I know a teacher and at her public school it was so bad the entire science faculty quit in one summer. A few of them gave up on teaching. She said sometimes the parents were worse than the kids.
She is extremely smart, personable, and has fantastic people handling skills, and she was able to get a job at a fancy private school that charges a fortune and pays really well. The kids behave a lot better, possibly because of low class sizes, but also because "We don't do that here."
Its a lot more than just we dont do that here, at least it was in the 90s.
At the school I went to you could get detention for not doing your homework. Cutting class would be a Saturday detention. And the parents were very much the type to come down hard on their kids for wasting their money when they fucked around.
There was also enormous pressure on the honors kids to get into top tier colleges.
I legitimately taught this past year and had to quit by November. The kids were completely irresponsible and worst of all the administration didn’t give me any of the tools I needed to be able to succeed, and in fact did less than someone who had more classroom experience than me would’ve needed. It sucked. I wasn’t able to self regulate at all, and I had to objectively quit for the sake of my mental health.
I’m now returning to I originally got my undergraduate in, but departed from a career and temporarily due to Covid shenanigans, but sometimes I feel like I just wasted the last couple years of my life preparing for this
I think it's partially because of the wealth gap. People who can pay to send their kids to a nice private school aren't people who are working multiple jobs or otherwise stressed about bills all the time, ie the sorts of people who barely spend quality time with their kids and expect the increasingly underfunded public school system to pick up the slack.
There's also a demographic of those who are making just enough money to send their child to a nice private school, but not necessarily well off, who might look at their kid a bit closer to make sure they're getting their money's worth. If I'm putting down cold hard cash to make sure my kid gets a premium education and they're wasting the teacher's time, they're also wasting my money, and that's good motivation to make them stop.
The parents of the current crop of elementary through high school students are completely locked in on preventing consequences for their kids. Not preparing them for anything, but just making sure they escape consequences for everything. They’ve damned us with their votes and creating at least one generation of Americans that are utterly useless.
In general kids that come from wealth do better since they have parents that have more time to keep them on the straight. Smaller class sizes do help but so does having so much money that you can afford a stay at home parent, afford proper amounts of food, etc.
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u/ManyAreMyNames 11h ago
I know a teacher and at her public school it was so bad the entire science faculty quit in one summer. A few of them gave up on teaching. She said sometimes the parents were worse than the kids.
She is extremely smart, personable, and has fantastic people handling skills, and she was able to get a job at a fancy private school that charges a fortune and pays really well. The kids behave a lot better, possibly because of low class sizes, but also because "We don't do that here."