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
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.)