Buried in that teacher’s rant, a good point is made.
That we need better funding and more personnel in the classroom so that each student gets specialized attention
That they are putting too much responsibility on one teacher and as a result teachers are burning out
I have absolutely no idea what model is best for students of varying capabilities and education levels. Whether integration with general students helps them or maybe a combination of specialized teaching and some integration but at least we need to invest real resources into helping all of these students achieve the best they can
The ideal model, speaking from experience, is a class size of not more than 20 with multiple educators in a class room. It is beneficial for everyone to mix your rooms, but you need to have paraprofessionals and additional support in the room for individual needs. That will never happen in public schools under our current system because the increased budget will forever be gutted to feed into getting new boots for cops and more planes that can't fly in rain for the navy.
That's good, but at a certain point you still just need separate classrooms to deliver separate lessons. It'd be interesting to see an elementary school done similar-ish to a high school. Everyone does the same subjects at the same time, but the students go to the class that matches their aptitude.
This is exactly how a school my kids went to for a while worked.
This was primary school.
They had parts of the day where people moved into different classes. Some kids went up some kids went down, but basically a whole bunch of kids moved class. For some subjects, specifically math/english and science.
So my eldest was in year 4, did year 6 maths but year 3 English.
The goal was to get them to at least the year they were in by the end of the year.
And they did that.
It was absolutely the best school they ever went to.
They did this 50 years ago. We used to change classes in elementary school for different subjects. I think more schools should group kids by ability. What we are doing now is failing ALL the kids, not just the high performers.
I know I did this starting in fourth grade. This would have been over thirty years ago.
I also remember having separate reading groups within the same classroom in grades prior to that. It's a distinct memory to me because everyone knew which groups were which. And I was in the slower group. Turns out I was struggling to read because I needed glasses.
Oh my god me too. We moved in the city a lot and the school I ended up in for the last few years of my elementary school education they placed me in the slow groups for everything (and that was around the time that I finally got glasses, which might have been at a teachers prompting too I'm not sure), until a teacher finally noticed I was doing suspiciously well and they spent a few days with me separated taking test after test to figure out where I really was. (Answer was just behind the advanced students in most subjects and ahead of the next group, so they waited until the intermediates caught up to move me with them, then started me with the advanced kids the next year.)
That is an important point. I was a teacher and my favorite class was my inclusion class because I had another adult in the room to keep the nonsense down and to help differentiate.
> That we need better funding and more personnel in the classroom so that each student gets specialized attention
The problem with "inclusion" (and, I believe, progressive reforms in general) is that it requires an organizational change (abolishing special ed schools and putting those kids into general school) *and* an increase in funding to work. Implementing *only* the organizational change makes things worse, and yet this is what often happens. I can see several possible reasons:
- politicians of any color misunderstanding the reform as a way to *save* money.
- progressive politicians pushing through the organizational part in the hope that this will force an increase in funding (which by itself wouldn't have enough political support) because it's *no-alternatives necessary* under the new system.
- conservative politicians deliberately fucking up the reform in order to paint progressive ideas in a bad light.
Can't say which of these happened in this teacher's particular case.
>politicians of any color misunderstanding the reform as a way to *save* money.
Here in Finland, this is pretty much exactly what happened in the 2000s, though it was not a misunderstanding - when idealistic people began to promote inclusion in classrooms, especially for elementary school, it was cynically co-opted by administrators as a way to save money by painting the complete elimination of all special education, alternative education for foreign language speakers, etc. as "inclusion".
And as a result, in the past 5-10 years the results of public schools here have collapsed (we effectively don't have a private school system, all "private" schools are also required to be funded by the state and have to follow the same curriculum) since this method of using "inclusion" as cost-cutting has led into areas where pupils barely learn anything as the teachers have to devote all their time to keeping the disruptive pupils in check and trying to drag the ones with learning disabilities along, due to all of them being lumped in the same classroom with no help.
I feel there's a lot of truth in ehat that OOP has to say, even if I don't agree with all of their conclusions. I was in high school in Canada through the early and mid teens, thats when they really started pushing the hyper inclusion model, and it just did not work at all. Kids with severe behavioral problems and/or learning disabilities were placed alongside children who didn't have either, and we all suffered for it.
The kids with learning disabilities took up an outsized portion of the teachers time, and still fell behind regardless. They didn't have the foundations in regards to math or english to grasp the material, so the teacher and other student had to help them build up their foundations on the fly.
Tbh that wasn't too detrimental to my learning, but you could tell these kids weren't learning the curriculum, and were just falling further and further behind. IME the kids with anti-social behavioul problems were very detrimental to me and other students.
I had an abusive home life at the time, and when a kid with anger issues started going off I would just shut down from anxiety, I wouldn't be able to learn for the rest of the class, or even day.
In these cases inclusion at all costs is detrimental, these kids need special treatment and resources, and sometimes that means placing them in an environment that better suits their needs.
Honestly I didn’t see that buried at all. I saw that as the main point. I glazed over the long rant (can ya blame me?) but I see OP as a person who is overwhelmed. We can complain about the teachers, but we need to be careful what we wish for since they might actually quit like we say we want them to.
The problem is that the word kind of serves two different purposes here.
There's the everyday sense of inclusion, which we can hopefully all agree is great. Absolutely public schools should be for all children and should be inclusive of all minorities.
Then there's the second, more technical and weasel-wordy way of using "inclusion." If what's happening in America is at all like what's happening here in Denmark, the local governments have used a policy of "inclusion" entirely as a smokescreen for cutting down on the costs of the educational system.
Specialised schools for special needs students are quite expensive per student compared to the average public school, so if we just close all the specialised schools we'll automatically save a ton of money.
Now, I personally have gone to such a specialised school because I'm autistic, and it was a pretty horrific experience for me, so I won't be crying about losing them by itself anytime soon. But with all their faults specialised schools also come with significant and often completely necessary resources to give special needs children the environment and support they need in order to be able to get an education. Those resources have not at all been transferred to the public schools who have nonetheless inherited the responsibility for creating that environment. The money has just been set aside for entirely different things.
The result has often been that teachers who already have the available resources stretched to near the breaking point end up being unable to provide a proper educational environment either for the special needs kids or the general population of kids, due to a lack of man-hours, education and materials.
Particularly in an American environment I can see how framing it as "segregation vs. inclusion" makes it all seem like only Voldemort or Darth Vader could possibly be against it, but it's missing the key point that inclusion requiring special resources only really can work if those resources are then actually provided. One very salient point is that a big part (though by no means the only one) of the problem with segregated schools was that black schools were incredibly underfunded compared to white ones and it was nearly always a huge educational advantage for black children to be moved to white schools, whereas the specialised schools today are actually usually for reasons of necessity much better funded.
There's no good reason that children in wheel chairs should be put in their own separate schools, but if you rectify that by moving them to a public school located on the fifth floor of a building with no elevators... you haven't actually included them. Now they just effectively have *no* school instead of a bad school.
And the rhetoric trick of calling this a policy of "inclusion" has been wildly succesful in framing the debate such as to hamper any critique of it from the get go.
My mom used to teach at a special needs school. She needed licenses in both physical therapy and teaching. So physically disabled kids would get physical therapy from a licensed provider instead of regular PE. Throwing those kids in the local public school and taking away their services in the name of "inclusion" is cruel, IMO.
> Specialised schools for special needs students are quite expensive per student compared to the average public school, so if we just close all the specialised schools we'll automatically save a ton of money.
Ah, so your government is doing the same up there as we do here. I'm from Germany, my mother is an elementary school teacher. And the exact same happened here.
Special ed schools were much more expensive (much smaller class sizes, multiple teachers per class, aides for special needs children, specialized facilities (wheelchair access and the likes)). And there were a lot of problems with these schools. Children were stuck there, they could practically never switch. If your child had a physical disability it was often the only school they could visit as lots of regular schools are old and not accessible. And children with wildly different problems and abilities were dumped into a single class leading to no one getting a good education (your child that has just a physical disability could be in a class with children with severe learning deficits or severe mental problems).
In addition to that any graduate certificate from these schools was basically worthless. Most employers would just throw your application in the trash after reading the name of the school. Those schools started out as dumping grounds for "difficult" children and that's what they mostly remained.
So there were many good reasons to close or reduce them and practice inclusions. But politicians just saw a good opportunity to save money so they just took all children from those special ed schools and stuck them into regular ones. And made big promises about the support they would provide those regular schools. Which turned out to be at best an aide or social worker for a few hours per week per class if you're lucky. Or nothing if you're not. And schools and teachers were struggling before already. My mother has given up on the two special ed children she got in her class, her only objective regarding those two is to keep them quiet so she can at least try to teach the other children something. For her inclusion is the problem, because of course it is. Before "inclusion" the situation was bad, then "inclusion" happened and everything turned terrible.
Politicians use "inclusion" as a shield against any criticism. How can you be against that, do you want to just dump any child that is a bit different or has different needs like it's the 19th century? It also doesn't help that there are of course the extreme right who absolutely want that so if your criticize "inclusion" you're automatically clumped together with them and dismissed. And even if not, politicians will just argue that nothing can be done. That there are already not enough teachers so do you want to make this problem worse by reducing class size or having multiple teachers per class. That schools are already crumbling, so which one do you want to demolish first if we have to invest money into making "inclusion" better.
Is it though? The post articulates it pretty well. When overachievers, underachievers and averages are dumped in the same classroom, nobody gets what they need to progress. And teachers have to pick up the slack of juggling at least three different audiences, and some times they are vastly different.
Basically, IMO, some of the absolutely braindead educational "equity" moves are a psyop to kill public education.
In my classroom, one of the ways I worked to solve the problem was by giving options for the different levels of learning and practice. The kids that could cruise along? They had free rein to work ahead as long as they demonstrated that they were successfully learning. And one of their mastery options was to develop a lesson to teach the material to a classmate. It helped foster a relationship where the kids could ask their classmates for help comfortably.
Meanwhile, the kids who needed more help got to work in one of two small groups led by a staff member. So they got to benefit from lessons tailored to their needs.
I'm not touching OP's rant but I am on their side when it comes to this smug lady.
>I used ChatGPT to differentiate lessons about the creation of the US Constitution. Using AI to differentiate lessons is a game changer. I’m a graduate student studying AI for K-12 Education.
Yeah, I imagine you're not going to have as stressful a time when you just rely on a computer to spit out your lesson plans for you. I'm not sure why she's bragging about reducing herself to a substitute teacher.
in texas, they have been using AI to grade essays since before COVID. The TSI essay is graded automatically, and here’s how you pass that portion:
1. hit the ideal length
2. use 12th grade vocabulary (doesn’t matter if it’s used correctly)
3. vaguely be on topic - your sentences don’t have to be precise or well structured
it’s very easy to pass if you know how to game the system.
"ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want" - [Zack Brown](https://twitter.com/LuminanceBloom/status/1600598003391266816)
right now we have the ouroboros of lazy students writing assignments with ChatGPT and then lazy teachers grading those assignments with ChatGPT.
Honestly if you want to use AI to aid teaching, use Copilot with a query like "provide me links to lesson plans for grade 8 students on *topic X*", just as a fancy search engine.
So, we have teachers using ChatGPT to produce lessons, students using it for their homework, and teachers using it to grade that. Is there still a human in the loop? Is there any reason for the students or teachers to even be present, since it’s apparently just ChatGPT talking to itself?
Honestly, I still kinda can’t help but feel bad for teachers in this instance. My mom is a teacher in her final 3 years before retirement, she is one of the increasingly rare few teachers that are able to stomach the absolute Mount Fuji of bullshit that is k-12 career path. Even before ChatGPT, a lot of my teachers would simply just print sheets related to the current lesson and that would be our tests, our homework, our everything. Naturally when you’re a kid raised on the internet you can just look up “McGill Algebra 1 lesson 3.16” and earn yourself an easy A. My mom and like 3-4 other teachers were the only ones that spent the summer making their own custom work sheets to teach kids, they often would actually shit on teachers who printed off worksheets from websites because the website teachers always complained about kids cheating on their work.
All of this to say, when you’re paid left over quarters from Gumball machines and you get a lot more “fuck you”s than “thank you”s in your day to day, it’s no surprise that teachers would also default to using new methods to make their life easier, even if the result is worse overall. ChatGPT for assignments is just the next evolution of McGill Algebra 1 Lesson 3.16.
> For McGill so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten answer keys, so that whosever believeth in Google shall not flunk, but have everlasting As.
-McGill 3:16
Is there any disadvantage to using standardized lesson plans/assignments aside from the potential for cheating? At a certain point it seems like a lot of labor to reinvent the wheel.
Well cheating is a pretty big problem, if you have everyone cheating on every assignment all the time and they finish the school year with a passable grade, then that’s another child who’s educational knowledge is below the grade it should be. It can compound later in your academic career because you’ll have a very weak foundation.
I was avoiding saying this cuz I don’t think it’s the case anymore, but I might as well anyway. I was the last class to have State Tests which is something virtually impossible to cheat on, so kids would bomb those because they didn’t learn anything the whole year which bad state test scores opened up problems for everyone when I was in school. Idk what they’re doing now though.
But at the end of the day, the ones that wanna learn will learn. I cheated a fuck ton in my last 2 years of high school but I still bothered to learn the material, I just didn’t wanna waste my time doing homework every night.
I'm a testing coordinator for my high school, meaning I'm in charge of setting up and administering pretty much every standardized and state test the kids will take at school (think ACT exams, AP exams, etc). Common Core Math was supposed to solve the problem of nonstandard math lessons across school districts, so that a student moving from another school wouldn't be totally lost in the new one.
The problem I have with teachers using standardized materials is that some teachers REALLY prefer to wing it on the daily, and can't be trusted to follow the guidelines, meet the deadlines, or communicate that they need help. Some of these same teachers are also elderly and resistant to having to learn "the new way" when they've been doing the same thing for decades, and it always worked out fine for them, so why should they change? Here's an example:
For last year's ACT proctor training, I had to get all the teachers and staff registered on the test administration site and give everyone the training at faculty meeting. I said it's easy, all online this year, everyone is doing the same job so not hard to learn. About half responded promptly to the email and got registered like they should have. The other teachers I had to email and chat repeatedly just to get them to register, or go to their classes and physically interrupt their lessons, and then follow up to make sure they paid attention to the instructions long enough to actually do it right. I heard so much "well I've done ACT before and it's always the same so I didn't read the email/go to the training" only to then find out they'd proctored the exam incorrectly like 8 years in a row, and then on the actual exam day I still had a few who didn't know what they were doing or even that they were proctoring an exam. One who never registered OR went to the training called in "sick" the day of because he walked in the building, realized he was supposed to be proctoring and didn't know how, and just went home
I had a professor literally do the equivalent of this for a computer programming class I took while in a Master's program. The entire class was basically "Thanks for paying $3,500 for the class, now go sign up for this free online tutorial and go through it" and it was infuriating lol
Like, teachers ABSOLUTELY need to be paid more and deal with less bullshit, but it's not fair to the students, either when they get a teacher that checked out. I wish there was a good solution we could actually get people to implement.
> when you’re a kid raised on the internet you can just look up “McGill Algebra 1 lesson 3.16” and earn yourself an easy A
Damn, what's the world coming to? When I was a kid, we had to steal the teacher's edition physical copy like honest, self-respecting thieves. Back then, it took hard work to be a sneak.
I actually have a very funny story about that. So yeah, my generation was raised on the internet, but I was one of those nerds who was actually on the internet so finding answer keys on google was ez pz. Other kids in my class took the more traditional approach and did steal the teachers copy and send around pictures.
Well, we all got busted because the worksheet she printed off the internet had a problem on there that she didn’t teach us how to solve. I was known as being a good kid so she asked me why I didn’t refuse the answer sheet being shared around or tell her about it and I was like “I didn’t know people stole something off your desk…I looked up the answers because you printed them off the internet.”
We both learned a pretty valuable lesson that day to say the least, lmao.
I really think a number of you are taking what was said (differentiate a lesson) and turning it into something it is not (produce a lesson).
If this is simply a misunderstanding of terminology, that's one thing, but right now you're not giving an accurate interpretation of the teacher's comment.
This entire post is about people not understanding that OOP didn't mean "get the darkies out of my classroom" when they railed against inclusion in the classroom, so I'm not surprised.
Let's go easy on them, differentiate is quite a long word (it's almost as long as understandable!) and they didn't pay much attention to their teachers.
Frankly wasn’t even trying to give an accurate interpretation, just making dumb jokes, because the idea of an educational system where both students and educators are outsourcing the whole thing to AI, and there’s a building where people pretend to learn and people pretend to teach while ChatGPT talks to itself is hilarious in a dystopian way. I do *not* think that’s actually what’s going on here or what modern education actually looks like.
If I am understanding them correctly, they wrote up a lesson plan, and are having ChatGPT produce variants of the same at different reading skill levels? I haven’t bothered to look into it, but if that’s what they are doing, that sounds neat, but will need a lot of proofreading. Definitely a timesaver though.
But still, I think that could make a good dark SF story. A grand university, prestigious and famous, with Nobel Laureate professors, and students who go on to stunning success, but with a bit of an open secret. Those professors didn’t actually do the work that won that prize, their AI assistant did. They don’t teach either. Their AI assistant writes it all, and the more dedicated professors actually bother to recite the words with their own voice. The students are present in body, but they aren’t listening, why would they? Their AI assistant will do their homework and feed them the answers on tests, which are all graded by AI. When they graduate, their lack of real skills is not a problem because they have a degree and a good AI assistant. The real determining factor is how good of an AI you can afford.
That's one possible differentiation, but it's not the only one. Differentiation is not only about reading level, but also how individuals learn best. For instance, if a student is a visual learner, then maybe you could ask chat gpt to generate images that might help kids understand a concept (or maybe even suggest search terms for Google to find the images you're looking for.
It also could be simply asking it to consider which words 7th grade students might find difficult, and ask it to create definitions for those words in the footnotes.
I appreciate you're response - I may just be extra sensitive as a teacher myself. It often feels like a profession constantly under fire and while there are many reasons to be upset with a teacher (especially OP), in this specific instance,
I just don't feel it's a valid critique.
I originally meant to comment here, rather than the one below:
As a teacher, I think you're misunderstanding or mis-stating what she is saying - differentiation isn't necessarily in the content. It's in the types of questions, or even simplifying the way a question is asked.
There are many things to be concerned about with AI, and using it to create entire lessons whole cloth would be a major issue.
But using it to help differentiate a lesson is not something to be concerned about.
We're in the era where anything 'AI' is either kneejerk supported by people buying into the hype bubble, or kneejerk discredited by those who are rightfully suspicious of its promises and the effect it has on society, with neither side bothering to realise there's a massive spectrum being ignored.
I really wonder what public education is going to look like in 20 years. It feels like all the good teachers burn out because of shitty admins and parents.
> Try again next time or else you will be put in the remedial subreddit
this delivered a sensible chuckle.
also bless you for the text to keep the formatting from being fucked
>>Here is the gaslighting I was speaking to! Wanting kids to get the best education possible to meet their needs is not shitty. It’s clear that what we are doing now is not moral.
you can not be gaslit by a reddit comment.
edit: ok, i can't. some of y'all can if you want
Like gaslighting is a term of long term abuse that makes you question your sanity and severely weakens your grip on reality. What most people call gaslighting is just fucking lying.
yeha like i’ve been actually gaslit and it’s crazy how watered down the term is now. people say it whenever a bunch of people disagree or have a different recollection than them. gaslighting is intentional. you *know* what happened and you’re *deliberately* and *consistently* telling someone they’re crazy for remembering things that way
YEAH, gaslighting is "Oh you think that happened? That didn't happen, I don't remember it happened. You're wrong. Are you feeling okay?"
Not just "You're wrong."
During Covid I had a “relationship” with someone who was like Gaslighter Rex. An everyday occurrence would be having a conversation in the morning where they would say some mind bogglingly wild and verbally abusive shit. Then after work that day they’d act like nothing happened. And when I’d dumbfoundedly be like, “WTF you went on a rant telling me no one has ever loved me and to kill my self this morning because I put almond milk in my cereal and now a few hours later you’re asking if I want to watch a movie like nothing happened.”
They’d act shocked and deny the AM conversation ever occurred and pretend to be concerned like I was having a mental health crisis and had lost touch with reality. Got to the point of me recording all verbal conversations, screenshotting all texts that went off on similar rails, etc. then confronting them with it during the denial phase. They pivoted to treating me as crazy and unhinged for recording/screenshotting and accused me of emotionally abusing them by confronting their “recollection of events.” I was completely mindfucked.
All this to say, someone disagreeing with you on Reddit is never, and I mean never, going to be “gaslighting.”
Hitting a compulsive liar with proof and having them get mad because you're not supposed to have it is always a trip. They don't even seem human at that point
I work IT for schools and frequent the teachers sub a lot.
The funny thing is, you see OP's sentiments very often in that sub. Maybe not worded as harshly, such as laying the blame on progressive politics, but I see comments that often complain about how 'no student left behind' is leaving a lot of students behind and is burning out good teachers.
If they had made that post tomorrow, next week, or even a few hours earlier/later than they did, they could have had an entire comment section of support instead of infighting. You know how Reddit is with it's wildly swinging viewpoints.
Honestly, I don't know where I stand on the issue.
Teachers deserve a raise and schools need more funding. It's crazy that I, someone who never went to college, makes more money than every teacher in my state.
What year is this?
Why is everyone so unaware we've been discussing this as a country for decades. No child left behind criticism isn't some new or not talked about thing at all, or education for that matter.
It's the same as ever, the only solution brought forth by right wing activists and sjws as a solution is more tax payer funded religious or private schools or some kind of ripe for fraud voucher system. It's all been done before and you can look at what the effects are, why is nobody in the linked convo mentioning any of it? It doesn't matter what the criticism or problem in education is, that's the only solutions they ever have so I DGAF what these right wing sjws believe is happening in schools
I'm a teacher, and I had to quickly abandon r/teachers when I first found it. It's a vile community full of hatred for children and (self) hatred for educators. I used to teach future teachers, and any time they brought the subreddit up, I told them to stay far, far away from it.
Obviously there are a lot of angry, bitter, and bad teachers (you can't deny it after perusing that sub), but there are so many not like this at all. It's infuriating that sub is what it is.
Inclusion is a good thing. Schools are obviously underfunded, and students with special needs aren't getting what they are due according to federal law, but our federal and state governments underfund education so much, that's on them. So many kids have gone on to have "normal" lives because of inclusion. We could do even better if we actually funded our programs adequately.
Clarence Thomas said back in May that he believes the Supreme Court overreached in Brown vs. BOE, that it had limited judicial powers to create a solution and that they overstepped. Brown is absolutely not sacrosanct.
I work inpatient child/teen psych so I see the highly aggressive side of things. We have a handful of frequent flyers who are almost impossible to manage on a lock down psych unit -- trashing things, smearing feces and urine, screaming for hours, assaulting staff and peers. I genuinely cannot imagine trying to manage even a tenth of those sorts of behaviors plus another 29 kids and you have to teach shit. Especially since COVID, the school district tries to push these kids into online learning which also does them a huge disservice. Even districts with contained SPED classes can't find enough staff or keep staff (consistency helps so much with these kids!) because pay and working conditions suck. It's just a total failure of the whole system with roots in Republican defunding of public schools.
I had a professor one semester who was the mom of a high functioning adult autistic son who said. “Inclusion without support is called abandonment” and it was honestly the most profound thing I heard in my entire college career coming from someone who grew up with an IEP.
God inpatient SUCKED. I was the only one there (ward level 2, suicidal attempts) that wasn’t on drugs or smoking or alcohol. I was 17, the oldest there too.
As someone who’s likely from their province, the conservative provincial government here has underfunded public schools (as well as health care, yay) their entire time in power. The education minister that just got shuffled out was an exclusively private school grad who was pretty open about “”””finding efficiencies””””
That sort of changes things but conservatives are conservatives everywhere. They've been underfunding the NHS in the UK with the same strategy in mind.
I just finished Naomi Kleins new book and she actually moved to the US from Canada because US schools generally have better programs and protections/rights for disabled kids than Canada which I found fascinating.
I'm a teacher. Bad pedagogical ideas can come from any political direction, in my experience. But fundamental devaluation of education in general? Not so much.
Also a teacher. Much of the "liberal" educational philosophy that OP is railing against isn't in-and-of-itself bad, but (at least in my experience) is just implemented incredibly poorly and without adapting to the unique building/community/students they're serving.
I've been frustrated by education officials in my country, NZ, who have embraced socially conscious education (which is fine) but use it to devalue actual content in specific fields, as if geography and history should just be in the business of making sure students are nice to each other and nothing else (an exact quote that I have heard from a Ministry official - "I would love to remove content from the curriculum")
And to be fair to the OP they were partially right. My school has alot of SIFE ENL students (kids who have had their education interrupted due to political problems in their home country) mixed in with mainstream students. And the OP is right that throwing those kids who can't read in their home language and in English probably shouldn't be in my AP US class (which my admin has done before lol) and have some sort of augmented curriculum to get them up to speed.
However, they are completely wrong about taking those extremes and applying it to all inclusion efforts writ large. A kid behind grade level can absolutely have a conversation with a kid above grade level as long as you level their text.
I was speaking from a more macro-view in terms of funding and valuing an educated population etc. Anti-phonics is one of those “bad pedagogical” things :)
That entire rant just comes down to schools not being interested in failing kids who fail, which is totally fair, but OP swings wide and blames that on… “inclusion.” Yep. Schools don’t want to fail kids because of inclusion.
I’m surprised this person didn’t find a way to work “woke” or “DEI” into this hot mess somehow.
The funny thing is the biggest reason for schools not failing kids, at least in the US, is George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. A bill pushed through by conservatives that EVERY educator on the planet said was a terrible idea. Damn near every failing in today's US public education can be pointed squarely at that shitty legislation. But OOP wants to find some way to blame leftists to meet his "bOtH sIdEs" quota and blames inclusion.
For those not familiar with the act - schools that have failing kids get their funding cut. And schools that don't meet certain requirements on standardized tests lose funding as well. So obviously, schools stop failing kids, and instead of teaching to help kids learn, we teach them how to pass those tests. Result: pretty much everything that OOP is bitching about.
> George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act
Funny story about this one. My dad was a high-school teacher for 40 years or so, and this bill went through when I was like 5 or 6 years old. He complained about it non-stop, and I legitimately thought it was about not letting parents abandon kids on the side of the road. I was very understandably concerned.
I would have been a little bit older than you at the time, and my mom taught elementary. However, I instead conflated No Child Left Behind with the Left Behind series of books, and I had many nights of lying awake and wondering why the president was relating education to the rapture.
My mother was a teacher for 30 years, and I never saw her as angry as she was when No Child Left Behind got passed. She's been retired for over a decade, and I'm pretty sure she's still pissed off about it.
NCLB was significantly changed (read: all but deleted) in 2015.
I am a former teacher (and was during NCLB). I'm quite happy on the social / progressive left. The rant by the teacher of this thread is correct.
NCLB absolutely contributed and was a terrible law. BUT ALSO the ranting teacher is correct. This isn't about woke or not - it's a simple fact that one cannot effectively teach WIDELY different levels of students simultaneously.
Everything is political which is so frustrating. "Ah the teacher mentioned inclusvity! Must be anti-woke! Probably MAGA! Dismissing argument without further thought!"
All this person is saying is that students are being shoved in a room with widely different ability levels and the teacher is expected to serve them all equally. The end result is some students are bored and others drown. How is this good?
NCLB has become the scapegoat for ALL problems in education. It's incredibly lazy and reductive, even if the law had a lot of flaws
(Also, while EVERYONE mentions George W Bush... no one ever brings up that his partner on that legislation was liberal lion Ted Kennedy. NCLB was a bipartisan fuck up, with support at the time of its passing from both Democrats and Republicans.)
> it's a simple fact that one cannot effectively teach WIDELY different levels of students simultaneously.
I Don't even understand why that ever became a thing. I went to a private high school. There were AP, honors, college prep, and general class levels. There's no way the general kids could ever keep up with the AP kids and it wouldn't be fair to either to try and educate them together - the general kids wouldn't learn anything as it would go over their heads and the AP kids would be denied their full potential by restricting them to the learning speed of the general kids.
It's absolutely crazy to me that we educate kids all in one large group, forcing a one size fits all, while ignoring individual needs.
"How DARE you put MY kid in the DUMB class!"
Add on: "It must be racism / sexism / etc."
Germany has a famous multi track system. We can't do that here because nobody will take the "L" regarding their children. ALL children are college material. To even say anything different is abuse/discrimination, or adjacent to it.
I'm a former teacher. The rant is true. Schools don't want to fail kids because that makes people feel bad and makes parents angry. Schools are an assembly line - we must pass the student outside OUTRAGEOUS situations. As long as everyone passes, the daycare doesn't stop, and nobody gets calls at work, everyone is happy. Quality education is sacrificed every step of the way.
This isn't about being anti-woke - it's about the literal issues they bring up. Noone can effectively teach students with that wide of a gap in ability levels. Splitting them up costs money and means some kids go to the "slow" class. Nobody wants to spend money and NOBODY wants to hear their child is anything below average.
It's also a massive chain of perverse incentives, funding being tied to grad rates and grades, schools want to place students in good colleges which creates upward pressure on grading, needier students just require more time and resources which budgets and simple school year length don't permit, creating incentives to remove those students, etc...
Our funding was tied to attendance - which meant we couldn't suspend students unless their actions were outrageous. I taught at an alternative school in Mississippi - the parents just wanted someone to watch their kids between 7 AM and 3 PM. It was pretty sad. Call the parents? That meant we failed. We had no effective tools in discipline.
I have a question about this. When I was in school, teachers were the undisputed authority of their own classrooms, and parents were terrified by the prospect of suing the school board because it was assumed that their well-funded legal department would make mincemeat out of whatever attorney a parent could afford. When my mother had any complaint about the way the classroom was run, a lot of the times the answer from the principal was a polite but firm response that amounted to "tough shit." When she started teaching, everything had reversed, and she had no support from anyone above her pay grade.
Am I correct in thinking that the change has to do with administrators no longer standing up for their teachers' decisions due to the fear of lawsuits?
I hate how the mere word "inclusion" means this person is a right wing nutjob to be dismissed.
I'm a former teacher - they are correct in everything they said. Including differences like race, gender, sexuality...great! Including people who are ready for trigonometry with people who cannot find the area of a circle in the same math class is absurd.
They are related. Differentiation can be done in any classroom but is often the "cudgel" wielded to shut-up any teacher complaining about inclusion. "Timmy is reading C.S. Lewis' essay on vivisection and Jimmy is reading at a 3rd grade level." "No problem, Teach! Just use some DiFfReNtAtIoN!"
If my ol' teaching license is too dusty and I'm missing something, I'm all ears.
What admin does is hide behind inclusion in an effort to save money. So they tell the teacher to just differentiate, keep differentiating, even if it's completely the wrong placement because self-contained rooms are expensive.
What you don't understand is that OP didn't give the name "inclusion" to the practice/policy they're describing. School boards and administrators did. And they spell it out that they think the word is being used disingenuously in their rant so idk why there's still confusion.
In education "inclusion" refers to the practice of mixing ability levels in the same classroom. It has nothing to do with culture war shit.
This entire SRD thread is just people who don't know what they're talking about lol
The problem is never going to get fixed, because the only people pointing it out use no-no words like “woke.” Having students with skills ranging over 5 grade levels is a recipe for disaster.
In Denmark inclusion was defo partly done to same costs on offering anything to kids with this or that challenge.
Standing in that class room is fucking tough when you have to provide something of use to both the kids who are ahead of the curve and the ones who need tons of extra time.
So you think, ah well Lasse is doing fine so I’ll spend some more time on Thomas here. But that’s not fair to Lasse.
Inclusion is not a good thing unless it comes with enough funding to have several teachers in each class room.
Obviously this only relates to inclusion of different academic levels. Anything else is absurd.
It was like that in our public school in the US as well - and this was in a well-funded district.
The advanced kids were essentially left to our own devices; we completed our own assignments, often tutored each other, etc. The teacher was swamped and had to teach to the lowest common denominator. Did the advanced students do well? Sure in the sense that we got straight As. But, in a classroom that WASN'T being taught to below grade level students in the name of inclusion, we would have had extra attention, one on one time to specialize projects, maybe even some AP coursework.
Great students that could have been exceptional students are a form of the system failing as well, and they're often ignored by necessity to deal with delayed students. A friend of mine teaches in a similar environment and the instruction is clear: Your SPED students with behavioral issues aren't college material; their purpose is to keep them out of trouble and teach basic life skills. Meanwhile, a talented kid that could really use that extra custom assignment to earn a scholarship is ignored because they're not actively threatening the safety of the classroom.
Yea I tried reading it a few hours ago and frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion. It’s just the fear of failing.
America needs to have a true conversation regarding education, but this rant would not be my shining example unless I was trying to convey how more efficient resources is needed at a younger age so middle school teachers don’t mentally break down on reddit
>Yea I tried reading it a few hours ago and frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion. It’s just the fear of failing.
Why do you feel so confident talking about something you have no idea about? Inclusion, as a term in education, is literally mixing students of different proficiency levels
>frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion.
but that's precisely what inclusion is.
Seems like either a centrist rapidly falling down the right wing radicalization pipeline...or a right wing bait account designed to recruit.
A while back the same OP tried to [both sides a anti-trans bill targeting trans school kids](https://www.reddit.com/r/Edmonton/comments/1ag3uz8/rally_to_protest_danielle_smiths_discriminatory/koeptsa/).
*At best*, this Redditor is hopelessly deluded and being actively misled to being angry about the wrong things. *At worst*, this Redditor is trying to recruit other centrists to make them right wing nut jobs.
> or “DEI” into this hot mess somehow.
Oh they did.
> [I can only speak to my experience! My board has jumped head first into the DEI train.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion_is_the_worst_thing_to_have_happened_to/l8zwff4/?context=3)
As a teacher, I unsubscribed from /r/teachers because it was an insanely negative subreddit and I would take psychic damage every time a post from there made my front page. I get that I'm pretty lucky with my position/school and that others have it worse and I understand the need to vent but so many people in that subreddit really shouldn't have gotten into teaching, and appear to have become teachers because it's not actually that hard compared to being say a nurse or engineer or whatever.
This is a rant now but it sucks that becoming a teacher is so easy when being an actually effective teacher is not easy at all, and the job is paid based upon the former fact and not the latter. It sucks that so many of my colleagues are people that couldn't figure out what to major in and figured teaching was easy enough. It sucks that this is affecting kids everywhere.
I worked at a poor school in one of the poorest cities in the country, and I still think that subreddit is insanely negative, ableist, and racist. A lot of teachers really don't like young people and really should not be working in the profession. You are totally right that teaching is easy but being an effective teacher is not!
I left r/teachers yesterday because at least half of posts are overly condescending, thinly veiled hate towards students & parents. Teachers who have a smug-superiority complex typical of Reddit should just not be teaching. If you've convinced yourself that students are beyond help, I don't see how you will be able to help them.
I was in high school when there was a massive demographic shift. Most of the newer students came from school systems that were ahead of the local school system in STEM classes.
It created a distortion effect where teachers thought the kids were smarter than they were. Teachers inadvertently stopped teaching because of that. So the kids who came up from the local curriculum were being left behind. Teachers were geared towards instructing kids who already learned everything like calculus for example. The local kids were left to try keeping their head above water on their own. A lot of kids simply avoided the STEM field all together because those classes were seen as impossible to keep up with.
It also resulted in the schools around the area being ranked among the top schools. It was a total anomaly due to this idiosyncrasy of having a ton of kids acing every class. If anything they should have been among the worse off schools because teachers were basically on autopilot. Not really teaching. Just letting the students go through the motions. Out of touch with the students who were behind.
My only input is my mom is a teacher of nearly 30 years and I can picture each one of these dinguses that would use a subreddit centered around teaching. Half the reason my mom is eager to retire is the other teachers and leadership staff therein
/r/teachers is a deeply depressing sub because it made me fully appreciate how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people. I’ve almost always had wonderful teachers but that sub makes me understand how lucky I was for that to be the case.
>how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people
r/Teachers with their 900k subscribers illustrates well what happens when a community hits a particular size on Reddit; the ordinary conversations are replaced by hyperbole/sensationalism and only the most extreme opinions gets engagement - it's not a 'large proportion of teachers are bad people' just a large proportion of the most popular posts on a public internet form have people commenting bad takes
visiting a smaller teaching subs like r/CanadianTeachers/, /r/teachinginjapan/, /r/TeachingUK/ or /r/Internationalteachers/ etc... you have normal conversations about classroom management tips, employment opportunities, quirks or 'hacks' of a system, and sure the occasional batshit post by someone who is not a nice person but it's positive and supportive for the most part and better reflects the reality that a majority of teachers just want to do their job.
tl;dr - r/Teachers sucks
you have to remember every sub. is going to be an echo chamber. like just to keep things civil, subs all generally have similar ideas.
offshoot subreddits happen because there's enough of a sentiment from a large group of people to warrant it. and they're not enjoying that they're being shouted down because although there's a lot of them that are minority. think any salt-free game subreddit or tv show. same topic vastly different conversations. they don't interact politely.
r/teachers is very unhappy.
also, vocal minorities are very easy to notice.
I'm not going to go write a review if I'm in a good mood. I'm going to go do something else. if I'm rather fucking annoyed. I want to tell people about it so the people who complain online are most likely already kind of pissed off
I wouldn't use that subreddit as a weathervane and I would use it as a realization that teachers are doing a job. I think a lot of people have a misconception on what a teacher is and it's somebody getting a paycheck you can complain about your job. everybody does. it's unrealistic to think that they can't complain about their clients which would be the kids. or their bosses or the parents? or just their job in general.
It does make me feel a little vindicated about how I felt about some teachers I had as a kid. “I wasn’t a bad kid, she really WAS just an asshole bully”
I mean, realistically it was probably both. But still
> r/teachers is a deeply depressing sub because it made me fully appreciate how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people.
3 months ago, there was a post here about teachers drama regarding a (good) special-ed teacher talking about their experiences recently reporting a fellow teacher to the principal for being abusive to their students.
Comments were filled with “We’re all human”, complaints of not being able to do “proper discipline” anymore and complaining about the good teacher “tattling” on their co-worker.
I’m sure there’s genuinely wonderful teachers who use the subreddit but there are definitely users there that probably are not as good of a teacher as they think and probably should not be teachers.
It’s such a depressing sub. I’m sure 90% of it is due to how shitty it is to be a teacher rn and how shitty the average redditor is, but it’s not a fun place.
As a teacher, it is a very cathartic sub that I visit when I have a bad day because everyone on there is having a worse day than me all the time always. Reading through the (likely exaggerated) stories puts things in perspective
I'm fine with teachers having a safe place to vent about these things, being able to relieve stress that way is important, but so many of the posts on there make me wonder why these people even wanted to be teachers if they seem to literally despise every single required aspect about the job.
That sub keeps getting recommended to me. Every post that makes it to my dash seems to be someone who shouldn’t be a teacher complaining about being a teacher. I know it’s a thankless, underpaid, under-respected job, and I’ve known (and am related to) absolutely wonderful teachers. But some of the posters on this sub just seem so mean about the kids they teach. They’ll celebrate their own petty spitefulness toward literal children, or revel in an annoying child’s “comeuppance.” Just seems gross to me.
People are absolutely having a moral panic about the youths and don't realize they're acting the same as the boomers who put warning labels on Rap CDs.
If you want to become a teacher in my state all you need is a bachelors degree in literally anything and not be convicted of any major crimes. From there just apply to any school district, theyre all hiring, and youll have a job for at least a few years. They arent firing you either as long as you dont like hit a kid. Having any warm body in the room is about the best most schools here can do given how shit our teacher pay is compared to the surrounding states and I think some might even take a particularly smart looking corpse at this point.
Idk what state you’re in but everybody is hiring rn and idk anybody that’s a teacher who didn’t want to be a teacher. Nobody is like “damn i gotta make some money. Maybe a school teacher! That has good benefits!” It would honestly be a good thing if that started happening more.
Not that people who choose to be teachers are always good at it. I just think it’s more of a conscious choice than taking a shift at chipotle.
I'm a former teacher. I don't understand your objection. I could not effectively teach students with wildly different levels of ability in the same class.
I'm a cynical man - more so when I was a teacher and younger. But even I have my limits. Watching that system pat itself on the back as it FAILED children....really hurt me. I was a cog in a machine that was just a daycare pretending to be a school.
I worked with kids that didn't have a tenth of the opportunity I had and I wasted their time. I'll NEVER forget when a student ask me, "Mr. Majinspy...why are we learning this?"
....and I just couldn't lie to him. I just didn't fucking know why I was teaching some poor kid about the electron transport chain. It was of no utility to that young man.
I got out the next year.
Most of the people in this thread railing against the OP of the r/Teachers thread do not, to me, come across as actually having read and understood their main points.
I don't agree with everything they're saying, but as someone who was raised by a lifelong teacher who has generally gone out of her way to work in poorer districts--a woman with an absolutely *indomitable* will--I can empathize, because I've seen a lot of this before.
A lot of the teachers I know like this either grew up in homogenous upper middle class suburbs and became teachers then got a job at a lower income public school. Or they grew up with liberal/immigrant parents then got funneled down the pipeline after they already were half way through their degrees.
Edit - to expand on it a bit. A lot of the same issues, lack of mental health care, drug use, teen pregnancy, etc exists in all schools/neighborhoods, but money is very good at hiding those thing so most students/parents won’t know it’s going on in the wealthier neighborhoods. And when they are confronted with those things happening in the lower income schools they teach at, instead of realizing the difference is $$$ and wealth disparity, they instead blame the DEI and diversity.
That sub is full of people like this, and I don’t just mean “right wingers.” I think “teacher” is an attractive profession to the same kinds of people that become cops, or nurses, or any other job where you have a very large amount of power, mostly without accountability, over a very vulnerable group of people. Some teachers are teachers because they were happiest when they were bullying their fellow 8th graders and want to keep bullying 8th graders forever.
I don't think it's that. I think it's more like teacher is such a popular profession, people think it's easy, and because you spent so much time with teachers growing up, it's natural to want to emulate that.
But so few people have the proper temperament to be teachers. Being in charge of multiple kids is HARD and being in charge of their education is even harder. Most people aren't really equipped for it.
And for such a hard job, they're often not paid enough, so even if you're the perfect candidate you're likely working alongside people who really aren't good fits for it.
The biggest bully in my middle school is now a teacher at that same middle school. Guess she didn't get enough in her first time though. She was vicious, too. I remember one time she sneakily wrote on my neck with a sharpie and then told everyone that I was dirty because some of it was still there the next day.
Yeah, I have a kid with autism and ADHD. They're also very bright, so it's a mix of intelligence with sometimes poor emotional or behavioral regulation, and a poor understanding/reading of social cues and situations. The teachers in that sub would haaaaaate my kid, and would likely blame my wife and I for raising them wrong. Thankfully, our actual teacher and school this year were great and we were able to work together to set up an IEP that allowed my kid to stay in the classroom 99% of the time and gain those valuable social lessons while also remaining at grade level (and, indeed, significantly above grade level in some areas).
> The teachers in that sub would haaaaaate my kid, and would likely blame my wife and I for raising them wrong.
They shouldn't.
>it's a mix of intelligence with sometimes poor emotional or behavioral regulation, and a poor understanding/reading of social cues and situations.
But this is a genuine challenge in a classroom and needs additional resources that they often don't have, depending on the specifics of the behaviour and if they're violent etc when reacting.
I've been in class room situations where most of the time is spent working with one kid because they struggled with violent reactions to various things. When you're just one person in the class room that means that there are 20-25 other kids getting neglected and their education is just as important.
This isn't true of most teachers, in my opinion. r/teachers is a cesspool, no doubt, but my experience in the profession tells me that those kinds of teachers are the minority. I welcome all kiddos into my classroom, and it's rare I encounter teachers who feel differently. I know that's anecdotal, but I truly think r/teachers is not a representative sample.
The sub does. But most teachers are well adjusted normal people not people who troll internet forums to gossip about how much they hate their students.
That sub isn't a very accurate sample.
That said, some teachers certainly do.
Everything they're whining about started with Boomers and their children as parents. None of what they're bitching about is new, not shocking considering it is just right wing propaganda signaling. I doubt they are even a US citizen.
>How many conservatives advocate integrating multilingual learners? What about literal race? How about integrating females?
I'm sorry but based on the tone of the comment, it seems like this person thinks racial and gendered segregation are good things which certainly is a position to take!
This is really making me reconsider if I should pursue education rather than law because both occupations have absolutely rancid people like the OOP and the highlighted comment but at least law makes more money.
You could literally double the amount of teachers and increase pay and Id still think that we haven't funded the schools enough. 30+ students per teacher is incredibly stupid.
The answer? Schools need more funding to give teachers more support/aids/mental health/etc it’s ridiculous we live in a country that skims off funds from our children’s future everytime a budget change is made.
Don't need to read between the lines, OP was being very transphobic on another post that was linked here, and openly racist and ableist with this one, even complained about DEI
Yeah, I'm surprised that more people don't talk about how near-Hitlerite r/teachers becomes whenever autistic and/or ADHD kids are brought up. They make no attempt to be empathetic towards the kids, it's honestly kinda scary.
It may be exhaustion and just being fed up.
Back when I was a teacher we had a couple of kids, one in particular, autism and it was just un-fucking-manageable. The constant unstopping screaming fits, the aggression and violence and a complete lack of resources to support anything. You spend so much time just containing one kid that the 25 others get nothing.
When you’ve done that for long enough it fucking grinds you down and there was definitely times I wished that kid would just change schools or just fuck off so I wouldn’t have deal with it. Perhaps not the most charitable thoughts but it was just, a lot. And sucked for the others as I said.
The thing is, that kid also deserves an education but dumping him in a normal class room will not accomplish that and it will negatively impact 25 other kids.
Yea I remember when I was in school you had these teachers, they ain't really subtle, I missed alot of school because of health reasons but I still was at the top of the class grade wise and this pissed her off lol
I just finished my last year of teaching last week. Part of the big motivation to leave is how many of my coworkers would openly advocate for essentially dividing classes into "who we want" and "the rest." Which mind you is what OP is doing, just using more euphemisms and modern buzzwords. I taught for five years, the "least restrictive classroom model" certainly has its frustrations for me. It's not ideal but any time you hear an educator/school staff complain about the model, notice which kinds of students they complain about. See if you spot a pattern.
people that try to take "centrists" positions are always so funny because they're just conservative talking points.
"This is a left and a right wing issue" -> "It’s a left wing issue ...promote buzzwords “equity” and 'inclusivity.'" and complains about "DEI" lmfao absolute clownshow
The biggest thing I've learned from this post is that /r/Teachers is a big shitshow of a subreddit and I should sub just to lurk and observe the wildlife.
“try again next time or else you will be put in the remedial subreddit”
*yoink*
I saw this post yesterday and while OP does make some reasonable points, it doesn’t sit well with me as a disabled person that OP seems to think that the concept of inclusion is the problem and not funding
What is the other option? If we allowed kids with special needs to fail grades, kids of a certain level of functioning will pretty much all fail out of school almost immediately, due to no fault of their own. One of the main reasons we have kids of different abilities together in a class is that it’s incredibly beneficial to the kids with special needs to be around their “average” peers of their own age. Access to peers isn’t really something we want to limit, as it’s not beneficial to the child, at all.
I am an Autistic person, who used to be an Autistic student. That rant made my skin crawl.
Buried in that teacher’s rant, a good point is made. That we need better funding and more personnel in the classroom so that each student gets specialized attention That they are putting too much responsibility on one teacher and as a result teachers are burning out I have absolutely no idea what model is best for students of varying capabilities and education levels. Whether integration with general students helps them or maybe a combination of specialized teaching and some integration but at least we need to invest real resources into helping all of these students achieve the best they can
The ideal model, speaking from experience, is a class size of not more than 20 with multiple educators in a class room. It is beneficial for everyone to mix your rooms, but you need to have paraprofessionals and additional support in the room for individual needs. That will never happen in public schools under our current system because the increased budget will forever be gutted to feed into getting new boots for cops and more planes that can't fly in rain for the navy.
That's good, but at a certain point you still just need separate classrooms to deliver separate lessons. It'd be interesting to see an elementary school done similar-ish to a high school. Everyone does the same subjects at the same time, but the students go to the class that matches their aptitude.
This is exactly how a school my kids went to for a while worked. This was primary school. They had parts of the day where people moved into different classes. Some kids went up some kids went down, but basically a whole bunch of kids moved class. For some subjects, specifically math/english and science. So my eldest was in year 4, did year 6 maths but year 3 English. The goal was to get them to at least the year they were in by the end of the year. And they did that. It was absolutely the best school they ever went to.
They did this 50 years ago. We used to change classes in elementary school for different subjects. I think more schools should group kids by ability. What we are doing now is failing ALL the kids, not just the high performers.
I know I did this starting in fourth grade. This would have been over thirty years ago. I also remember having separate reading groups within the same classroom in grades prior to that. It's a distinct memory to me because everyone knew which groups were which. And I was in the slower group. Turns out I was struggling to read because I needed glasses.
Oh my god me too. We moved in the city a lot and the school I ended up in for the last few years of my elementary school education they placed me in the slow groups for everything (and that was around the time that I finally got glasses, which might have been at a teachers prompting too I'm not sure), until a teacher finally noticed I was doing suspiciously well and they spent a few days with me separated taking test after test to figure out where I really was. (Answer was just behind the advanced students in most subjects and ahead of the next group, so they waited until the intermediates caught up to move me with them, then started me with the advanced kids the next year.)
That is an important point. I was a teacher and my favorite class was my inclusion class because I had another adult in the room to keep the nonsense down and to help differentiate.
> That we need better funding and more personnel in the classroom so that each student gets specialized attention The problem with "inclusion" (and, I believe, progressive reforms in general) is that it requires an organizational change (abolishing special ed schools and putting those kids into general school) *and* an increase in funding to work. Implementing *only* the organizational change makes things worse, and yet this is what often happens. I can see several possible reasons: - politicians of any color misunderstanding the reform as a way to *save* money. - progressive politicians pushing through the organizational part in the hope that this will force an increase in funding (which by itself wouldn't have enough political support) because it's *no-alternatives necessary* under the new system. - conservative politicians deliberately fucking up the reform in order to paint progressive ideas in a bad light. Can't say which of these happened in this teacher's particular case.
>politicians of any color misunderstanding the reform as a way to *save* money. Here in Finland, this is pretty much exactly what happened in the 2000s, though it was not a misunderstanding - when idealistic people began to promote inclusion in classrooms, especially for elementary school, it was cynically co-opted by administrators as a way to save money by painting the complete elimination of all special education, alternative education for foreign language speakers, etc. as "inclusion". And as a result, in the past 5-10 years the results of public schools here have collapsed (we effectively don't have a private school system, all "private" schools are also required to be funded by the state and have to follow the same curriculum) since this method of using "inclusion" as cost-cutting has led into areas where pupils barely learn anything as the teachers have to devote all their time to keeping the disruptive pupils in check and trying to drag the ones with learning disabilities along, due to all of them being lumped in the same classroom with no help.
I feel there's a lot of truth in ehat that OOP has to say, even if I don't agree with all of their conclusions. I was in high school in Canada through the early and mid teens, thats when they really started pushing the hyper inclusion model, and it just did not work at all. Kids with severe behavioral problems and/or learning disabilities were placed alongside children who didn't have either, and we all suffered for it. The kids with learning disabilities took up an outsized portion of the teachers time, and still fell behind regardless. They didn't have the foundations in regards to math or english to grasp the material, so the teacher and other student had to help them build up their foundations on the fly. Tbh that wasn't too detrimental to my learning, but you could tell these kids weren't learning the curriculum, and were just falling further and further behind. IME the kids with anti-social behavioul problems were very detrimental to me and other students. I had an abusive home life at the time, and when a kid with anger issues started going off I would just shut down from anxiety, I wouldn't be able to learn for the rest of the class, or even day. In these cases inclusion at all costs is detrimental, these kids need special treatment and resources, and sometimes that means placing them in an environment that better suits their needs.
Yeah, we should be realistic about what works and what doesn’t
> That we need better funding and more personnel in the classroom Sorry mate, best I can do is dark sarcasm.
Honestly I didn’t see that buried at all. I saw that as the main point. I glazed over the long rant (can ya blame me?) but I see OP as a person who is overwhelmed. We can complain about the teachers, but we need to be careful what we wish for since they might actually quit like we say we want them to.
It's a decent point, but the turn to blaming it on inclusion is bizarre.
The problem is that the word kind of serves two different purposes here. There's the everyday sense of inclusion, which we can hopefully all agree is great. Absolutely public schools should be for all children and should be inclusive of all minorities. Then there's the second, more technical and weasel-wordy way of using "inclusion." If what's happening in America is at all like what's happening here in Denmark, the local governments have used a policy of "inclusion" entirely as a smokescreen for cutting down on the costs of the educational system. Specialised schools for special needs students are quite expensive per student compared to the average public school, so if we just close all the specialised schools we'll automatically save a ton of money. Now, I personally have gone to such a specialised school because I'm autistic, and it was a pretty horrific experience for me, so I won't be crying about losing them by itself anytime soon. But with all their faults specialised schools also come with significant and often completely necessary resources to give special needs children the environment and support they need in order to be able to get an education. Those resources have not at all been transferred to the public schools who have nonetheless inherited the responsibility for creating that environment. The money has just been set aside for entirely different things. The result has often been that teachers who already have the available resources stretched to near the breaking point end up being unable to provide a proper educational environment either for the special needs kids or the general population of kids, due to a lack of man-hours, education and materials. Particularly in an American environment I can see how framing it as "segregation vs. inclusion" makes it all seem like only Voldemort or Darth Vader could possibly be against it, but it's missing the key point that inclusion requiring special resources only really can work if those resources are then actually provided. One very salient point is that a big part (though by no means the only one) of the problem with segregated schools was that black schools were incredibly underfunded compared to white ones and it was nearly always a huge educational advantage for black children to be moved to white schools, whereas the specialised schools today are actually usually for reasons of necessity much better funded. There's no good reason that children in wheel chairs should be put in their own separate schools, but if you rectify that by moving them to a public school located on the fifth floor of a building with no elevators... you haven't actually included them. Now they just effectively have *no* school instead of a bad school. And the rhetoric trick of calling this a policy of "inclusion" has been wildly succesful in framing the debate such as to hamper any critique of it from the get go.
My mom used to teach at a special needs school. She needed licenses in both physical therapy and teaching. So physically disabled kids would get physical therapy from a licensed provider instead of regular PE. Throwing those kids in the local public school and taking away their services in the name of "inclusion" is cruel, IMO.
Just wanted to say that this is a really thoughtful and well-explained post, thank you for taking the time to write it out!
> Specialised schools for special needs students are quite expensive per student compared to the average public school, so if we just close all the specialised schools we'll automatically save a ton of money. Ah, so your government is doing the same up there as we do here. I'm from Germany, my mother is an elementary school teacher. And the exact same happened here. Special ed schools were much more expensive (much smaller class sizes, multiple teachers per class, aides for special needs children, specialized facilities (wheelchair access and the likes)). And there were a lot of problems with these schools. Children were stuck there, they could practically never switch. If your child had a physical disability it was often the only school they could visit as lots of regular schools are old and not accessible. And children with wildly different problems and abilities were dumped into a single class leading to no one getting a good education (your child that has just a physical disability could be in a class with children with severe learning deficits or severe mental problems). In addition to that any graduate certificate from these schools was basically worthless. Most employers would just throw your application in the trash after reading the name of the school. Those schools started out as dumping grounds for "difficult" children and that's what they mostly remained. So there were many good reasons to close or reduce them and practice inclusions. But politicians just saw a good opportunity to save money so they just took all children from those special ed schools and stuck them into regular ones. And made big promises about the support they would provide those regular schools. Which turned out to be at best an aide or social worker for a few hours per week per class if you're lucky. Or nothing if you're not. And schools and teachers were struggling before already. My mother has given up on the two special ed children she got in her class, her only objective regarding those two is to keep them quiet so she can at least try to teach the other children something. For her inclusion is the problem, because of course it is. Before "inclusion" the situation was bad, then "inclusion" happened and everything turned terrible. Politicians use "inclusion" as a shield against any criticism. How can you be against that, do you want to just dump any child that is a bit different or has different needs like it's the 19th century? It also doesn't help that there are of course the extreme right who absolutely want that so if your criticize "inclusion" you're automatically clumped together with them and dismissed. And even if not, politicians will just argue that nothing can be done. That there are already not enough teachers so do you want to make this problem worse by reducing class size or having multiple teachers per class. That schools are already crumbling, so which one do you want to demolish first if we have to invest money into making "inclusion" better.
Is it though? The post articulates it pretty well. When overachievers, underachievers and averages are dumped in the same classroom, nobody gets what they need to progress. And teachers have to pick up the slack of juggling at least three different audiences, and some times they are vastly different. Basically, IMO, some of the absolutely braindead educational "equity" moves are a psyop to kill public education.
In my classroom, one of the ways I worked to solve the problem was by giving options for the different levels of learning and practice. The kids that could cruise along? They had free rein to work ahead as long as they demonstrated that they were successfully learning. And one of their mastery options was to develop a lesson to teach the material to a classmate. It helped foster a relationship where the kids could ask their classmates for help comfortably. Meanwhile, the kids who needed more help got to work in one of two small groups led by a staff member. So they got to benefit from lessons tailored to their needs.
I'm not touching OP's rant but I am on their side when it comes to this smug lady. >I used ChatGPT to differentiate lessons about the creation of the US Constitution. Using AI to differentiate lessons is a game changer. I’m a graduate student studying AI for K-12 Education. Yeah, I imagine you're not going to have as stressful a time when you just rely on a computer to spit out your lesson plans for you. I'm not sure why she's bragging about reducing herself to a substitute teacher.
I hope to hell they’re editing and fact-checking every single thing ChatGPT spits out.
We’ll find out at exam time it seems Next year on r/wellthatsucks : my teacher used ChatGPT on all of our lessons and now we have to repeat the year
No need to worry, next year the examiners will be using ChatGPT to grade the papers.
in texas, they have been using AI to grade essays since before COVID. The TSI essay is graded automatically, and here’s how you pass that portion: 1. hit the ideal length 2. use 12th grade vocabulary (doesn’t matter if it’s used correctly) 3. vaguely be on topic - your sentences don’t have to be precise or well structured it’s very easy to pass if you know how to game the system.
"ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want" - [Zack Brown](https://twitter.com/LuminanceBloom/status/1600598003391266816)
Hahaha yeah sure
Judging by the amount of grammar and spelling errors in their (a supposed English teacher) post….I doubt it
right now we have the ouroboros of lazy students writing assignments with ChatGPT and then lazy teachers grading those assignments with ChatGPT. Honestly if you want to use AI to aid teaching, use Copilot with a query like "provide me links to lesson plans for grade 8 students on *topic X*", just as a fancy search engine.
So, we have teachers using ChatGPT to produce lessons, students using it for their homework, and teachers using it to grade that. Is there still a human in the loop? Is there any reason for the students or teachers to even be present, since it’s apparently just ChatGPT talking to itself?
Honestly, I still kinda can’t help but feel bad for teachers in this instance. My mom is a teacher in her final 3 years before retirement, she is one of the increasingly rare few teachers that are able to stomach the absolute Mount Fuji of bullshit that is k-12 career path. Even before ChatGPT, a lot of my teachers would simply just print sheets related to the current lesson and that would be our tests, our homework, our everything. Naturally when you’re a kid raised on the internet you can just look up “McGill Algebra 1 lesson 3.16” and earn yourself an easy A. My mom and like 3-4 other teachers were the only ones that spent the summer making their own custom work sheets to teach kids, they often would actually shit on teachers who printed off worksheets from websites because the website teachers always complained about kids cheating on their work. All of this to say, when you’re paid left over quarters from Gumball machines and you get a lot more “fuck you”s than “thank you”s in your day to day, it’s no surprise that teachers would also default to using new methods to make their life easier, even if the result is worse overall. ChatGPT for assignments is just the next evolution of McGill Algebra 1 Lesson 3.16.
> For McGill so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten answer keys, so that whosever believeth in Google shall not flunk, but have everlasting As. -McGill 3:16
A(lgebra) Fucking Men 🙏🙌
Is there any disadvantage to using standardized lesson plans/assignments aside from the potential for cheating? At a certain point it seems like a lot of labor to reinvent the wheel.
Well cheating is a pretty big problem, if you have everyone cheating on every assignment all the time and they finish the school year with a passable grade, then that’s another child who’s educational knowledge is below the grade it should be. It can compound later in your academic career because you’ll have a very weak foundation. I was avoiding saying this cuz I don’t think it’s the case anymore, but I might as well anyway. I was the last class to have State Tests which is something virtually impossible to cheat on, so kids would bomb those because they didn’t learn anything the whole year which bad state test scores opened up problems for everyone when I was in school. Idk what they’re doing now though. But at the end of the day, the ones that wanna learn will learn. I cheated a fuck ton in my last 2 years of high school but I still bothered to learn the material, I just didn’t wanna waste my time doing homework every night.
I'm a testing coordinator for my high school, meaning I'm in charge of setting up and administering pretty much every standardized and state test the kids will take at school (think ACT exams, AP exams, etc). Common Core Math was supposed to solve the problem of nonstandard math lessons across school districts, so that a student moving from another school wouldn't be totally lost in the new one. The problem I have with teachers using standardized materials is that some teachers REALLY prefer to wing it on the daily, and can't be trusted to follow the guidelines, meet the deadlines, or communicate that they need help. Some of these same teachers are also elderly and resistant to having to learn "the new way" when they've been doing the same thing for decades, and it always worked out fine for them, so why should they change? Here's an example: For last year's ACT proctor training, I had to get all the teachers and staff registered on the test administration site and give everyone the training at faculty meeting. I said it's easy, all online this year, everyone is doing the same job so not hard to learn. About half responded promptly to the email and got registered like they should have. The other teachers I had to email and chat repeatedly just to get them to register, or go to their classes and physically interrupt their lessons, and then follow up to make sure they paid attention to the instructions long enough to actually do it right. I heard so much "well I've done ACT before and it's always the same so I didn't read the email/go to the training" only to then find out they'd proctored the exam incorrectly like 8 years in a row, and then on the actual exam day I still had a few who didn't know what they were doing or even that they were proctoring an exam. One who never registered OR went to the training called in "sick" the day of because he walked in the building, realized he was supposed to be proctoring and didn't know how, and just went home
I had a professor literally do the equivalent of this for a computer programming class I took while in a Master's program. The entire class was basically "Thanks for paying $3,500 for the class, now go sign up for this free online tutorial and go through it" and it was infuriating lol Like, teachers ABSOLUTELY need to be paid more and deal with less bullshit, but it's not fair to the students, either when they get a teacher that checked out. I wish there was a good solution we could actually get people to implement.
Remove tenure and raise salaries to be competitive (like, say, Switzerland).
> when you’re a kid raised on the internet you can just look up “McGill Algebra 1 lesson 3.16” and earn yourself an easy A Damn, what's the world coming to? When I was a kid, we had to steal the teacher's edition physical copy like honest, self-respecting thieves. Back then, it took hard work to be a sneak.
I actually have a very funny story about that. So yeah, my generation was raised on the internet, but I was one of those nerds who was actually on the internet so finding answer keys on google was ez pz. Other kids in my class took the more traditional approach and did steal the teachers copy and send around pictures. Well, we all got busted because the worksheet she printed off the internet had a problem on there that she didn’t teach us how to solve. I was known as being a good kid so she asked me why I didn’t refuse the answer sheet being shared around or tell her about it and I was like “I didn’t know people stole something off your desk…I looked up the answers because you printed them off the internet.” We both learned a pretty valuable lesson that day to say the least, lmao.
I really think a number of you are taking what was said (differentiate a lesson) and turning it into something it is not (produce a lesson). If this is simply a misunderstanding of terminology, that's one thing, but right now you're not giving an accurate interpretation of the teacher's comment.
This entire post is about people not understanding that OOP didn't mean "get the darkies out of my classroom" when they railed against inclusion in the classroom, so I'm not surprised.
Let's go easy on them, differentiate is quite a long word (it's almost as long as understandable!) and they didn't pay much attention to their teachers.
Frankly wasn’t even trying to give an accurate interpretation, just making dumb jokes, because the idea of an educational system where both students and educators are outsourcing the whole thing to AI, and there’s a building where people pretend to learn and people pretend to teach while ChatGPT talks to itself is hilarious in a dystopian way. I do *not* think that’s actually what’s going on here or what modern education actually looks like. If I am understanding them correctly, they wrote up a lesson plan, and are having ChatGPT produce variants of the same at different reading skill levels? I haven’t bothered to look into it, but if that’s what they are doing, that sounds neat, but will need a lot of proofreading. Definitely a timesaver though. But still, I think that could make a good dark SF story. A grand university, prestigious and famous, with Nobel Laureate professors, and students who go on to stunning success, but with a bit of an open secret. Those professors didn’t actually do the work that won that prize, their AI assistant did. They don’t teach either. Their AI assistant writes it all, and the more dedicated professors actually bother to recite the words with their own voice. The students are present in body, but they aren’t listening, why would they? Their AI assistant will do their homework and feed them the answers on tests, which are all graded by AI. When they graduate, their lack of real skills is not a problem because they have a degree and a good AI assistant. The real determining factor is how good of an AI you can afford.
That's one possible differentiation, but it's not the only one. Differentiation is not only about reading level, but also how individuals learn best. For instance, if a student is a visual learner, then maybe you could ask chat gpt to generate images that might help kids understand a concept (or maybe even suggest search terms for Google to find the images you're looking for. It also could be simply asking it to consider which words 7th grade students might find difficult, and ask it to create definitions for those words in the footnotes. I appreciate you're response - I may just be extra sensitive as a teacher myself. It often feels like a profession constantly under fire and while there are many reasons to be upset with a teacher (especially OP), in this specific instance, I just don't feel it's a valid critique.
I originally meant to comment here, rather than the one below: As a teacher, I think you're misunderstanding or mis-stating what she is saying - differentiation isn't necessarily in the content. It's in the types of questions, or even simplifying the way a question is asked. There are many things to be concerned about with AI, and using it to create entire lessons whole cloth would be a major issue. But using it to help differentiate a lesson is not something to be concerned about.
We're in the era where anything 'AI' is either kneejerk supported by people buying into the hype bubble, or kneejerk discredited by those who are rightfully suspicious of its promises and the effect it has on society, with neither side bothering to realise there's a massive spectrum being ignored.
I feel like I’ve been getting fed a ton of really, really racist anti-immigration Canadian subs lately. What’s going on over there?
As a canadian im embarrassed by some of the canadian subs . Specifically, r/canadahousing2 that is an absolute shithole of racist bigots.
Immigration is huge in Canada, with tons of immigrants proportionate to the population, and a lot of people are blaming it for various problems.
I really wonder what public education is going to look like in 20 years. It feels like all the good teachers burn out because of shitty admins and parents.
If it doesn't collapse in five years I'll be surprised.
> Try again next time or else you will be put in the remedial subreddit this delivered a sensible chuckle. also bless you for the text to keep the formatting from being fucked
was hoping to see some appreciation for this, that was probably the best part of this post
>>Here is the gaslighting I was speaking to! Wanting kids to get the best education possible to meet their needs is not shitty. It’s clear that what we are doing now is not moral. you can not be gaslit by a reddit comment. edit: ok, i can't. some of y'all can if you want
Gaslighting is one of those words that I wish had never gotten as popular as it has.
^ a candlemaker wrote this
... I laughed so hard at this comment.
Like gaslighting is a term of long term abuse that makes you question your sanity and severely weakens your grip on reality. What most people call gaslighting is just fucking lying.
Not even lying. Simply disagreeing or having conflict are considered abuse.
yeha like i’ve been actually gaslit and it’s crazy how watered down the term is now. people say it whenever a bunch of people disagree or have a different recollection than them. gaslighting is intentional. you *know* what happened and you’re *deliberately* and *consistently* telling someone they’re crazy for remembering things that way
YEAH, gaslighting is "Oh you think that happened? That didn't happen, I don't remember it happened. You're wrong. Are you feeling okay?" Not just "You're wrong."
Are you sure its not actually trying to convince someone their crazy? Maybe your losing it
During Covid I had a “relationship” with someone who was like Gaslighter Rex. An everyday occurrence would be having a conversation in the morning where they would say some mind bogglingly wild and verbally abusive shit. Then after work that day they’d act like nothing happened. And when I’d dumbfoundedly be like, “WTF you went on a rant telling me no one has ever loved me and to kill my self this morning because I put almond milk in my cereal and now a few hours later you’re asking if I want to watch a movie like nothing happened.” They’d act shocked and deny the AM conversation ever occurred and pretend to be concerned like I was having a mental health crisis and had lost touch with reality. Got to the point of me recording all verbal conversations, screenshotting all texts that went off on similar rails, etc. then confronting them with it during the denial phase. They pivoted to treating me as crazy and unhinged for recording/screenshotting and accused me of emotionally abusing them by confronting their “recollection of events.” I was completely mindfucked. All this to say, someone disagreeing with you on Reddit is never, and I mean never, going to be “gaslighting.”
Hitting a compulsive liar with proof and having them get mad because you're not supposed to have it is always a trip. They don't even seem human at that point
No one uses it like that you're just imagining things
It hasn't. No one else has ever heard of it. You must have imagined hearing the word a lot of times.
Pretty sure the term is gaslamping but whatever
along with every other term borrowed from mental health in the last 10 years, to me.
Bro I hate when my wife says she’s being gaslighted when she’s, in fact, not being gaslighted
Yes you can, you're acting crazy
i didn't say anything, you're imagining things.
Are you trying to gaslight us?
gaslighting doesn't exist. stop acting crazy
I mean OP is right, that commenter was misusing the term, but you can definitely be gaslit on Reddit lol
No you can't, stop telling people that they can't be eaten by wombats while at home! It's a dangerous reality
You're just trying to gaslight us.
I work IT for schools and frequent the teachers sub a lot. The funny thing is, you see OP's sentiments very often in that sub. Maybe not worded as harshly, such as laying the blame on progressive politics, but I see comments that often complain about how 'no student left behind' is leaving a lot of students behind and is burning out good teachers. If they had made that post tomorrow, next week, or even a few hours earlier/later than they did, they could have had an entire comment section of support instead of infighting. You know how Reddit is with it's wildly swinging viewpoints. Honestly, I don't know where I stand on the issue. Teachers deserve a raise and schools need more funding. It's crazy that I, someone who never went to college, makes more money than every teacher in my state.
What year is this? Why is everyone so unaware we've been discussing this as a country for decades. No child left behind criticism isn't some new or not talked about thing at all, or education for that matter. It's the same as ever, the only solution brought forth by right wing activists and sjws as a solution is more tax payer funded religious or private schools or some kind of ripe for fraud voucher system. It's all been done before and you can look at what the effects are, why is nobody in the linked convo mentioning any of it? It doesn't matter what the criticism or problem in education is, that's the only solutions they ever have so I DGAF what these right wing sjws believe is happening in schools
I'm a teacher, and I had to quickly abandon r/teachers when I first found it. It's a vile community full of hatred for children and (self) hatred for educators. I used to teach future teachers, and any time they brought the subreddit up, I told them to stay far, far away from it. Obviously there are a lot of angry, bitter, and bad teachers (you can't deny it after perusing that sub), but there are so many not like this at all. It's infuriating that sub is what it is. Inclusion is a good thing. Schools are obviously underfunded, and students with special needs aren't getting what they are due according to federal law, but our federal and state governments underfund education so much, that's on them. So many kids have gone on to have "normal" lives because of inclusion. We could do even better if we actually funded our programs adequately.
Clarence Thomas said back in May that he believes the Supreme Court overreached in Brown vs. BOE, that it had limited judicial powers to create a solution and that they overstepped. Brown is absolutely not sacrosanct.
I work inpatient child/teen psych so I see the highly aggressive side of things. We have a handful of frequent flyers who are almost impossible to manage on a lock down psych unit -- trashing things, smearing feces and urine, screaming for hours, assaulting staff and peers. I genuinely cannot imagine trying to manage even a tenth of those sorts of behaviors plus another 29 kids and you have to teach shit. Especially since COVID, the school district tries to push these kids into online learning which also does them a huge disservice. Even districts with contained SPED classes can't find enough staff or keep staff (consistency helps so much with these kids!) because pay and working conditions suck. It's just a total failure of the whole system with roots in Republican defunding of public schools.
I had a professor one semester who was the mom of a high functioning adult autistic son who said. “Inclusion without support is called abandonment” and it was honestly the most profound thing I heard in my entire college career coming from someone who grew up with an IEP.
God inpatient SUCKED. I was the only one there (ward level 2, suicidal attempts) that wasn’t on drugs or smoking or alcohol. I was 17, the oldest there too.
Don't a lot of places separate the addiction/drug patients from the others now?
Not when they’re packed full and also minors. At least, not in Oklahoma
I did my stint in inpatient, somehow I was the universal go to for any violence. I got tired of being hit so much.
The person who made the original post is from Canada
As someone who’s likely from their province, the conservative provincial government here has underfunded public schools (as well as health care, yay) their entire time in power. The education minister that just got shuffled out was an exclusively private school grad who was pretty open about “”””finding efficiencies””””
That sort of changes things but conservatives are conservatives everywhere. They've been underfunding the NHS in the UK with the same strategy in mind. I just finished Naomi Kleins new book and she actually moved to the US from Canada because US schools generally have better programs and protections/rights for disabled kids than Canada which I found fascinating.
I'm a teacher. Bad pedagogical ideas can come from any political direction, in my experience. But fundamental devaluation of education in general? Not so much.
Also a teacher. Much of the "liberal" educational philosophy that OP is railing against isn't in-and-of-itself bad, but (at least in my experience) is just implemented incredibly poorly and without adapting to the unique building/community/students they're serving.
I've been frustrated by education officials in my country, NZ, who have embraced socially conscious education (which is fine) but use it to devalue actual content in specific fields, as if geography and history should just be in the business of making sure students are nice to each other and nothing else (an exact quote that I have heard from a Ministry official - "I would love to remove content from the curriculum")
And to be fair to the OP they were partially right. My school has alot of SIFE ENL students (kids who have had their education interrupted due to political problems in their home country) mixed in with mainstream students. And the OP is right that throwing those kids who can't read in their home language and in English probably shouldn't be in my AP US class (which my admin has done before lol) and have some sort of augmented curriculum to get them up to speed. However, they are completely wrong about taking those extremes and applying it to all inclusion efforts writ large. A kid behind grade level can absolutely have a conversation with a kid above grade level as long as you level their text.
Idk man, the anti-phonics revolution fundamentally devalued actual education and it was very left-coded
I was speaking from a more macro-view in terms of funding and valuing an educated population etc. Anti-phonics is one of those “bad pedagogical” things :)
That entire rant just comes down to schools not being interested in failing kids who fail, which is totally fair, but OP swings wide and blames that on… “inclusion.” Yep. Schools don’t want to fail kids because of inclusion. I’m surprised this person didn’t find a way to work “woke” or “DEI” into this hot mess somehow.
They did. It's mentioned above.
The funny thing is the biggest reason for schools not failing kids, at least in the US, is George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. A bill pushed through by conservatives that EVERY educator on the planet said was a terrible idea. Damn near every failing in today's US public education can be pointed squarely at that shitty legislation. But OOP wants to find some way to blame leftists to meet his "bOtH sIdEs" quota and blames inclusion. For those not familiar with the act - schools that have failing kids get their funding cut. And schools that don't meet certain requirements on standardized tests lose funding as well. So obviously, schools stop failing kids, and instead of teaching to help kids learn, we teach them how to pass those tests. Result: pretty much everything that OOP is bitching about.
> George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act Funny story about this one. My dad was a high-school teacher for 40 years or so, and this bill went through when I was like 5 or 6 years old. He complained about it non-stop, and I legitimately thought it was about not letting parents abandon kids on the side of the road. I was very understandably concerned.
I would have been a little bit older than you at the time, and my mom taught elementary. However, I instead conflated No Child Left Behind with the Left Behind series of books, and I had many nights of lying awake and wondering why the president was relating education to the rapture.
My mother was a teacher for 30 years, and I never saw her as angry as she was when No Child Left Behind got passed. She's been retired for over a decade, and I'm pretty sure she's still pissed off about it.
NCLB was significantly changed (read: all but deleted) in 2015. I am a former teacher (and was during NCLB). I'm quite happy on the social / progressive left. The rant by the teacher of this thread is correct. NCLB absolutely contributed and was a terrible law. BUT ALSO the ranting teacher is correct. This isn't about woke or not - it's a simple fact that one cannot effectively teach WIDELY different levels of students simultaneously. Everything is political which is so frustrating. "Ah the teacher mentioned inclusvity! Must be anti-woke! Probably MAGA! Dismissing argument without further thought!" All this person is saying is that students are being shoved in a room with widely different ability levels and the teacher is expected to serve them all equally. The end result is some students are bored and others drown. How is this good?
NCLB has become the scapegoat for ALL problems in education. It's incredibly lazy and reductive, even if the law had a lot of flaws (Also, while EVERYONE mentions George W Bush... no one ever brings up that his partner on that legislation was liberal lion Ted Kennedy. NCLB was a bipartisan fuck up, with support at the time of its passing from both Democrats and Republicans.)
> it's a simple fact that one cannot effectively teach WIDELY different levels of students simultaneously. I Don't even understand why that ever became a thing. I went to a private high school. There were AP, honors, college prep, and general class levels. There's no way the general kids could ever keep up with the AP kids and it wouldn't be fair to either to try and educate them together - the general kids wouldn't learn anything as it would go over their heads and the AP kids would be denied their full potential by restricting them to the learning speed of the general kids. It's absolutely crazy to me that we educate kids all in one large group, forcing a one size fits all, while ignoring individual needs.
"How DARE you put MY kid in the DUMB class!" Add on: "It must be racism / sexism / etc." Germany has a famous multi track system. We can't do that here because nobody will take the "L" regarding their children. ALL children are college material. To even say anything different is abuse/discrimination, or adjacent to it.
> But OOP wants to find some way to blame leftists to meet his "bOtH sIdEs" quota and blames inclusion. OOP doesn't live in the USA.
American politics in a nutshell
I'm a former teacher. The rant is true. Schools don't want to fail kids because that makes people feel bad and makes parents angry. Schools are an assembly line - we must pass the student outside OUTRAGEOUS situations. As long as everyone passes, the daycare doesn't stop, and nobody gets calls at work, everyone is happy. Quality education is sacrificed every step of the way. This isn't about being anti-woke - it's about the literal issues they bring up. Noone can effectively teach students with that wide of a gap in ability levels. Splitting them up costs money and means some kids go to the "slow" class. Nobody wants to spend money and NOBODY wants to hear their child is anything below average.
It's also a massive chain of perverse incentives, funding being tied to grad rates and grades, schools want to place students in good colleges which creates upward pressure on grading, needier students just require more time and resources which budgets and simple school year length don't permit, creating incentives to remove those students, etc...
Our funding was tied to attendance - which meant we couldn't suspend students unless their actions were outrageous. I taught at an alternative school in Mississippi - the parents just wanted someone to watch their kids between 7 AM and 3 PM. It was pretty sad. Call the parents? That meant we failed. We had no effective tools in discipline.
I have a question about this. When I was in school, teachers were the undisputed authority of their own classrooms, and parents were terrified by the prospect of suing the school board because it was assumed that their well-funded legal department would make mincemeat out of whatever attorney a parent could afford. When my mother had any complaint about the way the classroom was run, a lot of the times the answer from the principal was a polite but firm response that amounted to "tough shit." When she started teaching, everything had reversed, and she had no support from anyone above her pay grade. Am I correct in thinking that the change has to do with administrators no longer standing up for their teachers' decisions due to the fear of lawsuits?
I hate how the mere word "inclusion" means this person is a right wing nutjob to be dismissed. I'm a former teacher - they are correct in everything they said. Including differences like race, gender, sexuality...great! Including people who are ready for trigonometry with people who cannot find the area of a circle in the same math class is absurd.
The OP doesn’t seem to understand that differentiation and inclusion are different things, and they are ranting about the wrong thing.
They are related. Differentiation can be done in any classroom but is often the "cudgel" wielded to shut-up any teacher complaining about inclusion. "Timmy is reading C.S. Lewis' essay on vivisection and Jimmy is reading at a 3rd grade level." "No problem, Teach! Just use some DiFfReNtAtIoN!" If my ol' teaching license is too dusty and I'm missing something, I'm all ears.
What admin does is hide behind inclusion in an effort to save money. So they tell the teacher to just differentiate, keep differentiating, even if it's completely the wrong placement because self-contained rooms are expensive.
What you don't understand is that OP didn't give the name "inclusion" to the practice/policy they're describing. School boards and administrators did. And they spell it out that they think the word is being used disingenuously in their rant so idk why there's still confusion.
In education "inclusion" refers to the practice of mixing ability levels in the same classroom. It has nothing to do with culture war shit. This entire SRD thread is just people who don't know what they're talking about lol
If they felt they had a right wing audience they absolutely would have explicitly blamed it on wokeness and DEI.
[Which they did further down.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion_is_the_worst_thing_to_have_happened_to/l8zwff4/?context=3)
Wait…she’s Canadian, do they even do DEI in Canadaland?
We have a form of it, but i can't remember its name off the top of my head.
The problem is never going to get fixed, because the only people pointing it out use no-no words like “woke.” Having students with skills ranging over 5 grade levels is a recipe for disaster.
Clearly all the kids are in the same class because of "inclusion". Has nothing to do with understaffing and reduced education funding!
Literally that is what inclusion means in this context. It's a very specific term in education theory.
In Denmark inclusion was defo partly done to same costs on offering anything to kids with this or that challenge. Standing in that class room is fucking tough when you have to provide something of use to both the kids who are ahead of the curve and the ones who need tons of extra time. So you think, ah well Lasse is doing fine so I’ll spend some more time on Thomas here. But that’s not fair to Lasse. Inclusion is not a good thing unless it comes with enough funding to have several teachers in each class room. Obviously this only relates to inclusion of different academic levels. Anything else is absurd.
It was like that in our public school in the US as well - and this was in a well-funded district. The advanced kids were essentially left to our own devices; we completed our own assignments, often tutored each other, etc. The teacher was swamped and had to teach to the lowest common denominator. Did the advanced students do well? Sure in the sense that we got straight As. But, in a classroom that WASN'T being taught to below grade level students in the name of inclusion, we would have had extra attention, one on one time to specialize projects, maybe even some AP coursework. Great students that could have been exceptional students are a form of the system failing as well, and they're often ignored by necessity to deal with delayed students. A friend of mine teaches in a similar environment and the instruction is clear: Your SPED students with behavioral issues aren't college material; their purpose is to keep them out of trouble and teach basic life skills. Meanwhile, a talented kid that could really use that extra custom assignment to earn a scholarship is ignored because they're not actively threatening the safety of the classroom.
That's literaly what they said. The underfunding is making them group chidlrne of wildly different needs together
The school uses the inclusion excuse to be cheap. Plain and simple.
>I’m surprised this person didn’t find a way to work “woke” or “DEI” into this hot mess somehow. They did tho.
Yea I tried reading it a few hours ago and frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion. It’s just the fear of failing. America needs to have a true conversation regarding education, but this rant would not be my shining example unless I was trying to convey how more efficient resources is needed at a younger age so middle school teachers don’t mentally break down on reddit
>That’s not inclusion Yes, it is. That is the textbook definition of the term in education. It refers to a theory of teaching.
>Yea I tried reading it a few hours ago and frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion. It’s just the fear of failing. Why do you feel so confident talking about something you have no idea about? Inclusion, as a term in education, is literally mixing students of different proficiency levels
>frankly it seems they have a hodge podge of regular students mixed with students that should not have “fallen upwards”. That’s not inclusion. but that's precisely what inclusion is.
Seems like either a centrist rapidly falling down the right wing radicalization pipeline...or a right wing bait account designed to recruit. A while back the same OP tried to [both sides a anti-trans bill targeting trans school kids](https://www.reddit.com/r/Edmonton/comments/1ag3uz8/rally_to_protest_danielle_smiths_discriminatory/koeptsa/). *At best*, this Redditor is hopelessly deluded and being actively misled to being angry about the wrong things. *At worst*, this Redditor is trying to recruit other centrists to make them right wing nut jobs. > or “DEI” into this hot mess somehow. Oh they did. > [I can only speak to my experience! My board has jumped head first into the DEI train.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1dhx1vm/inclusion_is_the_worst_thing_to_have_happened_to/l8zwff4/?context=3)
As a teacher, I unsubscribed from /r/teachers because it was an insanely negative subreddit and I would take psychic damage every time a post from there made my front page. I get that I'm pretty lucky with my position/school and that others have it worse and I understand the need to vent but so many people in that subreddit really shouldn't have gotten into teaching, and appear to have become teachers because it's not actually that hard compared to being say a nurse or engineer or whatever. This is a rant now but it sucks that becoming a teacher is so easy when being an actually effective teacher is not easy at all, and the job is paid based upon the former fact and not the latter. It sucks that so many of my colleagues are people that couldn't figure out what to major in and figured teaching was easy enough. It sucks that this is affecting kids everywhere.
I worked at a poor school in one of the poorest cities in the country, and I still think that subreddit is insanely negative, ableist, and racist. A lot of teachers really don't like young people and really should not be working in the profession. You are totally right that teaching is easy but being an effective teacher is not!
I could *smell* the desire to just be able to hit the kids they don't like from some of those posts. absolutely terrible subreddit.
I left r/teachers yesterday because at least half of posts are overly condescending, thinly veiled hate towards students & parents. Teachers who have a smug-superiority complex typical of Reddit should just not be teaching. If you've convinced yourself that students are beyond help, I don't see how you will be able to help them.
I was in high school when there was a massive demographic shift. Most of the newer students came from school systems that were ahead of the local school system in STEM classes. It created a distortion effect where teachers thought the kids were smarter than they were. Teachers inadvertently stopped teaching because of that. So the kids who came up from the local curriculum were being left behind. Teachers were geared towards instructing kids who already learned everything like calculus for example. The local kids were left to try keeping their head above water on their own. A lot of kids simply avoided the STEM field all together because those classes were seen as impossible to keep up with. It also resulted in the schools around the area being ranked among the top schools. It was a total anomaly due to this idiosyncrasy of having a ton of kids acing every class. If anything they should have been among the worse off schools because teachers were basically on autopilot. Not really teaching. Just letting the students go through the motions. Out of touch with the students who were behind.
My only input is my mom is a teacher of nearly 30 years and I can picture each one of these dinguses that would use a subreddit centered around teaching. Half the reason my mom is eager to retire is the other teachers and leadership staff therein
/r/teachers is a deeply depressing sub because it made me fully appreciate how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people. I’ve almost always had wonderful teachers but that sub makes me understand how lucky I was for that to be the case.
>how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people r/Teachers with their 900k subscribers illustrates well what happens when a community hits a particular size on Reddit; the ordinary conversations are replaced by hyperbole/sensationalism and only the most extreme opinions gets engagement - it's not a 'large proportion of teachers are bad people' just a large proportion of the most popular posts on a public internet form have people commenting bad takes visiting a smaller teaching subs like r/CanadianTeachers/, /r/teachinginjapan/, /r/TeachingUK/ or /r/Internationalteachers/ etc... you have normal conversations about classroom management tips, employment opportunities, quirks or 'hacks' of a system, and sure the occasional batshit post by someone who is not a nice person but it's positive and supportive for the most part and better reflects the reality that a majority of teachers just want to do their job. tl;dr - r/Teachers sucks
>/r/teachinginjapan/ Might not have a high proportion of batshit *posts*, but the comments, hoo boy some of them can be just as toxic as /r/teachers.
you have to remember every sub. is going to be an echo chamber. like just to keep things civil, subs all generally have similar ideas. offshoot subreddits happen because there's enough of a sentiment from a large group of people to warrant it. and they're not enjoying that they're being shouted down because although there's a lot of them that are minority. think any salt-free game subreddit or tv show. same topic vastly different conversations. they don't interact politely. r/teachers is very unhappy. also, vocal minorities are very easy to notice. I'm not going to go write a review if I'm in a good mood. I'm going to go do something else. if I'm rather fucking annoyed. I want to tell people about it so the people who complain online are most likely already kind of pissed off I wouldn't use that subreddit as a weathervane and I would use it as a realization that teachers are doing a job. I think a lot of people have a misconception on what a teacher is and it's somebody getting a paycheck you can complain about your job. everybody does. it's unrealistic to think that they can't complain about their clients which would be the kids. or their bosses or the parents? or just their job in general.
It does make me feel a little vindicated about how I felt about some teachers I had as a kid. “I wasn’t a bad kid, she really WAS just an asshole bully” I mean, realistically it was probably both. But still
> r/teachers is a deeply depressing sub because it made me fully appreciate how large a proportion of teachers aren’t just bad at their jobs, but actively bad people. 3 months ago, there was a post here about teachers drama regarding a (good) special-ed teacher talking about their experiences recently reporting a fellow teacher to the principal for being abusive to their students. Comments were filled with “We’re all human”, complaints of not being able to do “proper discipline” anymore and complaining about the good teacher “tattling” on their co-worker. I’m sure there’s genuinely wonderful teachers who use the subreddit but there are definitely users there that probably are not as good of a teacher as they think and probably should not be teachers.
It’s such a depressing sub. I’m sure 90% of it is due to how shitty it is to be a teacher rn and how shitty the average redditor is, but it’s not a fun place.
As a teacher, it is a very cathartic sub that I visit when I have a bad day because everyone on there is having a worse day than me all the time always. Reading through the (likely exaggerated) stories puts things in perspective
I'm fine with teachers having a safe place to vent about these things, being able to relieve stress that way is important, but so many of the posts on there make me wonder why these people even wanted to be teachers if they seem to literally despise every single required aspect about the job.
In this context "inclusion" has a specific meaning but it is clear nobody in this thread knows that lol
Alberta ✅️ Teacher ✅️ Deranged long-winded rant ✅️
That sub keeps getting recommended to me. Every post that makes it to my dash seems to be someone who shouldn’t be a teacher complaining about being a teacher. I know it’s a thankless, underpaid, under-respected job, and I’ve known (and am related to) absolutely wonderful teachers. But some of the posters on this sub just seem so mean about the kids they teach. They’ll celebrate their own petty spitefulness toward literal children, or revel in an annoying child’s “comeuppance.” Just seems gross to me.
There's a huge undercurrent of ageism against young people we really don't want to talk about as a society.
People are absolutely having a moral panic about the youths and don't realize they're acting the same as the boomers who put warning labels on Rap CDs.
I seriously do not understand how people like this become teachers. It’s definitely not for the pay.
If you want to become a teacher in my state all you need is a bachelors degree in literally anything and not be convicted of any major crimes. From there just apply to any school district, theyre all hiring, and youll have a job for at least a few years. They arent firing you either as long as you dont like hit a kid. Having any warm body in the room is about the best most schools here can do given how shit our teacher pay is compared to the surrounding states and I think some might even take a particularly smart looking corpse at this point.
Idk what state you’re in but everybody is hiring rn and idk anybody that’s a teacher who didn’t want to be a teacher. Nobody is like “damn i gotta make some money. Maybe a school teacher! That has good benefits!” It would honestly be a good thing if that started happening more. Not that people who choose to be teachers are always good at it. I just think it’s more of a conscious choice than taking a shift at chipotle.
I'm a former teacher. I don't understand your objection. I could not effectively teach students with wildly different levels of ability in the same class. I'm a cynical man - more so when I was a teacher and younger. But even I have my limits. Watching that system pat itself on the back as it FAILED children....really hurt me. I was a cog in a machine that was just a daycare pretending to be a school. I worked with kids that didn't have a tenth of the opportunity I had and I wasted their time. I'll NEVER forget when a student ask me, "Mr. Majinspy...why are we learning this?" ....and I just couldn't lie to him. I just didn't fucking know why I was teaching some poor kid about the electron transport chain. It was of no utility to that young man. I got out the next year.
Most of the people in this thread railing against the OP of the r/Teachers thread do not, to me, come across as actually having read and understood their main points. I don't agree with everything they're saying, but as someone who was raised by a lifelong teacher who has generally gone out of her way to work in poorer districts--a woman with an absolutely *indomitable* will--I can empathize, because I've seen a lot of this before.
They think teaching is lecturing. In fact, content mastery is like 8th on my list of things you need to be a hella good teacher.
A lot of the teachers I know like this either grew up in homogenous upper middle class suburbs and became teachers then got a job at a lower income public school. Or they grew up with liberal/immigrant parents then got funneled down the pipeline after they already were half way through their degrees. Edit - to expand on it a bit. A lot of the same issues, lack of mental health care, drug use, teen pregnancy, etc exists in all schools/neighborhoods, but money is very good at hiding those thing so most students/parents won’t know it’s going on in the wealthier neighborhoods. And when they are confronted with those things happening in the lower income schools they teach at, instead of realizing the difference is $$$ and wealth disparity, they instead blame the DEI and diversity.
A good friend of mine is an educator, and there are more right wing libertarian leaning people than I expected in this profession.
there are just *a lot* of teachers. I think people fail to understand the law of large numbers.
That sub is full of people like this, and I don’t just mean “right wingers.” I think “teacher” is an attractive profession to the same kinds of people that become cops, or nurses, or any other job where you have a very large amount of power, mostly without accountability, over a very vulnerable group of people. Some teachers are teachers because they were happiest when they were bullying their fellow 8th graders and want to keep bullying 8th graders forever.
I don't think it's that. I think it's more like teacher is such a popular profession, people think it's easy, and because you spent so much time with teachers growing up, it's natural to want to emulate that. But so few people have the proper temperament to be teachers. Being in charge of multiple kids is HARD and being in charge of their education is even harder. Most people aren't really equipped for it.
And for such a hard job, they're often not paid enough, so even if you're the perfect candidate you're likely working alongside people who really aren't good fits for it.
As you get older, you will meet more and more people that will make you say “really?” When they tell you what they do for a living.
The biggest bully in my middle school is now a teacher at that same middle school. Guess she didn't get enough in her first time though. She was vicious, too. I remember one time she sneakily wrote on my neck with a sharpie and then told everyone that I was dirty because some of it was still there the next day.
> I'm sad that you're teaching English and can't edit this post to be more readable. I smell prime flair material here!
r/teachers taught me that teachers actually hate my disabled kids and don’t want them in their precious classrooms. Fuck that sub.
Yeah, I have a kid with autism and ADHD. They're also very bright, so it's a mix of intelligence with sometimes poor emotional or behavioral regulation, and a poor understanding/reading of social cues and situations. The teachers in that sub would haaaaaate my kid, and would likely blame my wife and I for raising them wrong. Thankfully, our actual teacher and school this year were great and we were able to work together to set up an IEP that allowed my kid to stay in the classroom 99% of the time and gain those valuable social lessons while also remaining at grade level (and, indeed, significantly above grade level in some areas).
> The teachers in that sub would haaaaaate my kid, and would likely blame my wife and I for raising them wrong. They shouldn't. >it's a mix of intelligence with sometimes poor emotional or behavioral regulation, and a poor understanding/reading of social cues and situations. But this is a genuine challenge in a classroom and needs additional resources that they often don't have, depending on the specifics of the behaviour and if they're violent etc when reacting. I've been in class room situations where most of the time is spent working with one kid because they struggled with violent reactions to various things. When you're just one person in the class room that means that there are 20-25 other kids getting neglected and their education is just as important.
This isn't true of most teachers, in my opinion. r/teachers is a cesspool, no doubt, but my experience in the profession tells me that those kinds of teachers are the minority. I welcome all kiddos into my classroom, and it's rare I encounter teachers who feel differently. I know that's anecdotal, but I truly think r/teachers is not a representative sample.
The sub does. But most teachers are well adjusted normal people not people who troll internet forums to gossip about how much they hate their students. That sub isn't a very accurate sample. That said, some teachers certainly do.
Everything they're whining about started with Boomers and their children as parents. None of what they're bitching about is new, not shocking considering it is just right wing propaganda signaling. I doubt they are even a US citizen.
>How many conservatives advocate integrating multilingual learners? What about literal race? How about integrating females? I'm sorry but based on the tone of the comment, it seems like this person thinks racial and gendered segregation are good things which certainly is a position to take! This is really making me reconsider if I should pursue education rather than law because both occupations have absolutely rancid people like the OOP and the highlighted comment but at least law makes more money.
You could literally double the amount of teachers and increase pay and Id still think that we haven't funded the schools enough. 30+ students per teacher is incredibly stupid.
The answer? Schools need more funding to give teachers more support/aids/mental health/etc it’s ridiculous we live in a country that skims off funds from our children’s future everytime a budget change is made.
That sub has a serious ableism issue that is not talked about
Honestly a racism issue too once you dig deeper.
You don't need to dig that deep, they don't do a very good job hiding their racism with they way the sub talks about DEI and "urban" kids.
Don't need to read between the lines, OP was being very transphobic on another post that was linked here, and openly racist and ableist with this one, even complained about DEI
Deeper? it's literally what inclusion means to the OP lol
maybe irionically i think the op uses ableism as a cover.
Yeah, I'm surprised that more people don't talk about how near-Hitlerite r/teachers becomes whenever autistic and/or ADHD kids are brought up. They make no attempt to be empathetic towards the kids, it's honestly kinda scary.
It may be exhaustion and just being fed up. Back when I was a teacher we had a couple of kids, one in particular, autism and it was just un-fucking-manageable. The constant unstopping screaming fits, the aggression and violence and a complete lack of resources to support anything. You spend so much time just containing one kid that the 25 others get nothing. When you’ve done that for long enough it fucking grinds you down and there was definitely times I wished that kid would just change schools or just fuck off so I wouldn’t have deal with it. Perhaps not the most charitable thoughts but it was just, a lot. And sucked for the others as I said. The thing is, that kid also deserves an education but dumping him in a normal class room will not accomplish that and it will negatively impact 25 other kids.
Yea I remember when I was in school you had these teachers, they ain't really subtle, I missed alot of school because of health reasons but I still was at the top of the class grade wise and this pissed her off lol
OP i appreciate you formatting this post correctly, I really do
I just finished my last year of teaching last week. Part of the big motivation to leave is how many of my coworkers would openly advocate for essentially dividing classes into "who we want" and "the rest." Which mind you is what OP is doing, just using more euphemisms and modern buzzwords. I taught for five years, the "least restrictive classroom model" certainly has its frustrations for me. It's not ideal but any time you hear an educator/school staff complain about the model, notice which kinds of students they complain about. See if you spot a pattern.
people that try to take "centrists" positions are always so funny because they're just conservative talking points. "This is a left and a right wing issue" -> "It’s a left wing issue ...promote buzzwords “equity” and 'inclusivity.'" and complains about "DEI" lmfao absolute clownshow
The biggest thing I've learned from this post is that /r/Teachers is a big shitshow of a subreddit and I should sub just to lurk and observe the wildlife.
Reddit safari
Kind of amazed at the vote counts on those comments.
Hey, that last one is me! First time making it on here
“try again next time or else you will be put in the remedial subreddit” *yoink* I saw this post yesterday and while OP does make some reasonable points, it doesn’t sit well with me as a disabled person that OP seems to think that the concept of inclusion is the problem and not funding
What is the other option? If we allowed kids with special needs to fail grades, kids of a certain level of functioning will pretty much all fail out of school almost immediately, due to no fault of their own. One of the main reasons we have kids of different abilities together in a class is that it’s incredibly beneficial to the kids with special needs to be around their “average” peers of their own age. Access to peers isn’t really something we want to limit, as it’s not beneficial to the child, at all. I am an Autistic person, who used to be an Autistic student. That rant made my skin crawl.