Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

Oh, okay. Yeah I have made that mistake myself too I guess.

I agree that words have meaning, but IMO we want to focus the narrative on people who may have been unfortunate through no fault of their own. We want to treat them with compassion and take the time to find the right words for them. Words that they might describe themselves with. ...But they might say "I'm dumb" and think nothing of it.

The goal is to remove friction from the path to policy change, because we desire an outcome of improved efficiency. We may have to be creative with language to do it.

I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities. These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile."

Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.

I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.

I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

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Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.

At the point when he was confronted, had he already stolen the petitions. The fact that he gave them back doesn't turn that successful theft into a mere 'attempt'. It doesn't matter whether he was confronted a minute later or an hour later.

You should write this up on Quora so it sticks around.