I'm sorry but a child reaching freshmen year with their documentation that shows they are developmentally at a third grade level for reading and writing is unteachable. I know that may be a crazy opinion but I've never seen it this bad till this year.
Half a co-taught class developmentally 6 years behind where they should be. My co-teacher is losing their mind. I'm losing my mind. We're doing stories that are 3 pages long and they forget what was 1 paragraph before. They don't know how to operate a google document. Many have lost their homework sheets in their folder less book bags.
I don't even really know the other half of my class since I have no time to talk to the students who are demonstrating the basic ability to follow a 2 step direction since I'm busy putting the fire extinguisher to other half who seemingly have never been told to do anything their entire life.
I cannot scaffold things any lower without it literally being a third grade level class. One child literally had documentation showing they don't understand that stories begin and end.
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story. Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
I'm losing my brain
Really have to love the solidarity you all are showing. We wonder why teachers are treated like absolute dogshit.
The teachers in that sub sure as hell don't deserve solidarity. A handful of the posts are like this one, most of them and an even higher proportion of the comments are just pure hatred of the children and teens under their care and responsibility.
Well its reddit, what do you expect?
I will tell you that as a group teachers, much like nurses, are chock full of some of the worst fucking people you'll ever want to meet.
Oh, I totally know that. Especially special needs programs. Sure, there's a few who genuinely care and work hard and do good jobs and are criminally underappreciated, but there's a lot of burnt out ones just doing the minimum until retirement and being physically abusive out of desperation and panic, and a lot of people who take teaching jobs or educational assistant positions in special needs programs for easy access to children whose complaints are never taken at face value, making it so that the more extreme abuse they inflict, the less likely the victims will be listened to and any investigation performed.
I can't die on this special needs hill and it seems like you have experience with it. Special needs education in the state public system is a hell in and of itself.
Yep. SpEd is hell everywhere for everyone involved.
I was a student in it who was able to recognize the abuse and neglect both as what they were, and had a very rare mum who believed me. Still nothing that she could do about it because the system is inherently so shitty. Being believed by your parents is only a tiny piece of the battle for the victims. (But hey, if the abysmal academics in those hell holes didn't get me doing my own research into the stuff we were supposed to cover in Social Studies and didn't, I wouldn't have gone way further on political economy, the Cold War, and socialism, and I probably wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist today, so I think I got out better than most, and better than what would have become of me in mainstream classrooms...)
And now my mother works for a school, in the special education system, and she comes home every day with horror stories. Of admin carelessness, her coworkers' abuses of the children, both the rare deliberate and frequent desperate, and the general shoddiness of the system. We regularly have discussions, my perspective as a former victim and hers as a rare staff member that does her best to throw admin and teachers under the bus over ever abusing a child in her care, and the thing we keep coming to, is that separated special programs don't work because they turn into underfunded overcrowded dumping grounds for every child who's at all in the way of "normal" classrooms and all the worst teachers in a given district, and integration/least restrictive environment doesn't work because there isn't funding and staffing for the necessary support and classrooms are overcrowded and there's not enough individual attention for any kid as it is.
We're not in the US, and this is in the Catholic schools, officially the "Separate School District" here, but this is a problem that seems to happen in a huge chunk of the Western world.
Yeah a lot of the online left over-does the solidarity. Despite that they wouldn’t last 5 seconds in any union hall in the country lol.
The worst most delusional narcissistic people I’ve ever known at my school were the ones that became teachers. I’ve had teachers make me dig through a schoolroom trash bin for my bag because I have ADHD and left it under my desk. Teachers bringing religion into classrooms. Teachers slamming their fists on desks and straight up shouting at children in venom-filled tirades, making them feel like shit failures for tiny mistakes in that narcissistic way narcissists do.
Yes it’s a noble profession with many earnest workers that should be improved upon as a core part of society. Like most labor under capitalism. Bullshit jobs really aren’t as common as we like to say. Doesn’t mean it’s not full of shit people.
While the turds inevitably float to the top regardless, the worst part is the number of earnest teachers is directly proportional to the wealth of the school district.
I've absolutely had teachers that hated children, though a much larger portion were just... people who take jobs working for religious schools or special needs programs or both for easy power over people who will never be believed by most other adults in their lives when they complain about truly insane abuses (my mother was rare among mothers of diagnosed neurodivergent kids, she quit multiple support groups because of the abusive and infantilising mindsets that were common party lines), or people who really did want to do good, but had poor or no training, poor institutional support, and were expected to keep high school age behavioural problems that belonged in juvie from killing actual special needs kids like six or seven year old me, all in one utterly horrible mixed grade classroom often managed by one or two people for like fifteen kids that the rest of the building refused to teach. And between evacuating the room from middle schooler tantrums and controlling murderous rages, they were still expected to somehow teach us math and science and Language Arts. (The academics in a lot of those classrooms were laughably bad. They would pull "ketchup as a vegetable" level tricks, like having us spend 15 minutes right after Announcements and National Anthem on a class discussion on "current events" and say that counted for Social Studies, or have us do a single first or second grade level worksheet to count for a full day's worth of Language Arts. In the one I spent 5th grade in, we were given grade 3 math workbooks, I pitched a huge fit over that one. They couldn't even be arsed to give us busywork to fill our 6 hours plus lunch, sometimes. They'd just budget in time for tantrums and explosions.) I do not envy those positions, and the well meaning ones do deserve solidarity, my mom took an assistant job in a local school with a high proportion of special needs kids after I got to high school and my brother was old enough that she was willing to leave us home alone after school without expecting me to babysit him, and for every abusive adult I seemed to be a magnet for, there's a dozen like my mom that work damned hard, care about all those kids, and are criminally underpaid and underappreciated.
(Then there's the washed up old Cold Warriors that took jobs in Catholic schools because the public board might actually react to a parent complaining about their child being taken to the school office and asked the Communist Party question three times in two weeks. But that's a different story and probably not quite as common as narcissistic abusers and well meaning burnouts who enact physical violence out of utter lack of better tools.)