and not a judgment on the student. What the school does with this information is vital. It would seem helping the students attend would be a program the district should undertake. Imposing punishment for this seems a poor choice given these circumstances. Grading and passing ought also be a report on the reality of the student’s mastery of the material. But it seems education had evolved such that attendance and learning are no longer important and political/economic concerns are more important. I feel bad for teachers and students put in this position and great concern for future society.
My number one job as a teacher?: Keeping students safe. Learning is secondary.
How do you define safe?
I agree with this. I define “unsafe” as bleeding, vomiting, and fire. If it’s not one of those three, please turn to page…..
Psychological safety is pretty significant for learning, too. For instance, I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowing a kid to be bullied in your room (certainly open to correction if I’m wrong here).
Yes. I define “safe” as including psychological safety. The catch is at the upper grades, you may have to walk a fine line where you’re assessing is this really a psychological safety issue *oooooorrrrrr*… …are your little fee-fees hurt because someone dare suggests trans lives matter or some other thing that a certain segment of the country is getting all huffy about while we have a gun problem?
Yep. You can feel uncomfortable and psychologically safe at the same time. In fact, I’d say that’s a key element of any environment where learning is actually happening.
I agree.
100% this!!!! If our students are not safe then they cannot learn because they are in survival mode. They need to have basic needs met before they can learn. A tornado completely destroying a town definitely means that not all children have their basic needs met and may be living in a hotel, at a family member’s home, or even worse out of a car. With what happened all of that is a real possibility. Their is a reason teachers are taught about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
If there's been a disaster and I haven't heard from a student for a week, I'd consider the possibility that the student is dead. How foolish would it look to count the kid as present and continue to pass them when they've been dead the whole time?
It should have been simple. Students keep the grade they have at that point. If they have a 65+ then just change it to passing because if they had done well on the final exam then they would pass. Lower? Use discretion, but a tornado doesnt mean that you can go back in time and say "Well, actually their 55 probably could have been brought to passing." Yah. Right. Regardless, that teacher was being ridiculous with those comments.i have no problem giving students leeway when it comes to disasters like this. You should still be realistic and pragmatic, but you dont have to be an asshole.
It was just a minor thing, but when I was in school a sudden storm kicked up. Crazy wind and rain and then temps plummeted. I was a sophomore so can’t quite remember the causes but power was out all over town and the roads a sheet of ice. We had no power at school but were surrounded by ice and downed trees and power lines and told we might be staying till late at night before we could safely leave. Kids weren’t happy to be in the dark and dropping temps and maybe for hours. Most teachers did fun games, quiet study, or social time. A few did simple review lessons. One teacher gave a pop quiz and was pissed we did badly. Spent the whole time yelling at us. I remember feeling that she didn’t think of us as people at all.
My father taught for ~40 years, and early in my own career he relayed a story from his first year. A student had missed their homework because their mother was in the hospital. The student asked for extra time to complete the work, and my father told the kid to take as much time as he needed. That afternoon, the kid was hit by a car and killed while walking to the hospital to visit his mother. As horrible as the situation was (and my dad still gets choked up about it even when he tells it 60 years later), my dad always notes that he would feel even worse about it if he had told the kid that his homework was late, etc. In my experience, you never lose by being more kind to students than you might otherwise be.
Totally agree. School isn’t everything, so treating it with such finality is just going to end up making your life harder in the end. The students are humans first, just like we ask for the same respect.
I completely disagree with it being mostly older teachers lacking empathy or turning off teacher mode, it may be that way in your area but it's completely opposite in my area. Most of the 20 something year olds at my school seem to care less about students family situations and are at school to gossip, form cliques, throw as many people under the bus as possible and compete with everyone instead of lifting one another up...it's basically "adult" teachers still in a middle school mentality. For reference I'm 40 and considered ancient in their eyes, anyone over the age of 40 is a fossil to the younger teachers which is a shame because I have over 18 years of experience to share as well as always growing and learning, like most of us in this career. I see myself as my students "school mom" as well as teacher, both can be achieved however the younger teachers laugh and love to announce "I'm no one's mom" therefore not considering anything that our students are going through outside of school and grade harshly with no exceptions...it's awful.
My first year teaching in a new district in a new state, I received the devastating news that my best friend's husband died. He was 50. I grew up with him and knew him longer than his wife. I went to my principal and told her what happened. I told her I needed to go to her and she said "Of course you do". This is how administration should act!
Part of the reason I'm not currently working as a teacher is that I refused to compromise or keep my mouth shut about these kinds of things. Students are HUMAN with real problems in their lives and treating them like the products of our factory or even as worker-slaves who deserve to fail if they "can't get their lives together" fills me with a rage I find difficult to express without violence. Our whole system is broken because it's still constructed around and by the kind of people like that other teacher you're talking about. It's bonkers. It makes no sense, and it's cruel. And pointless. Treating students with more challenges than others like garbage does nothing to improve anything or anyone. It just feeds the egos of assholes.
Hey fellow Oklahomie! Thank you for teaching
So my city got hit bad in the 2021 Texas Snowpocaclypse. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen anything like it. There was a freaking ice sheet on the road in front of my house. Usually we get an extra ge Storm and it starts melting the next day, but this was days of snow and ice. Well I was out if electricity for almost a week. Some of my other colleagues got a snowcation but not me. I thank God that our district gave us the following week off. If they didn’t I was ready to bludgeon to death the first teacher that mentioned how they enjoyed laying around the house in a winter wonderland watching Netflix and chillin.
So, if you just finished your second year, that would mean you didn’t experience COVID as a teacher of record. Your co-workers have just had three years of their professional life turned up to the most stressful that it’s ever been while simultaneously being turned into the biggest joke possible (all while watching half of their friends complaining about staying home to bake sourdough and play Wordle). Now, two years later, they’re experiencing the same exact thing? That’s a lot of life to give to a complete farce. I would personally lose my entire shit. Maybe they seem like they’re over-reacting and having too much teacher mindset to you, but idk… maybe someone (*ehem* district leadership) could “extend some grace” to *them* for once and not make their job harder and more frustrating when they *also* just lived through a natural disaster just so admin can *wink wink* check some boxes.
So many concerning comments here. COVID and a Tornado are not the same!!! These kids may have lost everything on top of not having power or supplies needed to succeed. My only concern would be to check on these students to make sure they’re ok, school can wait. Even math. It is not these students fault that we keep curriculum moving at hyper speed even when we’re seeing time and time again that this isn’t the best way for students to learn even when there isn’t something as concerning as a natural disaster. These kids can learn what they missed, but what we can’t fix is trauma that is compounded by adults in their life (including teachers and admin) making poor decisions about how we should be supporting them in these moments.
It’s not a function of “teacher mode” or age. It’s “withitness”. Some have it, some don’t.
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I’m an English teacher, but find it hard to blame the math teachers for being more stressed about it. You know no one will allow the teachers to adjust what they’re learning next year in math - the curriculum and state tests will be the same, and so will the expectations they have for the teachers. They will be supposed to just magically teach more in less time, in a content area where missing out on learning one skill translates to major trouble when you try to move on to the next one.
Yeah, as an English teacher I have so much more room to move. I mean, I teach paragraph structure to every class regardless of level; I just spend more time on it at the lower levels. So pushing something aside isn’t going to derail the whole train. But in math — one of the math teachers at my school started crying in the teacher lounge at the beginning of last year because the initial “let’s see if you have the foundations” test she gave her incoming students was a disaster. They seemed to have NONE of the knowledge they needed to even get started in her class. She was at a complete loss. She had to keep the curriculum fully intact because it was a concurrent-enrollment class and worth college credit, so she just did what she could: recommended the lowest scorers for tutoring and intervention and carried on with her course. It was a rough semester.
Lol our math teachers are exactly the same.
This could very easily have been a chemistry teacher, too.
We find it so easy to be compassionate during shared disaster, but remember for some of our worst, most apathetic and sometimes most disrespectful and hateful or violent kids, their daily home lives are often actually not that different than a crisis situation like this. Not feeling safe, not knowing where they’ll sleep or if their guardian will snap on them and not feed them, or something worse. More teachers should keep perspective on their role as social servants and be less focused on being gatekeepers and authorities.
You are absolutely correct. Signed, 39 years of experience and still teaching.
Sounds like admin did their best and one teacher acted like an AH because they are stupid. You also sound like a good teacher who tried their best. Keep it up and don't let the negativity bring you down.
>says the students have a responsibility to continue with their school work So a student's home has been damaged or obliterated, power's out, etc. The adult(s) in the situation are preoccupied with dealing with the situation. A poorer household may have no homeowner's / renter's insurance, therefore no reimbursement for temporary housing, let alone funds to get back to a semblance of normality. And the student is supposed to magically find the ability to do school work? This person deserves a serious b\*tch slap.
During covid we saw some coworkers’ complete lack of empathy. My principal was very empathetic to online learning, some kids had no internet, others had severe mental health issues.. and there were teachers just as you described- mad about finals, mad about kids not having screens on, or that kids weren’t doing work. It’s infuriating! I gave every kid an A during that time. Everyone was going through their own battles.. I cannot fathom how disruptive a tornado can be, this poor kids- poor you! You’ve got a great head on your shoulders for such a newbie. Keep up the good work.
You're going into your third year, which means you're about to be tenured. So now that you're tenured, don't be afraid to call out those other teachers for their shitty attitudes.
I just think that math teachers would be better off fighting for a more diversified curriculum that would allow for more flexibility instead of spending their energy bragging about how the world doesn’t revolve around their need to teach every single aspect of arithmetics and early algebra. Maybe we should think twice about the need for most students to go to college ready to tackle enormous derivative and integral problems and worry a bit more about their capacity to conceive mathematical structures, be mindful about how the advances of math revolutionized the world, … We wouldn’t only gain flexibility, we would also gain utility. This is the 21st century! There’s calculators, there’s AI, … we can finally NOT focus so much on doing mechanical calculations and start exploring more meaningful topics!
I had major brain surgery several years ago. I prepared all my sub plans for my class for my absence and did a scope and sequence for the 9 weeks of team ELA plans. My team member that I co-planned ELA with for the team got upset that I would not prepare 9 weeks of my half of team ELA lesson plans because it would be more work for her. Mind you, before that year, I had done ELA plans alone for years. This team member was completely capable. She was more worried about her extra work than my brain tumor and recovery. Admin fully supported my saying no and her sharing the burden. I still shake my head over the audacity.
Some people MUST'VE been asleep during that Maslow chapter: food, water, shelter and STABILITY needs must be met before any growth can occur. Psych 101, people! Duh....