by mschuster91 | 2025-04-20 10:30:34+00:00
> What kind of crap teachers never taught that

It's rarely the fault of the teachers.

The problem is, in many MANY MANY schools, teachers are more like social workers that have to compensate for utter horrifics outside of school. You got a ton of children so poor they didn't have breakfast which means their first (and all too often: only) meal will be the school-provided lunch (Covid showed that - a bunch of schools were open at least for lunches). You got children that are literally homeless and living with their parents in some car on a Walmart parking lot. You got children whose parents are in and out of jail. You got children living with their siblings in way too small, pest and mold ridden "apartments". You got children whose parents don't have money to pay for basic school supplies. You got children who are dealing with mental, physical and sexual abuse. You got children where the parents are constantly on drugs or seeking for drugs. You got children with a drug dependency on their own - if they're lucky it's just tobacco or weed, if not it's opioids. You got children with parents or siblings with serious mental or physical health issues. Or you got children with their own mental and physical health issues, or if you want it worse, children with these issues but without access to any kind of treatment. You got children that are being weaponized in nasty divorces. You got children that are being weaponized by street gangs. You got children committing crimes from petty theft to dealing drugs just to survive. You got children that have to literally work (and states like FL pushing to have more working children). You got children having their own children already (either from sexual abuse, from under-education about their own bodies, or intentionally because they fell for some stupid challenge/dare). You got children dealing with bullying, you got some who actually are bullies because they have no other way of dealing with their emotions or getting lunch money. You got children with parents with about zero interest in them. You got children who worry that they'll come home and find out their parents got snatched and disappeared by ICE. You got children who worry that ICE will storm their classroom and deport them. You got children who worry they might not survive the school day because someone will shoot at them. You got children who are constantly on the move because their parents' employment/deployment requires absolute mobility. You got children who are LGBT and have to deal with ever increasing hate against them (and LGBT youth already had significantly higher suicide rates than before the GQP made it a culture war issue).

The US doesn't have any kind of system to help these children but schools and libraries, both are horribly underfunded (there's some school districts where teachers gotta take up second jobs because the government can only afford paying them for 4 days a week), and all too often teachers have to pay with their own money for students' school supplies.

And on top of dealing with these kind of nightmares, they actually have to try and teach these children something - even if the children in question aren't anywhere near a headspace where they can actually learn.