Disaster

Something needs to be done about teachers who hate kids tbh

My sister is currently getting her doctorate in child psychology & education, but years ago she worked as a substitute english teacher at a high school in nyc. She spent half a year subbing for a woman who was out for surgery, and had been teaching english there for years and years. Most of the kids in this class were remedial; they had failed english before and had to retake it. Most of them hated the class, and they hated literature, because they had been made to feel unintelligent. My sister decided to introduce them to poetry, which was a little easier to digest than long form prose, and had them read Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice." And the kids loved it! They connected with it, they were spirited and engaged in class for the first time all year. They wrote their own poetry! They started seeking out and reading poetry on their own! They were all on track to get a C, B or A in that class. And then the original teacher returned and failed every single student, to "teach them all a lesson". That was the moment my sister decided to go into administration so she could hopefully prevent that sort of thing from happening. But it's difficult. Despite numerous complaints from parents and other teachers, that teacher had a job there for decades. She continued to have a job there. There are a lot of teachers like her, wielding power and taking their frustrations out on kids, especially disabled and remedial kids. And students have so few advocates in the classroom.

I'm not sure if this applies to just me, or all the kids in my class, but I always had a teacher that hated me for no reason. They were always passive agressive in their sugar sweet replies to my emails, and didn't treat my participation in class the same as the rest of the kids. Something really does need to be done with this.

Yes! I had always hated this kind of teachers at school (who doesn’t?) but I wasn’t afraid of them. So I argued with them, I was sarcastic and blunt and I annoyed the shit out of them because that was how they treated us. Now that I look back, it probably backfired on my classmates, and that’s a big downside, but this kind of behaviour actually protected me.

See, a lot of teachers are emotional vampires. They lack content and happiness in their lives because the job of a teacher is hard and they don’t receive much for it (at least where I live). Thus, they don’t have much energy. But a person needs energy, so one of the ways to get it is to suck it out of people through manipulation, disrespect, abuse, etc. Teachers do that through shouting, passive agression, humiliating students, abusing their power, asserting themselves by, once again, humiliation and many other actions.

A natural reaction of a person is to protect himself from others sucking his energy out. The best way is to stop communicating with that person, but when it comes to school that’s impossible. So the other way is being rude and “disrespectful” as well, “talking back”, calling people out, etc. The third way is tolerating this bullshit and enduring it, which is really frustrating, to say the least. Unfortunately, most students are forced to walk the third way.

And I’m so fucking pissed about it, you have no idea.