The reality of being a teacher in America is that things aren’t great. Teachers have been consistently speaking out on TikTok, sharing stories about too little pay and children that aren’t listening. It’s one part funding and one part social. One teacher substituting in Hawaii says that she decided she isn’t going to return to her substitute teaching job. She’s quitting several weeks early, in fact, and the problem isn’t just with the kids.
TikToker Jens_teacher_journey, Ms. Jen, starts her TikTok video by admitting she can’t do teaching anymore. “I guess for the first time I’m just beat. I feel defeated.” She says she’s been substituting a sixth-grade elementary school classroom since the beginning of January. She says she’s scheduled for tomorrow but continues on to say, “I’m not showing up tomorrow.” Why? According to her, “These kids are a challenge. The lesson plans, they suck.”
Jen claims several teachers, the principal, and a counselor had to come in to talk with the kids because they’re misbehaving. All these parties have worked together to try to reign in the kids but, as Jen says, “They just refuse.” She wasn’t getting very far trying to get the children to finish lesson plans to the best of their abilities.
Instead, she says they roam around the room and try to spend extra time on their computers playing games. It sounds like she’s definitely lost all control of the classroom and she’s at wit’s end over it. The phrase ‘iPad kid’ didn’t spawn out of the ether.
On this particular day of recording, Jen said the classroom was chaotic. Some teachers came into the room to help her reign in the kids and told her, “You shouldn’t even show up tomorrow.”
Jen says that, when she was in school only a decade prior to this, “We wouldn’t dare act like this.” Now, I’m not so old I forgot what school was like. Kids misbehaved back then, too. Perhaps with better funding, school would be an exciting place to learn instead of ordering children—some as young as five—to sit for more than 10 minutes at a time. And Ms. Jen’s point of the lesson plans being poor adds some truth to that.
Other teachers shared with Jen in solidarity that they’ve dealt with the same things. One teacher stated, “I had a 7th grade class like that last year. I have no idea how I didn’t walk out. They were ridiculously disrespectful, refused to do work. My goal each day was to ‘go through the motions’ of teaching the lesson.”
Another person shared, “These kids don’t care. They know there is no real consequences for misbehavior and how limited the teacher is to do anything about it.” Hopefully for Jen, her next teaching mission is a positive one.
