Teacher goes against admin rules, devises new system to stop misbehaving students that actually works: 'I literally can never win in admin’s eyes'

No one ever said that school administrators are the ones who really know how to teach children.

We can all just imagine how much teachers have to put up with on a day-to-day basis. Whether it's trying to get kids to behave for the duration of a 45-minute history class or having to argue with entitled parents about how special they think their offspring are, there is a whole lot more to being a teacher than… well, teaching.

It's why the unbelievably unfair saying that "those who can't do teach" vastly misrepresents the number of things teachers have to juggle in order to effectively do their jobs well. All those graduate school dollars might help teachers devise lesson plans and learn various instruction methods, but we all know those skills end up amounting to a small portion of what the job actually entails. Much of one's time as a teacher, especially at the elementary and high school levels, involves politicking with the administration and with the school community.

This middle school teacher found herself at a crossroads when she couldn't get her kids to stop misbehaving and calling each other names during class. She worked at an institution that prided itself on positive reinforcement. No one was ever allowed to acknowledge that bad behavior was happening in the classroom; they could only promote the good stuff. This inevitably led to a problem because while punitive treatment is, of course, not ideal, students need to learn that they cannot treat one another poorly.

So this author decided to go against the administration's guidelines and instead instituted a new policy in her classroom that would reward classmates who treated one another with respect while keeping track of students who did the opposite. When I was a student, this would have been considered normal and justified. However, that did not seem to be the case at this school. Keep scrolling below for the full story and for the best reactions from several members of this online community.

It just goes to show that sometimes trusting your gut as an instructor is more important than appeasing an administration whose priorities are all wrong. What's amusing is that the administrators thought they were prioritizing moral integrity, but really, what they were doing was accidentally giving entitled kids permission to behave badly without any repercussions. I think it's pretty clear that in this case, repercussions were actually warranted.
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A middle school teacher gives a lesson in front of a classroom.
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"Finally seen a drastic improvement in student behavior…by doing the exact opposite of what my admin said to do"

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A middle school teacher gives a lesson in front of a classroom.
_{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
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