re: Teacher friends are cranky....

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not all. wifey is ready to go back.

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I was a teacher and my wife has been one for 15 years - it’s not necessarily the working part (which does suck) but it’s the inservice meetings which make you want to blow your own brains out that really suck.

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People ask me what killed teaching for me and I think immediately of two stories.


I had a straight F's kid that had truancy issues but was generally a sweet young man. His dad was in jail and he lived with his grandmother when I met him. He played ball for me so I had the opportunity to not only work with him for my class but also overviewing all of his work for eligibility purposes. It took awhile but we finally got him showing up to school everyday, practice everyday, doing his homework, going to tutoring, etc. We actually got the kid to a C level with a few B's mixed in and no discipline issues............ Then his dad got out of jail. Before you knew it, he was back truant, failing everything, quit football, dropped out as a junior and last we saw, he got hooked on the stuff his dad had him selling and looked like a skeleton with scabbies all over him around town. Found out later he caught alot of heat when his dad got out and saw he had good grades. His family ridiculed him for "trying to be white now?" "Think you too good for us, you wanna be the white man's monkey again?" It doesn't matter what you do, some of these families are determined to ruin their kids lives.



Other story was a kid that never showed up to school except for maybe two days all year. She found out during covid that we were doing distance learning and her mom demanded a packet of worksheets and she further demanded that her kid be passed if she completed the packet. Now, we all know that that kid probably didn't even do her own packet and even if she did, there's no way you can do a few worksheets and have the knowledge needed of the content to be prepared for the next years classes. Counselor and principal told me that the family was one to sue for racial discrimination and if she turned in any work at all, give her the lowest D. I quit at the end of that year and never came back.


The kids oftentimes could be bad, there's no doubt, but the adults, parents and administrators included, just took any and all optimism for me. I didn't want to be that grumpy guy just getting along to retirement so I quit and haven't regretted it a single day since.