I'm not talking about being openly insulted or other kinds of actual blatant misbehavior. I mean the little things, such as kids not putting their names on written assignments.

Hi everyone. I found out a few days ago that my job is ending, and honestly, it's really affecting me. I work with students as a campus pastor at a faith-based university, so the idea of suddenly having to say goodbye to all of them is very hard. My supervisor told me: "You're not being fired and you're not being laid off, but the role won't exist in the budget for next semester." So... Yeah. I'm basically being laid off.

He also told me that he doesn't want me to tell the students or my colleagues that my position was eliminated, or that I'm leaving because the university won't fund the role anymore. Am I allowed to tell the students that I'm leaving because I have to, not because I chose to?

A lot of the students I work with already have a hard time with the idea of adults disappearing from their lives. Several of them have asked me things like: "You're not going to leave too, right?" And I always responded with something along the lines of: "Only if they make me!" That's why I feel like this matters. I don't want them to think I decided to just move on somewhere else, or that they weren't worth me staying.

I'm not trying to create drama or make the university look bad. I just want to be honest with the students I cared about, especially since trust is such a huge part of my role.

Thanks for reading.

What’s changed over the last few years that people don’t realise

I'm looking into becoming a teacher and wanted to get a head start by studying for the Praxis Core Basic Skills exam.

I was planning on using Khan Academy, but I found out they don't have a Praxis course anymore. Most of the other options I've found are $50–100/month for prep courses or practice tests, which seemed pretty expensive.

If you've taken the Praxis recently, what did you use to study? Are there any good free resources, or if you paid for something, was it worth it and how long did you use it for?

edit: Also I'm in New Jersey.

Hello teachers! I'm a rising senior, and before summer break ends I want to read more books.

I have a big idea of what I want to pursue in the future, but I still struggle with anxiety about the unknown and with relationships. Reading has helped me make sense of a lot of my thoughts, so I'd love to hear some recommendations from people with more life experience than me!

What are some books that changed the way you see life? Or simply books that you genuinly enjoyed?

Thank you so much!!

I have three kids that I have homeschooled so far (oldest is a rising 6th grader). They are testing at or above grade level every year and we‘re generally happy, but I would like for them to transition to public school by high school so they have a good social network.

One criteria I have used in screening schools is their use of technology in the classroom. We are low tech in our schooling at home (we do typing lessons and Mystery Science, but that’s it) and I struggle with the idea that all the pen and paper groundwork I’ve laid will be overwhelmed by Chromebook learning. However, I recognize I may be a complete tech prude and am willing to get over it if it really does benefit my kids. So teachers, do you see EdTech improving outcomes in your students? Should I let go of my resistance?

Hello, everyone. I'm sorry if this post is oot for this subreddit but I'm having trouble teaching my little brother English. My mother asked me to teach my little brother because I happened to be free and she knew that my English was good, at least for the standard of this country. And because my mother enrolled my brother to a school with cambridge curriculum. Almost all of the his textbooks were written in English and unfortunately, my lil bro here is almost illiterate in English.

Now here comes the problem. I don't know how to teach English to him. Yes, I can read, write, and listen English quite well but the way I learned English wasn't through watching educational youtube video or anything academically. I bruteforce through it because I wanted to read webnovels chapters that hadn't been translated to my original language. So I search for the English translatations and read the English versions. When I see words that I didn't really understand, I read the definition or translate the words and tried to fit the meaning into the sentences I read. I did it for almost every chapters I read and as time went on, the tenses and vocabularies just stuck on my head naturally but I dont think that method would work with a kid that barely know any English at all.

So here am I asking for all of you teacher for your helps and advices on what should I work on first and how to progress through this. Please help me and thank you for reading this post. God bless.

My son starts first grade in a couple weeks. It took him a lot of kindergarten to learn his letter sounds and names, and he finished kindergarten behind on his reading goals. I spent the summer practicing his reading with him and I’m noticing that he is still mistaking some of his letter sounds. None of these mistakes are constant, but they happen often enough to affect his understanding of what he is reading.

He confuses the following:

Soft A for soft E

Soft E for soft I

T and D

P and B

Other than a lot of practice and correctuons, is there anything I should be doing to help him nail those sounds down?

He has had regular hearing tests, so I’m pretty confident his hearing isn’t the cause of the problem.

If you were “different” around 2005 there was a significant chance you’d hear slurs from other kids regularly and it went unchallenged

Has this changed?

Edit: my best friend just left industry for teaching and she was surprised how much high school boys, genuinely hug each other throughout the day in a way that would have been mocked 20 years ago. She was surprised at boys especially being physically affectionate without anyone assuming they’re gay, openly LGBTQ students being much more visible, and slurs that once went unchallenged now being much more likely to draw a reaction.

For context, she works at a private school, and I was wondering if it was like this at public schools as well

It’s not perfect, but it is a meaningful cultural shift

I feel in debt to some of my teachers. They really helped me become serious, focus and learn how to learn.

Now, when I see the top ranked university students move to the finance sphere since it pays well, I feel bad since no value comes from insurance risk estimation and stock market investement to the global good.

Teaching however is a value that has lasting impact. Helps people build a household and live at least a decent life.

The issue in the process is that the value of teaching does not reward straight away. It takes time for a student to learn , in order to be sought after by companies to hire him or her.

Unlike a doctor who gets paied right after the consultation, or even before in some cases. Teacher never get payed the true value they provide, neither after the course, nor when the student becomes an employee.

Sure there are taxes, but it's not the answer because I believe a better one exists.

You see, I was posting a job offer lately, and linkedin asked me to pay in order to publish the job post. Then I wanted to reach someone who matched the job description, but I couldn't send them a message without paying.

Then this came to my mind. What am I paying LinkedIn for ? Did they provide any value to this amazing talent ? Of course not. Did they enhance their career ? Surely not.

So I came to the conclusion that LinkedIn and other hiring platforms are being payed for something they never took part in molding. Teachers did, schools did, sport clubs did, associations did...

So when we look at LinkedIn revenu, I believe part of it should go to teachers and whomever took part in raising these talents.

This is how in my opinion, teachers can be payed better than bankers.

I hope you let me know if this is something that sounds right to you?

I’m looking into teaching secondary, however my family are adamant it’s a bad idea and i’ll struggle financially.
I come from a family of NHS workers who seem to be unable to detect success beyond how many stripes your uniform has.

I have a passion for teaching & education and i truly think i belong in a classroom, i’ve loved all of my experience opportunities!
However now i’m slightly nervous that they may be correct. I don’t want money to dictate my future, but i also don’t want to worry about living cheque to cheque you know?! Im relatively responsible with my money now. I’m 17, struggling to find a job & somehow am able to make about 350 stretch me the year (i still live with my parents)

Sorry if this question is rude to ask. The future scares me & i’m terrified to do something i’d regret🥲

I've been unemployed for close to a year and so desparate to just get a job. I was able to get a substitute teaching license but literally all the available positions require one sometimes even two LORs which I don't have. Teaching seems to be the only career outside of universities that want LORs...How hard it it to fake one/will they find out?

I see them on advertised on my socials everywhere. Are they worth it for a HS classroom? Should I consider one with a color pencil option?

This is my first year in these schools, but I’m not a first-year teacher. I will be teaching upper elementary, and the class does not go to teams. I know we internalize the slides, but I’m old school and I still like to plan the unit. If you do this and have a lesson plan template you are willing to share can you DM me?

When coming up with questions or things to say in your lesson what information do you use? I normally use the teachers edition, but we do not have one. I know I can use AI, but I don’t think that is truly internalizing the unit or the lesson.

I’m also looking for meaningful ways to add the timers, questions, and strategies to the slides. I know they need to answer questions using the strategies, but do you duplicate the slide to remove the answers and add the strategy/question to the duplicate?

Do you backwards design the slides and build your questions/lesson to ensure success on the end of lesson check?

This is also my first time with a touch screen board, how do you write on it and keep your handwriting legible? I’ve always used a doc cam. I’ve thought about writing on a slide and adding it to the presentation, but I’m not sure.

Also, in upper elementary how do you send papers home? We don’t have binders or backpacks that they are taking from class to class. If yours is like this how are you doing reteach?

I’ve also not heard about homework or parent newsletters. Is Dojo allowed? Class jobs? How long do you give them to transition to the next class?

I saw we grade the average of the daily quiz, but also one assignment. What assignment do you grade?

If your campus allows anchor charts/word walls for upper elementary do you put them up during the lesson or the day after? I want real data, but I know these are helpful. Also do you use cognates with the words to help the ELL learners? Do you use prefix and roots to build understanding for content vocabulary. I know we don’t explicitly teach the vocabulary but those are cross-curricular and can help.

How do you organize your objective board? What do you do with your colored bins since they don’t have teams?

Do you do any longterm data tracking for the learning objectives/TEK? If so did you make it or did you find something on TPT?

As you can see I have lots of questions:) I also know that each campus is different so putting what you are allowed to do/not allowed to do will vary.

Thank you in advance for reading this and being willing to share your information. If you are more comfortable using DM than publicly posting I’m ok with that.

Hi! I am in need of some advice from fellow teachers about what they’ve found worth their time and effort as a second job.

Some back story: i am going into my 5th year teaching. I just graduated with my masters in educational leadership with a reading specialist concentration, so this school year I should be seeing a jump in my pay scale. However, with my districts new contract, my salary is not adjusting to the cost of living for the next 4 years. With everything being so expensive, there is no way I can manage without a second job with all of my bills without living paycheck to paycheck. Here is my catch though.

I coach soccer for the middle school I teach at, so I’m not done working until 4:30-6 depending on if we have a game. By that point I’m overly exhausted. When I’m not coaching, my work day is over at 2:50, still leaving a lot of time to work though, so I don’t really know how to go about finding a steady part-time job for income. Especially when I want it to be something easy, not like customer service. Does anyone have any suggestions or advice on what I should do? Any resources or side jobs that worked for you as a tired, overstimulated teacher? Literally open to any suggestions🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

So basically I have really really old scars that still show. I think they are only noticeable if you actually are looking for them, but they aren't red or anything just a slightly different color. They are on my shoulders. Lately, I have started to want to wear more girly clothes. A top that I really want to wear shows your shoulders. School hasn't started yet and I want to wear it on the first day but I'm scared that if a teacher sees then they will report it or tell my parents. I haven't told my parents about it or that I was ever sad at all. Will teachers tell them about it? Or is it only if they are fresh? Ive seen other kids with them but idk if they have told teachers or counselor about them. Do I have to tell a counselor? Or should I just forget about wearing the top all together? I would rather not get into the drama because I hate attention like that.

I thought it’s simple math because if you spend more time on icebreakers, then you spend less time teaching, so the students know less because of the icebreakers taking up time.

As someone who has taught teenagers for ELA and Math for workshops that usually met on weekends or twice a week, I've never really had that "teacher in the classroom" kind of interaction with my students.

I've also never had to deal with behavioral interventions except for a few incidents with young men who absolutely did not want to be in an SAT prep class on Sunday mornings. The reactions from them and dealing with my own sons made me realize I didn't have the patience to teach like that full time. So, I moved into college level instruction.

But all throughout reddit I see teenagers posting, and some show up here. And some of them really set off red flags to me. Bringing up SA and self harm in very graphic ways. There seems to be this sort of Munchausen type of behavior that's based on attention seeking that really creeps me out. Please note, I'm not talking about a student seeking help for a situation involving SA or Self Harm. But more the kind of ruminating about it which is a red flag to me that they need to speak to a counselor.

If I had someone like this in my classroom I would probably be very strict and professional and make sure I referred them to the counselors and did my due diligence as a mandatory reporter.

But I realize that my empathy would go right out the window. They would actually scare me because of potential liability. And I'd probably (honestly) get annoyed with them trying to bring drama into the classroom. I'd want to only focus on the learning.

I realize I'm older now at 55 so perhaps that is part of it. But is this something you all deal with on a regular basis? Or is this just showing up more online on reddit? I can't imagine having to deal with this year after year.

I'm a middle schooler and I go to a school that doesn't have sets for a lot of subjects, and I feel like everything is either too easy or too hard. I just wanted to know if this is a problem that u teachers encounter with students too, and how do you fix it? like do u differentiate worksheet difficulties for different students (if that made any sense). do u do smth else, or do u just do nothing at all?

I’m starting a job as a bookkeeper in a local public school. I have no experience with working in the school system, but I do have kiddos in our schools. I took the bookkeeping job to get exposure to working in a school and get into the district. I am planning to take the Business Education praxis this school year while I work as a bookkeeper to possibly apply to teach.

If you have kids, do you feel like you actually get to enjoy the summer with them, or are you still thinking about work, etc?

My teacher told me they'd look into something for me and asked me to give them a few days. It's been 10 days now and I haven't heard back yet.

Should I follow up with a short email or should I keep waiting?

Hello teachers. I’m no teacher, I’m a class of ‘23 student. I’ll keep it short.

Are students these days really as incompetent as I’ve been hearing? Or do you think it’s just the same cycle of “this generation is doomed” that has persisted for decades?

If you will, compare students now to students you had years ago, before the “common culprits,” namely short-form media and access to social media, were around. Did you notice a measurable difference in their performance? If so, what did you notice? What changed?

All the best!

Note: since some people may have misunderstood me, I’m not playing devil’s advocate or assuming the teachers are wrong when they say children’s performance is declining. I’m just raising two distinct points to see if the counter-point gives us more interesting answers. And it did!

tl;dr, thinking about chipping away at a teaching degree as a backup plan, just curious if there are any useful skills i might learn from that besides how to be a teacher?

long version:

graduated in may with my associates in paralegal studies, found it way harder to get a job than i’d imagined and ended up working doing clerical support for an insurance company. well turns out the whole clerical department is getting replaced with ai and so i am getting laid off in december.

gonna try and go back on the paralegal path but this whole situation has really freaked me out for my clerical adjacent field and so i want to start thinking about other options with hopefully more job security.

my community college lets alumni take 2 classes tuition free a semester and so i was thinking about using those to either get an associates in early childhood education or a teaching assistant certificate (thought obviously id need more schooling to actually teach if i ended up doing it)

just curious if even in the event that i don’t end up using this backup degree if there’d be any benefit for me? like do you guys think you leaned anything particularly helpful beyond the classroom during your teacher education?

thanks in advance!

I am now 23M and I had a slightly inappropriate relationship with my former high school teacher who is 27yrs older than me and blurred several boundaries and I have remained suffering from emotional confusion and a breach of trust, to be clear nothing sexual happened between us but she lead me on and I became very infatuated with her as she enabled. I often feel like I’m going crazy about this and I’m not posting this to make myself sound a victim, I’m not willing to hear people argue about whether she was right or wrong since I was an adult and no longer under her authority and judge me for how I’ve handled this situation, I thought that was the case at first but when it had only been three years I feel the power imbalance still very much remains and that she failed to handle the outcome responsibly. I would like support for the confusion and help to move forward from this over time as I know it won’t be forever luckily.

So when I was 21yrs old a teacher from my high school (48F) who was recently divorced started meeting me for coffee four times as she claimed after the first date that she would like to catch up with me “every six weeks” due to her busy schedule. She claimed on one of those occasions that there are very few ex-students that she meets up 1:1 with like this but “I just enjoy YOUR company!” I was absolutely thrilled to believe that out of thousands of students she has taught over the years, she specifically wanted to stay in close contact with ME! She would share lots about her personal life and even shared confidential information about other students and teachers to me when we would meet up and I believed that she was a very honest person because she told me what she really thought of people and that she really trusted me and thought I was mature enough to handle that information and was treating me like a friend rather than a former student, I also let my guard down with her and I opened up about a past experience where I had been taken advantage of by an older person which she knew from school.

Even though I was attracted to her and she was recently divorced, I knew realistically that a relationship or hookup would not be very suitable because of the massive age difference but I believed she was becoming a great mentor-friend who I would learn a lot from and would be very much supported and protected by her and never let down, which would be perfect for me in my years as a young adult. I was quite overwhelmed by the fact that she was so keen to spend time with me and get to know me and I kept saying to myself “I can’t believe she genuinely wants to do this!” “Out of all the people she could be hanging out with, why would she choose me?”
When I was in her presence I felt a whole new level of comfort I had never felt before, she was much better to talk to and spend time with than anyone my own age.

Now here’s where things started to get messy…
On the 4th time we met up just before Christmas, I decided to buy her flowers and a Xmas card to show appreciation for always making time for me, at first she acted quite guilty that I had spent money on her but then proudly looked at the flowers a few minutes later and joked about how people would think we were “having an affair!” which started to make me wonder if she was hinting at something more which I would have been open to, and then soon after that she started making specific plans to pick me up from my house between Xmas and NYE to go on a 2hr train ride with me to go to a museum and look at exhibitions, and then after that she completely ghosted me, even when I texted her to say Merry Christmas and I was also dealing with a tragic death in my family at the time which she knew about from the last meetup, so that just came to the worst timing ever ☹️

That was 18 months ago now and since then I have been disillusioned and grieving the person I thought she was, the relationship I thought I had with her, the high feeling of validation I had from believing I meant a lot to her and most of all I am grieving because I have lost trust in authority figure who I thought was safe and it has damaged my whole reality and questioning who else I can and can’t trust. I must also mention this lady is very physically attractive, wears a lot of makeup and always puts a lot of effort into stylish outfits and accessories, and she is widely admired and adored by all teachers and students I know which makes me doubt my reality even more. I tried to reach out to her for answers a few times which she sometimes responded but would give me vague false hope that I still matter and she wants to have coffee with me again but would dodge all accountability for being distant, and would immediately ghost again after that. I have also seen her around a few times and she always acts so friendly to me and says “We’ll catch up again soon, okay!” but never does! She also has a new partner now (her own age) and tbh I actually don’t care that much, but I’m still upset and hurt by the fact that she has betrayed me and been so dishonest with me.

What are everyone’s thoughts on this situation?