I Don't Want to Send My Kids to Public School Because I Used to Teach at One

It's really bad.

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“You’re a fucking cunt!” were the words that burst out of an 8th-grader as she threw a chair across the classroom. My eyes darted around the room to thirty kids either laughing or unfazed. This particular student had attempted suicide twice, was rumored to have Tourette’s, and was one of those students whom others cleared a path for when she walked down the hallway.

“Go to the office,” was really the only thing I could say. Everyone knew that this lame attempt at ‘discipline’ would result in absolutely nothing. She knew it too. No one at “the office” had the skills or resources to help this student who was in a complete crisis.

When I imagined myself as a teacher, this is not what I had in mind.

The problem with schools, not just public schools, is that they are a microcosm of all of society’s problems. When parents are overwhelmed, absent, and consumed with survival; they’re not too worried when Dustin hasn’t turned in an assignment in 4 weeks. Try teaching The Cask of Amontillado to a kid who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from is in policy terms, ‘suboptimal’.

While private schools may price out the families suffering on the margins, they’re awash in the same problems that plague the higher-income bracket: dismal mental health, bullying, immense pressure from their parents to get a worthy return on their investment, and so on.

The problem with teaching is that, like a majority of teachers recently polled, I spent most of my day not teaching. While I loved pouring myself into creating engaging curriculum, I only spent about 30% of my day actually teaching it. The bulk of it was split between grading papers, straight up killing time and “classroom management.”

And I was horrible at classroom management.