u/thecooliestone

I am a teacher who is getting my specialist. I went with an expensive school because I went there for my masters and the professors were honestly great. I feel like it actually taught me instead of just being a pay bump. In my overarching research course there are two instructors. The main one who is a doctor and actually has a degree in education, and some adjunct science professor with a 2/5 on every rating site there is. She is not listed with a faculty email so it is my understanding she's supposed to be working under him, but she just took the secondary students while he took the elementary. She is obviously grading our work with AI. She references previous feedback that either never happened or was dropped on the same day. It's got the headings and the "a, b, and even c" type ai-isms. I gave her the benefit of the doubt at first but whenever I ask about feedback not making sense I'm given condescending responses about how the feedback makes perfect sense if I just read all 7 documents and 14 unpunctuated sentences in a row she dropped into the discussion post she makes every assignment into(it doesn't).

Example: we did statistical analysis practice in which we were told to make up numbers. I did. The feedback said my data entry didn't match the answer key. The first time I asked without quoting she said that "answer key" means "rubric" or "scoring guide". I sent the quotes that said my data points themselves did not match the answer key. She then said that what it meant was that I did not choose the correct test, in spite of her original feedback saying I correctly used a paired t test.

My question: is it unreasonable to ask to be transferred to the other instructor? This class alone is 10 grand for a fully virtual course and I'm not wasting money to get failed out of my program. I understand this is grad school and not k-12 where Mommy can yell at them, but for an expensive and well regarded institution this just seems outrageous.

I mostly do vernicomposting but I keep bedding in a cold bin to start decomposing just because I've heard that helps the worms. I add extra scraps to it sometimes if I don't have room in the freezer but mostly just cardboard. It's been out there for 2 and a half years and I decided to harvest the later at the bottom (about a foot and some change of finished black compost!). I'm digging through, finding the occasional earwig or soldier fly larvae. And then I look down to see two black spiders racing up my arm. I can only assume they're there because they have a dark enclosed space that's unbothered and has bug doordash, but it was still terrifying and now my patio is a mess of half sorted bins I'm too scared to finish sifting. Marking as compost friends because I'm hoping they help in some way and aren't just giving me nightmares

My seniors have had a weird schedule the past couple weeks. As a result of them being in and out, I gave...gasp...a packet for this week. It had a lot of small tasks and was easy to do in small chunks. They were THRILLED. They literally thanked me and talked about how they were tired of the talking and "cute" stuff and we're glad to just have some work they could get done and be done with it. They were more on task than they have been for an entire month. Most of them didn't even try and use AI. Nearly 100% rate of completion. Just a thought with all these "engagement" strategies. They also scored nearly double on their quiz than the classes that did what was on the pacing guide. Almost like the dog and pony show doesn't work if you do it literally all the time.

There is estimated to be a major food crisis next year due to fertilizer shortages and climate change. I was wondering if you think composting could become industrialized to the point of helping fill in the first half of that problem after enough people get hit with the hikes. We waste so much food that could easily be separated and turned into compost with a little bit of infrastructure, and it seems like such an easy solution

TW: mentions of suicidal ideation

My mom is dying and my sister and I are talking because we're the only two who aren't suddenly forgetting everything she ever did wrong. I was saying some of the things she did and I realized that she wanted to watch me fail more than anything. Not just in the normal jealous way. I think she wanted me to kill myself.

As a teen I was suicidal. Since around 12 to when I moved out, more or less. I went to an expensive college fully prepared to never have to pay these loans because I planned to kill myself first.

When I was 13 I tried getting help for depression. She told me I had no reason to be depressed and ranted about how her life was worse. Then she blamed me for her pain pills being gone too early. She told my whole family she caught me stealing them, and even though I didn't have them and obviously didn't test positive for them when she bought a drug test, my whole family went along with the idea that I, a straight a kid who never even cursed at that time, was on drugs. She had seen intervention and would always say it could be me when one of the people on it started out smart and then did drugs. She also always said how she felt worse for the mom than anyone as if it wasn't always the mom's fault.

Everyone realized she was lying, but my dad didn't care until his pills started going missing too. No one ever apologized. I just had to move on.

When I was 16 I was cutting myself. Literally thought of it as training for finally killing myself when my sister was grown and out of the house. I only wanted to be alive to protect her from our parents. They found out, and all I asked them was not to tell my sister. I didn't want her to worry about me. They loudly yelled and kicked me so that my sister had no choice but to hear it. They didn't get me help but my mom would continue to make fun of me about it.

At 19 I was in college and told my mom I was suicidal. I told her that I was only staying alive because I loved my sister. She would then tell me every time I disagreed with her how much better my sister was without me in the house and how all my sisters problems were because of me. It was a lie. I knew because my sister texted me for support daily. But I honestly believe she wanted me to kill myself. If I tell you that being a good sister is all that keeps me alive and you spend every waking moment telling me I'm a bad sister what else could it be?

I think she was jealous, but more than that I was the most successful sibling. I was an honor graduate in a good school who never got in trouble. If I ended up failing she could farm it for sympathy forever. I was also the last one to stand up to her so she could use me as a weapon against my siblings forever if I was dead.

She's now pretending to be religious and trying to "make amends" aka rambling until I say I forgive her and crashing out when I don't. She is furious that I'm not waiting on her hand and foot and telling her she never did anything wrong. But I can't bring myself to feel bad not giving her the absolution she wants in the end when she literally spent 20 years praying I would end up dead so that people would feel bad for her.

I have an entire class that had the same wrong answer for their constructed response. They all used the same app to take a picture and copy whatever it says. Then they all copied it word for word. I have heard about 27 identical personal stories that have nothing to do with the text assigned. The question now is if I deal with the headache of putting in 80% of my grades as a 0 for cheating or just give them a pop quiz over the information tomorrow. Even if it was right do they not think that when their friends all copied the same answer I'd notice and google it myself?

I have a sped student who is manageable most of the time but often won't do work curses at adults, and basically makes himself a menace. The problem is that nothing can be done because for the first three weeks of school his co teacher has shown up one time. His IEP is not being followed and his BIP requires her to take him to the sensory room if he gets irate. Can't do that if she's not there. She is HoD for sped but she also gets half of every day for planning plus lunch plus not having any morning or afternoon duty. I just have to watch this kid slowly go off the rails and rip my hair out.

I am in a district where the supe and all his cabinet got raises that were entire teacher salaries while step increases were paused. Schools are being closed but the lady who sends emails no one reads makes 225k.

School salary schedules should all be ratios, from the custodians to the supe. Have a base number and then multiply it by X for each position. That way if the dupe wants a raise he has to give it to everyone else in the district ACTUALLY doing the work. He already gets a free car so he doesn't have to put miles on his own driving around (the counselors who have to work two campuses don't though. Neither do multi campus nurses). He shouldn't also be the one getting raises if we're so far in the red that his goal class size is the state maximum

A lot of students and teachers are coming in with prescription AI glasses now. They are their only pair of glasses meaning they cannot meaningfully see without them.

We have been told we cannot take them up in spite of the tech use policy due to them being prescription, and to just act as though we're always being filmed.

When it comes to testing though, how will this work? Leaving aside FERPA questions, I know the script last year included AI glasses as a thing that couldn't be in the room. Teachers can be told to take them off and get new ones I suppose, but the kids will come in with them regardless. Do we not let them test? Do we tell them to test without their glasses?

Anyone who dealt with this last year, what did your school do?

My school and district are doing the pendulum swing away from tech. Instead of "use tech when it is best suited and use paper when it makes sense" it is now that any tech is the devil and is the sole reason why we're getting low scores and having behavior problems.

I like tech integration but okay. I guess I can do that.

The catch? We're still only getting one box of paper per year and one box of 144 pencils. Anything. Else we supply on our own. It might be fine for math, but the texts they're demanding to see the kids physically annotating (even though their test is digital and they can't do that on any of their assessments) are anywhere between 4-12 pages long. So 12 pages for 179 kids plus even two sheets of work and that's half your case right there. We're usually doing a text a week on the pacing guide. We can't even bump the pacing guide and go back to novels either. They took the book room due to a large number of students with disabilities and sent all the books back to the warehouse

I am a teacher who loves manga and has a lot of students with disabilities this year. Manga helps a lot, and I'm teaching a multicultural lit class. Are there any manga that are short (preferably one volume) that you guys think are good and would be interesting to 17-19 year olds?

I am switching from teaching 6/7 grade to high school. I know I'll have tenth, but haven't been told what my second prep will be yet. I just want to know what to look for as the big differences, both curriculum and otherwise.

The standards are basically the same, just switching "analyze" to "evaluate" and having different grammar for the most part. But I know that the difference between elementary and middle is more in depth than that so I'm looking for any advice about making the switch. I'd also like to know if y'all are putting up the full walls of anchor charts like we're supposed to in middle or if I can live my dream of being the ELA teacher with a room full of anime posters since most of my highschool teachers just had random stuff they thought was fun in there.

I was playing a new save and was going through it pretty fast. Didn't manually save. Just auto saves each day.

As FoM does sometimes, it crashed. Annoying, I thought. I'd just gone a big run filling in requests and I'd have to do it again. But no biggie.

I tried to open it and the file was corrupted.

Restarted the game, renamed the file--the renamed file is corrupted too.

I had no other files of this one. I even checked the files themselves and it's the only one in there for that character.

I spent 43 hours of my life and now it's just...nothing. I'm scared to play any of the others now just in case it messes them up too.

I knew this could happen with mods but I play completely standard. I'm so upset!

I watch streamers react to body cams. So many of them are just kids realizing that real life is different from school. Kids yelling "you can't touch me! You can't fucking touch me bro!" To cops after they commit violent crimes, then proceeding to hit the officers. Accusing everyone of stealing and then telling them to check X imaginary evidence. Lying and crying and saying to call their moms when they're dead to rights. And my favorite, one girl in the back of the cop car kicking and trying to bust out the window yelling "go ahead and suspend me, I don't give a fuck".

Just in case anyone thinks this isn't ruining their futures when we let them run wild for 13 years and then magically what became a cool video to show their friends becomes a felony.

My mom has been "dying" as long as I've been alive. If someone else had a diagnosis she's had it, if someone else dies, she's dying of the same thing. She's had fake cancer three times now.

I've watched her drop monitors on her foot, lie about 12 year old me stealing her pain pills and then tell everyone we knew that I was on drugs. She's intentionally sabotaged her back surgeries by refusing to wear her brace and watching her change her walker from how the doctor had it to being lower so she wasn't straight.

She had her gallbladder removed and refused to follow the diet. She only wanted to keep eating fast food and eventually after throwing that up because you can't have grease, caffiene, or dairy she ate nothing but fast food, coffee and ice cream, she ended up unable to eat at all.

She's been wasting away, lying about what was wrong with her and refusing to go to the doctor. She lied about every doctor who saw her and threatened to sue them when she messed up the aftercare and refused to go to physical therapy. She wanted the attention, and now it's too late.

She lost use of her legs, and she can't control her bladder or bowels. She's on a feeding tube. She's been sent home in hospice care. Giant fuck off hospital bed in the living room.

I feel like a shit daughter because I'm not even sad about her dying. I'm sad for my dad, because he just lost his mom less than a year ago. I'm sad for my grandmother because this will be the second child she loses, and I just found out my aunt is back on drugs. I'm sad for my uncle because he'll be left alone. I'm sad for my nephews because they really did love her.

Most of all I'm pissed. Because if she just hadn't been a selfish monster who wanted attention more than anything she'd be perfectly healthy right now. But she wanted SO BAD our whole lives to be dying and she finally made it happen.

I know I'll be the one who has to take care of it. I won't do that to my dad. But none of us can afford it. She has already written how she wants the insane, wasteful funeral she gave her father. Think super fancy casket, giant headstone, embalming, the whole deal. She's always said that she doesn't want to be cremated but none of us have burial money.

I just hate how selfish she is. How selfish she always has been. And how she's going to hurt people, and most of all hurt herself because we aren't rushing to her like I know she imagined. She's going to die in a bed in the living room without the influx of love and care because she wasted it pretending to be dying so many other times.

I hate her so much and I don't know what to do with it.

My homeroom was rough, but then they split another teachers class and put half of them in mine. It means that there's the girls with an attitude that were bad before, and now a bunch of shithead boys trying to impress them by showing off how bad they can be.

I got a little trophy because the top 10 kids in their class got to select one teacher as the one who helped them. Even though I'm not an 8th grade teacher, two of them still picked me. The kids broke it while I was in another class, and can't even admit who did it.

I've actually never been this upset. Maybe I'm just tired, but I didn't even get this mad when a kid made fun of my recently passed grandmother to try and get out of trouble.

They laughed when I got upset. They say it just did that. Just like everything else they break. I'm mad at admin for doing this teachers transition instead of the kids shit but more than that I'm mad at them for being wholly uncaring of anyone they hurt and how.

They will not get a party. They will not even get fun videos. They will get the meanest version of me I can legally be and maybe they'll be better to their 7th grade teachers.

My principal has, with next week being our last week, announced she wants final exams. She will not answer any emails about them, just repeating over and over that we are to have them on the last two days. The half day Friday is supposed to be spent doing a final.

Report cards are printed and will be handed out Monday. Awards are Tuesday. This is middle school, and they've never done finales before. She wants 90 minutes blocks with half of it being review, so to accommodate students with double time we have to make these "finals" less than 20 minutes long. The computers are taken up, so we can't even make it a digital test.

She also keeps bugging about the kids taking AR tests threatening to write teachers up for not having our kids take them when, again, we were already supposed to have turned in computer carts. The teachers "following the rules" are the ones breaking state law by telling the kids to use their phones for it.

I've had a bad principal before. But I swear this is one of the dumbest people I've ever met. Truly an example of failing up.

The only question is if I pretend not to see the emails, or send a notice to parents with her email and phone number attached.