For the last dozen summers, I've gone to the oceanfront for a week's vacation. There, I use my 12' surf rod for shore fishing. I live near Lake Michigan, though, and I use smaller, more appropriate rods for that.
I'm not going to the oceanfront this summer. I'd still like to use my surf rod at least once, though. Will I look like an idiot using it from the shore of Lake Michigan?
One of my closest friends is on that chat. I teach their child. I don't think the other parents realize that we're friends, and that that parent lets me know everything that is said in the chat. The chat has been pretty mundane all year. Parents asking questions about certain tests dates or homework or whatever.
But yesterday, a parent in the chat complained about the amount of homework their child was getting. Then all of the other parents piled on, complaining about it, too. They started calling out my coworkers by name, saying that we were "trying too hard" and should just "let the kids be kids."
First of all, they're teens, not "kids."
Second of all, we have started giving them less work. They're only bringing home so much homework because they waste their time in class. If they would shut up and do their work in class, they'd have no homework.
And third of all, this was the same parent group who were demanding "more rigor" earlier in the year.
I, too, would love to just show up for the next two weeks and do nothing. But you and I both know that you parents would just complain about the teachers then, wondering why we're getting paid if we're not teaching.
I saw a post from a popular influencer who was addressing rumors that she was on Ozempic. No, she said. She just "cut refined sugars."
I've tried doing that a few times. It seems impossible, unless you also quit your job and spend all of your time doing meal prep. Is there an easier way to "quit refined sugar?"
I don't use any of iReady's lessons or features or tools. I spend less than five minutes per week on iReady. I just check to make sure the students did their district-required two lessons, give them completion grades for that, and return back to the way I've always taught.
My district went all-in on iReady about ten years ago now. I went to a lot of very long PDs about using all of its features. I have a really thick manual for the program.
I tried it in earnest for about two weeks when we were first forced to use it. Decided it was a bunch of BS, and went back to the way I'd always been teaching. I honestly thought the district would have dumped the program by now.
Originally, the district insisted that our students spend one hour per week on the program. But a lot of students just moved the mouse around for an hour, but didn't actually do anything. So they switched it to "pass two lessons per week."
Every Monday morning, I pull up the report. Sort by "lessons passed." Scroll to the kids who have "0" and give them a 0/10 in grade book for that week. The kids who have "1" get a 5/10. Everyone else gets a 10/10. I use the auto-fill feature on the grade book for those. The whole process takes about five minutes.
And that's it. I don't touch iReady again until the next Monday.
I'm told that there are a lot of lessons and tools and such buried in that program for teachers to use. I will never use them. What I'm doing--what I've been doing for 21 full years now--still gets amazing results.
Edit: For people asking how the consultant responded. He was surprisingly cool about it. He was rather young, like 25, tops, and seemed to only care about the data. The numbers were good. He was curious as to how I got there. He didn't take it personally.
This is my 21st year teaching at a middle school in a very affluent area. The vast majority of my students come from stable homes in stable communities with plenty of adult support. A few struggle with learning disabilities, but those students are actually some of the most motivated and hardest working ones.
I'm looking at my grade book now. Thirty-eight of my seventy-five students are failing. They're all failing due to missing assignments. Every other student has an "A" or "B." There are no "C" or "D" students anymore.
Most of these are assignments that I give them time to do in class. They're not even homework. I give them more than enough time to do the assignments. They won't even start them. They put their names on them, and turn them in, untouched beyond that.
They would rather sit and do nothing than put in any effort whatsoever.
And it's not that they're on their phones, either. We're a phones-free school. They're not depressed, either. Some of them are burned out from after school activities. But most are just really, really lazy.
These are the children of privilege. They can have such easy adult lives, if they just try the slightest little bit to do... literally anything. But so many of them just refuse. It's frustrating.
I got bored yesterday and started looking at my Facebook friends' friends lists. I was doing that to one of my high school friends' friend list, and I saw my old crush was one of her friends. By "old crush," I mean a girl I liked back in 1996. She was never my friend. She knew that I liked her, but wasn't interested.
Will I start showing up on her suggested friends list now? And, if so, will she know that it's because I looked at her profile?
My parents both passed away in the last two years. They were both in their 70s. I'm their only surviving child, and they just left everything to me. Among the things I inherited is a giant jewelry box that my father made for my mom, and all of the jewelry in it.
My father literally carved the top of the box with my mom's name and a few decorations. I'm going to remove the top and turn it into art I can hang on my wall.
I offered the jewelry to my wife or daughters. They took a few pieces, but left the majority of it.
My parents' wedding bands are in there, too.
I don't need any of this jewelry. I know I can sell it. It's all real.
But I also don't need the money. But it's just taking up a lot of space on my shelf now.
Should I just sell it anyway? Even the wedding bands?
Basically, My father passed away, leaving about $300k to me. Most of that came from the sale of his house. I am the sole beneficiary and executor and POA and everything else. I was his only surviving child. In the weeks leading up to his death (he was in hospice and knew he was dying), he asked me to "make sure all of his grandkids got something" from the inheritance.
His grand "kids" aren't kids at all. One of my kids is a teen. The others are in their 20s. I also have two nephews in their 30s.
I do not need this $300k. I'm doing very well for myself. It would just go into a retirement fund which is already worth millions.
My kids, too, are doing well for themselves. The older two would probably put it towards paying down their mortgages or taking a nice vacation. None of them have student loans to pay off.
My nephews, on the other hand, are struggling. One in particular is on the verge of homelessness. I highly suspect he has a drug problem. Both complain about child support payments they have to make.
The consensus from commenters on my OP was that I should just distribute everything equally, regardless of need. I've decided that that's exactly what I'll do, but only the maximum I can give without it creating tax issues. I believe that's $19k per person. I will talk to my accountant about it. I'll put it in a trust for my teen, and just cut a check to the others.
No shit.
We've been shouting this from the rooftops for years now. I've been teaching literature for 21 years now. I started to notice a decline in reading ability about 15 years ago. It started to fall off the cliff about ten years ago.
For most students, that is.
A handful of others are still reading well above grade level. It's the middle group that's hollowed out.
Seventy-five percent of my students struggle with Dogman books. Twenty-five percent breeze through The Sound and the Fury like it's nothing.
Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But not much.
I'm glad the general population is finally paying attention to this problem. It's a little late, and I'm sure that they'll draw all of the wrong conclusions from it. But still, it's nice that they are noticing.
"Hey, that building is on fire," they notice after it's been burning for hours. "Some sprinklers when the fire was small would have been helpful."
Geee... Thanks.
"Extreme ADHD," you say? That's the diagnosis? Really?
It's almost like that's what we've been saying FOR YEARS now. All of those notes home. All of those parent/teacher conferences. Every single time you gaslit us. You blamed us.
"He's just being a normal boy... your expectations are unreasonable."
"You just don't like him because he's too smart."
"Other kids are doing it too. You're picking on him."
Sure, the other kids do some of those behaviors some of the time. Your kid does them nonstop, every day. He distracts his classmates the whole time, too. Literally his entire class is months behind where they should be, mostly because of him.
But you refused to listen to us. Your son fell further and further behind because he simply could not focus on anything. He brought his classmates down with him.
Finally, our admin gave you an ultimatum: get him tested, of find another school. (This is a private school.) So you got him tested, reluctantly. And the test told you the same thing we've been telling you all of these years. The doctor highly recommended medication? No shit.
I'm not saying "we told you so." I'm just saying that, perhaps, you may want to consider apologizing to my coworkers, for the years of shit you put us through.
Apologize to your son while you're at it. Maybe his classmates, too.
It's a short bridge that just carries one road over another. The road it carries, though, is one of the main roads through town. The official detour is not through my neighborhood, but anyone with GPS or a map can see that cutting down my street is will save them some time. Well, it normally would, until everyone else does it. Then traffic just gets backed up on my street, because it's not designed for that level of traffic.
They estimated 18 months for this project. It's been 22 months now. There was a flurry of activity when they tore down the old bridge. That took about a week.
But, since then, there will be months with absolutely no one working on it at all. It looks exactly the same as the day they tore it down.
And no one seems to know what's going on with it. This is a huge topic of discussion among my neighbors now. We've all tried to contact the people in charge to see what's taking so long, and none of them can give us an answer.
I am in my late 40s, which means I was a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s, when stumbling upon your dad's secret stash of Playboys was a rite of passage.
Now, of course, those kinds of magazines seem very quaint, compared to what's available online.
But now, too, I have a lot of disposable income and love for nostalgia. I also have a desire to collect something. I've been collecting comic books, but that's becoming less fun for me. It's starting to seem kind of childish, and not hitting the "childhood nostalgia spot" anymore.
So I'm thinking of starting a collection of "vintage" (70s-90s) Playboys.
It that a weird hobby for a man these days? If you knew a man collected them, would you assume he was a creep?
Writing this after getting the news that one of my students, who currently has a 35% in my class due to not doing any work all year, has qualified for the state finals in track. He's failing all core classes, all because he does no work. And he doesn't care, because there are no consequences for him.
There will be next year.
For as long as anyone currently working there can remember, our school has treated sports as a completely different entity from the school. There was a school board, and a sports board. The coaches did not work for the school. They worked for the sports program.
When I started teaching there, some 21 years ago, a old-timer told me that they did that in the 80s, when enrollment was down and they had to combine students from multiple schools in order to field some of the bigger teams. They just never changed it back.
Whatever the reason, every year I've had to watch students do absolutely nothing in class all year, but still play sports.
When our admin told us about the change for next year, we all had the same question. She answered it before we asked it.
"Yes, this means that students who get below a "C" in any core class will be banned from participating in sports."
Thank God.
My father passed away last year and left everything to me, his only surviving child. But, in his final months (he knew he was dying), he asked me multiple times to "make sure all of the grandkids got something" from his inheritance. He wasn't specific, though.
Everything has been sold and closed and whatnot. Now I have a little under $300k to distribute.
There are five grandkids. Three are my children. Then I have two nephews. Their dad, my brother, passed away a long time ago.
When distributing this money (which is, legally, all mine. I am just trying to fulfill my father's dying wish), should I consider each grandchild's needs? If distributed equally, it would be a nice little bonus for some of them, but a life-changing amount for others. Some will be fine even without getting any of it. Others could really use the help.
Edit: Nephews are in their 30s. My three kids are late 20s or teens.
Asking as a 21-year veteran teacher.
It's easy to see, when you work with students for as long as I have, how many of the behaviors problems they have are a direct result of parenting styles. But do the parents themselves ever realize that and/or feel guilty about it?
Middle school. It's a small school and we know the students pretty well. There are four boys this year who are failing all of their core classes. They're all failing due to not doing the work. They are all perfectly capable of doing the work. They just don't give a shit.
I get that. I was like them once. My parents came down on me for bad grades, so I did the bare minimum. But these boys' parents aren't coming down on them, so they just don't care to even do the bare minimum.
So I give the bare minimum of effort to them. Want to sit in my class and do nothing and fail? Go for it. As long as you don't bother your classmates, that's fine with me. Zeroes are easy to put into the grade book.
But my coworkers, all female, are coming in early and staying late and giving up their prep periods and lunches to "tutor" these boys. "Tutoring" just means sitting beside them and holding their hand through everything, dragging the boys across the finish lines on assignments. They think it will make a difference. They think that something will eventually "click" in the boys and they will start trying on their own.
Again, I've been there before. It's not going to "click" for them until they're halfway through high school, if at all.
These boys don't have special needs. They're not struggling with the content. They just don't care.
All of the time and effort my coworkers have been putting into helping these boys hasn't moved the needle at all. They're all still failing all of their core classes, all due to missing work. The only work that gets turned in is the work my coworkers basically do for the boys, while sitting next to them, literally telling them what to write.
I've tried explaining this to my coworkers, but they don't want to see it. I mean, if they want to keep stressing themselves out for no reason, that's their prerogative. But the fact that I don't do it doesn't make me the bad teacher here.
Started in the summer of 2024. A little over a hundred pounds to lose. I dropped 60 pounds, but the needle hasn't budged in over a year now. Doctor moved me to Zepbound in February, starting at .5 and now up to 7.5. Still not moving. I don't know what else I can do. I feel like I'm already eating too little. It's just not coming off.
Assuming I make it to the highest Zepbound dose, and still stuck where I am, then what? What's the next step?
I am a teacher. I recently took my students, middle schoolers, on a field trip to a natural history museum. It was in the middle of the day, and this is a very popular museum for field trips. There were at least a dozen other schools there. The place was packed with children, even though it's not a specifically "children's museum."
There were some older couples there, too. And a handful of middle-aged couples. I actually felt bad for them. They were trying to enjoy the museum, but were overwhelmed by hundreds of school-aged children. The kids could not have cared less about what the museum was trying to teach them. Just like when they are in school, they were focused on socializing.
More than once, I saw an adult couple leave an area once a bunch of loud students arrived, clearly annoyed that they couldn't enjoy the area they were in.
I sympathize with those adults. I, too, wanted to learn something at the museum. But I knew better, once I saw that other schools were there (I can control my own students fairly easily), that no learning was going to take place for me that day.
Even if you go on the weekends or in the evenings, most museums have a lot of children there, ruining the experience. They should offer adults-only hours from time to time, for those of us who want to take the time to read the displays and actually learn something.
Sure, we've always had a few students who were coddled way too far into life. But the number of students whose parents do everything for them has been steadily increasing over the last ten years, to the point now where more than half of my students have learned behaviors that, when I started teaching, we would have considered "special needs."
I have 14-year-old eighth graders who cannot tie their shoes. They are perfectly capable of the physical part of tying a shoe. They've just never had to do it, so they don't know how. Their parents tie their shoes for them once, and the kids just slip them off and on from that moment on.
About twenty percent of my students are absent today. Why? They "feel tired," so their parents just let them stay at home. This is par for the course for Mondays now. We've learned to not have any important lessons on Mondays, because we'll just have to reteach it to the absent students the next day.
We don't allow cell phones at this school. Some parents think we should excuse students from homework, then, since they cannot take a picture of the homework list board. The thought that their angel should just write down what's on the board doesn't register with the parents.
And the parents email with excuses for their children all of the time. Fully half of my emails from parents are different versions of "please excuse my child from [this thing] because they are [sad or tired].
I actually had a parent once request that their child not have to take a test one day, because the child's favorite college basketball team was eliminated from the tournament the day before, so they were "depressed."
My school had to stop accepting Door Dash deliveries for students, because too many parents were Door Dashing lunches to their children in the middle of the day. Expecting their children to bring their own lunch was too much, I guess.
It's actually really sad to see play out in real life. This year, we're going to send a few dozen 14-year-olds off to high school who are completely unprepared for it, not academically, but behaviorally. They act like second graders, and they don't even realize it, and aren't embarrassed by it, because it's how they've been raised to act.
I am middle aged and am now the only living member of my pre-marriage family. My parents, siblings, and all of my aunts and uncles have all passed away. There is not a single person alive who knew me well before I was well into my 20s.
Even though there are literally billions of people alive who are my age or older, I often get this feeling that I can only describe as "last survivor."
For example, I recently took my children to see the new Mario movie. I tried to share with them my experiences of playing the original Mario on the original NES, back when it was new, but they didn't really care. I felt like I had this knowledge... this memory... and no one left alive to share it with.
Me: My dad used to take us (me and my siblings) to the Blockbuster on Park Street every Friday night. We could all rent one thing. Then we’d get pizza from the place next door. It was the best part of the weekend.
My kids, who never met my dad or siblings (all died before kids were born) and grew up in a different city (no idea what Park Street is) and never got to experience a Blockbuster: Cool, dad. Whatever.
Even though I know it's not true, I get this feeling sometimes like I'm the last person alive with firsthand experience of being a kid in the 80s.
And it makes me sad. But it's a different kind of sadness.