I know I'm not the only guy sick of this...

Kids run the school system. I no longer felt like taking orders from 14-18 year old kids.

There was a period during shutdowns where a lot of parents reevaluated the role of teachers and had an increase in value placed on the role of teachers. But once kids went back to school that all went back to normal.

I think this virus has shown that in a lot of cases teachers are just glorified babysitters. Many parents don’t care what happens at school as long as their kids come home safe and get passed along to the next grade.

I get that there’s an assumption that teachers don’t have much of a workload and I agree with it to a certain degree. But there’s a reason there’s a massive teacher short coming. The job is much harder than people realize or understand. Yes we get summers off. Yes we don’t have to lift or hammer and do anything physically taxing. But many transition to teachers struggle because it’s not the vacation career they thought they were walking into.

I’m somewhere in the middle on this one. Teachers shouldn’t expect to be treated like heroes. We do a job and get paid to do it. But changes in education have often made us out to be villains as well, which we also are not.

Your district has actually stopped caring about test scores?

We all just got taken to task for why our kids didn't do better on their district winter benchmarks, which is something our central office makes that literally only our district cares about.  We had to do an item-by-item analysis of how our kids did on each question and explain why they didn't all get it all right.

Meanwhile I'd been on the job 3 weeks when we gave it.  I am already the 3rd longest tenured person in my department after being on the job for 3 months.  I seldom see over 75% attendance in any of my classes.  Our two principals are spending all their time putting out fires (sometimes literally) with kids vandalizing the school, doing drugs, or going off on teachers and we've already had numerous kids (in a school of only 400) hospitalized for suicide attempts, with one "successfully" completing earlier this year.

Also, the only kid I have who wears a mask wears it on his chin with both his nose and mouth uncovered.  He insists on wearing the mask and will lose his $hit if he doesn't have it, though.

It's still better than working in healthcare right now.

Devious licks has been a huge problem at our school.

For a lot of these kids, this has really screwed them up psychologically.  Many of them spent a year or two doing absolutely nothing via "distance learning" and forgetting how to act in a classroom.

From working on the psych unit through Covid and catching the kids who were struggling the most, I will say that a lot of these kids have been through some awful stuff in the last two years and it's easy to forget.  Many have lost family members.  When schools shut down, for a lot of them, that also took away their regular meals, socialization, daily routines, and connection to the community--as well as the only threat of accountability on parents for abuse and neglect via DCS reports and truancy.

A bunch of them were basically put into solitary confinement by parents afraid of Covid, with the only socialization available to them coming via social media and all the b@tshit stuff that comes with it.  Others just got to run feral and do whatever they wanted while parents were at work or strung out.  DCS and the juvenile court system in general have collapsed in our area and I suspect it's the same in a lot of places.  If a kid was being abused, they just got trapped with that person 24/7.

The adolescent psych hospital I worked on went from being at 50% capacity when the pandemic hit to being expanded to accommodate 70% over capacity by the time I left in September, with even more kids waiting in the ER.  Most were there for some type of suicidal behavior, but we also got a bunch of horrible neglect cases that had driven kids to flip out and budding personality disorders galore.

Single parent homes are often dependent on grandparents for help with kids and support. Covid has wiped out a lot of those grandparents. I've had a bunch of kids blame themselves for bringing Covid home from school and sickening their family.

It's not just Covid, but Covid and all the political BS and social media culture in general now are heaped on tops of disintegrating and stressed families in my area.

Our juniors and seniors here aren't so bad, but the freshmen... the kids who were in 7th and 8th grade when Covid was screwing things up... those kids are a wreck.  They have zero impulse control, attention span, or focus and they're extremely oversensitive and touchy about everything.  They have the maturity and social skills of 6th or 7th graders, while performing academically more like 5th graders.

Test scores? They stopped caring about whether kids/teachers came to school or not. We have teacher who are lying in bed in their panjamas in dept meetings. And we dont have a kid who failed, been held back in 2 years. Put another way, EVERYBODY PASSES Moves to next grade, graduates, whether they come to school or not, much less do any work. 

Those who can't do, teach.
Those who can't teach, become curriculum specialist, educational specialists, etc.

I may be too optimistic but the need for good coaches and a good structured football program should become invaluable now more than ever. If we can re-instill some positive values in the ones we are able to get, that must count for something. Tall order I know. I'm not THAT naive.

As someone who was in school (credential program) during remote learning i loved it, my grades shot up and it was a positive experience for me regarding academics.

I know why others dont want to do it. I feel bad 'wishing' to do it,  but for me academically as well as health wise it would be great. But obviously the world doesnt revolve around me and so i have to go with whats happening, that being said i can still 'wish' for an alternative.

I really don't know where to start. I tell people I will never blame COVID for all the problems, but it sure as hell didn't help one gosh darn thing.

I worked for a district that paid us for covering classes during our prep hour. The best part was, they lump-sum paid it at the end of each semester. I never said no and it made a nice Christmas bonus for me every year.

IMO, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place.... We've gotten hit hard with staff members and kids out throughout all of this. To the point where we probably should've been shut down. But, remote instruction has absolutely, positively and utterly failed around here. We closed up shop for two and half weeks last year and nothing was accomplished.

So, we're just pushing through it because it's our best option. We have some staff members who really want us to go back to remote learning. I can empathize with them to a point, but only to a point. They know online learning is beyond ineffective and they knew this year was going to be tough. So, either keep your mouth shut and push forward or quit.

As an aside, those same teachers are the ones who take 15 days off every year, refuse to get a masters to bump their pay and were b-tching about the bug long before covid hit.

What do they get if they don't use their sick days?

I mean, what do teachers get if they don't use the sick days that they're allowed in their contract? 

We cargo at 90 and the payout is dumb pay not my daily rate