Teachers Share BIGGEST Red Flags They Saw in Their STUDENTS (r/AskReddit)

our slashes credit serious teachers have read it what red flags have you seen in your students what happened this will get buried that I feel like it's important to share this kind of story I'm not a teacher but I've been a day camp counselor for nine years and seen hundreds of kids come and go a lot of them come back to a summer after summer so I get to know them and watch them grow up and get to know some of the parents too there was this one kid he's probably about 12 or 13 now who always acted out was always loud and seemed like he just wanted attention it was never anything too bad just generally being intentionally annoying for attention I liked him enough and tried to keep the other kids off his back because they would pick on him I felt bad for him last summer a small altercation with one other kid broke him and led to him having a mental breakdown while crying and banging his head against a handrail he told me he wanted to hang himself said nobody cared about him not even his dad I told him I cared about him but he didn't believe me we called his dad who I'd always gotten a weird vibe from like he wasn't necessarily the nicest guy and I explained what happened his dad didn't take it seriously even saying he wants to hang himself should I go to Home Depot and buy him the robe I was floored I shrugged that comment off and kept explaining what happened to him he didn't get it didn't get why this was a big deal it was like he wasn't willing to accept there was anything wrong with this kid not because he thought he was a perfect kid but because he the dad didn't want to be bothered to do anything to help him the dad took him home and that was that that was on a Friday on Monday he came back with his grandma to be dropped off we welcomed him back of course but he was definitely putting up a happy front he was acting happy and it was obvious but I gave him some room told him if he needed to talk or anything that I was more than willing I watched his interactions with the other kids most of whom were kids that had been there the previous week and had been informed about what happened and everything seemed to be going smooth enough awake summer ended and I didn't hear from him until he came back last summer all of that was the red flag this is where it gets worse he came back for a few weeks this past summer and he seemed to be back to his normal self but a little more mature and less annoying that wasn't really the case one day near the end of this past summer a group of the girls in the teen group approached me and told me that he'd been extremely inappropriate and at times physically aggressive with them throughout the summer they hadn't told any staff because they didn't want to get him in trouble there were really really nice kids they explained that he'd groped them smelled their hair without asking first and two one one girl in particular described to her in extremely graphic detail how he was going to maim and raped her rather than keeping in all the anger he had like he was before he was now expressing it outwardly and in dangerous frightening ways nobody was physically hurt thankfully though the girls he groped have to live with that I reported all of this to my boss who took it up the ladder and I haven't heard anything since all I know is that it was handled by people higher up than me I don't know where he is now or how he's doing I think about him from time to time and wonder if there was anything I called done differently when he had his breakdown cold Vai have challenged the dead after his by him the rope joke I didn't see it as my place to challenge a parent like that I do wish I will reiterate it that this was life or death serious but I put faith in human decency and hoped he'd do the right thing for his kid I struggled with the decision to call CPS but other than the dad being kind of a dick I didn't think I had proper cause there were no signs of physical abuse and I hadn't observed anything like verbal or mental abuse I didn't call I kind of wish I had now but maybe ed world made things worse I also wonder if i sholde kept a closer eye on him this past summer if maybe I cold caught something but from what the girls described he was smart about when he did the things he did making sure no staff would hear or see and we didn't I don't know if I cold have changed anything I wish I had edit a few words clarified some things I have a story that's perfect for this thread it's going to be long though and it'll probably get buried I'm a seventh grade English teacher last year I had a student who I'll call mark I knew mark had a lot of issues before I even met him by just looking at his record mark was almost 16 learning-disabled and he had not one but two traumatic brain injuries these injuries are the reason why I believe Mark had no common sense and no filter but it in no way excuses the events I'm about to describe when the year started he was pretty docile and eager to please however as the year went on he became more aggressive and inappropriate I'm a young woman and he would frequently stay after class to ask for hogs I would politely redirect him but sometimes he would ignore me and I'll have to physically push his hands away that made me uncomfortable for personal and professional reasons toward the middle of the year he started dating a girl let's call her sue and they had me for the same class period but they broke up after a few weeks as middle schoolers often do after sue broke up with him mark became obsessed with her following her to all of her classes harrassing her on social media and in school it got to the point where sue did not feel comfortable coming to my class unless she was literally sitting right next to me at the front of the room sue also came late to my class and would wait until after the tardy bail for the next period rang before she'd leave my class to avoid him this girl was so scared she broke down crying when I told her she had to go to her next class because she was so afraid she'd run into him in the hallways I am around our Dean's and guidance counselors about Mark's harassment and reached out to both Susan Mark's parents to let them know what was happening the school established a no contact contract between them sort of like a middle school version of a restraining order and things got a little better for Sue but Mark's inappropriate behavior did not end a couple weeks later I was out for a doctor appointment when I get an m/l from the deans at my school saying mark has been suspended out of for ten days a student only gets ten days off if they are about to be expelled and I was freaking out thinking that he had done something to sue sue was fine but mark as a prank had pulled down the pants and underwear of a kid I'll call him Ryan in front of the entire class from what my students told me the next day mark was laughing and making vulgar crude comments about Ryan's private parts making Ryan run crying from the room Ryan's parents came in that afternoon raising hell rightfully so saying mark needed to be charged with sexual harassment at this point I'd had enough I went to the principal directly to write a formal statement detailing Mark's escalating pattern of aggressive and inappropriate behavior to ensure his expulsion would go through the expulsion process is kind of like a trial and you need lots of documentation to get a kid kicked out school I told her and the expulsion committee that I didn't think having mark at our school was safe for the other students it was a matter of time before mark seriously hurt someone on top of that I believe he needed professional help and I thought being expelled would get him that help because he'd have to attend a much stricter charter school long story short the committee decided not to expel him they said it wasn't in Marc's best interest he came back to school after serving his suspension flash-forward about a month one day mark is absent which is weird because he's never absent later I get an email saying he's transferred to another school in our County I'm wondering what happened to him so I reach out to his other teachers to see if they know anything what happened was Mark had yet another altercation with a student this time in art class mark was playing around with a kid and pushed him into a metal filing cabinet the back of this kid's head went into the corner of the filing cabinet right at the base of his skull we teachers later found out this injury resulted in a reversible brain damage for this kid he spent the rest of the year being home sholde and is still in rehabilitation therapy idk if he'll ever attend public school again after this incident marks Mon immediately transferred him to an school to avoid his expulsion to my knowledge he's never faced repercussions for what he did I was furious I had said to my principal and argued to the expulsion committee that something like this would happen because Mark had no sense of boundaries and zero disregard for other people's feelings this poor kids life has been changed forever and I blame their negligence as much as I blame mark the writing was on the wall and the people who had the power to stop mark and get him help ignored it idk where mark is now I think one day he'll end up on the news for accidentally killing someone one kid seemed normal enough his younger brother had one of the worst cases of ADD I have seen he could not sit on a chair properly for longer than a minute we always worried more about the younger sibling then the brother started behaving erratically at school and by all reports at home the younger one was sent away to live with his grandparents interstate and this precipitated extreme outbursts by the oldest sibling violence towards others sexually threatening girls trying to get into my head by insinuating that he would follow me home I had to physically restrain him numerous times what Farrah past's revealed later that he was experiencing something akin to grief due to the separation from his brother as well as a history of neglect by his parents his mother in particular from the age of 7 his mother would take him to a cinema several suburbs away and leave him there with no supervision to be picked up hours later the thought that someone harms their own child is horrifying but the thought that a parent could just willfully ignore a child and leave them unsupervised and exposed to all sorts of depraved individuals her actions made it seem like she was wishing her child away was extremely depressing he moved schools shortly thereafter a colleague told me that the school he went to the behavior continued but was beaten up by a girl when he made sexist and racist remarks to her and so the spiral continued I never did find out the actual reasons for this behavior shift the kid went from normal to uncontrollable in the space of a term I speculated at the time that he might have been acting out due to not being able to crows protect his brother from abuse or that with the younger sibling out of the picture he would receive more unwanted attention another kid I taught was considered by a more experienced colleague to be the worst he'd ever experienced he was notorious for saying sexually explicit things referring to incest and was inconsolable after the breakup with his backward girlfriend who was several years younger than him we had to have him under supervision so he wouldn't attack her in the school ground he was 12 at the time the girl ate after an escalation in sexually explicit talk asking a teacher if it was okay to have sex with your sister not in an attention-seeking way but a nun confiding manner he was referred to a counselor who in turn referred him to specialists whose aim is to stop children who exhibit such behavior from becoming adults sexual predators he was put on a waiting list for such a group but when his drawings were shown to said specialists it was recommended that he begin therapy immediately however such intervention required permission from a parent which his mother refused to give the kid was a coward and often cried if others teased him but the level of sexually menacing behavior he exhibited towards female still makes me anxious to this day and extremely concerned for the women with him he will come in contact I taught in a small primary school Ireland 35 kids in the school 14 in my class aged 9 to 12 after the Christmas holidays we got a new kid in from another school and I near old no reason given for the change of schools during the school year even though he was coming from a school that was only 5 to 10 minutes away and closer to his house on his first day I tried to get him settled label all his books show him around introduce him to the other kids tell him about our routines he had no interest I tried talking to him are you excited are you nervous his response was I don't get nervous he had no interest in interacting with the other kids he made no attempt to make friends he'd throw evil looks at kids in the class etc World Book Day came up a few weeks later and had to dress up as their favorite character and bring in their favorite book he brought in five nights at freddys along with a mask I had never heard of it but given his very low ability level I was surprised he was reading such a big complicated book I don't think he could read it at all he just wanted to show it off I was a little unnerved by it and looked it up realizing that it's pretty scary stuff for a nine-year-old but I had ten year old in the class playing GTA et Cie so I'll let it go fast forward a few weeks and they are doing a dramatic piece for 1916 they developed a character and wrote diary entries as the character his diary was covered in red blood his entry was about seeing his family being killed and how happy it made him then he decided to take revenge on the killers and stab them then killed himself a bit odd for a nine-year-old so I had a look at his free writing copy a copy they write in every day that I don't check for spelling grammar et Cie to encourage a love of writing it was all talk of killing himself and others creepy stalking Allah five nights at Freddy's hunting people down and killing them but constant talk in the background of kill me kill me now I need to die I brought it straight to the principal made an appointment to speak to the parents and called the psychologist man told me she thought he'd grown out of it sorry what I couldn't believe she knew about it apparently his older brother is autistic and always talks of suicide and he picked it up and would repeat what he heard age didn't understand my concern at all she didn't want to be referred to the mental health unit available and didn't want me to talk to him about it I finished up in that school a few months later with him being under the attention of the psychologist but without the parents permission not much could be done from what I was told the kid really gave me the creeps I didn't think he was suicidal I got the feeling that he wanted someone to see it and to watch their reaction TL DR I had a 9 year old sociopath in my class I think my first year I taught beginning ESL to 11th graders 16 to 17 years old one of my girls was a phenomenal student so hard-working would always stay hours after class and spent an insane amount of time studying and revising her work she would turn in essays that read as if a native speaker had written them I would watch her painstakingly look up every word in the dictionary and a raisin tree right until it was perfect all of her teachers loved her and was so proud of the quick progress she made with the English language about halfway through the year I noticed that she seemed less happy than she had at the beginning much more stressed cracks beginning to show she was still a joy to have in class but I noticed that she didn't have many friends she would pull at her head constantly and she started coming to school looking and kempt as though she hadn't showered this is a red flag for abuse at a low-income school like mine so I was on alert the strange thing was that I also had her brother in another class and he was completely fine if it was something at home it was affecting her and not him I sent an email to the counselor and resolved to talk to her about it I tried to start a conversation a few times but she would perk up and tell me of course everything was okay sometimes some of the students would comment on how much time she spent working typical kids poking fun not malicious and she would take it very personally once one of my troublemakers teased her in Spanish said something like whoa mama give the rest of us a chance to answer and winked at her and she visibly cringed and teared up he looked really confused but shrugged it off and I redirected the class and went on with the lesson after class I asked her to stay behind to find out what was going on I was really thinking that these were red flags for abuse at home even though I had met her parents and seen her interact with the mid open house and she seemed completely comfortable more comfortable than with the students at school I'm not completely fluent in Spanish but my Spanish was better than her English we had a conversation where she insisted everything was fine but that she could hear everyone talking about her I was confused and thought I misunderstood her language she repeated the terrible things people would whisper about her were upsetting I was shocked I hadn't noticed her being bullied at all she was mad respected by others in the class if anything they were proud of how good her English was and bragged about her to each other the few times I had heard students make teasing comments they were well in line with how they all talk to one another not rude or malicious I asked if she meant what happened in class today and she said yes she said that what the boy said didn't bother her but what everyone else said right afterward did I was so confused nobody else had spoken after that comment she insisted that they had that everyone was whispering terrible things things she couldn't repeat but that they wanted her to die now I was very confused and concerned I asked her to elaborate and she told me that she could hear them all the time talking about her and telling her to kill herself she said it happened all through class and in the hallways and at lunch and that it was stressing her out that it made her not want to come to school because everyone hated her and wanted her to die I listened a bit more and tried to comfort her then when she left to go to lunch I called the counselor the council are met with her and referred her to an outside bilingual psychologist that day she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and didn't finish out the school year the next year her brother didn't return to our school and I don't know what happened to her the scariest part of the whole thing is that while identified the red flag and reported it I still have no idea what I was seeing was she hearing voices that weren't there was there bullying going on and I was completely unaware was her preschool teacher here our program is private and we don't accept any government assistance in our tuition so red flags for me are few and far between when I do see them though they are major my worst case I've ever reported involved a little boy in our rolled a 4 / new leaf Ives group who was living with his grandmother he was seriously one of my favorite kids to teach I know we aren't supposed to her favorites but come on who are we kidding his mother was a wonderful woman to be around so I never had the realization that something might have been a bit off she was quite young for a mom and she was a single mom at that she would show up to pick her son up and drop him off wearing scrubs so I figured the boy was staying with Grandma due to her assumed hospital job again we rarely have any bad situations going on so these kinds of things just don't get welled upon by a staff that often anyways mom she was younger very beautiful and very intelligent she definitely had a good sense of responsibly and was very much in the picture when it came to the care of her son his real dad was nowhere near being in the kid's life nobody ever said a word about him everything throughout the school day for a while was perfect the kid got along well with his classmates he napped well during nap time he ate full meals at lunch etc I say for a while because things started to get a bit difficult for him a few months into the year he would stop eating as well and his motivation to finish work and craft started to lack sometimes kids at this age go through little phases for a week or so where they act this same way so I didn't put much thought into it I mean the kid was four I'm sure many of you know how four-year-olds are our school is open strictly 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. it is very unusual to be held up at work late as most of our parents are teachers but the occasional car trouble or traffic incident does keep us we usually pull the kids file and start ringing mom or dad about 5:45 to give you a good idea right around the time that this kid started to behave differently his mother would start to pick him up closer and closer to 6:00 p.m. eventually his grandma started to pick him up and we'd see less and less of mom one day it was well past 6:00 p.m. and nobody had called to see where his ride home might be I pulled his file which is usually the directors job she was out this day to look for his mom's phone number on her contact sheet there were several phone numbers that had been crossed out and reread she had gotten her phone number changed about six times in the last three months according to this contact sheet this is where I started to pick up on the red flags I tried to call the most recent not scratched out number only to get the automated message telling me that the number was not in service shocker right I go to call grandma her number of main done to shade so I figured it was a safe bet nope out of service again I dig deeper into this kids file to get his emergency contacts card it was empty at this point I was freaking out I remembered that I had his mom and grandma added to my FAFSA book page that I created for our classroom it's 6:30 p.m. going on 7:00 p.m. at this point I frantically message them both to see who'd be picking the boy up grandma eventually replied that his grandfather would be on the way kid got picked up before 7:00 p.m. and all was good just a fluke right wrong as it turns out the boy and his mother were fleeing one of her previous exes he was brutally abusive to her and in ways that are just plain sick they had been together for a matter of weeks before he began beating her up she left him and things got worse he stalked her threatened her son and made numerous false police reports against her in hopes of her ruining her career things got really out of hand so she moved a few states away from him to start fresh with her son grandma was really a new neighbor of theirs that had been acting as a guardian angel of sorts for the boy this is why he was a new enrollment as opposed to our usual start as a baby and graduate into kindergarten with us types of kids on this particular day the mom had come home to their apartment during her lunch break to see that her new neighbor was the ex he broke into her place and beat her into a bloody pulp she made her way out but she lived on the second floor he had caught up to her and threw her down the concrete stairs once in the parking lot as I presume she is screaming for help he curb-stomp sir this happened a month and a half ago and she is still in the hospital the kid was released to Grandma and the ex was arrested on multiple laurens he still comes to school every day and his personality has been almost normalized since the scary man that follows my mom has been put behind bars my sister used to teach second grade 7 to 8 year olds before she was switched to another grade her last year of teaching second grade she had one of those notoriously badly behaved kids that teachers warned each other about he didn't like school he was really behind for his grade level and he liked to disrupt the class now my sister is well known for turning kids around and getting them to like school which is probably why he was put in her class this kid was labeled a kid of interest which means there were lots of meetings with the principal how to deal with the kid and how my sister was helping him accomplish his goals this was really hard because the kid wouldn't come up with goals he just didn't care now backstory on this kid one of the first meetings my sister had with the principal they talked to her about this kids home life his dad was in jail his mom had gotten the new bf who didn't like this kid and had chosen her bf and his kid over her own she basically left him on his grandparents doorstep and they were forced to take care of him looking at that info the school figured he was in a much more stable situation and weren't too terribly worried about it back to the main story my sister is struggling with this kid she can't figure out what motivates him and is getting more frustrated because of all the pressure the principal is putting in her to set goals and such finally parent-teacher conferences come and my sister is hoping to get some help from the grandparents as soon as she starts speaking with the grandparents everything makes sense their attitude was literally what has a little [ __ ] done this time they belittled him they called him terrible names and it was obvious they didn't want him this poor little boy had been told he was worthless and stupid his whole life and believed nobody wanted him because all the people he'd lived with had never wanted him after all of that my sister spent extra time with this kid just making him feel loved and wanted he started liking school and progressing a ton he was participate in class and everything people thought my sister was a miracle worker when really she just let the kid know somebody out there cared back in first second grade I was a huge red flag child I was born with a muscular disorder that made me have to go to a Children's Hospital literally three times at 6:00 a.m. in the morning my mother bless her soul I loved her daily and I'm so glad she did what she did would drive me from Children's Hospital in Chicago to my small town elementary school I had casting put on my legs every day and for the first couple of hours I couldn't walk on them I had to be wheeled into school in a wheelchair every Monday Tuesday and Wednesday no kids every talk to me no one wanted to look at me no one wanted to play with me during the winter I couldn't go outside because of my casting but damn I was a bad kid I talked back to my teacher through things fought with other kids the only time my teacher ever got relief was when I would go every Thursday to this accelerated reading class they had four kids that read on a high level he had this color system for behavior green yellow and red and boy I was always on red which pissed me off if I stayed on green for a week I got a prize I was angry and I hated him for it one day he pulled me aside at recess I would normally play on a computer during recess and he told me that if I stayed on green for the entire day I'd get a prize that started going on for a whole week and he would slowly make the day's longer it moved to two then three days than a week I rarely got below yellow every teachers conference he'd tell my parents about my behavior they'd apologize because they knew why I acted that way I had no friends I wanted people to like me not look at me funny but he also told them nice things how creative I was how good at writing and reading I was how I had a bright and creative future ahead of me he knew it I'm 20 now and a junior at a university and I have an associate's degree in creative writing and going for a bachelor's in film I was no longer a red-flag child after that class I am held him back before I graduate junior college and soon enough I heard back and he remembered me said he knew I would be as successful as I was and that I just needed a little push forward I'm forever thankful for him without him I wouldn't be where I now thank you so much for watching please like and subscribe the channel

Channel: Slime King

Views: 6,952

Rating: 4.9694657 out of 5

Keywords: high school, reddit stories, askreddit funny, askreddit scary, reddit top posts, askreddit comedy, comment awards, askreddit, top posts, dankify reddit, brainydude reddit, tz reddit, r/, askreddit creepy stories, toadfilms, reddit and chill, middle school, middle school cringe, teacher, pupil, parrents, tantrum, askreddit friends, askreddit secrets, askreddit parents, family secrets, askreddit kids

Id: 8EFGr2U-xgw

Length: 29min 16sec (1756 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020