High school teacher learns a life lesson from her 10th-grade student after assigning the class a 20-page paper due in a week that she is “too lazy” to grade efficiently: 'She still had to give me an A.'

At what point is it appropriate for a high school student to call out their teacher?

I was a little… uhhhh, well, I won't directly quote what my high school teachers used to call me back in the early aughts, but I was not the best student. In fact, my chemistry teacher used to keep a squirt bottle in class to squirt me with water when I would act up too much… He was chill, though. At least he was funny about it! Does that make me pro-talking back to teachers? Absolutely, it does. But it has to be for a good reason. 

Students can't just undermine teachers left and right. There is a power dynamic there that must be respected if the kid wants to learn anything. That being said, sometimes it is the teacher that's gotta learn. There are definitely students who are much more academically inclined than I ever was, and I always respected them. As long as you don't remind the teacher we have homework due, we're chill. But when the teacher is obviously wrong and the students are in the right, it's time to speak up. 

That's exactly what this 10th grader had to do when his English teacher started getting lazy on them. It would be one thing if it were a mutual agreement to be lazy, but the teacher was demanding way more from them than she was willing to dish out. She asked for a 20-page paper due in a week! That is insane. The most I was ever assigned was a 10-page paper, and we had the entire semester to work on it! I loved to write, so my paper usually ended up being 15-20 pages anyway, but that was as far as my good-student-actions went. Either way, I would have been POed if the teacher made us write a 20-page paper in a week and then refused to grade them for months. That would've never flown with Mrs. Kennedy. Also, sorry I kept falling asleep in your class… But what did you expect a night owl 17-year-old to do in a 7 am class??