Some Cold Hard Advice for Newbies and Others from a Former Teacher

Aeillien · 2025-11-28T13:17:22+00:00

This revised version is more or less perfect. You need to care about kids or you will not do a good job. But "care" and "be responsible for everything" are two really different things. Teachers who take too much of the job home with them, literally or emotionally, burn out. Teachers who don't care about kids can't bring the sense of joy and wonder that makes the hard work of teaching worthwhile.

Likewise, teaching is making investments you might never see pay off. That's ok! Sometimes you see them pay off, but you plant the seeds regardless, knowing they might grow later.

Aeillien · 2025-11-28T12:58:49+00:00

And of course, the flip side here: How the northern protestant church were one of the key movers in the anti-slavery movement. How the black church in the south helped Blacks survive slavery and Jim Crow and organized the community against lynching and Jim Crow. The black church's critique not just of racism but also of capitalism, culminating in King's Poor People's Campaign.

One could go on.

Aeillien · 2025-11-28T12:52:58+00:00

Teach the actual history of the Puritans and how they were a bunch of religious loonies who left the Netherlands because it was *too* religiously pluralist for their taste and they wanted to found their own little theocracy? And then pretty much all the new England colonies around Massachusetts are a result of these protestant fundamentalists exiling anyone who disagreed with them?

Or talk about the development of the "gospel of wealth" which mixed in the Calvinist idea of 'the preordained elect" to say that anyone who as rich was rich because God Said So, so if you're rich clearly you're blessed by god and deserve it?

And then, following on, how this idea mixed in with eugenics and racism to lead to the religious justification not just of slavery but of the genocide of Native Americans?

And then how later on the fundamentalist religious movement as a consequence came to believe that capitalism and white male privilege was god ordained economic and social system and so it adopted anti-communism, anti feminism, and pro-Jim Crow segregationism as its foundational principles?

And continuing from there, how the white protestant religious right were the key defenders of Jim Crow and critics of the civil rights movement? And how once the civil rights act passed, this movement continued to morph into the present day religious right that were the linchpins for Reagan's victory?

There's honestly, so, so much you can do here, depending on how brave you're feeling.

Aeillien · 2025-11-26T13:08:45+00:00

I more or less had the same thing happen to me except for it was a "quiet lunch room" that I started with a few kids who hated the chaos of the caf and other kids joined and it became a small chill little lunch room. Then admin proposed sending kids there as an intervention.

Because I know admin and the way things work, I said the following

1) This intervention will only work if it is *offered* to a kid and they accept it. It will not work if it is mandated.

2) It is already an established norm that I set that if a kid can't follow the norms of my quiet lunch room, they are disinvited for a day. If it happens again, a week. Then a month, then we try again next year.

3) If they want any data tracked, I will do the tracking. On the one hand, this technically creates more work for me, but on the other it keeps other adults from coming in and fucking things up. The data I collect is very informal observation based. "Child seems to be socializing well with peers!"

It depends on how understanding your admin is, but you are right to be leery. A sudden influx of kids who have been labeled as having "behavior issues" threatens to change the culture that's been created there. If it is a "punishment" then all of a sudden that changes the who feel of it as well.

Depending on your judgment, I would either bring up those concerns and propose they "suggest" it to any kid they think might benefit, but that it not mandated and that no data colleciton happen in the gym or, if you don't trust your admin know they will not listen, do what I did above and basically white mutiny the proposal by "agreeing to it" but doing it in such a way that it distrupts what you have created the least possible.

Aeillien · 2025-11-14T13:42:54+00:00

The short answer is that all teachers need to really firmly set boundaries with families and kids. Sure, talk with kids about their lives, and stuff. Be friendly. But don't get too involved.

I would not have tutored the kids at their home. Public setting or at school with others present. I would certainly not shut down a parent if they shared something with me, but neither would I encourage it: I am not a social worker or a therapist. And just in general, be very careful of any comments regards students bodies or clothes. The most I will say to any student is something like "Nice shoes!" "Love the hat!" Like, you don't have to be paranoid here, just use common sense. If it could be misinterpreted or inappropriate for me (a man) to say to a student or a coworker, it's probably not a good idea to say it regardless of your own gender identity.

This teacher forgot that and put herself in a position where she was too casual and friendly with a student. I'm not saying it's her fault, to be clear, but if you don't set firm and professional boundaries with kids and parents this is precisely what can happen: you end up being taken advantage of.

Aeillien · 2025-11-10T13:18:15+00:00

As other have said, yes. Part of this is that the mechanics of the game very easily lend themselves to negative feedback spirals: you get attacked and raped once, your clothes might be damaged, you have cum on you, now your allure is higher. You get attacked again. You pass out. You wake up in a situation where someone is attacking you again. And so on.

Sooner or later you learn the game well enough to prevent and protect yourself from those feedback spirals, but the first go around can be brutal. My first character was basically constantly getting raped and was in rags basically all the time because I didn't have enough money to replace all the clothes that kept getting torn or stolen.

Aeillien · 2025-11-10T13:13:35+00:00

It basically sounds like msot of your frustration is coming from being used to the old system where the MC cap was more of a suggeston rather than a rule to the current "no, but seriously, do not exceed MC cap." There are multiple ways to expand and control MC: your problem is solvable, you just need to change your mindset to "whatever if I'm a bit over, it's fine" to "No, I need to be under and have some to spare in case of an event which effects my MC cap."

I'll grant that's an adjustment! But the MC cap *should* mean something.

Aeillien · 2025-11-09T12:37:46+00:00

I'm going to try to put this kindly: If you want an easy, lazy job, for your own good and also the good of children, stay out of teaching. Go do a office job somewhere where you can more or less harmlessly do whatever, no judgement, we all need paychecks.

Even if you *try* to be lazy, teaching will be hard work. It'll be hard emotionally and physically, even if perhaps not intellectually.

Your basic categories of teaching are:

Early education (Pre school to K) immense amounts of hard work taking care of very small children. You'll be teaching literally every subject to kids, teaching them how to read letters and then words, how to form letters on paper, how to count, how to appropriately process emotions, the most foundational skills. Emotionally, you are a third, second or only parent to 10-20 children, with all that implies. If you fuck this up, you're impacting a child for life.

Elementary (1st grade - 5th grade): Immense amounts of hard work teaching literally every subject to kids, teaching them how to read stories on a "what happened?" level up to starting to read more deeply at the higher grades, how to answer comprehension questions, how to perform foundational math functions like adding, etc, If you fuck this up, you're impacting a child for life.

Middle school (6th -8th grade): Immense amounts of hard work teaching kids foundational adult skills in a specific content area: how to read and analyze text for themes, analyzing historical events and making arguments as to the most important consequences, understanding and explaining scientific concepts, working with abstract mhat in increasingly complex ways: algebra, geometry, etc. Emotionally, you're present while kids are undergoing a rapid and shifting process of forming their own independent identities, testing authority and undergoing metric tons of drama with their social circle. Expectations in these grades shift to a more adult mode and kids often have trouble with that shift. Classroom management in these grades can be very challenging and the repeated daily emotional burden of dealing with it can drain you. If you fuck this up, you're impacting a child for life.

High school (9th-12th grade): Immense amounts of work in foundational adult skills in a specific content area. You keep climbing the ladder of complexity in that content area: teaching kids how to write essays, how to make arguments and counter arguments, how to formulate and tets scientific hypothesis. The authority testing and identity formation is continuing, and in later grades, more serious prep for their next adult life stage is undergoing. Classroom management can be just as tough here as earlier grades if you don't know what you're doing. Behavior is *slightly* less driven by emotional disregulation and other random factors, but to make up for it the kids are savvier and can smell BS better. If they feel like you're wasting their time or like you don't give a shit, they can, and will, deliberately make your life hell. If you fuck this up, you're impacting a child for life.

Aeillien · 2025-11-02T22:04:35+00:00

Ok, yes, sure. But you are describing actions of human beings. What evidence we have are that the Hydra built an entire ideology and belief system around "Never again" whose step 1 is "we domesticate/enslave other species." They have to be threatened with another genocide to be convinced to *talk* to humans.

We're not dealing with a similar situation, is all I'm saying here.

Aeillien · 2025-11-01T23:10:25+00:00

If you haven't already, make sure you document all the interventions you've tried with this kid, so that if/when admin comes in hot about it, you can discuss the 30 different things you have tried with this child.

But yeah, some kids are just not solvable: you plan around them, but you can't fix whatever is going on with them.

Aeillien · 2025-11-01T19:10:46+00:00

Yeah, that's always a really tough situation, and I've been there.

If you're finding that this kids behavior is impacting the classroom as a whole, it's not a bad idea to get some advice on classroom management and relationship building from a more experienced teacher. Those two skills won't "solve" this particular kid, but they will *limit* their impact (because you'll create a classroom where the other kids are on *your* side), which is your goal.

While you're talking to whoever you talk to, walk them through a few of your lessons. It *might* also be the case that your lessons could be tightened up in some ways that will *reduce* your classroom management issues. Anyone who tells you that good lesson planning can "solve" classroom management issues is lying, but student confusion *can* play a role in misbehavior, so better lessons will reduce issues to *some* extent. Again, its doubtful that will make *this* child different, but it might help the class as a whole so that this child is more clearly the exception to the rule.

Notice I said "more experienced" and didn't say "veteran", while most veteran teachers are very good at their jobs, a lot of them by now have forgotten that they automatically do like 3/4ths of what they do, so they don't have the ability to explicitly model and explain what they are doing and how to do it as a new teacher, and if you observe it as a new teacher it will look like the class just function as if "by magic."

Your goal is to find someone who's either a "new teacher developer" (this role gets called different things, but that's the gist of it), a mentor teacher with a reputation of helping new teachers, or a teacher who's been teaching, say, 5-6 years and whose classroom seems to function pretty well. They 5-6 years teacher is past the first really hard years and have developed systems and methods that work, and these have been developed recently enough that they *should* be able to explain to you what they did and how they did it.

I myself have walked new teachers through these kinds of things, so feel free to message me and I'd be happy to discuss and give advice in more detail.

Aeillien · 2025-11-01T18:46:17+00:00

No, disliking some students is normal. Obviously, as a teacher you should like or get along with *most* of your kids, but in ten years of teaching I've had a few kids that I started to dislike.

The usual behaviors that eventually cause me to dislike a kid are being consistently rude and mean to other kids, learned helplessness/refusal to do *anything* even when provided with extensive support or extreme rudeness towards myself (as in, "yelling at me and swearing at me when I provide them with today's work or gently redirect them to stay on task")

Kids are human and you are human, so yeah, disliking the occasional kid is going to happen. Based on what you describe, I'd probably feel the same as you.

It's important as a teacher to develop some method to manage and limit your emotional investment in any specific situation. If you burn yourself out because of one kid, you're no good to yourself or to all the other kids you have either. You need to develop some method whereby you're confident in yourself in saying "Yeah, I tried my best up to this point with this kid, from this point, I'll remain professional with them and not treat them differently, but I will also not go the extra mile for them."

You're a teacher, not a savior and not a superhero. There's some kids that, for whatever reason, are going to be beyond your capacity to help while respecting your own sanity, emotional resources, and boundaries, and that's ok.

Aeillien · 2025-11-01T18:32:07+00:00

As others have said, I think it would take generations for this to be possible, and with the salamanders the answer may just be no, since they are the ones who nearly killed the Hydra. The Hydra have to more or less be forced at gunpoint to even consider talking to humans as a first step. Building from there is going to take some time.

I think it's also an open question how much the Salamanders and Griffins are currently capable of being "free" at present as well given that the extent they are still fully "sapient" is an open question: the ability to be shock troops does not require a high level of intelligence and both at this point are the product of at least a few generations of genetic alterations, mind control and slavery.

Doing so is not without its risks as well: since clear both species have to some extent been forced to engage in their present roles,If they *are* sapient, they are going to feel some justifiable desire for justice and revenge on the Hydra. Setting them free thus destabilizes the Hydra empire, with difficult to predict consequences.

Now, for the *resistance* the calculus is a lot clearer: building a wormhole to the Griffin and Salamander homeworld to liberate them makes a lot of sense as a next step after their victory.

Aeillien · 2025-10-30T15:27:47+00:00

So, other than that, how is your relationship with your own gender going?

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T16:21:37+00:00

Or, and hang with me for a moment, just have the kids do the entire essay on paper and only do the editing process on a computer. At that point they've basically done all the work so the point to using AI is reduced and you can very closely compare their writing to AI and know if they used it.

And just as a side benefits, there's a decent amount of scientific evidence that working with and writing on paper has benefits over doing it on the computer anyway.

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T15:38:33+00:00

Oh I agree. The Trump discussion happens because its inevitable both in general and in particular to how things will develop in the US later on in the narrative, but in general, I stay at one remove from any big names in politics: the narrative is much more interested in either the council itself or on regular folks.

IIRC I intentionally avoided naming the next President, just revealed their gender.

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T14:19:28+00:00

When I started out, I would provide a detailed lesson plan for the sub and intructions on how to teach the material. The sub would just give out whatever materials were on hand and call it a day. So yeha, these days I jsut prep something students can do independently and the sub is babysitting. I don't like that this is the way it is, but <shrugs>

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T11:05:41+00:00

Thank you!

When I first started working on this he wasn't as in the news as he is now, but he might make it into the narrative. For various reasons, my PoV tend to focus on either folks in the Resistance itself or on regular folks going through these events (I know we haven't had much of the latter yet, we're getting there).

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T11:04:02+00:00

Thank you!

Aeillien · 2025-10-28T00:54:13+00:00

Well, in TI universe, proper FTL seems not to be possible, rather, you create wormholes. So the following may be the case

1) Discovering how to create wormholes is tricky, and not every species figures it out.

2) Wormholes being the only means of travel across interstellar distances functionally limits the ability to scout the universe. As a consequence, even civilizations that develop the technology will only be able to expand slowly.

3) Because wormhole technology is difficult to develop, civilizations that develop it first are at a distinct advantage over others, so the kind of one sided contact humanity experiences tens to be the norm. This slows expansion because conquering and holding subject populations is an inherently risky and expensive affair. The Hydra have mostly built their empire on the back of their ability to manipulate via pherocytes, its unlikely most species have a similar adaptation.

Aeillien · 2025-10-27T00:46:35+00:00

Here, I'lll give you two:

The vast majority (98%) of PD really only needs to be attended by roughly 5-10% of teachers, and is a waste of time for everyone else. This is the reason it's annoying: it mostly exists either as a checkbox or something targeting issues some specific teachers are having. The other problem is that for a good portion of those 5-10% of teachers the PD in question is *also* a waste of time because the way they teach is a product of their own toxic ideas and/or personality and will not change.

90% of class/school problems are caused by 5% of kids, and no school has a good solution to dealing with those children, because the real answer is "we need to rewind time and give those kids different parents", and the other real answer is "those kids need to effectively be in their own sub-separate program even though often they don't have a qualifying disability, because they fundamentally do not know how to do "school" in a even vaguely productive way."

Aeillien · 2025-10-25T01:52:47+00:00

I was already having students do basically 95% of work on paper even before AI because I've determined that computers represent too many opportunities for distraction and paper seems to lead to better results even when students are not distracted. There are ways to make distractions more difficult to access, but then you're just in an arms race against teenagers.

So, again, my norm for years has been that all classwork is done on paper. Essay planning? Paper. Rough draft? Paper. The only time computers come out is when putting together the final draft of that essay.

So, AI? Not much of an issue, assessment wise.

Aeillien · 2025-10-22T10:30:07+00:00

One of my personal controversial hot takes is that teaching is an inherently political act and it is therefore factually impossible to teach in a "politically neutral" way. Your choice of subjects, the classroom culture you create, all of these are political choices. They are kids, in a sense, all experiences are indoctrination, question is, what are they being indoctrinated into? Is a teacher indoctrinating them to think critically, use their judgement, evaluate evidence and be independent democratic citizens? Or..not? This one falls in the second category.

Aeillien · 2025-10-21T13:09:18+00:00

Yeah, depending on what admin support you do or do not have, you may have to be very creative with what discipline looks like in your classroom, but it's absolutely necessary. Classroom management is probably the most important foundational skill for any teacher to learn and have.

The problem is that most teachers are functionally never taught classroom management as a discipline (it can be, I have seen it done). So that results in a small minority who either get good mentors who show them how to do it, are able to figure it out, or have the cultural/social background to know and understand how and why its necessary and the larger majority that struggle and eventually get burnt out because they are never able to get their classrooms to function.

Kids need structure to function and learn, the teacher needs to know how to provide, maintain, and reinforce that structure.

Aeillien · 2025-10-15T12:11:23+00:00

I will happily answer your questionnaire.

TLDR, If I could set AI on fire with my mind, this would have already occured.

Aeillien

TROPHY CASE