u/ciegulls

Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it’s also kind of true. It looks like city planners hate the neighborhood.

It’s right by an existing A2 exit/entrance, but it looks like to get on you have to drive at least 10 minutes to reach roads actually let you join. It looks like one lane roads in and out of the area, which I imagine makes morning commutes terrible and leaving would take like 20 minutes.

So to those who live in/know the neighborhood, how bad actually is it? And is a highway connection ever going to be built?

I’m still a relatively new teacher. The advice I always get from teachers when I explain these situations usually goes something like “I just don’t.” As in, they don’t get into these situations anymore. I’ve been improving more and more at this, but I will literally get into some situations where I’m having students go full teenage-attitude tell-me-what-to-do during or after lessons no matter what short clear boundary-led answer I give.

Scenario 1: a student came in and immediately starts breaking the rules by not following the seating chart. I ask her to move to her correct spot. She wants to start a conversation about the situation, but I need to get the lesson started. She keeps talking at me and not moving, so I tell her that I won’t go into this right now and she needs to go to her correct spot. In that spot, she raises her hand continuously. I remind her that I won’t discuss this now, which was a mistake I guess. She then decided that was her opening to talk over me with all her complaints and questions that all actually just stemmed from her not accepting my answer. I guess I’m seeking advice about this because while I feel like I should have just ignored this student’s hand, I also don’t quite understand why reminding the student of the “boundary” ended up in another moment of a newbie back-and-forth scenario.

Scenario 2: A student maybe did their homework on their laptop but was too busy on Whatsapp to show it when it was being checked, so I wasn’t able to confirm and marked it missing (it’s not graded, there’s only a consequence if it starts to add up). This student messages me about it and I respond with the reason. Clear and simple, if I can’t check that you did your homework, it cannot be marked as completed. This student responds in a way that shows they think they have the power to tell me what to do and that I’m not doing it right. They pretty much don’t acknowledge anything I said. I respond a few days later, saying the same thing but worded even more clearly. The student responds again telling me about how wrong I am and not acknowledging a word of what I said. So I’m asking for advice from those with more years in the field but modern enough to experience the terror of giving teenagers Teams chats that we’re supposed to respond to. Would you just ignore this student at this point? Would you not have sent a 2nd message? Would you have ignored the first message? Would you only respond in person, in the classroom? What if they respond in a similar way to scenario 1, where I’m being talked over. Right now I want to just respond again and say a professional version of “I’m a strict teacher, reread my last message to understand my decision, I will not respond to any more messages or complaints about this topics.” But that’s probably feeding into the back-and-forth cycle that doesn’t seem to end with teens.

When it gets to these situations where these students treat me like less than even their equal, all that ends up happening is an escalation of warnings which leads to me removing them from the class (happened in Scenario 1). I want to be better about not having this happen in the 1st place. But I’ve also been in situations where obviously ignoring a student who acts like Scenario 1 has led to escalation anyways because they end up really kicking up a huge fuss because of their emotions. I’ve also have situations where crowds of young teenage boys encircle my desk (no escape route) and they all start talking/yelling at me all at once about things like how I’m actually wrong about marking them late and whatnot.

I would love some help… I feel like it’s because of the factors at play being a young woman with an accent. But the teaching culture in my country doesn’t allow for asking for advice because colleagues really look for weaknesses to use against you later and they act like they are perfect and don’t face the same problems…

Edit: More responses are coming in than I expected and quickly too! It’s all good and very much appreciated but I can’t respond much more tonight. I do think it’s probably important to add that I genuinely can’t make such good quips back to students as some of you are suggesting because while I speak the language more than enough to do the job, it’s not with the fluency needed to handle it like I would in English. I’m going to translate some of these responses (native speaker checked so I don’t worsen my situation by saying actual nonsense) and memorize them though.

Edit 2: Scenario 1 isn’t a classroom wide seating chart scenario. It’s two students who aren’t allowed (by me) to sit next to each other anymore because it leads to even worse behavior. They were literally great like 6 weeks ago, but a month ago they switched to becoming bullies towards me and others and it was just a continuous action-consequence scenario that has been better in most lessons now that I don’t allow them to be next to each other. Except when it wasn’t, scenario 1. I don’t know the extent of their friendship, but I read in Sc.1’s file today that she literally decided last minute not to go on a school trip to another country because the other girl wasn’t going.