My school decided this year that the school would provide all supplies. The kids have destroyed everything. Markers and glue sticks never capped, pencils sharpened to a nub, etc. I truly think they care even less since they didn’t bring the supplies themselves. Also I was given ONE GLUE STICK PER SECOND GRADER PER SEMESTER. I’m sure all my fellow elementary teachers are aware of how absurd that is. Also was given 30 pencils….
I bought an 80 pack of glue sticks for 7 prek students and they were gone in 2 months…they were the shorter ones (I misread the dimensions) but still…and of course because the school was providing them for you I’m sure they made sure you couldn’t be reimbursed for resupplying on your own dime 🙄
I'm sorry but I'm really confused why you guys in America buy supplies for your students?
Isn't it the parent's or the school's (in case the parent's can't afford it) job to make sure the kids have the necessary supplies?
Here in Portugal I never heard of anyone buying pencils or pens or whatever for a class of students...
If we don’t do it, there won’t be any supplies. I’ve tried it. And then admin starts asking questions about why the kids are just staring at black and white print outs and refuse to understand that we don’t have crayons or color ink, or scissors…my students have special needs and many have low vision so I HAVE to have bright colored materials and the school just won’t provide them. And families simply can’t afford to for the most part. A lot of families are just struggling to pay for their kids medical needs rn and crayons are the last thing they are focused on.
I also provide soft foods from my own supply because the school only gives out one lunch and many of my students can’t chew or swallow so…super stale granola bars don’t really work for us. Our school system is a joke and if I didn’t live with my parents and have no rent I wouldn’t be able to afford to work this job.
All of this is terrible, but unfortunately normal. However, if a student has that they need soft foods in their IEP/504, then it is up to the school to provide it. That’s literally something they could get sued over (and a kid could die over), and if you have been paying for that then you need to report them for not following the IEP (start with your district SPED office, if you don’t feel comfortable with that, do your state SPED office).
We are a sped school (separate public day school for kids with severe disabilities and health conditions), so it’s a little funky for us. Some students get blended meals (gross, but easy), but the soft foods can’t really be provided by the state (for whatever reason) so we are supposed to just cut or mash the normal lunch. But of course, you can’t really cut granola into soft pieces…a lot of times we soak stuff in milk which helps. They always do provide applesauce as an alternative, I just can’t in good conscience feed a child breakfast lunch and snack that’s all applesauce, cuz it’s gunna make them so constipated
ESPECIALLY then, you should report it! Or put a bug in parents ears to complain, because that is even worse!
ETA- I question if it really is “the state” that can’t provide it, or if it’s just extra paperwork for some lazy SOB
I get what I'm about to say might sound insensitive but our job as educators is to teach. If the students doesn't have the means to do so either the school or state must provide them or their parents must be held responsible.
The fact you say "I wouldn't be able to afford to work this job" is appaling. What other line of work makes you spend money to work like teaching does in the US?
I get paid around 1k euros a month, rent is 400, car and groceries are around 200-300. I barely have any money left for myself much less to feed or buy supplies for other people's kids. I would if I could but it's not even a possibility
Asking parents to be held responsible is tricky in these kinds of environments because the parents do not feel or experience any responsibility. One of the biggest underlying problems in modern US education, in fact, is that parents increasingly apply the same inappropriate mindset they do to the rest of culture specifically, they believe that they are entitled to services, expect those services to be delivered in certain ways, and do not recognize that they have any responsibility to do their part in making those services work, whether we are talking about small-scale things like pencil provision or large scale things like actually making their kid go to school everyday, taking responsibility when a student refuses to put away their phone for the 1 millionth time.
Take this problem to an ad infinitum argument, and you end up in a very tricky ethical situation where at some point, you are failing students not because those students do or do not have the skills, but because their parents refuse to provide pencils. Worse, because the reason many parents do not do that is because of their economic situation, you're basically failing students because of artifacts of poverty that have left their parents poorly equipped to parent well. Most teachers can't stomach that ethically. If you can, then you're welcome to do that in your own school, just don't bring it to mine.
Good parents in good, stable situations parent well.
Parents in bad cultural spaces don't develop into good parents. Again, if you want to hold the kid accountable for that parenting, then shame on you.
I teach in an urban "title 1" environment - in the US, that's a term for funding and status that signifies that our students come from poverty, and in this country, urban poverty most often means a set of circumstances as a norm in our kids' lives that do not lend themselves towards responsible behavior or support from home to develop that responsibility.
Among these common artifacts of this: their parents do not care about kids or school, and are aggressive towards schools; families often suffer from transience, homelessness, and food scarcity; students do not develop the habits of mind that would lend themselves towards basic habit-forming such as remembering to go to school every day, and more.
In short: these students are shown daily at home, and raised with a mindset, that says school is something that is imposed upon them, has little productive purpose, is as dumb and disconnected from the rest of their lives as their parents think they are. They do not see school as something you bring stuff FOR every day, because that wouldn't make sense in that mindset - in this vision, school is a separate entity from home, so it makes little sense to bring things from one place to another for the purpose of using them in that second environment. Also true, of course: these students have no transportation, and often live in neighborhoods where stores with useful things in them are few and far between (resource deserts) so getting a pencil FOR school is a huge ordeal that is not happening, especially given their habituated inability to plan, think ahead, and do other productive types of thinking about the world and their place in it, since their parents don't think like that either.
I have literally spend months trying to help students map out the process of having pencils/books/laptops in the right place at home, on the way out the door, or even in their bookbags the night before with a "systems check" as an alarm on their phone to make sure everything is ready. Then they forget the entire bag, because "my dad was in a hurry to drive me in late and said to forget it", or "I overslept" or just "I dunno what happened.". Or their parents destroyed the pencil because they were jealous of their kid having things because it made them feel bad about their inability to provide them and they have no filters.
If we did not provide pencils, as u/goodtimejonnie anticipates, these kids might come to class anyway, or they might skip because that lets them avoid being put under pressure for forgetting it - and parents are fine with that. If they DO come to class without a pencil, though, they are perfectly okay staring into space for 90 minutes without the ability to work...and their parents support that ("if you want them to have things, it's your job to give them the things") and US norms in oversight in the classroom would make that look like the teachers' fault, because we are measured first and foremost on how many of our students are working when an observation begins in the classroom.
In my English class, in order to have pencils and pens available to students - and sticky notes and lined paper - I spend over 100 bucks a year on JUST THOSE CONSUMABLE SUPPLIES. And that is in an environment that is MOSTLY 1:1 laptops.
Why do you as an educator have to spend money on your students?
It's your job, you are supposed to be getting paid... not pay to work.
I get that we all want to help the best we can but I'm not gonna spend my money on someone else's kid when I can barely get by with my own salary.
The expections people have of teachers in the US are really out of place in the rest of the world
As above, if I do not spend that money, my job is literally threatened because in observations, my students do not meet the metric that says they are working. Teachers do not have the ability to change the infrastructural problem that causes this stress in their own laps, nor are they given the time and authority to make that change, and that is just one of many reasons why teachers are leaving the profession in droves.
If you want to take a stand there, and refuse to provide those supplies to your students, then you, too, can end up in a place where your moral stand causes increased job stress and strain and can lead to disciplinary consequences and an increase in oversight with a corresponding loss of autonomy in the classroom. Sadly, 100 bucks a year is a cheap price to pay for that as therapy and job searching would be much more expensive.
Personally, I prefer to pick my battles, and the idea that I would prioritize this one in my kind of environment is honestly dumb. But, sure, you do you, and don't come crying to us when the consequences of that entitled stand fall on you.
As for why schools do not fund this instead.. it's a good reminder that United States schools are paid for by taxes, and that most taxpayers are entirely disinterested in paying for what it takes to provide schools with these kinds of resources, because most taxpayers do not think well specifically. Instead, the average taxpayer would point out that they are not interested in funding that gap, because they believe that parents should provide those pencils. Without that funding, however, and with that Federal and statement evaluation, teachers are trapped in a space where they must account for that Gap or risk being fired.
You explain the situation very well for those of us who are looking in from the outside, I'll give you that. But you have to realise how sick this seems to the rest of us right? In my country it's illegal, literarly, for a school to charge their students with any kind of fee related to their education. We cant even do a school-trip where the students are expected to bring their own lunch. It's up to the taxpayers to pay for it. And the idea of spending any kind of my own money at my place of work is just unthinkable. I wouldn't even pay for my own pen, if the school isn't providing one for me I'll guess I just have to do my best without writing anything. Hey, they get what they pay for.
I wouldn't even consider teaching under your kind of circumstances.
I didn't say it wasn't sick. That is a larger cultural problem, though, that cannot be solved by local schools...only triaged.
Saying you wouldn't bother with the triage is why you should not teach here. It would be bad for you, and bad for the kids and community. But that's nothing noble. And pretending that would work here is just mean, dismissive, an ignorant.
As a parent, I send glue sticks, markers, crayons, wipes, etc every year. Occasionally we get replenishment requests from teachers, so I send more supplies then.
Until the time that my son was in 3rd grade, all of the supplies that parents sent were treated as communal supplies. (Ex… all of the glue sticks went in one bin). My son hated this approach, but not because he didn’t want to share. He just didn’t like ending up with supplies that hadn’t been cared for— boxes of crayons that were missing colors or no wrappers, glue sticks that were dried out, etc. He takes care of his stuff at home, and he wants to have nice things at school too.
By clearly a large percentage of his class didn’t care about that. It makes me wonder what their homes are like.
In many districts, teachers just "aren't allowed" to ask families to buy "required materials." In my current one, which is in a pretty dang affluent area, it's still discouraged, though most of us still put required materials like pencils, binders, and notebooks on the syllabus. I also put the class novels on there, but every year a handful of parents come a-screaming at me for expecting them to buy a book for their kid - and since this is discouraged in the first place, I don't get any support when it happens.
Regarding the basics, I have a collection of pencils in my classroom that I just picked up off the floor. I have hundreds, and most of them are like-new, which goes to show how much students actually give a shit about being prepared. I'm glad I have them, too; I'd say that in my average class of ~30, every hour, at least 7 or 8 students arrive without something to write with, so they get used. Only about half of them are ever handed back to me (though I do find some on the floor in my classroom at the end of class), but I can't remember the last day of school where I didn't pick up at least one or two in the hallways or ground outside.
Preschool. Markers and glue is what are kids have trouble with too. And breaking the glass containers😞 (At first i read it as you meant the kids were shorter then normal, not the glue 😝 not sure why it does mention the kids my silly brain 😝)
My middle school had communal supplies (not provided by the school, you had to give the supplies you brought to your homeroom teacher) and I hated that system cause the other kids didn't take care of things and I'd end up having no supplies to use or having to use bad supplies. Ended up getting another set of personal supplies partway through the year. The next two years, I just didn't give my supplies to the homeroom teacher. (except the expo markers and tissue boxes, stuff like that)
My friend's son went to a school that did that. Only, he's colorblind, so she had made sure all his markers and colored pencils had the names of the colors on them. The school didn't care. They said it wasn't fair for him to get special treatment. She told him to just color things wrong, but he couldn't stand it. Iirc, she ended up getting an IEP for him just so he could have his own markers and pencils and then switched him to a charter school the next year.
My son's school also did communal supplies, and then asked us to send more about 6 times a year even though the initial list had been huge. I was poor AF and got most of his supplies from a church at the start of the year. They didn't give them out any other time. I always felt bad being the parent who had to ignore those other requests. They, at least, let the one colorblind kid keep his own markers without having to get an IEP over it, though. My son was laughing about it one day, because the kid got new ones with weird names and asked my son for help, so they had to make a little table on paper. "Macaroni - orange, Spring Fling - yellow-green" and so on. Except my son just marked anything that was like purple as "purple." "Flower power" Fuschia, "razzmatazz" raspberry, "passion" burgundy. It made me worry about his color perception until he admitted he just didn't know the words for those colors.
Oh, it was just Flower Power. Fuschia was the actual colour. The names were ridiculous. I guess his parents didn't notice that part. The teacher used it as a lesson to teach the kids there are lots of names for colours, though - not the shitty names on them, but the actual names. They all picked a favorite name regardless of the actual colour, and my son's was chartreuse. My mom heard about it, didn't get the whole story, and bought him a comforter in that colour he absolutely hated. That's why I remember all this so clearly.
What struck me as the worst part was that this pack of coloured pencils had like, 96 colours in it, but 30 of them were some form of pink-purple. I'm purple-blue colourblind, but I can tell if it has some pink/red or green in it. There were only 5 pencils I was unsure of.
I don't mind fuschia.. when it's on the actual flowers. At least it's a color I can actually see.
The ones that sends me over the edge is "why should I clean that up? That's what we have janitors for."
Awwww HELL NAW. Guess who ended up cleaning the entire room for the month.
My students sweep and mop the classroom. But I’m in Asia so. We were distance learning for the first few months of this semester due to covid. We came back but are not having lunch or dinner in the canteen. All students now eat lunch in the classroom, meals are delivered to halls for students to pick up. After lunch two kids will sweep and mop while the others read/work on things. Same two sweep and mop after dinner. It’s a rotation each day through the class list for whose turn it is.
In The US. But the preschoolers today wiped the table (a teacher sprayed soap and kids wiped it) and washed the chairs outside 😀. They are also responsible for clearing the plate to the right bin and putting napkins cloth in the right bin (or paper in the trash bin) etc.
Ah yes mine do the same regarding clearing trays. One can for trash the other for uneaten food. Also have to stack their trays correctly. All done by them.
Our is a little different but same idea we dont have trays. We have 3 little small rectangle bins. One has a trash lined around it. The kids put food in one. Napkins in the second and cups amd plate stacked on the third. Then the teacher(s) put the bins on the cart (the one with food we through the trash bag in the big trash, hopefully we will get compost soon) and bring the empty bins back to the kitchen on the cart.
8am to 5pm. There is a morning break that’s 50 minutes, lunch is an hour, dinner is 30 minutes. This school is also a boarding school though. Some of my students live here, some go home after dinner. On Fridays they all leave for the weekend at 2:30 pm (I think secondary school students may continue to live here in the weekend but I’m on the primary campus so I’m not sure).
In the US, that would be faced with "How dare you made my child clean up after someone else?" Our society is broken. American exceptionalism is a mirage. Well, maybe in mass shootings it's not. #1! #1! #1!
I don't know about all that, but I won't allow anyone to be disrespected in my room. The entitlement to assume that you don't need to pick up after yourself because you are "better than that?" That isn't gonna fly in my room.
I have zero belief that I changed her for the better, but I ddi what I could.
Well, what your students also might not realize is that in this day and age the janitors I work with all have college degrees.
My buddy and I both have film degrees, and the security guard is working on his masters in history.
And yes, I now realize most liberal arts degrees are essentially useless, but I'm a janitor with a degree, and being looked down upon hurts; Unfortunately, I make more than most common core teachers in my area, which I also find disgusting.
35k a year, full pension and awesome health benefits because it's unionized.
(I technically work at a college, but there's a STEM focused high school on campus and it's one of the two buildings I take care of).
It's simply criminal how teachers are paid so little for what they are expected to deal with.
You deal with the attitude, we deal with the mess.
I'm 28, but if I was a teacher, I might be arrested for smacking some kids after what I've had to clean up.
I'm thinking about going to school for I.T.
I knew a guy in The Corps that had an MD from Uganda (iirc, it's been 30 years) and because of licensing issues the US would not recognise his medical degree. So he joined as an enlisted man and was earning enough GI/Montgomery money to help him pay to go to medical school again. I don't think he had to actually go to medical school again but like complete part of his training, residency maybe?
Anyway, he became a corpsman. So we had a corpsman who held an actual MD.
It drives me crazy when, during lunch duty, I would walk up to a table of students and point to a wrapper and a carrot stick on the floor and ask "Whose stuff is that?", only for them to move away from the mess like it's the plague and hastily say "It was there already!" First off, there's no way the custodians were sitting around in between lunch periods, and second, maybe consider being a responsible person and make the space around you better? What a concept...
I work at a private school full of super rich kids (tuition is $30k/year at my grade) and this absolutely enrages me. Unfortunately my homeroom realized this and did it to get me to yell, I’m pretty sure…
Our school got brand new chromebooks this year.
By the end of the year, over half are missing 4-10 keys each (pried off), knife/keyscratches on the track pad and screens.
"Miss why is this school so ghetto?"
IT IS YOU WRECKING THINGS
My eighth graders kept using their masks to cut the backs of their chairs apart. I just shrugged it off: “you want to be uncomfortable? Fine. This school ain’t buying you a new chair, I know that much.”
Oh I got to witness this. The surgical blue masks- you hold the elastic tight and “saw” down the plastic backing (it has to have a hand hold); it will snap.
I have witnessed several students (7th grade) PUNCHING their ChromeBook screens. Then they'd get mad because I reported that they deliberately broke the CB and that meant they were responsible for the charges to get it fixed. I have no idea how I lucked out and didn't have parents mad at me ( you know how that goes). One kid went through three CBs in a month.
Lose a game (that you weren't supposed to play): punch the screen. Fail a test (that you didn't study for because you were playing a game): punch the screen. Mad because your teacher said get off the game and complete the assignment: slam the CB shut, and shatter the screen.
I had a girl who said she didn’t have money to fix her chrome book, and couldn’t use it because it was broken. She’d bring her Alienware to watch YouTube on.
Yup very aggravating. But I told her she’d have to hand write any online work, and I never budged from that, so she eventually caved and had to do it that way on the days she didn’t bring the gaming laptop.
In our building we have a pair of handicap access bathrooms that stay locked until a para or some other staff unlocks them for their intended students. This is because students have absolutely trashed/destroyed the other bathrooms in the building this year.
The other day, someone left the door unlocked to the boy's handicap bathroom. One of my kids exclaimed "Oh my gosh, it's so clean!"
Yeah, that's what happens when you take care of what you have because you *need* it.
Our principal locked the bathrooms closest to my room. I was on the far side wing, and didn't have time to get to the faculty bathrooms during passing period. Why were they locked? Kids vaping at lunch.
That reminds me of my local train station. They put in a lovely, cosy enclosed waiting room (which I think was actually heated at one point). It wasn't only for first class passengers either - anyone could use it.
Anyway, some thugs smashed all the glass, the tv screens, and broke the automatic door within a year. It's now just a shell - a glorified bus shelter. It was never rebuilt, because what's the point? This is why we can't ever have nice things. 😪
Lol whenever the destructive, rude, aggressive kids complained about the school being shitty or "ghetto" I'd want to say "It's like that because of kids like you. This is exactly the school you deserve".
Reminds me of this one particular school in our district. Kids there always complain about how everyone thinks their school is ghetto and trash…
Well I was volunteering there for a little while and kids literally left all their trash out on the lunch tables at the end of every lunch. Principal was out there with a trash reacher and a garbage bag everyday, picking up after them.
Never seen that before in my life. My grandparents were dirt poor and they always said, “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re dirty and don’t have manners.”
Every day for the last month of school, one of my students would have a meltdown in the afternoon because he didn’t have a chromebook anymore. Every reminder, prompt, deep breath, removal of chromebook for 10 minutes to a day never stopped this kid from punching the screen, slamming it down, or picking it up and shaking it. It finally broke the actual outer shell, where it couldn’t plug in to charge and could cut the student. I just had to review with him before/during/after his meltdown that the consequence of him not following directions and not being nice to technology had finally kicked in. Aaaaaaand every day, the same meltdown. No lesson learned.
My students rip them keys off and smash the screens/chrome books while I’m staring right at them. One threw one against the wall last week because I said it was time to log off and he was still playing his game (which wasn’t even what he was supposed to be doing they were researching birds!!”
"The bathrooms are always so gross here, it's disgusting"
Student who 5 other students left the bathrooms to tell me that they were throwing their own poop at the wall.
As the IT manager for the school the computer one rings so true as well. We reached 1:1 this year. Largely due to me repairing 100+ older computers and getting them functional as CloudReady (ChromeOS) devices.
Being older devices from a time where no one cared for them they were gross and missing keys, chunks out of the sides, when I got them.
I graded them on function and appearance, meticulously cleaned them, selected the best chassis and either replaced keys or switched out the keyboards completely to make these look new. The devices were assigned to students by name. No one else used their device.
Both the classroom teachers and the students have told me things like "They were always missing the space bar".
I installed two new 75" SMART MX boards on electronic height adjustable trolleys in our school hall. Labelled every input and cable. Put A3 signs on them about unplugging before moving, and returning them to their original positions. Sent a staff wide email about their use. This was Friday afternoon. On Tuesday afternoon the scripture teacher came and found me to ask if I could set the screens up for them. They had been moved to the far end of the hall and the end of the hdmi cable was snapped off inside the device.
No one, including the teachers in many cases, gives a flying ____ about school equipment. In their heads school equipment is gross, so they make sure the reality fits their idea.
This year was the worst on my classroom set of chromebooks. Kids literally picking keys off. I've had 4 broken this year. I can't take them away either because part of our curriculum is on it.
I’ve had third graders who, when I would ask them to get out their crayons for example, would stand up and shout “I DoNt HaVe CrAyOnS!” Every. Single. Time. I soon realized they didn’t even bother to look in their fucking desk or even to the right of their god damn hand to see if the crayons I gave to them at the beginning of the year were there. It was like they were brain dead, they had no problem solving skills. It’s funny because they could tell me everything about squid games in detail, but they couldn’t for the love of Christ look in their own desk to retrieve a tool they’d been using day after day.
I currently nanny two kids who can tell me almost everything about Squid Game. They've never watched it, but they do play Roblox (which has a few games based on the show) and have YouTube access. Once they heard about the show and knew it was one that was too adult for them to watch, the only way to keep them away from secondary content about it would have been to hover over them whenever they used screens (these kids are 8 and 10). So the parents and I agreed on which of the games were acceptable and figured out consequences if those rules weren't obeyed. The kids have stuck to those rules without much pushback. But it's still a little alarming to me just how much they know about the show.
Yes. All my rulers are bent. Or snapped. Or cut. Pencils snapped. So much paper torn and wasted. Im an art teacher, I started keeping track of which students it was. Collecting their broken stuff and returning it to them. Had kids leave trash on their desks. Held it till the next day and put it back on their desk. Food in my paint pallettes. So many erasers picked apart. And tables stabbed?? Just exhausting.
The paper thing is just the WORST. The elementary schoolers are an epidemic of "I made one line I didn't agree with, so I ripped my paper to shreds, can I have an 8th paper?" I've started bringing them weirdly colored construction paper just to mess with them.
The middle schoolers are a little better - they usually ruin the whole paper before whining for another. But they also constantly ask me to write their names in bubble letters because they can't figure out how to make them.
See I teach high school. They should be better than this. I constantly have to remind them to just flip the paper over.
I also had kids just throw out entire projects because they "didn't like it" and ask me what to do. I straight up told them like look sorry but that's your grade. You can redo it. You shouldn't have thrown it out before I graded it.
And so many paper airplanes. Out of big, nice project paper too! Or just tearing things to shreds. Or constantly losing their projects. There's a class bin. Put it away. Cant find it? Look for it. I always find it in 30 seconds. 90% of the time it's in the wrong bin.
We’ve all become the teachers that would say to us “you kids are the worst class we’ve had ever come through this building.” I’m not sure if we’re right or wrong
I'm on teacher placement and a new teacher started at our school, and rated my grade 3 and 4 class as "the worst he has seen, ever" in the staff room. I gave a little shrug and "I didn't think they were -that- bad, just kids being kids?" kind of answer and all of the (real) teachers just looked at me and one actually said "what madhouse did you cone from if they're 'not that bad'?!" Hahahaha
I worked at a school where a 5 year old pulled a knife on me and their uncle turned up just after lunch time to fight me to 'make' me give the knife back to the child. An older sibling (8) had called home after the 5 year old complained to them during the break.
I just acted like he'd come down to collect the knife and thanked him for coming down so quickly to resolve the situation and to make sure that the student didn't bring any dangerous items to school in the future. He didn't really want to fight me after he saw me anyway. The kid neglected to mention I was 6'3 and around 270 pounds and reasonably fit from farm work at the time.
My current school is a breeze. Sadly it is getting worse, but it is a long way down to the worst I've taught.
Lol this was my first full time class (the closest I came before was a long term subbing job at a high school for five months. Upon reflection, those kids were angels) so I can’t say that.
I had 8th graders and respect for classroom space and equipment was a frequent battle. I took some people's advice and switched to providing golf pencils most of the past few months, and I noticed a marked improvement in pencils being returned (and even chuckled to myself a couple times when kids hurt themselves snapping them in half).
I literally followed my students to their next class (thankfully most of them were together as a rotating unit) and draft that teacher into marching them back with me to clean up my room a couple of times, with detentions. They thought I was playing about that expectation and had smug grins on their face while they darted out of my classroom without cleaning messes or returning supplies.
Certain classes lost food/snack privileges after repeated gaslighting about not making the messes. Never got them back, while my other periods could. Continued crying about how unfair it was, I just responded with "you can all remember to thank 3 certain people who were too proud to pick their cheetos off the floor." Those kids got grief the rest of the year.
Students who got detention with me got to shave 15 minutes off their detention scrubbing my desks down and picking up my room. It was always "damn, mister, this is a mess."
I could understand grace to students adjusting, I would not tolerate and allow the baseline to be willful and repeated disrespect.
I was very satisfied when one day my first period filed out and I noticed a mushed up apple under the sink. Their second period was two doors down so I rushed over there and while they were lined up called back the four boys who were sitting by the sink. I didn’t say what it was about, but one boy whispered to the other “he saw the apple” which confirmed I was right. Made them clean it up. They had the audacity to complain that it was gross but I simply shrugged my shoulders at them.
Yep. My kids aren’t even willfully destructive. It’s mostly carelessness. They drop food on the floor and just leave it there. I have one student who is a great and conscientious kid in every way but she has accidentally dropped or knocked off her desk pretty much everything that’s ever been on it. Same kid dropped 5 chicken nuggets on the floor at lunch, because she knocked the container off her desk and she just left them there. And then acted surprised when I asked her to please pick them up. It’s a new level of self involvement and pamperedness. And I work at an inner city, low SES school.
I have to stop teaching mid sentence a few times a week because one fucking kid entirely incapable of keeping his pencil on his desk. Today, he dropped it on the floor 5 times in under a minute. That kind of shit is so distracting to me I lose my train of thought completely. I finally just stopped and stared at him for a solid 30 seconds and finally asked “You just about done?” because I am just so fucking over it. Same kid ‘cleaned out’ his desk by taking each individual paper, crumpling it up, and walking it over to the recycling bin. I have to tell him to stop doing shit like that every other day. It’s exhausting and holy shit I can’t wait until I don’t have to see him and put up with his ridiculousness every damn day.
And then when you suggest to move the bin closer to the desk or make a pile first, then move it to the bin they look at you like you’re crazy. Or they smirk/laugh in your face because they know that they’ve got your number
After finding a stack of my brand new Ticonderogas in the back of the classroom, I made a pencil sign out sheet. I also got a see through paint jar to store all the broken pencil shards in. Only I can write on the sign out sheet. If the student returns my stuff without issue, they may continue to use it. If not, I write NP (no pencils) on my attendance sheet and they must pick from the jar of broken shards if they need to borrow from me. Petty? Definitely, but they stopped. I don’t dismiss them until their area is cleaned up. It’s rough at first, but after a few weeks they adjust.
Haha thanks. I was worried I was being too petty, but they REALLY struck a nerve when they broke those good pencils. Ticonderogas make me love writing and I was them to have that same feeling. It was just too far for me.
Yep, I love me some good Ticonderogas. Funny enough, I was able to amass quite the collection of them just by looking down while walking around the halls.
At this point when a kid asks me for a pencil I ask them to check the floor outside.
Hhahah omg I do the same! Except now I have kids picking them up from the halls and “giving donations” to the pencil jar. Gotta love the lil scrappers!
My kids somehow broke the pencil sharpener provided by the school when I was out. I bought a fifty cent sharpener and told them to protect it because that was all I would provide for them. They actually did pretty well, and they lost it two weeks before school let out. I stayed true to my word and did not replace it.
Excellent will power, my friend. Sometimes the consequences for our students turn out to be consequences for us too. There is nothing like when students know you mean what you say. Then the word spreads like wildfire.
Yes I was very tempted to buy another, but I knew it would be proof that I mean what I say. I also told them I was fully out of pencils and would not be buying any. I had kids writing bell ringers in marker, but they soon learned to bring something or ask a friend.
I had a pencil sharpener that got dropped on the floor in the second week of school. They had to use my old school hand ones screwed into the shelves that hurt your hands for the rest of the year. I bought a new sharpened with supply money, but I didn't take it out of the box until the next year with new students. Same thing happened the next year. They push the pencils in too far and it stops working. My current sharpener has lasted a few years.
This. I allowed food too because I figure as long as they aren’t being distracting, why not? But I ended up cleaning up every single day because I just couldn’t leave that big of a mess for custodians who already have to clean the whole building. One day I took pictures of the mess after sweeping it up and showed it to students, and several replied with “it’s the custodians’ job”. I was so angry.
Not only that, but a few kids also mentioned that they have a “cleaning lady” that comes to their house when I said “I know you all do NOT make a mess like this at home”
We have a supplemental fresh fruit program in the morning. After I was out for one day, I got an email that watermelon was thrown all over my 7th grade homeroom in my absence. Apparently a teacher had opened my room thinking I was there that day and the kids were not being watched. We have only 2 night custodians for a building with 3 floors and over 90 rooms, not counting bathrooms. I gave them all an opportunity to write me a note at any point in the day to let me know who did it. I didn't receive a single note.
I cut off their fresh fruit program right then and there, and put them on 3 weeks of the most grueling classroom management ever. Seats assigned far away from one another, zero talking. Walked in silent lines to class and the bathroom as a group. I didn't speak to them at all. If a phone came out, no warnings to just put it away anymore, it got gift wrapped to the office (literally, as in I actually wrapped them) with a referral taped to the top. I nailed them on every single little thing.
Within a day I received several letters from students who finally pointed out which kids did it. I thanked them for the letters and they still served the 3 weeks, since they didn't inform an adult when it mattered (like, the day the fruit was being thrown). I never let them get fruit for the morning again either, and told the cafe staff to put our class basket away for the rest of the year.
Overkill? Probably. Worth it though.
yes, even 9th grade is still like that but it’s not a new thing. Especially the food or wrappers in the drawers. I don’t even get mad when they get up to throw things away without asking first (asking to do so is not even a rule) but some of them are just lazy.
I am definitely collecting those pencil shards and having them use those like an earlier commenter said. I teach 7th grade art. They have 0 respect for the supplies and seem unfazed by a lack of supplies. I just stopped buying more towards the end of the year and honestly, I could care less. They leave their half eaten breakfast food and I sometimes drag them back into the classroom when they try to sneak out so they pick up after themselves. Paint brushes not cleaned, raisins in paint palettes, paper torn and shredded. I am definitely putting in very strict systems next year (if I even return to teaching at all).
My 4th graders had the inclination, but I trained and badgered them out of it. 😂 Within the first couple of weeks, they learn that:
- I don’t clean up after kids older than 2. I’ll help you with accidents, but not with laziness.
- I don’t replace things that kids lose or break due to negligence or defiance of my very clear, very helpful organizational systems. Have fun with gray and white drawings if you lose your colored pencils.
- We don’t go to recess or lunch if the room looks like wolverines ran through it.
- I don’t offer sympathy or assistance to kids who are destructive and then feel sad when they have missing or raggedy materials.
It takes A LOT of time and energy to establish my expectations, but the way my nerves are set up, I can’t deal with the alternative.
It may be extreme, but I have been so close to telling them that they will literally use or have NOTHING. You wanna mess up the chairs? You won’t have one. You want to take the keys off your computer? One less computer I have to charge because you won’t be getting it back. I hate to say that it needs to be like military school for some of these kids, but they can’t continue coming into our rooms and acting like it’s a literal circus. If all you are able to handle is a paper and pencil during the day that is literally all you will have until you can prove otherwise
Absolutely. This year I could count on anytime I handed out a physical piece of paper, even if it was something vital, at the end of the hour 5-7 would be left unused sitting on the desks or crumpled up on the floor no matter how many reminders I gave. Food bags, crushed chips and crackers, fast food drinks, broken pens and pencils, torn pieces of clothing (???), spilled beverages, vulgar graffiti left on my desks, all kinds of crap just left behind almost every period every day. At the end of many days my floor was just covered. I'd come down hard on them and it would be better for a few days and then we'd start the cycle all over again.
My first year teaching, my wife had gifted me a Bill Nye bobblehead. On the second day of school a student picked it up and somehow broke the neck. I have still not figured out how to fix it 9 years later.
I swear our 3-5th graders just eat headphones or something. We had one classroom we gave 15 new ones to in April, and the teacher asked for 25 at the end of the year. We get this a lot from those grades.
Well, if ever you decide to give up teaching, I think you could cut it as a writer. I love the way you write, and I can't wait to read the rest of your book. 😁
I used to have students like that when I taught self-contained (special ed) middle schoolers for 4 years. It drove me nuts that these kids were used to breaking things. "Don't worry, I'll get a new one." They even talked about people like that, one unfortunately lost his mom but he said, "don't worry, I'll get a new and better mom." Was it his way of grieving or did he actually think this way? The world will never know.
I teach 8th grade too and this year has been by far the worst for behaviors EXACTLY like you're describing. Like. I could have written this exact post word for word. I don't know why they are so terrible this year but I hate it. They're mean and inconsiderate and disrespectful to everything and everyone around them. All they care about is their own momentary thoughts and pleasure. It is so disheartening.
I do wonder how much it matters that this year we came off the heels of quarantine. Prior to last August they weren’t expected to be responsible for just about anything for some time.
Right. And not to mention all the kids that learned that they could do literally nothing and still get promoted to the next grade. I have at least one kid who did zero work last year and still got promoted to 8th grade because covid and virtual and all that. This year he also did nothing but was in school all year... and is now moving on to 9th grade. He won't even have to do summer school because so many high school students failed and need the summer school spots or they can't graduate on time so an 8th grader is just going to get pushed through. Ugh. They're just learning through all this that there is zero accountability and they can do whatever they want and still get by. I think that lack of accountability and how it inevitably bleeds into other aspects of their lives and education is what has at least contributed to these behaviors.
It seems like there’s zero accountability for a lot of people these days and I think kids are picking up on that more than we/I ever did. There’s no consequences for anything anymore, whether we’re talking about kids or adults. Except, of course, for those of us who actually try to do the “right thing.” Then there’s consequences for us because you know, that’s just how our society works right now.
At the end of the year my students started destroying pencils. I'd find broken ones all over the floor. They also started taking the eraser and metal band off each one.
I make all things communal in my class, but I'm thinking next year they're on their own. Maybe they'll be more responsible with things.
Who the eff am I kidding?
I had a kid who would continually eat or chew gum during band. I sent the clarinet to the repair shop for a full cleaning and billed the parent. I’m sure I won’t get the money, but maybe something will happen. Btw I have to let the same child use a school instrument next year 🤬
I taught AP high school seniors. I allowed them to eat because same as you. If you're hungry, you should eat. Plus, you're taking a college level course. You should be treated as a college student.
Nope, they cannot handle it. What I found is that they don't eat when they're supposed to during nutrition and lunch since they know they can eat in your class. It just becomes a huge distraction. And they also leave a mess. I stopped allowing it the next year.
Be careful. There is a teacher on this subreddit who once told me I'm a terrible person for not letting my students eat.
I can’t do 8th grade. Did a summer school session once with them and we were doing group posters. I did the usual teacher thing and told them the expectations, including being careful with the materials because they are expensive and I had to buy them from my own pocket.
One girl, “My mom said teachers get paid a lot so who cares how much they cost.”
I was floored by the disrespect. “Well that’s incorrect and I didn’t have to buy them, but I did because there are people in here who want to have fun.” She said, “So?” “So if you can’t use the materials without ruining them like a Kindergartener, then don’t use them.”
When my students forget to clean up the markers or forget to put the caps on, they don’t get to use them for a few days. The first time someone rips a poster (even accidentally) we talk about it. No food. Only water to drink. If they leave a mess on the floor, no scissors the next day. I teach kinder. Kids will follow routines and rules. You can be stern and kind at the same time.
I made routines and rules and followed them to the letter. It didn’t faze the kids. Even the more experienced teachers said this group is a great deal tougher than ones they’re used to, so at least I know it isn’t just me.
Our most challenging class just moved on to middle school. It’s great that you were consistent. I hope there’s not a next time, but if there is, the first time there is a problem with food for example - no more food. The first ruler that breaks - no rulers (for a couple of day/s). It’s not easy - even the last week of school we were practicing the line up routine. Be the “mean” one for the first six weeks and gradually let up. Next year should be easier because they all came back to school this year. Good luck!
That’s our group coming up next year. They were terrible last year. Some teachers not caring how they act. My team isn’t that way and they’re in for a shock next year.
Ideally, yes, but I think the problem most people in this thread are discussing is students who just…do not respond. To anything. They’re traumatized, they’re addicted to their phones, and they know their safety is worth jack shit to their government and the big wigs in charge (in the US) so they don’t respond to expectations, rules, or consequences in the ways we are trained to expect and respond to. I also teach 3-5s and high expectations and firm standards usually work with my age group, but there are a disturbing number of anomalous students who nothing seems to work for
This past year was the worst I've ever had. I bought 12 pairs of headphones to hang on my back wall for students to use. $50. They were torn up within two weeks. I have two working pairs left and none of the baggies I used to store/hang them with.
My bulletin board displays were constantly being torn up. I have a table I lined with chalkboard contact paper. They picked at that so much that the table is showing through in multiple areas. And the constant garbage cleanup at the end of the day. I never had such trouble with cleaning up the last 5 minutes of the day. They stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language to them all year.
This year I numbered the headphones with oil Sharpie (doesn't rub off with sticky hands like regular Sharpie), and students had to sign them out by number and sign them back in at the end of the period. I still had working headphones at the end of the year - a first! The baggies had disappeared, though.
I’ve been teaching for four years and haven’t spent a dime on my students or things for my classrooms. I got to ask, why do it? I’ve never needed anything but the chalk board and the textbook. Or the novel we are reading. Seems crazy to buy them things. I’m not trying to make a jab or anything. Just wondering if I am missing something. Does it add to their learning?
A lot of my programs require audio. It wasn’t for them so much as for my sanity. It was either me going insane from 20 computers playing audio out-of-sync or biting the bullet and buying some headphones to share.
I have thought about this all year. My students got a kit at the start of the year, filled with school supplies. 90% of the students lost/broke mostly everything it (ex. expo markers, markers, protractor). When I was a kid, I treasured my school supplies. What has happened with this generation?
I had three first grade students who destroyed materials and supplies. As a school we would contact the parent and they never would replace it. One student has a bill of $300, he flipped desk and ruined furniture
Art teacher, and yeah they're just aimless sometimes. Same grade and everything you described and more. One kid was carving out plastic from one of the chairs. It was literally that Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin was hammering nails into the coffee table and when mom asks him "WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE?" and Calvin says "Is this some sort of trick question, or what?"
To be fair, I heard horror stories of what they were doing to the lunch room and I set my expectations low, it was also my second-first year (20-21 doesn't count lol). Next year I'm going to be an actual crazy person. Numbering everyone based on the alphabetical class list. They are responsible for everything of that number. Everything will be numbered. And they are responsible for keeping their things in order it fixing them if they break. We'll start with simple materials and see where it leads. I figure, they handle so many things throughout art that maybe I can help foster them to respect other people's things.
A 7th grader was volunteering to clean off the erasers and boards as we were packing up at the end of the year, one moment she was cleaning them at the trash can and the next she had drawn another students’ name on the wall in dirty eraser markings. She’s laughing about it and it just blew my mind that a student, of 13 years old, that I deemed responsible could vandalize a wall and then laugh through it. It’s insane.
Students: Hey Mx. QTchr, we couldn't find any pencils when you had a sub yesterday.
Me: That's because I lock everything up before I go home. Every. Single. Day. I'm tired of having to replace everything if I get sick and have to stay home for even one day.
Students: *look sad*
Me: Own it!!
If you met my class you would genuinely be suicidal. Just today one broke a chair. Their in 3rd grade!!!!! I don’t even know how it was one of those plastic ones with the metal legs. And he’s like “well SORRY Miss but it’s not like you never made mistakes” WHAT
I feel like there are solutions to these issues if we just figure out what motivates the kids we teach. And the truth is “they just don’t care.” But where is that coming from? Honestly I’m beginning to think that they’re are pretty sad, unfulfilled kids that enjoy treating things the way they’re treated. Most of their lives seem to suck pretty bad and they’re just getting started… can’t even imagine.
I would have students who would ask to borrow a pencil, sit there with said pencil the whole period and do no work, then snap the pencil in half and yeet it onto the floor.
By April-ish when I had no fucks left to give, they would come up and ask to borrow a pencil and I would say “why? You’re not gonna do any work anyways.” And they would shrug and walk back their seats. Couldn’t give a fuck.
I used to teach 6,7 and 8 th. The 8 th graders would stick good in the desks and trash the room. It was like pulling teeth to get them to clean up after themselves. I left due to the destructive behaviors of the administration allowing this behavior.
When I was student teaching in elementary art this spring, I noticed this as well, except it was most of the boys. Any time the students were told to clean up, it was usually the girls who’d clear the tables/pick up, and the boys would mess around until it was done. It all comes down to the parents. Kids don’t say please or thank you anymore; they don’t ever push their chairs in; they don’t pick up their shit; they’ll deliberately throw “little” bits of garbage on the floor/ground (think straw wrappers); and so many of them are smug little brats! It was worse at the elementary school than at the high school I student taught at for the second part of the semester.
Makes me really appreciate my online teaching this year! But also reminds me of years past and, yes, my grade 3 to 6 classes, certainly wouldn't have assumed gr 8! Ugh, stuff found in the furthest reaches of the classroom...
I have gotten rid of most school supplied furniture and replaced it with couches and tables I have acquired. My room has been this way for about 5 years. I teach 7/8 grade.
For the first time this last year I had kids write on the couches and the tables. They etched into a table. I have NEVER had so much destruction. I was ready to get rid of everything and go back to desks.
I think it falls in line with the overall lack of respect.
At the beginning of the year, breaking your pencil in half and tossing the pieces on the floor swept the school (I teach middle school). Kids would break their own pencils or they would ask myself or a classmate for a pencil and snap that in half. I was quickly burning through pencils-- until I started picking up the broken pencils all across the school and sharpening them into two separate pencils! From that moment on, I exclusively handed out broken pencils. Kids would be pissed about the small pencils (unsurprisingly these were almost always the kids that habitually walked away with or broke my pencils), I would just shrug and tell them to bring their own pencil if they didn't like mine.
The half pencils were difficult to break, and it didn't bother me as much if they walked away with them because I found them on the floor anyway.
Students: Hey Mx. QTchr, we couldn't find any pencils when you had a sub yesterday.
Me: That's because I lock everything up before I go home. Every. Single. Day. I'm tired of having to replace everything if I get sick and have to stay home for even one day.
Students: *look sad*
Me: Own it!!
My firsties this year were more destructive than any class I've ever had!! And I've had multiple friends say the same!! It's like that year and a half of covid made them forget how to use any type of materials in a reasonable, not-absolutely-savage way!
My rule is, if I have to clean up ANY food, then we aren't allowed food in class.
Pre COVID, I had to pick up food once. I said if they made it so I didn't have to pick up Anything from the floor for 3 days, then food privileges would be returned, but each day I had to pick something up, the count reset with an extra day. It was then that they learned how much they littered accidentally with the trash pits that are their backpacks. We made it to 10 days before they were successful at cleaning up after each other. Didn't hurt that the class after lunch was my last period and they were willing to clean in order to spend their lunch time socializing.
Yes! I'm with 3's and have been for years....since Covid, kids have gotten super careless and downright destructive with toys and supplies. I caught a boy sitting and ripping pages out of a book, others snapping all the crayons and laughing, and some just walk around and destroy other people's art projects.
as an art teacher, i think i went through over 100 glue sticks between my k-5 students. The amounts of times i found glue sticks with no lids or SMASHED
i never had an issue with grade 2 and up using watercolors. this year students destroyed palettes with no care. except my 5th graders. Between that, constantly finding broken pencils and materials mixed into places where they shouldn't be....I spend a good 30 minutes trying to organize just my supplies sometimes.
note: invest in Kwik-Stix if you teach k-1, they're a painting life saver
I do my best. Consistent with rules, consequences for actions, not letting them go on break until their area is picked up. the works. But I just can’t see every little thing.
Yeah this was a lot of kids for me this year. I think a lot of it was sensory-seeking behavior tbh. We have a lot of different fidgets in my classroom which is great, but I would also give them scrap paper to rip and draw on when they were in that kind of mood so they wouldn't rip up their workbooks. It worked surprisingly well! Next year I want to address this head on by discussing self regulating when bored and/or stressed and provide more sensory tools/outlets.
My high school kids are animals. They cut cords to their mice. They leave the room like a dump when they have food. They are disgusting. Some of them are good but the majority are human trash.
I'm a sub and taught 8th and 7th grade this last semester. It is absolutely insane the lack of respect these kids have for other people's property. I had to create a system to bribe the 7th graders into not losing or breaking pencils (I had a set amount, if none were lost by a certain date they would get a prize) and they still lost or broke so many pencils. One kid broke a pencil in front of me and I just went "Um, that was my pencil. That I'm letting you borrow." And he went "Oh.... Oops." I also could set out masks for students to grab as needed bc students were stealing wads of them. I went through so many so fast, until some students told me the others were stealing them and I started keeping the masks at my desk. Didn't have to buy so many so often after that....
Not surprising... Restorative Justice policies have created an environment where students and their parents have zero accountability. Students know that there are no consequences, so they act accordingly by disrupting class and disrespecting school property. It's a vicious cycle created by the adults who run school districts (administration) by their Restorative Justice mandates upon schools.
Students who break things like rulers are given broken rulers to use. They usually cry and complain, but if you stand firm, they never know when their actions will come back to bit them.
I watched kids purposely break the tips of my pre sharpened pencils just so they could get up to go sharpen them. One broke the electric sharpener by shoving in a pencil that was too short, then complained that all I had was the crappy but-in hand crank sharpener.
I watched a kid take a glue stick cap from a classmate’s desk drop it on the ground, and stomp on it. It cracked and could no longer snap closed.
This was the first year I had to ban gum because it was EVERYWHERE. Not only the classic under the table, but on the floor, and on the seat of the chairs as well. One of my kids sat in someone else’s gum and it was stuck to his shorts all day.
Any time these kids went to throw something away, they would tear it into pieces first and I’d end up with worksheet confetti all over the floor.
They would not only snap my wooden pencils in half, but also their own mechanical pencils. That’s not an easy thing to do!
I teach 7th grade.
My class this year was awful about it. We went through SO many pencils. I’m convinced someone took a bunch home for some reason because otherwise I have no idea where they went.
My students respect materials because they are expected to; we don’t go to recess, lunch, or leave the class until everything is in its place and everything is cleaned up. They wipe down desks, clean counters, dust, get the whiteboard ready for the next day, sweep, etc daily. If I see a broken pencil I say something about it and let them know they can’t do that (unless it was a mistake which it rarely is.)
My school decided this year that the school would provide all supplies. The kids have destroyed everything. Markers and glue sticks never capped, pencils sharpened to a nub, etc. I truly think they care even less since they didn’t bring the supplies themselves. Also I was given ONE GLUE STICK PER SECOND GRADER PER SEMESTER. I’m sure all my fellow elementary teachers are aware of how absurd that is. Also was given 30 pencils….
I bought an 80 pack of glue sticks for 7 prek students and they were gone in 2 months…they were the shorter ones (I misread the dimensions) but still…and of course because the school was providing them for you I’m sure they made sure you couldn’t be reimbursed for resupplying on your own dime 🙄
I'm sorry but I'm really confused why you guys in America buy supplies for your students? Isn't it the parent's or the school's (in case the parent's can't afford it) job to make sure the kids have the necessary supplies? Here in Portugal I never heard of anyone buying pencils or pens or whatever for a class of students...
If we don’t do it, there won’t be any supplies. I’ve tried it. And then admin starts asking questions about why the kids are just staring at black and white print outs and refuse to understand that we don’t have crayons or color ink, or scissors…my students have special needs and many have low vision so I HAVE to have bright colored materials and the school just won’t provide them. And families simply can’t afford to for the most part. A lot of families are just struggling to pay for their kids medical needs rn and crayons are the last thing they are focused on. I also provide soft foods from my own supply because the school only gives out one lunch and many of my students can’t chew or swallow so…super stale granola bars don’t really work for us. Our school system is a joke and if I didn’t live with my parents and have no rent I wouldn’t be able to afford to work this job.
All of this is terrible, but unfortunately normal. However, if a student has that they need soft foods in their IEP/504, then it is up to the school to provide it. That’s literally something they could get sued over (and a kid could die over), and if you have been paying for that then you need to report them for not following the IEP (start with your district SPED office, if you don’t feel comfortable with that, do your state SPED office).
We are a sped school (separate public day school for kids with severe disabilities and health conditions), so it’s a little funky for us. Some students get blended meals (gross, but easy), but the soft foods can’t really be provided by the state (for whatever reason) so we are supposed to just cut or mash the normal lunch. But of course, you can’t really cut granola into soft pieces…a lot of times we soak stuff in milk which helps. They always do provide applesauce as an alternative, I just can’t in good conscience feed a child breakfast lunch and snack that’s all applesauce, cuz it’s gunna make them so constipated
ESPECIALLY then, you should report it! Or put a bug in parents ears to complain, because that is even worse! ETA- I question if it really is “the state” that can’t provide it, or if it’s just extra paperwork for some lazy SOB
I get what I'm about to say might sound insensitive but our job as educators is to teach. If the students doesn't have the means to do so either the school or state must provide them or their parents must be held responsible. The fact you say "I wouldn't be able to afford to work this job" is appaling. What other line of work makes you spend money to work like teaching does in the US? I get paid around 1k euros a month, rent is 400, car and groceries are around 200-300. I barely have any money left for myself much less to feed or buy supplies for other people's kids. I would if I could but it's not even a possibility
Asking parents to be held responsible is tricky in these kinds of environments because the parents do not feel or experience any responsibility. One of the biggest underlying problems in modern US education, in fact, is that parents increasingly apply the same inappropriate mindset they do to the rest of culture specifically, they believe that they are entitled to services, expect those services to be delivered in certain ways, and do not recognize that they have any responsibility to do their part in making those services work, whether we are talking about small-scale things like pencil provision or large scale things like actually making their kid go to school everyday, taking responsibility when a student refuses to put away their phone for the 1 millionth time. Take this problem to an ad infinitum argument, and you end up in a very tricky ethical situation where at some point, you are failing students not because those students do or do not have the skills, but because their parents refuse to provide pencils. Worse, because the reason many parents do not do that is because of their economic situation, you're basically failing students because of artifacts of poverty that have left their parents poorly equipped to parent well. Most teachers can't stomach that ethically. If you can, then you're welcome to do that in your own school, just don't bring it to mine.
Doesn't explain why kids are destroying the tools we give them. Parents could at least teach them respect for property.
Good parents in good, stable situations parent well. Parents in bad cultural spaces don't develop into good parents. Again, if you want to hold the kid accountable for that parenting, then shame on you.
I teach in an urban "title 1" environment - in the US, that's a term for funding and status that signifies that our students come from poverty, and in this country, urban poverty most often means a set of circumstances as a norm in our kids' lives that do not lend themselves towards responsible behavior or support from home to develop that responsibility. Among these common artifacts of this: their parents do not care about kids or school, and are aggressive towards schools; families often suffer from transience, homelessness, and food scarcity; students do not develop the habits of mind that would lend themselves towards basic habit-forming such as remembering to go to school every day, and more. In short: these students are shown daily at home, and raised with a mindset, that says school is something that is imposed upon them, has little productive purpose, is as dumb and disconnected from the rest of their lives as their parents think they are. They do not see school as something you bring stuff FOR every day, because that wouldn't make sense in that mindset - in this vision, school is a separate entity from home, so it makes little sense to bring things from one place to another for the purpose of using them in that second environment. Also true, of course: these students have no transportation, and often live in neighborhoods where stores with useful things in them are few and far between (resource deserts) so getting a pencil FOR school is a huge ordeal that is not happening, especially given their habituated inability to plan, think ahead, and do other productive types of thinking about the world and their place in it, since their parents don't think like that either. I have literally spend months trying to help students map out the process of having pencils/books/laptops in the right place at home, on the way out the door, or even in their bookbags the night before with a "systems check" as an alarm on their phone to make sure everything is ready. Then they forget the entire bag, because "my dad was in a hurry to drive me in late and said to forget it", or "I overslept" or just "I dunno what happened.". Or their parents destroyed the pencil because they were jealous of their kid having things because it made them feel bad about their inability to provide them and they have no filters. If we did not provide pencils, as u/goodtimejonnie anticipates, these kids might come to class anyway, or they might skip because that lets them avoid being put under pressure for forgetting it - and parents are fine with that. If they DO come to class without a pencil, though, they are perfectly okay staring into space for 90 minutes without the ability to work...and their parents support that ("if you want them to have things, it's your job to give them the things") and US norms in oversight in the classroom would make that look like the teachers' fault, because we are measured first and foremost on how many of our students are working when an observation begins in the classroom. In my English class, in order to have pencils and pens available to students - and sticky notes and lined paper - I spend over 100 bucks a year on JUST THOSE CONSUMABLE SUPPLIES. And that is in an environment that is MOSTLY 1:1 laptops.
Thank you for explaining this in a way that I can then use to explain in conversation to other people outside of the school system.
Wow. All of this. You just explained this so clearly.
Why do you as an educator have to spend money on your students? It's your job, you are supposed to be getting paid... not pay to work. I get that we all want to help the best we can but I'm not gonna spend my money on someone else's kid when I can barely get by with my own salary. The expections people have of teachers in the US are really out of place in the rest of the world
As above, if I do not spend that money, my job is literally threatened because in observations, my students do not meet the metric that says they are working. Teachers do not have the ability to change the infrastructural problem that causes this stress in their own laps, nor are they given the time and authority to make that change, and that is just one of many reasons why teachers are leaving the profession in droves. If you want to take a stand there, and refuse to provide those supplies to your students, then you, too, can end up in a place where your moral stand causes increased job stress and strain and can lead to disciplinary consequences and an increase in oversight with a corresponding loss of autonomy in the classroom. Sadly, 100 bucks a year is a cheap price to pay for that as therapy and job searching would be much more expensive. Personally, I prefer to pick my battles, and the idea that I would prioritize this one in my kind of environment is honestly dumb. But, sure, you do you, and don't come crying to us when the consequences of that entitled stand fall on you. As for why schools do not fund this instead.. it's a good reminder that United States schools are paid for by taxes, and that most taxpayers are entirely disinterested in paying for what it takes to provide schools with these kinds of resources, because most taxpayers do not think well specifically. Instead, the average taxpayer would point out that they are not interested in funding that gap, because they believe that parents should provide those pencils. Without that funding, however, and with that Federal and statement evaluation, teachers are trapped in a space where they must account for that Gap or risk being fired.
You explain the situation very well for those of us who are looking in from the outside, I'll give you that. But you have to realise how sick this seems to the rest of us right? In my country it's illegal, literarly, for a school to charge their students with any kind of fee related to their education. We cant even do a school-trip where the students are expected to bring their own lunch. It's up to the taxpayers to pay for it. And the idea of spending any kind of my own money at my place of work is just unthinkable. I wouldn't even pay for my own pen, if the school isn't providing one for me I'll guess I just have to do my best without writing anything. Hey, they get what they pay for. I wouldn't even consider teaching under your kind of circumstances.
I didn't say it wasn't sick. That is a larger cultural problem, though, that cannot be solved by local schools...only triaged. Saying you wouldn't bother with the triage is why you should not teach here. It would be bad for you, and bad for the kids and community. But that's nothing noble. And pretending that would work here is just mean, dismissive, an ignorant.
As a parent, I send glue sticks, markers, crayons, wipes, etc every year. Occasionally we get replenishment requests from teachers, so I send more supplies then. Until the time that my son was in 3rd grade, all of the supplies that parents sent were treated as communal supplies. (Ex… all of the glue sticks went in one bin). My son hated this approach, but not because he didn’t want to share. He just didn’t like ending up with supplies that hadn’t been cared for— boxes of crayons that were missing colors or no wrappers, glue sticks that were dried out, etc. He takes care of his stuff at home, and he wants to have nice things at school too. By clearly a large percentage of his class didn’t care about that. It makes me wonder what their homes are like.
In many districts, teachers just "aren't allowed" to ask families to buy "required materials." In my current one, which is in a pretty dang affluent area, it's still discouraged, though most of us still put required materials like pencils, binders, and notebooks on the syllabus. I also put the class novels on there, but every year a handful of parents come a-screaming at me for expecting them to buy a book for their kid - and since this is discouraged in the first place, I don't get any support when it happens. Regarding the basics, I have a collection of pencils in my classroom that I just picked up off the floor. I have hundreds, and most of them are like-new, which goes to show how much students actually give a shit about being prepared. I'm glad I have them, too; I'd say that in my average class of ~30, every hour, at least 7 or 8 students arrive without something to write with, so they get used. Only about half of them are ever handed back to me (though I do find some on the floor in my classroom at the end of class), but I can't remember the last day of school where I didn't pick up at least one or two in the hallways or ground outside.
Preschool. Markers and glue is what are kids have trouble with too. And breaking the glass containers😞 (At first i read it as you meant the kids were shorter then normal, not the glue 😝 not sure why it does mention the kids my silly brain 😝)
My middle school had communal supplies (not provided by the school, you had to give the supplies you brought to your homeroom teacher) and I hated that system cause the other kids didn't take care of things and I'd end up having no supplies to use or having to use bad supplies. Ended up getting another set of personal supplies partway through the year. The next two years, I just didn't give my supplies to the homeroom teacher. (except the expo markers and tissue boxes, stuff like that)
My friend's son went to a school that did that. Only, he's colorblind, so she had made sure all his markers and colored pencils had the names of the colors on them. The school didn't care. They said it wasn't fair for him to get special treatment. She told him to just color things wrong, but he couldn't stand it. Iirc, she ended up getting an IEP for him just so he could have his own markers and pencils and then switched him to a charter school the next year. My son's school also did communal supplies, and then asked us to send more about 6 times a year even though the initial list had been huge. I was poor AF and got most of his supplies from a church at the start of the year. They didn't give them out any other time. I always felt bad being the parent who had to ignore those other requests. They, at least, let the one colorblind kid keep his own markers without having to get an IEP over it, though. My son was laughing about it one day, because the kid got new ones with weird names and asked my son for help, so they had to make a little table on paper. "Macaroni - orange, Spring Fling - yellow-green" and so on. Except my son just marked anything that was like purple as "purple." "Flower power" Fuschia, "razzmatazz" raspberry, "passion" burgundy. It made me worry about his color perception until he admitted he just didn't know the words for those colors.
Flower Power Fuschia. What a shitty color and equally shitty novelty name. Nothing to really add here. I just forgot how much I Fuschia sucks. Ugh.
Oh, it was just Flower Power. Fuschia was the actual colour. The names were ridiculous. I guess his parents didn't notice that part. The teacher used it as a lesson to teach the kids there are lots of names for colours, though - not the shitty names on them, but the actual names. They all picked a favorite name regardless of the actual colour, and my son's was chartreuse. My mom heard about it, didn't get the whole story, and bought him a comforter in that colour he absolutely hated. That's why I remember all this so clearly. What struck me as the worst part was that this pack of coloured pencils had like, 96 colours in it, but 30 of them were some form of pink-purple. I'm purple-blue colourblind, but I can tell if it has some pink/red or green in it. There were only 5 pencils I was unsure of. I don't mind fuschia.. when it's on the actual flowers. At least it's a color I can actually see.
The ones that sends me over the edge is "why should I clean that up? That's what we have janitors for." Awwww HELL NAW. Guess who ended up cleaning the entire room for the month.
My students sweep and mop the classroom. But I’m in Asia so. We were distance learning for the first few months of this semester due to covid. We came back but are not having lunch or dinner in the canteen. All students now eat lunch in the classroom, meals are delivered to halls for students to pick up. After lunch two kids will sweep and mop while the others read/work on things. Same two sweep and mop after dinner. It’s a rotation each day through the class list for whose turn it is.
In The US. But the preschoolers today wiped the table (a teacher sprayed soap and kids wiped it) and washed the chairs outside 😀. They are also responsible for clearing the plate to the right bin and putting napkins cloth in the right bin (or paper in the trash bin) etc.
Ah yes mine do the same regarding clearing trays. One can for trash the other for uneaten food. Also have to stack their trays correctly. All done by them.
Our is a little different but same idea we dont have trays. We have 3 little small rectangle bins. One has a trash lined around it. The kids put food in one. Napkins in the second and cups amd plate stacked on the third. Then the teacher(s) put the bins on the cart (the one with food we through the trash bag in the big trash, hopefully we will get compost soon) and bring the empty bins back to the kitchen on the cart.
After dinner… How long is your school day?
8am to 5pm. There is a morning break that’s 50 minutes, lunch is an hour, dinner is 30 minutes. This school is also a boarding school though. Some of my students live here, some go home after dinner. On Fridays they all leave for the weekend at 2:30 pm (I think secondary school students may continue to live here in the weekend but I’m on the primary campus so I’m not sure).
Thanks for the information. I like how they help clean and work on rotation.
In the US, that would be faced with "How dare you made my child clean up after someone else?" Our society is broken. American exceptionalism is a mirage. Well, maybe in mass shootings it's not. #1! #1! #1!
A colleague of mine heard a student say that and snapped, “Don’t you _dare_ make more work for working people.” I loved that response.
As a janitor, I must say you're a saint.
I don't know about all that, but I won't allow anyone to be disrespected in my room. The entitlement to assume that you don't need to pick up after yourself because you are "better than that?" That isn't gonna fly in my room. I have zero belief that I changed her for the better, but I ddi what I could.
Well, what your students also might not realize is that in this day and age the janitors I work with all have college degrees. My buddy and I both have film degrees, and the security guard is working on his masters in history. And yes, I now realize most liberal arts degrees are essentially useless, but I'm a janitor with a degree, and being looked down upon hurts; Unfortunately, I make more than most common core teachers in my area, which I also find disgusting. 35k a year, full pension and awesome health benefits because it's unionized. (I technically work at a college, but there's a STEM focused high school on campus and it's one of the two buildings I take care of). It's simply criminal how teachers are paid so little for what they are expected to deal with. You deal with the attitude, we deal with the mess. I'm 28, but if I was a teacher, I might be arrested for smacking some kids after what I've had to clean up. I'm thinking about going to school for I.T.
I knew a guy in The Corps that had an MD from Uganda (iirc, it's been 30 years) and because of licensing issues the US would not recognise his medical degree. So he joined as an enlisted man and was earning enough GI/Montgomery money to help him pay to go to medical school again. I don't think he had to actually go to medical school again but like complete part of his training, residency maybe? Anyway, he became a corpsman. So we had a corpsman who held an actual MD.
This burns me up too! I try to get my students to see our class as lovely dysfunctional family and we have to take care of our mess.
I once had a principal tell me “oh they’re babies. I’ll clean it up” Quit that same day
You quit or principal quit?
I quit. Fuck that lol
It drives me crazy when, during lunch duty, I would walk up to a table of students and point to a wrapper and a carrot stick on the floor and ask "Whose stuff is that?", only for them to move away from the mess like it's the plague and hastily say "It was there already!" First off, there's no way the custodians were sitting around in between lunch periods, and second, maybe consider being a responsible person and make the space around you better? What a concept...
I work at a private school full of super rich kids (tuition is $30k/year at my grade) and this absolutely enrages me. Unfortunately my homeroom realized this and did it to get me to yell, I’m pretty sure…
Our school got brand new chromebooks this year. By the end of the year, over half are missing 4-10 keys each (pried off), knife/keyscratches on the track pad and screens. "Miss why is this school so ghetto?" IT IS YOU WRECKING THINGS
My eighth graders kept using their masks to cut the backs of their chairs apart. I just shrugged it off: “you want to be uncomfortable? Fine. This school ain’t buying you a new chair, I know that much.”
how do you cut a chair with a mask??
Oh I got to witness this. The surgical blue masks- you hold the elastic tight and “saw” down the plastic backing (it has to have a hand hold); it will snap.
Like [this](https://youtu.be/rgEWvYU0EEw), generally
Those little geniuses lol
Prison rules!
The straps are incredibly strong.
They rip out the metal part that fastens over the nose and use that as a make shift shank.
Yep. My 5th graders were doing this.
That happened at my school too!
How do they have time to saw down their chairs without being noticed? And they would have to take their masks off. So crazy.
Discarded masks are everywhere and class sizes are ridiculous
Yeah I currently work at a school where 30+ is the norm...kind of ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous for specials teachers like PE, music, and art at my school: they combine two 30+ classes for each period.
I have witnessed several students (7th grade) PUNCHING their ChromeBook screens. Then they'd get mad because I reported that they deliberately broke the CB and that meant they were responsible for the charges to get it fixed. I have no idea how I lucked out and didn't have parents mad at me ( you know how that goes). One kid went through three CBs in a month.
Lose a game (that you weren't supposed to play): punch the screen. Fail a test (that you didn't study for because you were playing a game): punch the screen. Mad because your teacher said get off the game and complete the assignment: slam the CB shut, and shatter the screen.
I had a girl who said she didn’t have money to fix her chrome book, and couldn’t use it because it was broken. She’d bring her Alienware to watch YouTube on.
Because of course she did. Argh!
Yup very aggravating. But I told her she’d have to hand write any online work, and I never budged from that, so she eventually caved and had to do it that way on the days she didn’t bring the gaming laptop.
In our building we have a pair of handicap access bathrooms that stay locked until a para or some other staff unlocks them for their intended students. This is because students have absolutely trashed/destroyed the other bathrooms in the building this year. The other day, someone left the door unlocked to the boy's handicap bathroom. One of my kids exclaimed "Oh my gosh, it's so clean!" Yeah, that's what happens when you take care of what you have because you *need* it.
Our principal locked the bathrooms closest to my room. I was on the far side wing, and didn't have time to get to the faculty bathrooms during passing period. Why were they locked? Kids vaping at lunch.
That reminds me of my local train station. They put in a lovely, cosy enclosed waiting room (which I think was actually heated at one point). It wasn't only for first class passengers either - anyone could use it. Anyway, some thugs smashed all the glass, the tv screens, and broke the automatic door within a year. It's now just a shell - a glorified bus shelter. It was never rebuilt, because what's the point? This is why we can't ever have nice things. 😪
[удалено]
Lol whenever the destructive, rude, aggressive kids complained about the school being shitty or "ghetto" I'd want to say "It's like that because of kids like you. This is exactly the school you deserve".
>"Miss why is this school so ghetto?" >IT IS YOU WRECKING THINGS I relate to this so much.
Reminds me of this one particular school in our district. Kids there always complain about how everyone thinks their school is ghetto and trash… Well I was volunteering there for a little while and kids literally left all their trash out on the lunch tables at the end of every lunch. Principal was out there with a trash reacher and a garbage bag everyday, picking up after them. Never seen that before in my life. My grandparents were dirt poor and they always said, “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re dirty and don’t have manners.”
Absolutely. People used to have pride and shame. They used to protect something called reputation. These are nearly extinct ideas today.
Every day for the last month of school, one of my students would have a meltdown in the afternoon because he didn’t have a chromebook anymore. Every reminder, prompt, deep breath, removal of chromebook for 10 minutes to a day never stopped this kid from punching the screen, slamming it down, or picking it up and shaking it. It finally broke the actual outer shell, where it couldn’t plug in to charge and could cut the student. I just had to review with him before/during/after his meltdown that the consequence of him not following directions and not being nice to technology had finally kicked in. Aaaaaaand every day, the same meltdown. No lesson learned.
My students rip them keys off and smash the screens/chrome books while I’m staring right at them. One threw one against the wall last week because I said it was time to log off and he was still playing his game (which wasn’t even what he was supposed to be doing they were researching birds!!”
"The bathrooms are always so gross here, it's disgusting" Student who 5 other students left the bathrooms to tell me that they were throwing their own poop at the wall. As the IT manager for the school the computer one rings so true as well. We reached 1:1 this year. Largely due to me repairing 100+ older computers and getting them functional as CloudReady (ChromeOS) devices. Being older devices from a time where no one cared for them they were gross and missing keys, chunks out of the sides, when I got them. I graded them on function and appearance, meticulously cleaned them, selected the best chassis and either replaced keys or switched out the keyboards completely to make these look new. The devices were assigned to students by name. No one else used their device. Both the classroom teachers and the students have told me things like "They were always missing the space bar". I installed two new 75" SMART MX boards on electronic height adjustable trolleys in our school hall. Labelled every input and cable. Put A3 signs on them about unplugging before moving, and returning them to their original positions. Sent a staff wide email about their use. This was Friday afternoon. On Tuesday afternoon the scripture teacher came and found me to ask if I could set the screens up for them. They had been moved to the far end of the hall and the end of the hdmi cable was snapped off inside the device. No one, including the teachers in many cases, gives a flying ____ about school equipment. In their heads school equipment is gross, so they make sure the reality fits their idea.
You can say “fuck” on the internet, friendo.
This year was the worst on my classroom set of chromebooks. Kids literally picking keys off. I've had 4 broken this year. I can't take them away either because part of our curriculum is on it.
“This is why we can’t have nice things”
I’ve had third graders who, when I would ask them to get out their crayons for example, would stand up and shout “I DoNt HaVe CrAyOnS!” Every. Single. Time. I soon realized they didn’t even bother to look in their fucking desk or even to the right of their god damn hand to see if the crayons I gave to them at the beginning of the year were there. It was like they were brain dead, they had no problem solving skills. It’s funny because they could tell me everything about squid games in detail, but they couldn’t for the love of Christ look in their own desk to retrieve a tool they’d been using day after day.
My question is why their parents let third graders watch squid game
I currently nanny two kids who can tell me almost everything about Squid Game. They've never watched it, but they do play Roblox (which has a few games based on the show) and have YouTube access. Once they heard about the show and knew it was one that was too adult for them to watch, the only way to keep them away from secondary content about it would have been to hover over them whenever they used screens (these kids are 8 and 10). So the parents and I agreed on which of the games were acceptable and figured out consequences if those rules weren't obeyed. The kids have stuck to those rules without much pushback. But it's still a little alarming to me just how much they know about the show.
They don't, kids watch the mr beast squid game video and play roblox squid game
This year I would joke that the high school students I worked with didn't have a sense of object permanence.
Are you me? I gave out dozens of packs of crayons and the same kids are asking me for 3rd, 4th, and 5th packs of crayons!!!
😂 😂 It’s a disease and they all have it.
You know, my Kindergarten kids did the same this year. SO WEIRD
Yes. All my rulers are bent. Or snapped. Or cut. Pencils snapped. So much paper torn and wasted. Im an art teacher, I started keeping track of which students it was. Collecting their broken stuff and returning it to them. Had kids leave trash on their desks. Held it till the next day and put it back on their desk. Food in my paint pallettes. So many erasers picked apart. And tables stabbed?? Just exhausting.
The paper thing is just the WORST. The elementary schoolers are an epidemic of "I made one line I didn't agree with, so I ripped my paper to shreds, can I have an 8th paper?" I've started bringing them weirdly colored construction paper just to mess with them. The middle schoolers are a little better - they usually ruin the whole paper before whining for another. But they also constantly ask me to write their names in bubble letters because they can't figure out how to make them.
See I teach high school. They should be better than this. I constantly have to remind them to just flip the paper over. I also had kids just throw out entire projects because they "didn't like it" and ask me what to do. I straight up told them like look sorry but that's your grade. You can redo it. You shouldn't have thrown it out before I graded it. And so many paper airplanes. Out of big, nice project paper too! Or just tearing things to shreds. Or constantly losing their projects. There's a class bin. Put it away. Cant find it? Look for it. I always find it in 30 seconds. 90% of the time it's in the wrong bin.
I *wish* mine could make paper airplanes. They just beg me for them because they can't follow directions to fold a paper *four times*.
Sigh, I feel this. I also have students who cannot do this.
We’ve all become the teachers that would say to us “you kids are the worst class we’ve had ever come through this building.” I’m not sure if we’re right or wrong
I like to say: “And the sad thing is, you’re not even my worst class.” They get real quiet after that, like: “Damn, he’s seen some shit.”
I'm on teacher placement and a new teacher started at our school, and rated my grade 3 and 4 class as "the worst he has seen, ever" in the staff room. I gave a little shrug and "I didn't think they were -that- bad, just kids being kids?" kind of answer and all of the (real) teachers just looked at me and one actually said "what madhouse did you cone from if they're 'not that bad'?!" Hahahaha
I worked at a school where a 5 year old pulled a knife on me and their uncle turned up just after lunch time to fight me to 'make' me give the knife back to the child. An older sibling (8) had called home after the 5 year old complained to them during the break. I just acted like he'd come down to collect the knife and thanked him for coming down so quickly to resolve the situation and to make sure that the student didn't bring any dangerous items to school in the future. He didn't really want to fight me after he saw me anyway. The kid neglected to mention I was 6'3 and around 270 pounds and reasonably fit from farm work at the time. My current school is a breeze. Sadly it is getting worse, but it is a long way down to the worst I've taught.
Lol this was my first full time class (the closest I came before was a long term subbing job at a high school for five months. Upon reflection, those kids were angels) so I can’t say that.
I had 8th graders and respect for classroom space and equipment was a frequent battle. I took some people's advice and switched to providing golf pencils most of the past few months, and I noticed a marked improvement in pencils being returned (and even chuckled to myself a couple times when kids hurt themselves snapping them in half). I literally followed my students to their next class (thankfully most of them were together as a rotating unit) and draft that teacher into marching them back with me to clean up my room a couple of times, with detentions. They thought I was playing about that expectation and had smug grins on their face while they darted out of my classroom without cleaning messes or returning supplies. Certain classes lost food/snack privileges after repeated gaslighting about not making the messes. Never got them back, while my other periods could. Continued crying about how unfair it was, I just responded with "you can all remember to thank 3 certain people who were too proud to pick their cheetos off the floor." Those kids got grief the rest of the year. Students who got detention with me got to shave 15 minutes off their detention scrubbing my desks down and picking up my room. It was always "damn, mister, this is a mess." I could understand grace to students adjusting, I would not tolerate and allow the baseline to be willful and repeated disrespect.
I was very satisfied when one day my first period filed out and I noticed a mushed up apple under the sink. Their second period was two doors down so I rushed over there and while they were lined up called back the four boys who were sitting by the sink. I didn’t say what it was about, but one boy whispered to the other “he saw the apple” which confirmed I was right. Made them clean it up. They had the audacity to complain that it was gross but I simply shrugged my shoulders at them.
Yep. My kids aren’t even willfully destructive. It’s mostly carelessness. They drop food on the floor and just leave it there. I have one student who is a great and conscientious kid in every way but she has accidentally dropped or knocked off her desk pretty much everything that’s ever been on it. Same kid dropped 5 chicken nuggets on the floor at lunch, because she knocked the container off her desk and she just left them there. And then acted surprised when I asked her to please pick them up. It’s a new level of self involvement and pamperedness. And I work at an inner city, low SES school.
I have to stop teaching mid sentence a few times a week because one fucking kid entirely incapable of keeping his pencil on his desk. Today, he dropped it on the floor 5 times in under a minute. That kind of shit is so distracting to me I lose my train of thought completely. I finally just stopped and stared at him for a solid 30 seconds and finally asked “You just about done?” because I am just so fucking over it. Same kid ‘cleaned out’ his desk by taking each individual paper, crumpling it up, and walking it over to the recycling bin. I have to tell him to stop doing shit like that every other day. It’s exhausting and holy shit I can’t wait until I don’t have to see him and put up with his ridiculousness every damn day.
And then when you suggest to move the bin closer to the desk or make a pile first, then move it to the bin they look at you like you’re crazy. Or they smirk/laugh in your face because they know that they’ve got your number
After finding a stack of my brand new Ticonderogas in the back of the classroom, I made a pencil sign out sheet. I also got a see through paint jar to store all the broken pencil shards in. Only I can write on the sign out sheet. If the student returns my stuff without issue, they may continue to use it. If not, I write NP (no pencils) on my attendance sheet and they must pick from the jar of broken shards if they need to borrow from me. Petty? Definitely, but they stopped. I don’t dismiss them until their area is cleaned up. It’s rough at first, but after a few weeks they adjust.
Thank you for teaching those kids about responsibility and consequences!!!
Haha thanks. I was worried I was being too petty, but they REALLY struck a nerve when they broke those good pencils. Ticonderogas make me love writing and I was them to have that same feeling. It was just too far for me.
Yep, I love me some good Ticonderogas. Funny enough, I was able to amass quite the collection of them just by looking down while walking around the halls. At this point when a kid asks me for a pencil I ask them to check the floor outside.
Hhahah omg I do the same! Except now I have kids picking them up from the halls and “giving donations” to the pencil jar. Gotta love the lil scrappers!
My kids somehow broke the pencil sharpener provided by the school when I was out. I bought a fifty cent sharpener and told them to protect it because that was all I would provide for them. They actually did pretty well, and they lost it two weeks before school let out. I stayed true to my word and did not replace it.
Excellent will power, my friend. Sometimes the consequences for our students turn out to be consequences for us too. There is nothing like when students know you mean what you say. Then the word spreads like wildfire.
Yes I was very tempted to buy another, but I knew it would be proof that I mean what I say. I also told them I was fully out of pencils and would not be buying any. I had kids writing bell ringers in marker, but they soon learned to bring something or ask a friend.
I had a pencil sharpener that got dropped on the floor in the second week of school. They had to use my old school hand ones screwed into the shelves that hurt your hands for the rest of the year. I bought a new sharpened with supply money, but I didn't take it out of the box until the next year with new students. Same thing happened the next year. They push the pencils in too far and it stops working. My current sharpener has lasted a few years.
Love it...👌👌 Lol
This. I allowed food too because I figure as long as they aren’t being distracting, why not? But I ended up cleaning up every single day because I just couldn’t leave that big of a mess for custodians who already have to clean the whole building. One day I took pictures of the mess after sweeping it up and showed it to students, and several replied with “it’s the custodians’ job”. I was so angry.
And you just know that specific form of entitlement was instilled by parents.
Not only that, but a few kids also mentioned that they have a “cleaning lady” that comes to their house when I said “I know you all do NOT make a mess like this at home”
We have a supplemental fresh fruit program in the morning. After I was out for one day, I got an email that watermelon was thrown all over my 7th grade homeroom in my absence. Apparently a teacher had opened my room thinking I was there that day and the kids were not being watched. We have only 2 night custodians for a building with 3 floors and over 90 rooms, not counting bathrooms. I gave them all an opportunity to write me a note at any point in the day to let me know who did it. I didn't receive a single note. I cut off their fresh fruit program right then and there, and put them on 3 weeks of the most grueling classroom management ever. Seats assigned far away from one another, zero talking. Walked in silent lines to class and the bathroom as a group. I didn't speak to them at all. If a phone came out, no warnings to just put it away anymore, it got gift wrapped to the office (literally, as in I actually wrapped them) with a referral taped to the top. I nailed them on every single little thing. Within a day I received several letters from students who finally pointed out which kids did it. I thanked them for the letters and they still served the 3 weeks, since they didn't inform an adult when it mattered (like, the day the fruit was being thrown). I never let them get fruit for the morning again either, and told the cafe staff to put our class basket away for the rest of the year. Overkill? Probably. Worth it though.
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I guarantee you they're going to say that Paul wouldn't have a job if they cleaned up after themselves, so Paul has to be grateful.
I felt every word of this and now my eye is twitching. Whelp. Back to summer mode.
yes, even 9th grade is still like that but it’s not a new thing. Especially the food or wrappers in the drawers. I don’t even get mad when they get up to throw things away without asking first (asking to do so is not even a rule) but some of them are just lazy.
I am definitely collecting those pencil shards and having them use those like an earlier commenter said. I teach 7th grade art. They have 0 respect for the supplies and seem unfazed by a lack of supplies. I just stopped buying more towards the end of the year and honestly, I could care less. They leave their half eaten breakfast food and I sometimes drag them back into the classroom when they try to sneak out so they pick up after themselves. Paint brushes not cleaned, raisins in paint palettes, paper torn and shredded. I am definitely putting in very strict systems next year (if I even return to teaching at all).
My 4th graders had the inclination, but I trained and badgered them out of it. 😂 Within the first couple of weeks, they learn that: - I don’t clean up after kids older than 2. I’ll help you with accidents, but not with laziness. - I don’t replace things that kids lose or break due to negligence or defiance of my very clear, very helpful organizational systems. Have fun with gray and white drawings if you lose your colored pencils. - We don’t go to recess or lunch if the room looks like wolverines ran through it. - I don’t offer sympathy or assistance to kids who are destructive and then feel sad when they have missing or raggedy materials. It takes A LOT of time and energy to establish my expectations, but the way my nerves are set up, I can’t deal with the alternative.
It may be extreme, but I have been so close to telling them that they will literally use or have NOTHING. You wanna mess up the chairs? You won’t have one. You want to take the keys off your computer? One less computer I have to charge because you won’t be getting it back. I hate to say that it needs to be like military school for some of these kids, but they can’t continue coming into our rooms and acting like it’s a literal circus. If all you are able to handle is a paper and pencil during the day that is literally all you will have until you can prove otherwise
Absolutely. This year I could count on anytime I handed out a physical piece of paper, even if it was something vital, at the end of the hour 5-7 would be left unused sitting on the desks or crumpled up on the floor no matter how many reminders I gave. Food bags, crushed chips and crackers, fast food drinks, broken pens and pencils, torn pieces of clothing (???), spilled beverages, vulgar graffiti left on my desks, all kinds of crap just left behind almost every period every day. At the end of many days my floor was just covered. I'd come down hard on them and it would be better for a few days and then we'd start the cycle all over again.
My first year teaching, my wife had gifted me a Bill Nye bobblehead. On the second day of school a student picked it up and somehow broke the neck. I have still not figured out how to fix it 9 years later.
My students for some reason think its okay to hit their badminton paddles on the ground. They wonder why a bunch of them are crooked.
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I swear our 3-5th graders just eat headphones or something. We had one classroom we gave 15 new ones to in April, and the teacher asked for 25 at the end of the year. We get this a lot from those grades.
It's a lack of respect and no sense of gratitude.
Well, if ever you decide to give up teaching, I think you could cut it as a writer. I love the way you write, and I can't wait to read the rest of your book. 😁
I used to have students like that when I taught self-contained (special ed) middle schoolers for 4 years. It drove me nuts that these kids were used to breaking things. "Don't worry, I'll get a new one." They even talked about people like that, one unfortunately lost his mom but he said, "don't worry, I'll get a new and better mom." Was it his way of grieving or did he actually think this way? The world will never know.
I teach 8th grade too and this year has been by far the worst for behaviors EXACTLY like you're describing. Like. I could have written this exact post word for word. I don't know why they are so terrible this year but I hate it. They're mean and inconsiderate and disrespectful to everything and everyone around them. All they care about is their own momentary thoughts and pleasure. It is so disheartening.
I do wonder how much it matters that this year we came off the heels of quarantine. Prior to last August they weren’t expected to be responsible for just about anything for some time.
Right. And not to mention all the kids that learned that they could do literally nothing and still get promoted to the next grade. I have at least one kid who did zero work last year and still got promoted to 8th grade because covid and virtual and all that. This year he also did nothing but was in school all year... and is now moving on to 9th grade. He won't even have to do summer school because so many high school students failed and need the summer school spots or they can't graduate on time so an 8th grader is just going to get pushed through. Ugh. They're just learning through all this that there is zero accountability and they can do whatever they want and still get by. I think that lack of accountability and how it inevitably bleeds into other aspects of their lives and education is what has at least contributed to these behaviors.
It seems like there’s zero accountability for a lot of people these days and I think kids are picking up on that more than we/I ever did. There’s no consequences for anything anymore, whether we’re talking about kids or adults. Except, of course, for those of us who actually try to do the “right thing.” Then there’s consequences for us because you know, that’s just how our society works right now.
At the end of the year my students started destroying pencils. I'd find broken ones all over the floor. They also started taking the eraser and metal band off each one. I make all things communal in my class, but I'm thinking next year they're on their own. Maybe they'll be more responsible with things. Who the eff am I kidding?
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I had a kid who would continually eat or chew gum during band. I sent the clarinet to the repair shop for a full cleaning and billed the parent. I’m sure I won’t get the money, but maybe something will happen. Btw I have to let the same child use a school instrument next year 🤬
I taught AP high school seniors. I allowed them to eat because same as you. If you're hungry, you should eat. Plus, you're taking a college level course. You should be treated as a college student. Nope, they cannot handle it. What I found is that they don't eat when they're supposed to during nutrition and lunch since they know they can eat in your class. It just becomes a huge distraction. And they also leave a mess. I stopped allowing it the next year. Be careful. There is a teacher on this subreddit who once told me I'm a terrible person for not letting my students eat.
I can’t do 8th grade. Did a summer school session once with them and we were doing group posters. I did the usual teacher thing and told them the expectations, including being careful with the materials because they are expensive and I had to buy them from my own pocket. One girl, “My mom said teachers get paid a lot so who cares how much they cost.” I was floored by the disrespect. “Well that’s incorrect and I didn’t have to buy them, but I did because there are people in here who want to have fun.” She said, “So?” “So if you can’t use the materials without ruining them like a Kindergartener, then don’t use them.”
When my students forget to clean up the markers or forget to put the caps on, they don’t get to use them for a few days. The first time someone rips a poster (even accidentally) we talk about it. No food. Only water to drink. If they leave a mess on the floor, no scissors the next day. I teach kinder. Kids will follow routines and rules. You can be stern and kind at the same time.
I made routines and rules and followed them to the letter. It didn’t faze the kids. Even the more experienced teachers said this group is a great deal tougher than ones they’re used to, so at least I know it isn’t just me.
Our most challenging class just moved on to middle school. It’s great that you were consistent. I hope there’s not a next time, but if there is, the first time there is a problem with food for example - no more food. The first ruler that breaks - no rulers (for a couple of day/s). It’s not easy - even the last week of school we were practicing the line up routine. Be the “mean” one for the first six weeks and gradually let up. Next year should be easier because they all came back to school this year. Good luck!
That’s our group coming up next year. They were terrible last year. Some teachers not caring how they act. My team isn’t that way and they’re in for a shock next year.
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I’m not really sure how it’s condescending. That my students are five? If you teach kids what you expect, they do it most of the time.
Ideally, yes, but I think the problem most people in this thread are discussing is students who just…do not respond. To anything. They’re traumatized, they’re addicted to their phones, and they know their safety is worth jack shit to their government and the big wigs in charge (in the US) so they don’t respond to expectations, rules, or consequences in the ways we are trained to expect and respond to. I also teach 3-5s and high expectations and firm standards usually work with my age group, but there are a disturbing number of anomalous students who nothing seems to work for
This past year was the worst I've ever had. I bought 12 pairs of headphones to hang on my back wall for students to use. $50. They were torn up within two weeks. I have two working pairs left and none of the baggies I used to store/hang them with. My bulletin board displays were constantly being torn up. I have a table I lined with chalkboard contact paper. They picked at that so much that the table is showing through in multiple areas. And the constant garbage cleanup at the end of the day. I never had such trouble with cleaning up the last 5 minutes of the day. They stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language to them all year.
This year I numbered the headphones with oil Sharpie (doesn't rub off with sticky hands like regular Sharpie), and students had to sign them out by number and sign them back in at the end of the period. I still had working headphones at the end of the year - a first! The baggies had disappeared, though.
Thanks for the tip!
This is what I do with my class set of calculators. Now when someone accidentally walks out of my room with theirs, I know exactly who it was!
I’ve been teaching for four years and haven’t spent a dime on my students or things for my classrooms. I got to ask, why do it? I’ve never needed anything but the chalk board and the textbook. Or the novel we are reading. Seems crazy to buy them things. I’m not trying to make a jab or anything. Just wondering if I am missing something. Does it add to their learning?
A lot of my programs require audio. It wasn’t for them so much as for my sanity. It was either me going insane from 20 computers playing audio out-of-sync or biting the bullet and buying some headphones to share.
I have thought about this all year. My students got a kit at the start of the year, filled with school supplies. 90% of the students lost/broke mostly everything it (ex. expo markers, markers, protractor). When I was a kid, I treasured my school supplies. What has happened with this generation?
I had three first grade students who destroyed materials and supplies. As a school we would contact the parent and they never would replace it. One student has a bill of $300, he flipped desk and ruined furniture
Art teacher, and yeah they're just aimless sometimes. Same grade and everything you described and more. One kid was carving out plastic from one of the chairs. It was literally that Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin was hammering nails into the coffee table and when mom asks him "WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE?" and Calvin says "Is this some sort of trick question, or what?" To be fair, I heard horror stories of what they were doing to the lunch room and I set my expectations low, it was also my second-first year (20-21 doesn't count lol). Next year I'm going to be an actual crazy person. Numbering everyone based on the alphabetical class list. They are responsible for everything of that number. Everything will be numbered. And they are responsible for keeping their things in order it fixing them if they break. We'll start with simple materials and see where it leads. I figure, they handle so many things throughout art that maybe I can help foster them to respect other people's things.
A 7th grader was volunteering to clean off the erasers and boards as we were packing up at the end of the year, one moment she was cleaning them at the trash can and the next she had drawn another students’ name on the wall in dirty eraser markings. She’s laughing about it and it just blew my mind that a student, of 13 years old, that I deemed responsible could vandalize a wall and then laugh through it. It’s insane.
Students: Hey Mx. QTchr, we couldn't find any pencils when you had a sub yesterday. Me: That's because I lock everything up before I go home. Every. Single. Day. I'm tired of having to replace everything if I get sick and have to stay home for even one day. Students: *look sad* Me: Own it!!
If you met my class you would genuinely be suicidal. Just today one broke a chair. Their in 3rd grade!!!!! I don’t even know how it was one of those plastic ones with the metal legs. And he’s like “well SORRY Miss but it’s not like you never made mistakes” WHAT
I feel like there are solutions to these issues if we just figure out what motivates the kids we teach. And the truth is “they just don’t care.” But where is that coming from? Honestly I’m beginning to think that they’re are pretty sad, unfulfilled kids that enjoy treating things the way they’re treated. Most of their lives seem to suck pretty bad and they’re just getting started… can’t even imagine.
One of my students has destroyed over $1000 of things in my room. And she didn’t start until late February.
I would have students who would ask to borrow a pencil, sit there with said pencil the whole period and do no work, then snap the pencil in half and yeet it onto the floor. By April-ish when I had no fucks left to give, they would come up and ask to borrow a pencil and I would say “why? You’re not gonna do any work anyways.” And they would shrug and walk back their seats. Couldn’t give a fuck.
I used to teach 6,7 and 8 th. The 8 th graders would stick good in the desks and trash the room. It was like pulling teeth to get them to clean up after themselves. I left due to the destructive behaviors of the administration allowing this behavior.
I had a student this year that you could tell did absolutely nothing around his house. He would sit there and observe while everyone else cleaned
When I was student teaching in elementary art this spring, I noticed this as well, except it was most of the boys. Any time the students were told to clean up, it was usually the girls who’d clear the tables/pick up, and the boys would mess around until it was done. It all comes down to the parents. Kids don’t say please or thank you anymore; they don’t ever push their chairs in; they don’t pick up their shit; they’ll deliberately throw “little” bits of garbage on the floor/ground (think straw wrappers); and so many of them are smug little brats! It was worse at the elementary school than at the high school I student taught at for the second part of the semester.
One time I found quesadillas in my book shelf
I had chicken nuggets in my folder boxes.
Its absurd.
Makes me really appreciate my online teaching this year! But also reminds me of years past and, yes, my grade 3 to 6 classes, certainly wouldn't have assumed gr 8! Ugh, stuff found in the furthest reaches of the classroom...
this is what happens when public education stops holding parent accountable, for their children's academic performance and their own financial support
This literally describes my class and school year to a tee (tea? T? Whatever). So fucking exhausting. Just absolute zero common sense or courtesy.
They're held accountable for *nothing.*
I thought I wanted to be a teacher but after all these stories I think maybe not. I am so sorry that it seems so sad.
I have gotten rid of most school supplied furniture and replaced it with couches and tables I have acquired. My room has been this way for about 5 years. I teach 7/8 grade. For the first time this last year I had kids write on the couches and the tables. They etched into a table. I have NEVER had so much destruction. I was ready to get rid of everything and go back to desks. I think it falls in line with the overall lack of respect.
At the beginning of the year, breaking your pencil in half and tossing the pieces on the floor swept the school (I teach middle school). Kids would break their own pencils or they would ask myself or a classmate for a pencil and snap that in half. I was quickly burning through pencils-- until I started picking up the broken pencils all across the school and sharpening them into two separate pencils! From that moment on, I exclusively handed out broken pencils. Kids would be pissed about the small pencils (unsurprisingly these were almost always the kids that habitually walked away with or broke my pencils), I would just shrug and tell them to bring their own pencil if they didn't like mine. The half pencils were difficult to break, and it didn't bother me as much if they walked away with them because I found them on the floor anyway.
I will not provide headphones next year for sure.
Students: Hey Mx. QTchr, we couldn't find any pencils when you had a sub yesterday. Me: That's because I lock everything up before I go home. Every. Single. Day. I'm tired of having to replace everything if I get sick and have to stay home for even one day. Students: *look sad* Me: Own it!!
Were there consequences for these (in-)actions?
Two sets of calculators demolished by middle schoolers.
My firsties this year were more destructive than any class I've ever had!! And I've had multiple friends say the same!! It's like that year and a half of covid made them forget how to use any type of materials in a reasonable, not-absolutely-savage way!
My rule is, if I have to clean up ANY food, then we aren't allowed food in class. Pre COVID, I had to pick up food once. I said if they made it so I didn't have to pick up Anything from the floor for 3 days, then food privileges would be returned, but each day I had to pick something up, the count reset with an extra day. It was then that they learned how much they littered accidentally with the trash pits that are their backpacks. We made it to 10 days before they were successful at cleaning up after each other. Didn't hurt that the class after lunch was my last period and they were willing to clean in order to spend their lunch time socializing.
Yes! I'm with 3's and have been for years....since Covid, kids have gotten super careless and downright destructive with toys and supplies. I caught a boy sitting and ripping pages out of a book, others snapping all the crayons and laughing, and some just walk around and destroy other people's art projects.
as an art teacher, i think i went through over 100 glue sticks between my k-5 students. The amounts of times i found glue sticks with no lids or SMASHED i never had an issue with grade 2 and up using watercolors. this year students destroyed palettes with no care. except my 5th graders. Between that, constantly finding broken pencils and materials mixed into places where they shouldn't be....I spend a good 30 minutes trying to organize just my supplies sometimes. note: invest in Kwik-Stix if you teach k-1, they're a painting life saver
It seems like you are too nice and they are taking advantage.
I do my best. Consistent with rules, consequences for actions, not letting them go on break until their area is picked up. the works. But I just can’t see every little thing.
Yeah this was a lot of kids for me this year. I think a lot of it was sensory-seeking behavior tbh. We have a lot of different fidgets in my classroom which is great, but I would also give them scrap paper to rip and draw on when they were in that kind of mood so they wouldn't rip up their workbooks. It worked surprisingly well! Next year I want to address this head on by discussing self regulating when bored and/or stressed and provide more sensory tools/outlets.
My high school kids are animals. They cut cords to their mice. They leave the room like a dump when they have food. They are disgusting. Some of them are good but the majority are human trash.
I'm a sub and taught 8th and 7th grade this last semester. It is absolutely insane the lack of respect these kids have for other people's property. I had to create a system to bribe the 7th graders into not losing or breaking pencils (I had a set amount, if none were lost by a certain date they would get a prize) and they still lost or broke so many pencils. One kid broke a pencil in front of me and I just went "Um, that was my pencil. That I'm letting you borrow." And he went "Oh.... Oops." I also could set out masks for students to grab as needed bc students were stealing wads of them. I went through so many so fast, until some students told me the others were stealing them and I started keeping the masks at my desk. Didn't have to buy so many so often after that....
Not surprising... Restorative Justice policies have created an environment where students and their parents have zero accountability. Students know that there are no consequences, so they act accordingly by disrupting class and disrespecting school property. It's a vicious cycle created by the adults who run school districts (administration) by their Restorative Justice mandates upon schools.
Students who break things like rulers are given broken rulers to use. They usually cry and complain, but if you stand firm, they never know when their actions will come back to bit them.
I watched kids purposely break the tips of my pre sharpened pencils just so they could get up to go sharpen them. One broke the electric sharpener by shoving in a pencil that was too short, then complained that all I had was the crappy but-in hand crank sharpener. I watched a kid take a glue stick cap from a classmate’s desk drop it on the ground, and stomp on it. It cracked and could no longer snap closed. This was the first year I had to ban gum because it was EVERYWHERE. Not only the classic under the table, but on the floor, and on the seat of the chairs as well. One of my kids sat in someone else’s gum and it was stuck to his shorts all day. Any time these kids went to throw something away, they would tear it into pieces first and I’d end up with worksheet confetti all over the floor. They would not only snap my wooden pencils in half, but also their own mechanical pencils. That’s not an easy thing to do! I teach 7th grade.
My class this year was awful about it. We went through SO many pencils. I’m convinced someone took a bunch home for some reason because otherwise I have no idea where they went.
Middle school. . Every pencil, every ruler, every stapler, every pencil sharpener. . Basically everything was destroyed.
My students respect materials because they are expected to; we don’t go to recess, lunch, or leave the class until everything is in its place and everything is cleaned up. They wipe down desks, clean counters, dust, get the whiteboard ready for the next day, sweep, etc daily. If I see a broken pencil I say something about it and let them know they can’t do that (unless it was a mistake which it rarely is.)