Teachers FINDING The SAD Truth About Their STUDENTS (r/AskReddit)

our slashes credit teachers have read it what's the saddest thing you've ever found out about a student I taught preschool three-year-olds I got a new student who was in her grandparents care because she had been molested / raped by her mother's boyfriend she had all kinds of issues obviously because she didn't know how to comprehend what happened to her and how to deal with it she was so damn smart and funny and great but at the same time had violent outbursts hearing a three-year-old trying to describe sex acts that happened to her was one of the most devastating experiences of my life my girlfriend has a four year old and admittedly I call her my daughter to others but not in front of her yet so I don't confuse the little lady since her real dad is strung out however she knows I love her dearly but I would [ __ ] kill myself before I ever even thought of touching her inappropriately what the [ __ ] is wrong with people and how the hell does a three-year-old have anything sexually appealing about them I'd [ __ ] murder someone without hesitation if they ever touched her like that I had a student that I taught in seventh grade and he was my friends the librarian student aid in eighth grade who had horrible hygiene and he was often bullied for it for his birthday we decided to create a shaving kit for him we filled it with cologne soaps a razor and other items we ordered a pizza and we decorated close the library and had a small party to celebrate him when he opened his gift he started to cry at first we thought it was happiness but it quickly escalated to sobs we thought we offended him and began to apologize through his sobs we finally made out I thought it would make him stop we looked at each other and gently asked what he meant slowly the story emerged that he father had been sexually abusing him since he was five and he thought if he made himself as gross as possible his dad would stop by law we had to call Child Protective Services and we explained that to him as I went to do that my friend tried to console him as it was his birthday his mom showed up to pick him up early arriving just after CPS the caseworker let her in the room and the first words she said were couldn't you just hold on for three more months it seems she knew what was happening and was getting her LPN so they could move out she had not worked before this sad story does have a happy ending CPS in conjunction with our school social worker found them a shelter so they could stay together the father was convicted and sent to prison where he was eventually stabbed to death asterisk I should have explained that mum was regularly beaten and told that she and son would be killed if they tried to leave I'm not in any way excusing her behavior just putting in the context 7th grade student lost an older brother to a drive-by after a few months I was told they had lost two other siblings the same way a few years earlier in elementary school three years down the line and his name was in the local newspaper for killing an 11th grade boy for his gang that year I had the 11th grade boys little sister in my class what a terrible cycle you reminded me of my story that's a breaking the gang cycle story fortunately I had a student as a seventh grader who wasn't a bad kid per se but as the year progressed became a real piece of work he became a big troublemaker and made a point to be disrespectful in class but was so so so frustrating because he was very smart and a genuinely nice kid one-on-one I contacted his single mom when I started seeing these problems to find out if there was anything I could do to better support him and figure out what was happening he immediately improved about a week later I contacted mom to tell her about the improvement she said I just lost my oldest son to gang violence and I'm not about to lose e to he's too damn smart and I'm not going to watch him get into that crap I'll kick his ass myself so I don't have to watch a thug do it I asked him about it and sure enough his older brother had just been killed in a gang-related shooting I now have him as a freshman and he is easily one of my favorite students I know he has a great future lined up for himself the cycle sometimes can break I teach fourth grade and two years ago the students at our school read enough books to spend this reward wheel that we have it landed on eat fried worms I embrace my role as the young popular teacher so of course I ate a giant live worm in front of the whole school after that this little girl used to stop me at lunch and she would just say in a super disgusted voice ooh what you ate a worm so after that I started going up to her each day at lunch and looking at her food and asking her where the worms were and we would become back and forth this continued into last year and one day we got done with our routine and one of the paraprofessionals stopped me and thanked me she told me that that student had been molested on multiple occasions by her moms various boyfriends she said that she never saw the girls smile as much as she did when we talked about worms together for that brief moment each day I broke down outside the cafeteria after she told me that I just hate to believe that someone could do something so awful to a kid she told me she wanted to be in my class when she got to fourth grade and I hoped she would be she moved at the end of last year I never even knew her name and that's what kills me I wish I would have asked her her name edit I just want to thank everyone for the kind words I hadn't thought to check a yearbook and I have no idea why we keep extra copies in our media center and I'm going to check today as far as the paraprofessional sharing that information I don't want to justify her doing so but it might help to know that she was older and close to retirement and she no longer works at my school teacher here I work with emotionally disturbed teams last year was my first year and I had one female student who was the first kid in her family to graduate from high school sweet girl smart and always worked hard I worked hard to get her into college on a full ride she had a lot of demons in her life mom is a drug user sister was as well and she was dating an abusive boyfriend about three months before the end of the school year she disappeared mom left a voicemail while very high saying she hasn't seen her in a few weeks I somehow get a hold of her on the phone and she was whispering her boyfriend in the background was screaming at her she told me she wasn't coming back about a week later the police showed up to my class asking when we last saw her if we had any recent photos they can't say why but mom was as high as a kite I get a call later that night asking if I could come down to the station and identify her because mom is refusing she was beaten to death by her boyfriend to the point she was barely recognizable I threw up in the trash can after seeing a photo of her she was 17 and killed by her boyfriend who left her body on the side of the road more mother few days later and no one was left to bury her it was a reality check working with her so bright and had a future but she was a victim of her environment not a teacher but I volunteered in an after-school program that tierod kids my group was 14 to 15 years old so I have this extremely bright kid in my group when we talk about anything else it was clear that he was super smart when we did homework together he was doing great and understood everything perfectly he even helped the other kids however he would fail every single one of his tests and not just a few mistake here and there on a few subject no he totally completely falling every classes it didn't make sense at all so there had to be something else going on I talked to my supervisor about it and he promised me to look into it turn out his older brother had been held back and they were in the same classes the father would beat up the younger one every time he had better marks than his older brother because yo was making the true hair look bad that the reason that my grade 12 student was falling asleep during math class was because he was working 40 hours a week to pay his parents bills I saw his pay stub he was a great kid to one of my head professors told us a story about a student that fell asleep every day she told us that she found out years later it was because a student had to stay up all night because one of the parents would molest a younger sibling if everyone was asleep trying to keep it vague for obvious reasons edit this is getting a lot of attention things like this happen all the time teachers have limited power and training and can only do so much I encourage everyone to get involved with their local school district you don't have to have a kid in the district to go to board meetings and ask questions and give input I've been in education for two years some say that we can change the world and some say that's unreasonable there's a happy medium in there somewhere if we can change even one person's life for the better then we've changed their whole world predict let's do it let's work hard to change as many worlds as possible I had this student miles who was a radio trial he started out very smarmy and attention needy and as a new teacher in a difficult class I struggled to give it to him so he acted out probably for attention from me or his peers he was in seventh grade and alternated between acting extremely mature talking about six cursing acting like a little gangster and being very immature compared to his peers he drew little kid cartoons disgust Center and beg to do classroom chores what he didn't do was work when I held my first parent-teacher conference it all became clear his grandma who raised him had died last year and his mom was in and out of jail his dad was only allowed supervised visits and flaked out a lot his guardian was an elderly lady who had agreed to take care of miles and his brother and told them um got out of mom never showed up and didn't what either boy the Guardian has recently been diagnosed with cancer and didn't have the energy to control or handle the hurt grieving middle schooler she said things such as I'm old and sick I wasn't supposed to be raising him if it weren't for his grandma I would wash my hands he's no good and I can't do anything for him if I'm not doing right by him take him this is all I can do it was eye-opening and sad I wish I could say that I saved miles or that I changed his life when he was sent to another school our school was great based he came up and hugged me and thanked me the teacher he gave help to every day and it felt like a minor victory honestly though it wasn't good enough I couldn't do enough I'm no longer a teacher and this is a big reason why my feelings of inadequacy substitute teacher here was in a classroom for a week and a half third grade it was already kind of in flux I was subbing for their long-term sub because their teacher had a baby which meant it was super hectic and it had like three kids with IEP s who needed constant one-on-one attention right but it was a great class they were all smart just off routine and bored there was this one kid though he's a brilliant kid smartest but also smart smart like we had an agreement that he could work ahead during math so he wouldn't distract all the kids around him by talking once he finished early he was a jerk and kind of a bully but it was clearly coming from a place of frustration the behavioral specialist told me that if I needed to keep him in line he was deathly afraid of getting a note sent home to his parents so I could use that as a threat not really my style though seemed a bit cruel so that didn't come up I had to punish him a couple times because yeah he had a ton of behaviors but there were only two major incidents first incident he was upset with a kid who wasn't moving as quickly as he was and started to the rate him so he had to sit out at recess with me and have a talk about understanding how other people felt we got to just talking and he told me about his dad who he clearly adores and I wound up introducing the kiddo to Calvin and Hobbes because he reminded me of Calvin they even look alike second one though damn he would not listen during math refused to distracted the rest of the kids called out during the lesson and eventually hyped himself up enough that he called me something disrespectful not mean-spirited but inappropriate along the lines of miss poop or something similarly stupid and I sent him to the office to get his work done in private I made the mistake of mentioning that he'd used disrespectful language kid comes back in half an hour in absolute tears the behavioral specialist is with him she takes me aside and asks me if I'm sure I really want to continue with filing a report what because his dad really kicks his ass when he gets sent home with one I explained that know this kid and I had an understanding he just needed to cool down and I did not intend to send a report home but a lot of the stuff he told me just clicked this wasn't a spanking oh my mom what's my ass type thing the kid was crying silently at his desk clearly trying to hold it back utterly terrified I sent her away sat down with him and told him that short of his actually harming another student he would not have a note sent home while I was teaching one of his classes that yes he needed to fix his behavior but a note home about a stupid name was not worth endangering his well-being and I went home and slowly put together that the teachers know this child is being beaten but the behavioral specialist still told me I could use that abuse as at all I have no idea if there's a CPS case or not against this family I'm worried reporting it myself could interrupt a case they already have against them and anyway I have no real information the kid's first name and class at school that's it I haven't had another job at that school yet but I'm going to check in and get more information the next I'm there I got home and cried he has his problems that I'd adopt that kid in a second he deserves so much better than that edit keep the amazing advice coming guys I am at the school soon and I want to get more information from slash on the behavior specialist but after that I'm going to report this I was working in a severely handicapped classroom once as a long-term substitute for an aide we had this one kid who I will call Johnny he was in fourth grade and couldn't communicate by speaking plus he was really developmentally behind he would kind of stare off into space with a blank expression on his face for most of the day but for this classroom he was very functional when I first started if you were walking with him the moment you turned your head he instinctively knew and took off running it was like his personal joke on you because you would have to chase after him like an idiot while other classes are going on well after a while I was put in charge of taking him out to the swing set he loved going with me because he was a big heavyset kid and all the female teachers were not strong enough to give him a good push and boy did I push him I mean I almost had this kid going inverted on his swing it scared the hell out of me but he loved it through sign language he would beg me to go higher and higher for a good couple of months we did this every day multiple times a day with him signing higher higher and be yelling hold on hold on I'm convinced it was the greatest thrill of his life thus far then one day we were getting ready to go home and he found out that it was my last day we were watching a movie he did his blank stare straight ahead but this time tears were pouring down his cheeks he couldn't talk but was kind of moaning one of the senior rates suggested I sit next to him to calm him down so I did we just sat there watching the movie toward the end he reached over and patted me on the knee a few times I looked over and he was just staring blankly ahead without any expression on his face but I knew what he was trying to convey to me that is the day that I found out that Johnny was one of my best friends and I would probably never see him again my first year teaching was in an inner-city middle school about eight weeks into the school year I confiscated a notebook from a sixth grader after she smacked another student over the head with it after school that day I received a phone call and needed to jot down a note I opened the spiral notebook to a random blank page and wrote down my note then ripped out the page I turned around in my chair and graded papers for a while and then turned back to take a drink I was leaned back in my chair taking a long pull of coke and letting my eyes wander about until they landed on the word [ __ ] written in the notebook I was so startled that I nearly choked on my coke so it took a minute for me to regain my composure sit up and take a good look at the page it was an ode to the students best friend explaining in great detail about added to it how her own grandmother performed oral sex on her quite often and how great it felt and how she the students were do it to her best friend as soon as they had a chance yes I called the authorities no they didn't take the child out of the home I teach in high school for background I was sitting at my computer one day placing grades in or something and overheard a few students chatting about what they thought they were getting for Christmas everyone was excitedly chatting about what they might get and this one girl never really spoke up finally someone asked her what she was getting and she looked at them and said nothing my parents have been working like crazy to make ends meet and they would just all have some type of meal together on Christmas the other kids were shocked she was so content listening to the other girls talk about what they might get kind of like living through them almost the girls changed topics and talked about something else after that at lunch I ran out to the local Walmart and grabbed a Visa gift card got a card and wrote an anonymous thought you could use this kind of thing in the card I ran into my principal and explained the situation the principal called her down and gave her the card she never knew who did it I noticed when we returned to school she was rocking some new shirts and what looked like jewelry the same group of girls noticed and asked her about it to which she excitedly said she was surprised with them I teach English in a Middle School in China and one of the grade 7 12 - 13 years old girls I teach I'm 90% sure has ADHD or something similar however being this is a public school and knowledge about mental issues is a lot lower here she is just labeled as naughty a distraction a bad student TTC and because of the large class sizes people just choose to remove ignore her rather than find out why she is like this she is quite clever but the teachers rarely give her the time of day or chance to answer questions I often see her standing outside the classroom looking really sad when I see her at playtime recess CTC she is often alone she is basically extremely misunderstood anyway I always turn up to the classes early and spoke briefly to her the next class a week later she gave me a note saying that she wants to answer more questions and to pick her if she puts her hand up so I obliged her by doing this she gave me another note saying she wants me to read her comic I had a look and I guess I was one of the first people to as it made her so happy she's not naughty she just wants people to look at the comics she has drawn I'm late to the party so no one will ever see this but my mom taught second grade in the inner city for 27 years when she began teaching the neighborhood was bought a very poor predominately Polish immigrants when she retired the community had transitioned through at least two other ethnicities and settled into mostly Hispanic every year she would have a project child when I was younger I didn't really get it but as I got older she would let me see a little more into their lives I will never forget taking a Christmas dinner and extra food to last over Christmas break - one of her students homes there was a six-foot white hole in the floor if you didn't know it was there when you stepped through the front door you would fall into the basement the house had no running water and they couldn't afford a plumber to fix it and the landlord was the one who put the hole in the floor to fix the plumbing but conveniently never got around to finish the job I was in fourth grade when the twins had my mom for second they would come over every Monday and Wednesday evening for dinner a bath and to attend a winner on Wednesdays the boys were super smart and their little sister would run circles around them she went Ivy League one twin went to Michigan and as a meteorologist the other went to Stanford and owns a restaurant but their housing situation had always stayed with me we were not rich by any means if my mom had money left from her paycheck every two weeks we would go to McDonald's there were a lot of times that she wasn't hungry and only I would get something sometimes we weren't able to go we always seemed to have money to help her projects though I sometimes resented it before that day it turns out that we didn't have a lot of money to throw around because my parents were on a very strict budget they saved every penny they could so they wouldn't have to worry about money later in life we always had just enough because anything extra was going into investments when I was in law school I wanted to flip houses with a couple of buddies my parents loaned me the money to buy into the group we would go into neighborhoods and buy as many houses on a block as we could because a street full of nice houses has a greater or than one nice house on a crappy street one day I found myself standing in the twins house and as I pulled the carpet back I saw a really crappy patch job where the hole used to be I talked to my partners and we decided to keep six of the 12 houses on that block when we started buying the next block we offered to move six families into the newly renovated houses for no increase in rent we continued to do this in and around my mom's old school the test scores have gone up parental involvement has gone up and even though the demographics of the neighborhood have changed there is a strong sense of community when I sold my portion of the business to my partners I had 94 houses with people living in them that could never afford such a home otherwise a few years ago a new kid started in my class mid-year he was the cutest sweetest kiddo who had lost his two front teeth and smiled with his whole face he seemed to be focused on pleasing his teachers and trying to be the first to do things correctly to earn praise he was easy to love and made friends fast a couple of weeks in he had a disagreement with another kid and had an outburst which seemed completely out of character I called the parent number one hat and it was his stepmother who said she and his dad had recently gotten custody and he was acclimating to living with them and his step siblings and after coming from a violent household he was exhibiting more of those behaviors at home hitting fighting breaking things etc she was talking like I knew the full story saying things like we are trying to just love him through this so I interrupted her politely and she said oh you didn't know did you see that story on the news last month about the mom who knocked her kids teeth out on the way to school and dropped him off with a bloody uniform that's him she told me about more of what he'd been through and then she cried and thanked me for caring when she hung up I cried and then I went home and cried again when I told my husband because I had seen that story on the news weeks before and was heartbroken and angry but meeting the kid that way it just really got me thank you so much for watching the whole video please leave a like and subscribe

Channel: Slime King

Views: 179,849

Rating: 4.946064 out of 5

Keywords: high school, reddit stories, reddit

Id: C0zahPWHOeU

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019