Current Events > It's my first year teaching, I made teacher of the month for January yet...

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm sitting here wondering if I should continue teaching or not. I've worked in criminal justice for fourteen years, dealt with some dangerous folks in community supervision, dealing with kids is hard. I teach 7th grade Science, about 40 percent of my time is dealing with discipline and teaching the kids basic things that they should have learned at home. The thing is I like kids but teaching them is draining, the attention span is the length of the average TikTok video. I hate to be the "well in my day..." guy, but when I was in middle school kids knew when to play or talk and when to chill out and pay attention, there was an "off" switch. The maturity level is just not there with kids these days it seems, there is no chill. It's not all of them, most of my students are good kids but any teacher knows the dynamic of the classroom changes with a couple of them and it can snowball, now imagine half of them within a period with 504 plans, behavioral plans, ADHD, etc.

The administration is great, I love my co-workers and the rest of the faculty and staff. I'm just at a loss as to what to do with my problem students. Calls to parents don't work, I've rearraigned seating charts, referred to the counselor, wrote referrals, did one on one talks with them to see where their head is at (maybe they're acting out because of something going on at home), nothing seems to get through.

Yeah, I'm not one to say social media is bad, I still believe in its value, but YouTube was already hurting our attention spans, and you can't believe how mad I am that we let a worse version of that happen with TikTok. I mean, not only is it functionally worse, but it really is ruining our brains.

I think the biggest problem millennials as the big bosses in charge are going to face is how to actually get a productive day out of gen z and alpha. Gen Z and Alpha are not going to be typing away for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it just ain't happening.

My mother's been a teacher for years and everything in her once award-winning school has gone to shit over the past five or six years. The stories she tells me are so unbelievable at face value. Relatively older students have no social skills, embarrassingly-bad reading comprehension and vocabulary skills, and are so addicted to their phones that almost 100% of the time they break out into hysterics and become confrontational just when a teacher tells them to stop using them.

Gen Alpha is so unbelievably screwed. I can't imagine them being employable in any kind of setting whatsoever. Imagine them trying to use Microsoft Office or something. Even older Zoomers don't know how to use computers.

CRON posted...

My mother's been a teacher for years and everything in her once award-winning school has gone to shit over the past five or six years. The stories she tells me are so unbelievable at face value. Relatively older students have no social skills, embarrassingly-bad reading comprehension and vocabulary skills, and are so addicted to their phones that almost 100% of the time they break out into hysterics and become confrontational just when a teacher tells them to stop using them.

Gen Alpha is so unbelievably screwed. I can't imagine them being employable in any kind of setting whatsoever. Imagine them trying to use Microsoft Office or something. Even older Zoomers don't know how to use computers.

In regards to the lack of social skills, I really think the pandemic set these current batch of students back. My 7th graders act like they're still in elementary.

You really won't know what you're doing for several years. Summer will recharge you a bit. I say at least stick it out 3 years before giving up. Get through this year and you will have a better plan of attack for next year.
My first year was not easy but overall okay, but my second year was non-stop hell. Like I wished I would get cancer so I could take medical leave. But then I switched from an inner city school to a rural school and absolutely love it. The school you are in can make a big difference.
I teach 6th and 7th and the maturity jump in that one year is pretty crazy.