Yahoo Lifestyle Teachers Are Speaking Out About The Challenges Of Educating Generation Alpha And The Next Wave Of Students
Whether it's staying on top of course curriculums or stopping teens from vaping in the bathrooms, being a teacher today is no easy feat. With kids facing record-high anxiety levels, technology taking over classrooms, and public education caught in political crossfire, it’s a nonstop rollercoaster of stress. Whether you’re a teacher or a parent, the challenges are impossible to ignore.
To vent some of their frustrations with the difficulties of teaching today, southpawfa took to the r/teachers community on Reddit to ask other educators a simple but loaded question: "What is the most unpopular opinion you have regarding teaching today?" Their responses give a raw, unfiltered glimpse into how fed-up teachers are these days.
1."School does not need to constantly be fun and engaging, and engagement is certainly not a cure for disruptive behavior."
"I agree! I am NOT your child's cruise director!"
2."99% of the problems in education can, and should, be fixed at home."
"Bad parenting is a huge part of the problems in schools. Our team calls these students PICs — Parent Impaired Children."
"I agree. But we only work with the kids, and we're often all they've got. So unless you've got a plan to eliminate poverty, make all healthcare (including mental healthcare) free and easily accessible, extend mass transit to levels never seen before in the US, and increase wages, education is not going to be fixed in the home."
3."Some kids need to be held back! I have kids that can’t read! I teach high school!"
4."Boredom is important; it helps you reflect on yourself, your life choices, and your future decisions. This notion of entertaining the children to engage them in learning is just to excuse their apathy. I'm a teacher, not a clown."
"It also allows you to practice self-regulation and delayed gratification — things that kids today struggle with due to the activities and content marketed to them."
"There was a time when we would be so bored out of our minds that we would create our means of entertainment to escape it. Boredom fosters creativity. Constant (electronic) entertainment pacifies an idle mind and leads it to dysfunction."
5."We need to start teaching honest American history at a younger age. Warts and all. Students shouldn't have to wait until late high school to see primary source documents for the first time or to find out what happened when Columbus arrived in the Americas."
"Children ARE AWARE of the world they live in. Middle schoolers are exposed to gruesome and hateful things online, and they need to know the context of it in our culture and history. Keeping the violence of slavery, colonization, etc. a secret only creates apathetic adults who think that their actions and beliefs don't have broader impacts."
6."I don't believe in automatically passing students due to age. I believe students should only pass by skill when they show they have proficiency in the skills required for the next level of instruction."
7."Sports don't belong in the education system; they belong in the township. STEM and art competitions are much more acceptable as high school extracurriculars."
"Sports shouldn't be associated with a school or used to get scholarships. The word is scholarship, not athlete-ship."
8."Our administrators give us a hard time if the students are 'compliant' but not 'engaged.' Basically, if everyone is doing their work, but they don't seem to be enjoying themselves, then we're told we're not doing a good enough job. Doing something simply because you were told to or want to get a good grade isn't enough."
"For the record, I try hard to engage my classes. I just hate that it's become an expectation."
9."Make them memorize. There is value in memorizing facts. Spelling. Stories. Etc."
"I keep telling the kids. It's a multiplication table. It's the same every time you look at it. Yes, you need to understand the concept of multiplication, but also just memorize the table. It's never going to change!"
10."Direct instruction is more necessary than some school districts think. When small groups can end up being more work (for the teacher) than they’re worth."
11."I hate the push for small groups in districts without the resources to have effective small groups."
12."Mine will actually be unpopular: It's not our job to teach character. It's our job to provide a safe environment free of bullying. It's our job to be good role models. This involves interventions, but actively intervening in the natural social learning that occurs at school age slows the evolution that comes naturally. I think kids are being worse today due to rebelling against schools trying to tell them how to feel and what to believe."
13."We should be teaching for real life, not college. Academia is not real life; in many ways, it's quite the opposite. When students graduate high school, they should be armed and ready to function wholly on their own, no matter which path they take."
"We also need to stop pushing for college and start pushing for the trades, or our infrastructure is going to collapse within a generation or two."
14."I think that 'inclusion' means the district doesn’t want to, or can’t, pay for higher levels of service."
15."We need to move back to pen and paper more for general work and limit technology. The ease of Googling the answers is ruining critical thinking skills and inferencing."
"Handwriting notes and answers on worksheets has been proven time and again to aid retention."
16."Before Covid, I was a big proponent of technology in the classroom. The reasoning is that we are in a tech-driven world, and students need to know how to use it. Post-Covid, I sing the opposite tune. The tech is way too distracting. There is too much fun stuff on the internet to keep kids engaged in a lesson on it. They get bored with it if it is used too often. They learn better with paper and pencil."
"I now use the Chromebooks pretty sparingly, only to read the story (our 'textbook' is only in electronic format, which I hate) and research for a project."
17."I think teachers should be able to turn off the internet in their classrooms."
18."Repetition is boring but it helps to develop memory. Some of my high school kids' prerequisite knowledge is embarrassing. Basic facts and skills are underdeveloped and neglected."
"This is also true in the world of instrumental music education. Do you want to get good at the trumpet? Get in the practice room and practice your scales. Certainly, some people find scales engaging, but they aren't engaging for the average person. And that's okay. Repetition, repetition, repetition. There's not much else that'll make up for it."
19."Not requiring students to turn in reasonable assignments on time, with a HARD deadline, is robbing them of their opportunity to develop vital time management skills. Not having these skills will cause problems later in life if they do not gain them somewhere else."
20."We educators need to bring back some form of tracking (meaning placing students into groups based on ability level). Having high-performing students in the same room with students reading 4 years below grade level is a huge disservice to both. There would have to be flexibility and the ability to move up and down as needed, but seventh graders reading at a first-grade level need space to catch up."
21."No school should be 1:1 with technology. Personal laptops should no longer be in schools. They're distracting. Students aren't learning basic computer skills or how to take notes. They rely on online programs that hinder actual learning."
22."We never should have stopped teaching students how to write in cursive (script). We also should never have stopped teaching kids how to type."
23."Test retakes do more harm to the profession than good. I'm talking at the middle and high school levels. It irks me when a student is about to turn in a test and asks if they can retake it."
24."Standards have gotten too high. New kindergarten levels were not required until second grade or higher. This has resulted in academics being forced on children before they are developmentally mature enough to take in so much information. We complain that 5-year-olds can't sit through all-day instruction, forgetting that when many of us older folks were 5, kindergarten looked MUCH different, and we weren't expecting to learn core academics all day."
"Since kindergarten is no longer about learning social skills and norms, play, and basic emergent academics, Pre-K should be free and available to all students."
"Our kindergarteners just completed their Narrative Writing final in November. They were expected to (three months into kindergarten!) use simple grammar correctly and write details about how characters felt in their stories. Yet, before starting Kindergarten in August, most of my students had never even tried phonetically spelling words."
25."Arts classes are not a place to just dump kids because they got booted from other classes. Especially if it's a class that requires performance and judged evaluations."
26."Very unpopular opinion: Secondary teachers should stop giving grades for work other than assessments. Put accountability for learning on them and let them know it is their choice to learn the content so that they can pass. Give them feedback on their work, but stop giving grades to bait them into doing work they are supposed to do to get the job done."
"Adults are not graded for every move they make toward completing their assigned projects. We have to exercise responsibility, delayed gratification, time, and resource management to get the job done, and we do so because the results of 'test day' fall squarely on our shoulders alone, and we suffer enormous consequences when we mess that up.
Now, these students think it is my job to get them to do work and will only read, write, take notes, or even show up if I grade them. And because of this, they also think it's my job to get them to learn, and don't even remotely understand that I am here only to teach (aka bring the horse to water). Plus, they (understandably) hate busy work--give them study or practice time instead. Stop wearing ourselves thin and only provide constructive feedback until test day."
Do you agree with these teachers' unpopular opinions? Share your education hot takes in the comments or anonymously via this form!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
