It's finally over

Every student has had this dreaded interaction with a K-12 teacher. "Can I use the restroom?" “I don't know, can you?” Not only is it unoriginal, but most children will not understand the grammatical problem at hand. That's because there is no grammatical problem with “Can I use the restroom,” and teachers who act like there is are simply in the mood to be pedantic. There is a specific Southern brand of this interaction that I remember vividly from elementary school. “May I use the restroom?” “…

As if teachers don't have it hard enough already...

When you're a little kid, there's nothing scarier than the possibility of attending summer school. That's where you go when you're a juvenile delinquent throughout the year and don't finish your schoolwork. When a teacher brings up the dreaded idea of attending summer school, it's usually a simple scare tactic to submit a class of youngsters into obedience. There's nothing wrong with that! Once you get to high school , you realize that summer school is an actual possibility and not just a scare…

I'm so glad I'm not in school anymore and no longer have to be the “buffer student.” Almost every former girl child knows what it's like to be the “buffer student." When teachers have “problem kids” in their class, they often seat them next to quiet and well-behaved kids (mostly girls) to attempt to mitigate the problem (or buffer it). Teachers think that well-behaved kids will rub off on the rowdy ones, but usually, it results in well-behaved kids becoming miserable. I always seemed to end up…

It's refreshing to see someone standing up for these students when they most need it.

When you're a kid, you have to be a little sneaky with what you say. When I was a wee lass, I had a huge potty mouth , and it took me a while to learn that there were some words you just couldn't say in front of adults without consequences. I remember how unjust I thought it was that my mom could swear, but I couldn't when I was 11 years old. Swearing seemed like the coolest thing in the world, and all I wanted to do was show the kids at school that I knew more bad words than they did. But alas…

No students allowed

Telling them like it is!

Teachers are some of the most harshly criticized groups of working professionals out there. Everyone has their own idea about how teachers should do their job, and few of them could do even half of what teachers do daily. So many parents expect teachers to be able to fix everything that's wrong with their bad kids and try to place the blame anywhere but on themselves. All of this criticism can get exhausting. At most jobs, employees only have a couple of supervisors, but teachers have administr…

Five Six Seven Eight!

Back to school! Again!

Teachers are some of the most harshly criticized groups of professionals out there. Everyone has their own idea about how teachers should do their job, but so few of them could do even half of what teachers do every day. So many parents expect teachers to be able to fix everything that's wrong with their bad kids and try to place the blame anywhere but on themselves. All of this criticism can get exhausting. At most jobs, employees only have a couple of supervisors, but teachers have administra…

It's finally time for teachers to take a load off. It seems like this semester has been rough for everyone, and every teacher who taught this fall needs a well-deserved break to catch up on their sleep. So many people give teachers crap about having a summer and a winter break . They think that because their office job is all year long, they must work harder than anyone who gets a considerable period of time off. What those people don't know is that teachers have to spend a lot of their breaks…

Teachers deserve so much more respect than they get, and I am partly to blame for this. When I was in high school , I wasn't blatantly rude to my teachers, but I did not give the educators in my life the respect they probably deserved. For instance, I called every single one of my teachers Senior year by their first names, either behind their backs or to their faces, depending on how close we were. Out of Barb, Cathy, John, Paul, Linda, and Kelly, I could only call Barb by her first name to her…

There is nothing more humiliating in school than being dress coded. I remember being dress-coded by a teacher I once thought was my friend: the middle school theatre teacher. I soon learned that he was nothing of the sort. He made me change from simple black leggings into sweatpants from the 90s, and I was horrified. I don't know what changed in him, but one day he snapped and started ranting about the importance of the dress code and how we need to “dress our age.”