Quote:
Originally Posted by The Fisher Account
Remember when we were kids and your parents interacted with your teacher once, maybe twice a year at PTI's?
My wife is a teacher now. Between power school updates, seemingly endless IPP's, ad hoc phone meetings and never ending emails from parents, she's often working 7 days a week.
Parents email her at 8pm on a work day and are upset if she doesn't reply by the next morning.
All this additional work, plus more kids per class and lower (based on inflation) pay than our teachers growing up made.
What a job.
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Pretty much my experience too, except that it's directly from students. They've been raised to think this sort of access to teachers is normal.
I had one student who screamed at me in class because he was upset that I didn't respond to a question he had about an assignment almost immediately, and thus he felt he "couldn't complete the work". The student sent me an email at 1 pm on a Saturday. I was at a kid's birthday party for one of my son's classmates. I responded later that evening around 6 pm. Apparently, that wasn't good enough for this psycho. Following his screaming rant at me I patiently explained to him that "I have a family to take care of on the weekend", to which he responded, "Yeah, well I have a family too, and they're very distressed about your lack of help!!!" Then he stormed out of the room and yelled F***! at the top of his lungs. This is also a student who has such a severe learning disability/behavioral disorder that he would come to my office hours and ask me what exact sentences he should write for his essay. We would talk about the nature of the assignment and the kind of content he should include. I would give a sample sentence and then he would write it down verbatim and say "should I write this? Is this okay?", to which I would reply, "that was just an example, you need to write what you think is best based on your own thoughts." Again, that wasn't good enough and the student complained that I wasn't helping him enough to my Dean.
Just an absolute nightmare. I'm sure his parents taught him to act that way with his teachers and they enabled that behavior. Someone kept pushing him through the system until he got to me. I had severe anxiety attacks each day before class just because I was anticipating having to deal with his crazy ####.
Now bear in mind, these students are far and few between, and most students are easy to work with and can handle their responsibilities well, but students like these take up 90% of my time and energy, and I'm simply not equipped to deal with a person that extreme. Quite frankly, I don't know who is equipped to deal with someone like that.
Not sure what the solution is, but I just wanted to commiserate. The job is draining.