I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Discipline your goddamn kids.
Seriously doubling down on the last part because this behavior doesn’t form in a fucking vacuum.
Please remember this applies to substitute teachers as well. I’m a sub, and there are a few districts I am between “leery” and “may not ever go back to” right now because they were so hard to deal with.
Make your sub’s life as easy as possible. Trust me, it’ll benefit everyone.
I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.
Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.”
She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”
And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”
She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea! The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn. I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did. So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”
I had a teacher who couldn’t see color (
Achromatopsia ) and on the first day of class, he told us to tell him if his clothes clashed because he could not tell.
Me: Now we’re going to end the nature talk with a very big snake– *opens bag to reveal a large ball python*
Thirty kindergartners: *screaming with excitement*
Me: Yes she is very big, does anyone know where ball pythons are from?
Kid: The woods!!
Me: Yes, they do like the woods where they’re from. It’s a very big continent. Who knows what continent you find them on?
Another kid: The sun!!
Me: That’s … in space, so no
Yet another kid: Earth!!!
Me: Yes … that’s definitely the planet they and we are on! The snake is from the same place giraffes and lions are from …
Several kids: The zoo!!!!
Me: A continent is–
Teacher, deadpan: It’s where Wakanda is
All thirty kindergartners: AFRICA
People acting like this is some statement on todays schooling when it says right in the post these are kindergartners. They’re just learning how to read and write it’s not surprising they don’t know what a continent is.
It’s more about how the teacher knew how to use the kids’ area of interest (Black Panther) to help them connect their background knowledge to the present situation.
Wide Spread Interests 