Sometimes, teachers can be really crappy. And not just like this…
Sometimes teachers just don’t seem to get it when it comes to the ways their students are being treated. It’s hard enough being a student of any age – everything from kindergarten through college is a daily struggle against laziness – with having to worry about your teachers making things harder for you. So we’ve compiled a list of things we wish teachers knew. Well, we can all dream.
Handle Bullying When it Comes Up
Bullying isn’t just something that happens when you’re a kid and someone steals your lunch money – it can happen all the way through and past your education, even into the workplace. The best way to stop that happening is to nip bullying in the bud when it arises – namely, having teachers intervene when they see kids getting picked on, and finding some way to mediate between the victim and the perpetrator. Brushing it off as “kids will be kids” isn’t helping.
Doodling helps you concentrate
This might seem a small point for people who don’t doodle or fidget, but for those who do, their lives have been an endless uphill battle against a parade of teachers constantly reprimanding them for seemingly distracting themselves from the task at hand. Seriously, doodling helps you take in facts more easily, and people who fidget are slimmer (tenuous, I know, but still: clever and skinny!), so stop giving us the evils for drawing on our notebooks.
Academia isn’t Everything
Look, it’s just the way it is: not all students are going to excel at the more academic side of school life. And with so many colleges requiring a general interest course along with your main degree, it’s doubly important that teachers start accepting this. Some kids are going to kill it in the music studio, on the track, or at the lathe, but they’re stuffed when it comes to dissecting poetry or weird maths stuff (yes, you’ve rumbled me: I can’t do maths in any way, shape, or triangular form).
The Tests. THE TESTS
When it comes to teaching for tests, there’s a fine line between just shoving everything that’s on the test and nothing else down our throats and giving us a broad look at the subject area in general. But there’s nothing worse than turning over a test paper and realising that you don’t recognise a damn thing on there – or, even worse, you sort of do but your professor wound up rushing over it in class just so they could say that they covered it.
Homework
This is something that rumbles right up from grade school to the end of college – why can’t teachers understand how much we’ve got to do without sticking acres of homework on top of that? In a dream world, teachers would coordinate with each other and make sure that no class was getting a ton of homework from everyone at once. Apparently, however, this remains pretty much impossible, with tumbleweed-empty weeks followed by a fortnight of maniacal activity.
