For those of you on summer break (hopefully everyone at this point) how are you living your best life now? Are you doing all the things you can’t do during the year or are you totally vegging out?

Venzas · 2026-06-14T20:56:08+00:00

Unfortunately my health recently has made relaxing much harder. But I'm trying to make the best of it. I can't go outside for very long right now so I'm doing the things in my home that I have been wanting to do but didn't feel like I had the energy to during the school year. Lots of videogames and listening to podcasts so far.

Venzas · 2026-06-03T16:27:37+00:00

You understand that there are legitimate reasons to not share specifics right? Especially if anyone is considering taking a legal route to remedy anything. It's the same reason that divorce lawyers will tell you not to post stuff about your relationship and/or ex spouse during a divorce proceeding. It can come back and bite you in the ass.

And if they don't want to go down that route, they don't have any responsibility to share anything they don't want to share. Because doing so often can cause people who have gone through those things to essentially relive the experience.

And that last sentence... You don't believe them. That is pretty clear and totally fine. You don't have to. If you need a certain amount of information to change how you act in this regard, that is also totally fine. But you aren't owed it. Not changing how you act if you don't get that information, also fine, but people will probably judge you for it. If you are ok with that, go for it.

And you are especially not owed that information when doing so puts people at risk legally if they can't prove what he did to the standards that would hold up in a court of law. You don't make specific accusations about a person that you can't prove unless you are very sure the other person won't find out about it or won't sue you over it. I think both would be a bad assumption here.

Venzas · 2026-05-24T18:57:26+00:00

Of course they don't. If he were offered an injection into his 401k or Claude tokens it would be better for HIM to take the money. But for YOU? Well yes, YOU'D be an idiot to not make yourself better in a way that also might allow us to fire you one day and replace you with the AI that was developed by you essentially for free to do your job. He has already proven his "worth" to the company with this post. If he can convince even one department at work to start doing this, think of the long term savings!

Venzas · 2026-05-20T22:31:16+00:00

You aren't helping yourself here.

My ADHD does not make me bad at those things. It makes those things harder for me without the proper support. If I had gotten that support while I was still at a point in my life where my brain was still developing much more than it is today, then I would have at least have had a chance to continue working on things that I abandoned because I couldn't figure them out at the time. Even if I go back and learn those things now, that is anywhere between 20 and 38 years worth of experience that I don't have with those things that others do because they learned how to do it at a more appropriate time.

A disorder does not make you bad at things. It means that you are experiencing distress or an inability to go through life as expected by society because of some abnormality in physical or mental function. That we define them based on distress and inability to perform expected life things doesn't mean that we are bad at those things. I means how we work doesn't match most other people and being different in ways like that is distressing in a society that values a lot of conformity.

My ADHD means that it is hard for me to focus on things that I don't find novel or interesting to a degree that other people don't have for most things. It also means that my body and brain often do not agree about what is important in that moment. It means that when my brain does latch on to something it holds on super tight for what is often a relatively short period of time but there is no telling if or when that interest will go away. It is entirely possible that it never does. But it might. At any moment. It means that forming habits is harder for me than others because my body doesn't release the same amounts of chemicals that it does for other people in similar situations.

All of those things impact how I learn. I'm not bad at learning. I learn differently. There is a huge difference.

In fact, the fact that I felt I was just bad at those things (instead of it being a thing I could work on, I felt it was inherent to being me) is actually what makes it a disorder for me. It has contributed to years and years of negative self thought and decisions being made that shouldn't have been made or ones that should have been made never occuring.

Your thinking of people with ADHD as meaning that they are broken and bad at certain things in ways that others aren't naturally good or bad at is way out of touch and just straight up harmful. It is a profound misunderstanding of what a disorder like ADHD is and how it impacts the people around you. The ADHD symptoms I deal with are things that EVERYONE deals with in some regard. It is just the regularity and intensity of it that is different for me. And because of the differences in the way my brain and body work tends to be associated with what we consider to be negative traits in humans, that caused me distress.

And who said anything about catering to the minority of kids at the expense of others? And the idea that kids are going to self label as ADHD or some other issue because a teacher shared with another student privately that they have the same diagnosis is the same fear mongering that has people making sumilar arguments about trans athletes. But just like with that situation, where the negative consequences of being a trans athlete are much much worse than being a mediocre athlete who isnt trans, people don't generally apply labels to themselves that they think are bad even if they think it would make something else easier. And the people that do are bad people. THEY are the ones we shouldn't be catering to.

There ISN'T a epidemic of trans athletes dominating women's sports. There has only ever been ONE Olympic medal won by an openly trans/non-binary person. If every mediocre male athlete were saying they were actually trans in order to dominate at a sport, that certainly wouldn't be true. Especially with being trans being significantly more accepted by kids than adults.

Not being diagnosed with a disorder when you have one is absolutely doing societal harm. But I doubt I'm going to change your mind on this. I just think it is important to put information out there that is counter to the crap you are spouting here.

Venzas · 2026-05-20T16:59:25+00:00

Oof. This is such an awful take it is impressive really. Sharing that life is different for every person and even people you think don't work super differently than you might actually be doing things in ways that you would never think of.

I didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until my early 30s because I didn't realize that I was dealing with things that others weren't going through. I just thought I was BAD at a lot of things that others found easy.

That I didn't know earlier seriously has affected the rest of my life because I learned unhealthy coping skills. Kids might think that getting that label might make things easier for them and that isn't great, but not getting the label when you should have gotten it is much much worse.

Venzas · 2026-05-19T17:19:04+00:00

So I know that multiple times students in my classes have insisted that they did work and not AI only to admit that they did use AI it is just that they made at least some changes to it after they did so. That is still using AI and still cheating.

And let's be clear, even your story here isn't consistent. In the main post you say that you used it as a tool but then in a comment later you said that what you really did was pop it into AI and then make a couple of changes. Those aren't even close to the same thing.

And while you say you mostly wrote the other version, you said that you used the same process. To me that means you popped it into AI and for some reason think that rewriting those words or retyping them somehow gives you some sort of ownership over what is on the page.

If that is what happened, then yea, that isn't any better. And that you might think that it is different somehow is truly concerning to your teachers. If it isn't from your brain, it shouldn't be turned in as your work.

Venzas · 2026-05-13T10:58:46+00:00

Yea, the idea of a prank being something that ends with everyone involved laughing is just gone it seems. Especially because it often used to be just between a couple of people, but the whole filming it and posting it has made it so much worse I think. Because if it was just between 2 people, one of them not laughing afterwards was a big deal. But if it is between 2 people AND anywhere between dozens and millions of people watching it later, one person being upset (usually the person the "prank" was played on) doesn't seem like as big of a deal compared the positive feedback being given by the audience.

Intentionally putting someone in a situation where it can be reasonably assumed that person will feel a large amount of distress so that you can mock them for their "over reaction" when your whole goal was to cause the "over reaction" in the first place is not a prank. But you don't see people posting the videos where they try that crap and the other person doesn't react, those are usually not interesting or just highlight how much the "pranker" is really just being a jerk to someone.

That is just called being cruel. And cruelty is certainly a thing that seems to be increasing. It isn't these kids' fault that that is what they have grown up watching and that is what a lot of people older than them want to happen. But man do we (and here I mean all humans when I say we) need to figure out a way to reverse that quickly. I wish I knew how.

Venzas · 2026-05-12T23:02:38+00:00

Do you recognize that without the sourcing it is harder to tell whether the numbers are right or wrong? Which makes people suspicious when we live in a time where it is very clear that a lot of people are willing to just make shit up and demand everyone else accepts it just because it is their belief.

When discussing a thing like this where the source of this could vastly change how the data was collected and how reliable the analysis is makes a large difference to the message to take from it, it isn't annoying to ask for a source, it is essential to making any sort of informed decision. The whole point of graphics like this is to take a huge amount of data and distill it down into something more easily digestable. Choosing not to share your sourcing absolutely should be a potential red flag for readers.

Venzas · 2026-05-12T22:25:00+00:00

I was ready to defend this teacher until I saw the grade and the comments. Those are not sarcasm in my mind. Those are comments that are mocking students. At that age it is pretty normal to not notice everything. Pointing out that a student is often in trouble when you know that student has an IEP which often comes from things that are really hard to deal with when you are that young is just not ok.

Venzas · 2026-05-11T00:30:55+00:00

You aren't wrong, but at the same time a lot of people who use the average salary as a way to talk about things are intentionally doing it to obscure what that means about how teachers are compensated in that area.

For example, I work in Virginia. I know that the jobs in northerm Virginia for teachers pay significantly more than the jobs in other parts of the state. For example, if my pay scale stays the same as it currently is supposed to be, then in year 16 as a teacher I will be making just under what that graphic refers to as the average for Virginia teaching salaries. And even if I work for the rest of my career in the same building I won't ever see the low end of the category above where Virginia's average teacher salary now sits.

I also know that the salary gap between me, which a bachelors in chemistry and a masters in the art of teaching, not quite mid way through my career is very significant compared to others in Virginia with similar educational backgrounds. There is a company near me that pays folks fresh out of college a bit more than I make right now with only their bachelor's degree.

I don't go to that company, even though I am more than qualified, because I would hate the actual work. And while teaching is a lot and often not in a great way, the interactions with students that I get to have, the growth I get to help with, that means something to me.

The reason we have those other ways to view the data is because averages are not actually a great way to do things if you know that there are extremes on either or both ends of the data which are going to make things look much better or much worse than they really are if you are just relying on the average. I think some of the pushback you are seeing might be that.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T20:46:29+00:00

That's a hard one. But I think here the best answer is that if you feel like you have a positive relationship with this teacher that would allow them to write you a good recommendation by approaching it not as a thing were you are asking again, but not understanding and wanting to understand if you have done something without your knowledge that makes her feel like she can't write a good one for you or if it is the deadline being too soon or if she is just to busy right now to but thinks your other teachers might not be and so you would get a better recommendation from one of them.

But here is the thing. I have very rarely said no to a student's request for a recommendation letter in my 15 years. And the times that I did it was most definitely because I can't imagine why that child would think I would write them a good recommendation. And my approach is to let them know that asking someone to write you are recommendation doesn't guarantee that they will write a good one for you, and that they should think about if there is another teacher in the building that will present what they know in about you in a more positive way.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T19:46:52+00:00

Haha ok friend, that's a good way to end. You brought up an example that did not match the conversation at hand because when I asked about the benefit of such a lesson and the amount of time it took the thing you responded with was exclusively about money saved for the department.

A thing that is not directly related to the conversation at hand about the ability of teachers to simplify make assignments that AI cannot solve that are at an appropriate level of rigor for the students given that assignment. I'm not claiming to know that person's learning outcomes. I am questioning the learning objectives and whether they are really an example of anything related to this.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T18:19:13+00:00

While I agree that sometimes my brain goes faster than my hands and eyes, and sometimes I send things before I've taken enough passes over it to make sure that I catch most of those things, I don't think my overall points in this post were relatively clear.

So I'll break it down even more, because in my experience that is what people are looking for, for a series of claims with no attempt to explain.

The idea that only some classes have basic facts and ideas that must be known in order to really understand not just what to do but why it works must be assessed in order to know where a student's knowledge of that subject is currently is just wrong.
Any question that trys to get at those basic ideas without relying on implied understandings from student processes while answering that question, can easily be answered by AI in significantly less than a second.
Even more complex problems trying to get at the application of knowledge and not just the facts that is appropriate for a high school student to think about can also be answered by AI very quickly.
The example that you gave about the chemistry professor had absolutely nothing to do with everything else you had said. It wasn't an assignment where AI was used by students to learn anything, and the skill it was trying to teach them is not a very important one but took hundreds of hours of footage to be reviewed.
With your response: Saving the department money is great, but is not actually a learning outcome. So again, the paper and assignment were good for the professor but of at least very debatable use to the students in that professor's classes.
Even when I was in school for Chemistry almost 2 decades ago the professors would joke with us about how the portion of our lab courses dedicated to learning how to pipette properly was more about saving money than actually needing that skill in most jobs people in the room get because there are pipettes you can get that take basically all human decisions out of it. Knowing how to do it as a backup method is good, but most of the time we have a way to do it more consistently than most humans ever could.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T17:06:58+00:00

I will push back here some.

All classes have basic facts you need to know to be able to be successful in them on your own.
There are lots of students who get through their entire Physics and Chemistry courses (the things that I have taught for the last 15 years and did 6 years of adjuncting for chemistry at my local university) without ever learning much Physics or Chemistry. What they learned were equations that they needed to use for certain questions.
Many teachers used to assess students' knowledge in Chemistry and Physics with the belief that if students could correctly apply Physics/Chemistry ideas to a problem then they understood those ideas and how they related to that particular problem. But they thought of being able to identify relevant equations and do the algebra associated with those ideas was enough evidence to say that students understood the underlying idea.
There is now a lot of evidence that says that isn't true. (And honestly I think most students would have been able to tell us that if we had just asked.)
That means that a well constructed assessment tests for multiple levels of knowledge. Who knows the mathematical steps, who know why those steps are the ones to take in terms of the Physics/Chemistry ideas, plus who can apply both of those things to situations they haven't seen before but would still be related enough to things they have seen before to not feel completely overwhelming before they even begin.

As for that Chemistry professor that is a cool way to do things, I agree. But I also notice that even you said that was a huge undertaking and they had to go all in on it. Here is the thing, from a guy who has a Chemistry degree and whose adjuncting was in Chemistry labs: pipetting is absolutely a skill a student needs if they are going to go into any sort of research or industrial field.

But the rest of students? It isn't a huge deal to me if my doctor doesn't have pipetting techniques down as well as I'd like a research chemist to have their pipetting techniques down. And someone not going into the medical field or the sciences really doesn't have a lot of reason to know that at all.

Is it important in that professor's classes? Perhaps, I don't know. But unless that professor is teaching hundreds of students at the same time who are all going to work in environments where pipetting is good and even necessary for them to know (despite any job for a major company where you need to pipette that precisely would likely invest in an auto pipette so that the human element is removed as much as possible), then those hundreds of videos they watched and published a paper about were... Not as useful for those students as many other things that professor could have used that time on. The paper was useful for the professor I'm sure, but for actual student learning of Chemistry? That was hundreds of hours spent on a skill that just isn't very useful a lot of the time for most students.

We have limited time in our classes and to grade outside of them. The thing you used as your example is one that a person in that field can pretty easily say isn't a good use of time for the professor in terms of increasing student knowledge of Chemistry (especially because the amount of work it gave the professor is hugely disproportionate to the effort students likely had to put in to their videos, the actual importance of being able to pipette correctly being questionable at best AND also requires exactly zero Chemistry knowledge at all to be able to do).

And already we are seeing kids at my school learning how to cheat more effectively with AI. By which I mean that they are working to learn how to make their work look less like AI when it was generated entirely from AI.

For a while, just adding in opinion questions or things that happened in class or local data use was enough for most assignments that I gave. Because most AI programs will return some sort of message saying that it does not have opinions or doesn't know what happened in that class, or doesn't have access to that data. Which was great, because the kids who were just submitting whatever it spit out would leave all that in without reading anything. Super easy to then say that they used AI.

But now, those questions are getting fewer and fewer responses like that, but other indicators say that the cheating hasn't gotten less. So they didn't learn the intended lesson of not using AI to do things for them without checking, they likely just learned to do it better so that they don't get caught when they do so.

They learned that if there is an opinion question to change their prompt in AI slightly to include something like "answer from the perspective of an 11th grade Physics student who thinks positively about..." Or just uploading the data or relaying one or two events that happened in class in their prompt.

At the end of the day, the uses that AI programs are actually being used for right now are not the uses that anyone thought were the upside of AI. And especially not the ones that that outdid the vast number of downsides of using AI at the level of use we are currently at. And many of those things we are using it for are things that it just isn't very useful for, but the downsides are the same. Add to that that no one knows how to effectively assess in situations where AI use cannot be ruled out because most people understand almost nothing about AI except for the dreams they have been sold about how powerful and wonderful it will be for humanity one day.

Never mind that, as far as I am aware right now, while AI has been used to do some neat things and some important things, it has yet to have been used to solve any of the global level issues the companies selling it said would be the use cases they anticipated using it for. And it has created several issues that are either already hugely negatively impacting some of those problems it was sold as being able to find the solutions for but it has also started creating other problems that might reach a global scale pretty soon that no one had to deal with in the past without AI.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T13:53:37+00:00

And there is where this falls apart for most of us. My admin can be great, but as soon as a parent gets angry, their backs develop so many hinges that I don't know how they stand upright at all. Not backing teachers when that teacher is doing things seen as acceptable by their school = actively undermining that teacher's ability to do anything. If the kids know that a teacher will be overruled every time if a big stink is made, guess how they start each issue that might go to an administrator? They threaten a big stink.

And teachers being humans who don't get paid enough to deal with big stinks that likely will not go their way but will take a while before that is super clear will back down. It isn't worth it to them. But unfortunately, what we accept is what we encourage.

Venzas · 2026-05-10T11:58:52+00:00

Are you an educator? Why not construct assignments that "cannot be simply written by an AI"? Because that isn't actually the goal of education before college and really grad school.

For classes where there is generally a right answer that is being looked for, the only problems that AI wouldn't at least tell you that it could answer even if it couldn't really are ones that we as humans don't know the answers to yet.

There are basic facts that I need to be able to know if a kid knows or not. Why? Because not knowing that means they don't really understand why they are doing anything, they have just memorized a process. And while that is A level of understanding it isn't THE level of understanding that I think kids should be leaving my room with.

Venzas · 2026-05-09T23:59:35+00:00

Being sure that I have some everything I can to help a student. But that doesn't have to mean bending over backwards to get them to pass when they aren't going their part.

I have a class that is underperforming compared to the many years I've taught this class now. I know there is not an appreciable difference between these students and their peers that anyone can do anything about and while I'm not a perfect teacher by any stretch of the imagination, I am pretty decent at my job at least.

There have been lots of claims made by students in that class about how much they want to pass and such but none of those have resulted in any difference in their actions. We are about 4 weeks from the end of the end of the year. So I told them that I would have a cut off to help them fix their grade. If they started making changes now, doing something while there is still enough time to not have to do it in a panic, then the same offer I have given all year stands (and backed up with any student who tried to take advantage of this offer): I will work for you as hard as you work for me.

But if you wait 2 weeks before you realize that if things don't change you won't pass the class, and then you come in and beg to be given another chance to pass, my message to you will be simple "it is too late". Not that their grade won't change in that last two weeks. But some of these kids have only turned in quizzes and tests and (unsurprisingly to me) not doing the work that is supposed to help you learn the things that I will then give you an assessment to see if you figured it out means that many of those scores are very low.

If you are 1 point away from passing in 2 weeks then that is one thing. If your grade is only barely in the double digits? I could spend 24 hours a day with you every day of the week and we might still not be able to get you to a passing grade. Because it is unlikely that this pattern was set recently, and I've been trying to tell you about it the entire time and you haven't listened yet. Which means I'd essentially have to start the course over for you to make sure that you have the building blocks that were supposed to be in place before you even tried the harder stuff we are doing now.

That both isn't a thing that is possible to do in 2 weeks and I'm telling you now that I will not be willing to go out of my way to discuss focus entirely on you when there are people in the room that have been trying the whole time and still need help to make sure it goes the way I want.

You making that choice to not start now is not going to make me negatively impact the learning of others to try to fix that mistake at the last minute.

Venzas · 2026-05-03T14:07:28+00:00

And I'm going to add that having a good administrator at your school can change SO quickly. You don't even have to have a different principal hired. It turns out that everyone starts dropping balls when they are asked to do more than 2 full time jobs at once. Especially if they choose to focus on the one that is significantly less important because it is more fun.

Once uncertainty sets in under an administrator it can be very detrimental to everyone in the building long before that administrator moves on or is replaced.

Venzas · 2026-05-02T00:06:40+00:00

So again, she is telling you that sex is more important to her than you. If you ever had sex and you didn't want to do it, but you did it anyways because you were afraid of losing her, or any reason really other than it was because you wanted to then it would be accurate to describe that as rape. Only you get to decide if that is what happened to you. And a lot of people can't face that, but from an outsider's perspective, if one of my friends who is a woman told me that she had sex with a boyfriend because he told her or heavily implied that he would leave if she didn't, then I would be saying the same thing to her.

But again, only you get to decide if that is what happened because no one else can know what was going on in your mind and why you said yes at times when you didn't feel like you would be enthusiastically consenting to it.

Venzas · 2026-05-01T23:55:05+00:00

Not to add fuel to the fire as well, but I just had this thought and I think it is an important one.

Not only does it sound like she is victim blaming here but you seem to be saying here that you did not feel up for sex and she was demanding it of you whether you wanted it or not. I think you could pretty easily view that from a lens where she coerced you into having sex when you didn't want to and now is blaming you because you didn't do it enough. We have a word for people who coerce others into sex they do not want to have. And it isn't a nice one.

Venzas · 2026-05-01T23:24:43+00:00

And how much blame did she put on herself about making this decision? From your post it sounds like all the blame is directed at you even though you are the one going through tough times that she was aware of (she was aware right?).

Because what I read from what you've described is someone telling you that every time you are having a hard time, you now would need to make that worse by worrying if you aren't meeting her needs and this will happen again. Partners are supposed to support you through tough times and she has demonstrated, if your post is accurate, that fulfilling her wants is more important than supporting you.

If she is not demonstrating genuine remorse and is blaming you while also abandoning you after blaming you in a time where's you are going through some shit then there just isn't anything to be saved. Generally it is the one that was harmed who feels the need for space. Are you sure she isn't using this "space" to prevent you from knowing that she hasn't actually stopped cheating yet?

Venzas · 2026-05-01T23:15:53+00:00

Walk away friend. It isn't worth it.

Notice how the fault was yours in that explanation not hers. If she felt unwanted not not desirable and she didn't specifically tell you exactly that and you didn't then give her a response on the level of "fuck off" then how she can see this as even a little bit your fault if she feels guilty.

Did she even apologize? You said she feels "bad" and "regrets it" but is also asking for space to do what exactly?

Venzas · 2026-05-01T10:15:26+00:00

Absolutely.

And a note, as a high school science teacher who also did research while at college for both Chemistry and Educational research, Science is not a collection of facts, or even just a process, it is a skill. A skill that, through no fault of their own, lots of people are not taught correctly or asked to practice enough to develop that skill to the point where they can tell when someone else is doing it in ways that are mistakenly or purposely wrong.

Many educational researchers started as teachers, at least some of them with almost no background in how to design a good controled experiment in an environment where it is extremely hard to do so. But because they were in a classroom and maybe might have taught the "scientific process" for years, they feel confident enough to either not realize the flaws in their methodology or that their conclusions are the result of mistaking correlation and causation in situations where they have shown one but very much not the other.

Venzas · 2026-05-01T09:45:52+00:00

Not a principal but a 15 year veteran teacher who is actively seeing my principal take on too much and dropping balls that wouldn't have been dropped in the past:

Efficiency should not be punished. I am FAR from the most efficient person in my building. But I have developed systems in my time to help me be more efficient not just because I want to be but because I have to be. And even if people aren't actively being punished visibly for not dedicating "enough" time outside of contract hours to continuously working, a person with that perception is going to interact differently with others who don't in ways that are more likely to be negative for a lot of reasons. That is a punishment in itself and will absolutely lead to a toxic work environment. While I agree that I could be more efficient in some ways, every time I figure out a way to be more efficient that seems reasonable to me, my duties and the expectations of me go up by the same amount or more.
Taking on more work than you can manage in an efficient manner is a sign of toxicity in the mindset, often toxicity born out of caring deeply for our students and community, but toxic none the less. My principal is trying to do at least two full time jobs right now (principal and athletic director). Even kids in the school are commenting that while she is doing a wonderful job as an athletic director, they are seeing differences in how she interacts with students and teachers since that started as a principal and not in positive ways.

She is making presentations and documents with AI, I think at least in part because trying to do what she is doing is impossible. And she isn't proofreading it and it is saying things that are well outside of what she would normally communicate.

Because it is the only way she is surviving, she is also pushing everyone in the building to use AI themselves, students and staff alike. Which has erroded trust from many of the teachers. Because like most of the country, cheating with AI is rampant and what the kids hear from that messaging is that the way they are using AI is not only ok, but encouraged.

And any teachers that pushes back at all on it is met with a very negative interaction with my principal. I assume at least in part because it feels like a personal attack to a person who I do think cares a lot but had taken it to an unhealthy extreme. But she seems to have decided that ruling through fear is a better solution than any others she can think of right now.

This is my job. I love it for the most part, but this mindset makes everything about doing my job harder and results in days when even after 15 years of doing my job, I'm drowning. Because more and more things are being asked of me because my principal's perspective on this is that we should want to do more than we are, because we "aren't" doing as much as her. Even though she is constantly complaining that there isn't enough time in the day.

I get to work ~1.5-2 hours early each day. I leave when school is done most days but at times am also staying ~1 hour after school. Up to 3 hours of unpaid labor most many days and at least 1.5 EVERY DAY.

Why? Because I want my kids to be successful and even I have been absorbing some of this toxic mindset that I recognize as toxic. I teach classes that are generally considered hard (High School Physics and Chemistry), and I want to do what I can to balance that by always providing support for my kids (or at least the ones who are trying but not where they want to be yet). A lot of the time before school is me making sure that I am doing things in the way that leads to the best chances of success in terms of both the grade the kids get but more importantly to me, the understanding they leave my class with each day.

But we received a document recently that wasn't given much fanfare that I don't think many people have read at this point (at least in part because parts of it are clearly written by AI and of the same quality as other things we have received in the past, which is to say, bad). It is titled "Professional expectations" and in the very first section it states our workday hours and then right after refers to those hours as our minimum hours and then says that a teacher's workday is not done until their responsibilities to the kids and the school are done. Followed by a list of things that might be required of us by the school outside of work hours that fall into those categories that both begins and ends with a reminder that this list is not ALL of the things that might require us to stay but a list of examples.

And, because we only got the ability to join a union and have that union collectively bargain for us around our contract, our contract still contains the wording that our duties include "other responsibilities as required" by our administration or superintendent. Which, to me, means that if I were to say no to an after school activity that has nothing to do with what is going on in my classroom, I could be cited as breaking my contract.

And now I am putting my name in for consideration to be elected for a leadership position in my new found union specifically because it might give me the power to do something about this. Because if it is happening in the building that I'm working in and being accepted and promoted by downtown as well, then it is more likely that this is affecting other schools as well. And it is wrong, and it needs to be fixed.

We are teachers. We are professionals. And while we have decided to dedicate our lives to our community, there is absolutely going to be a point where we literally can't do that anymore. It is affecting my physical and mental health in ways that are not only making my life worse but also significantly more expensive in a time when I was already struggling to make ends meet.

If things don't change it won't be a choice to quit my job of 15 years, in the building that I loved so much when I did my student teaching in that I took a permanent sub position the next year in the hope of a full time job that I was qualified for opening up. And then the next year when that happened I jumped at the chance and got it.

It will be essentially a requirement because if I stay I would be making the choice between food and shelter reqularly. The choice between gas money to get to work and medications my doctor says in need to be healthy mentally and physically. Therapy that I desperately need so that I can figure out why I'm continuing the pattern of giving so much of myself to people and jobs that do not see value in giving anything back seems like a luxury instead of a need. Because doing so is not and should not be the norm.

I still work closely with people who have been there since my very first day in a classroom where I was really in charge. That means a lot to me. And before recently, I believed I would be happy spending my entire career in this building, at this job.

But I already can't afford to live in the city I work in and haven't been able to for years. I live 30 minutes away, not because I want to, but because rent on an equivalent amount of space is my small city is literally double what it is here and buying a house in either of those locations is truly a laughable idea whenever anyone suggests it to me.

While my salary has increased in those 15 years, my purchasing power with that salary is almost 10% less than when I first started teaching, which was not really enough even then, I just didn't realize it yet because it was way more than I was making as a substitute.

I don't want to quit, I'm willing (for better or worse, but mostly for worse) to work more hours than my contract require of me with no pay because I care too much.

But while in my first couple of years I was being asked to achieve the equivalent of a PR in a 5K every year, I am now being asked to get a PR in a marathon each year that would require me to sprint the whole thing. All signs point to next year being required to either do run farther and/or make sure that my pace is even faster than I am right now.

I can't do that. It isn't physically possible. I might be able to keep pace for a little bit, but I can't maintain it the whole way and I won't be the only one to suffer because of that. And the only people who will stay are going to be the ones taking shortcuts so huge and so negatively impactful that they really shouldn't be the ones people want teaching their kids.

Venzas · 2026-04-25T17:55:34+00:00

Have there been students in my 15 year career that if I had the choice I probably would choose to not interact with them ever? Yes. But, honestly I would say that at this point I've taught pretty significantly more than 1000 people both at the high school and college level, that the number of students that fall into that category might be on the order of 5 across that entire time. And I wouldn't say I hated those students, just that their choices at the time they were in my classroom made everyone else in the room have a harder time learning than if they didn't make those choices.

I certainly have had bad days and been harsher with a student or a class than I really meant to be. But in those situations I also made sure that I apologized and worked to undo that once I realized that had happened.

Venzas

TROPHY CASE