A Letter to Parents from a Burned Out BC Teacher
Not all of you will agree with what I've written. Some of you will be downright angry by the end of it. This doesn't apply to every parent, many of you support your child’s teacher and work with them in ways I'm genuinely grateful for. You know who you are. This letter is not about you.
I have been teaching in Ontario, Alberta, and BC for twenty years. I have stayed late, lost sleep over other people's children, and genuinely loved this job. But something has shifted, and I'd be doing everyone a disservice to keep pretending otherwise. This letter started as a conversation with colleagues, checking in the way teachers do, somewhere between the photocopier and the parking lot and the question someone finally asked out loud was one we'd all been quietly sitting with: Should I feel this exhausted? The answer is no. Not like this.
A growing number of parents have adopted an attitude toward their children that can only be described as aggressively accommodating. Every demand is met, every limit negotiated, every consequence appealed. When a student is asked to show basic manners, to wait their turn, to sit and listen, to do work they find difficult, it is sometimes met with genuine bewilderment, as though the expectation itself is unreasonable.
I understand the impulse to protect your child from difficulty. But children who are never told no are not being protected. They are being quietly set up to fail. When a student arrives at Grade 7 never having been held to a deadline, never having had to sit with the discomfort of being wrong, they are not prepared for school, and they are not prepared for life. That is not harsh. That is honesty and I think honesty is what many of these kids are not getting enough of at home.
Teachers are leaving the profession in numbers that should alarm anyone paying attention. Those who stay are absorbing problems they were never trained or paid to solve, managing classrooms that increasingly include students with needs that exceed what one teacher with twenty-five other students can realistically address. We do it because we care. But caring doesn't make it sustainable. If the conditions don't change, the good teachers will burn out, fewer people will enter the profession, and the ones who remain will be capable people doing an impossible job. That is not a system that serves children.
I teach students who are significantly below grade level in reading, writing, and math not because they lack ability, but because many have not been given the expectation that effort is required, that struggle is normal, and that falling short is survivable. BC's proficiency scale, Emerging, Developing, Proficient, Extending was designed with good intentions, but in practice I've watched students receive a Developing and feel entirely fine about it, because the language is gentle enough that it doesn't register as a problem. Children deserve an honest picture of where they stand, not a softened one that leaves them unprepared for what comes next.
Failure is not the enemy. When a student genuinely fails, figures out what went wrong, and tries again, something important happens: they learn that a setback is survivable, that their worth isn't tied to a single outcome, and that problems can be solved if you think hard enough. They build resilience not by being told they are resilient, but by actually getting back up. The values that carry a person through a hard life, responsibility, self-discipline, integrity, the ability to work at something that doesn't come easily are not innate. They are learned through difficulty, through expectation, through being held to something and having to rise to meet it. When we strip that from a child's experience, we are not protecting them. We are robbing them of something they need.
I'm not asking parents to be hard on their children. I'm asking you to be honest with them. Let them experience the natural consequences of their choices. Don't call the school in anger every time your child is asked to do something difficult, or every time they receive feedback that stings a little. The sting is not cruelty, in most cases, it's useful. I'm asking my fellow teachers to keep talking honestly about what is happening in our classrooms, because that parking-lot conversation needs to be said more openly. And I'm asking everyone who cares about young people to take seriously what is at stake. The children in my classroom will be adults in a handful of years. What they become depends, in very large part, on whether we were honest with them while we still had the chance.
I still believe we have that chance. I hope we use it.