30 Times Students Taught Their Teachers Something About Life, As Shared In This Thread

Shortly after my divorce, I was teaching reading in 6th grade. I was unhappy but going through the motions of teaching the best that I could. I was tired after school and less than a model parent to my own two children.

One of my 180 students that year, Mark, a quiet and polite student, was only attending my first period class two or three days a week. He rarely did his homework and failed most of his tests. At a conference with his other core teachers, I was not surprised to find out that he was failing his other classes as well. As a teaching team we called a parent teacher conference. We were hoping to work together with Mark’s parents in an effort to help Mark’s attendance and motivation.

The conference was scheduled for 7:15am in the morning before school. Mark’s father came in smelly, unkempt, extremely overweight and drunk. His mom had left the family with no notice or word of if she’d ever return. Mark’s father was explosive, miserable and ready to punish Mark harshly if he didn’t improve. Quite frankly, I was a little afraid for Mark.

After the conference I asked Mark to come to class just to talk for a minute. After starting the class and assigning a task for the other students, I called Mark to my desk and told him that I was sorry for his situation and hoped things would get better for him. I asked him if he might find more peace at home by doing some of the things his father asked him to do.

Mark responded quickly, “Why? So I can be more like him?”

My harsh truth came instantly. I realized then that I needed to be a happier, healthier person to give my own kids a better example. Why would they want to do what I asked if they saw me as a miserable adult? Mark motivated me to become a happier adult and taught me how to be a better parent.

P.S. Thank you all for your questions of concern for Mark. I would love to tell you a happy success story for him. However, shortly after the conference, Mark and his father moved away from the school area. He didn’t stay in touch with me, any of his other teachers or any of the students. Sadly, I don’t know what happened to Mark. I wish this was an isolated incident but our schools are full of similar stories, especially in lower socioeconomic areas. In my opinion, this type of story won’t improve until parenting improves. Is there hope for advancing parenting skills?

Nothing I do matters if the child is not ready to learn.

As captivating as I can be, when a child doesn't have a place to live, regular sleep, food, warm clothing, and LOVE; processing my words is impossible.

I can only control so much in a student's life.

I can make sure they eat breakfast and lunch, organize food/clothing drives, hug them and build them up, give their parents access to community services, and call CPS, but there is an awful lot of their life that I just cannot change.

I learn these over and over again, but they're heartbreakingly harsh each time.

It was one of the most blatant cases of plagiarism on a term paper I have encountered in nearly a decade as a university professor.

A student - a ‘business bro’ - was taking my theology class at a Catholic study abroad program in Rome. He, like many students, was there for the experience of being in Rome more than the classes. I’m used to them. They generally do enough work to get a C or a low B, but that’s it.

When it came time to hand in the paper for the term, he turned in a paper written by another student who took the same class previously. He changed the name and date and nothing else. I know this, because he left ‘track changes’ on, and when i opened the paper I saw not only his changes and the original student information, but also all of my comments and final grade from grading the previous paper.

According to school policy, I could either fail him the assignment, fail him the class, or recommend suspension from the university. I leaned toward him failing the class, but the dean and director of the program both preferred he just fail the assignment. So he did, got a D in the class, and passed.

A couple years later, LinkedIn recommended him as a connection. He was less than a year out from graduation and working as a consultant at some firm in some big US city. According to Glassdoor, he was likely making 3x my salary, in his first year.

He didn’t intend to, but that certainly underlined the fact that salary is rarely a good indicator of hard work, competence, integrity, or intelligence, and it always surprises me when people assume that it is.

I was teaching in a UK school and it was in a very rough area. There was a young girl of 11 whose parents didn’t have much, but she always looked happy.

I recall I was starting to become rather disillusioned with teaching and thought that there were better things I could be doing with my life.

One day, close to Christmas, I learned that this little girl had witnessed her father being shot and he died right there in front of her. I was mortified for her. Her mother came into school and said that because it’s so close to Christmas, she’d like to maintain the girl’s friendship groups and get her to share in the end of term fun with her peers, so she should remain in school. The school helped this happen in a very supportive way.

The girls was in my class. We’d got to the end of the activities and we were waiting, lined up, for the end of class bell. I asked what everyone was getting for Christmas.

“A BMX bike,” said one. “My mum’s getting me a Wendy house,” said another. The little girl’s hand went up in a shot and she had a gigantic smile beaming across her face and she said, full of the joys of Christmas, “I’ve asked Santa for a hoola-hoop,” she beamed. I was floored.

This is a girl that had lost her father so violently and all she wanted was a hoola hoop. I was quite distressed that she wanted so little. But then I thought about it.

All the others sounded so sure about what they were getting, about what their parents were buying them. It was clear that their belief in Santa had waned. But it was clear from her answer that her belief was still alive.

This got me thinking about my own position. That no matter what you take from a child, their heart is always open to receive. That no matter what Hell has come to them, you can always take them on their own journeys, their own discoveries. And, in true Pandora’s Box style, no matter what you remove, hope remains.

I thought to myself that as long as I can give hope, I’m making a difference to a child. Maybe I’m making them a stronger person; a better person. Maybe I’m making the world a better place through my small contributions to its future inhabitants. Maybe I’m not finished as a teacher; because there are lessons still to be learned.

Sometimes, you have to give up on someone and focus on the people you can help... the people who actually want your help.

I know that’s a harsh thing for a teacher to say. We’re supposed to spend as much time as necessary to help every student achieve to the best of their potential.

But that’s not the reality. If a student doesn’t want to succeed, there’s not much you can do to help them.

So it was with a student I had five years ago. He never did any work and did everything he could to disrupt class. Frequent discussions with his mom (the dad was not in the picture at all) and frequent visits to the principal’s office did not help. I couldn’t kick him out of class. I couldn’t continue to let him disturb the class.

So I had to give up on him.

I gave him simple worksheets to do on his own, and let him listen to music while I was teaching the rest of the class. He put on his headphones and spent the entire class “looking for a good song” on YouTube. That is, he just watched videos. He didn’t do the worksheets.

But at least he was quiet so I could teach the rest of the class.

His mother even approved of this “alternate, independent learning plan” I came up with. She would have agreed with anything as long as she didn’t have to deal with it.

Every few weeks I’d try to re-integrate him back into the regular classroom, but it always failed. He just didn’t care.

He ended up going to a private high school in a special program that they had for students with behavior disorders. Then he got arrested for vandalism, kicked out of that school, and never enrolled in the public school. He became a dropout. The last I heard of him, he was in jail for stabbing someone in a drug deal gone bad.

His classmates from the class I taught that year, on the other hand, are all college freshmen with bright futures. At least the ones that I keep up with are.

Words do matter.

I teach in art and design, and unlike other fields, it involves a certain level of subjectivity and personal vulnerability. At the time, my primary teaching responsibilities were upper-level courses tasked with preparing students to become professionals.

In this instance however, I was asked to teach first-semester freshmen — a rarity for me. The class went relatively well and at the end of the term, each student prepared their work for an exit interview and review.

Normally, these reviews are conducted in faculty teams, but during this particular review, I was alone. No big deal, this wasn’t a problem student. She was a promising individual who showed interest and engagement in the arts. She participated in discussion, regularly attended class, and showed potential in digital work. The review was going fine until we covered the final semester grading — she fell just below an A and was clearly distressed and crushed. So, just as I had done dozens of times before, gave her rationale for the decision, walked her through the individual projects, and told her that learning, developing and ultimately the portfolio itself, were more important than any individual course grade.

It didn’t matter, she was broken. Perhaps she had never received a B in her life, maybe I was too direct or too matter-of-fact, maybe instead of talking, I should have sat quietly and gave her a chance to speak. Whatever it was, I will never know, because when she walked out of the room that day, she didn’t come back.

Through that experience I learned to choose my words more carefully. I learned that sometimes I should shut-up and listen instead of rationalize or justify. I also learned that a student’s mental stability should not be assumed or taken for granted. I used to think brutal honesty was the most fair approach to teaching, I was wrong.

I was teaching Freshman Comp as a grad assistant at the University of Michigan. It was a very nice setup, with no more than 17 per class. One class had a tall, reserved young man - boy, really - from somewhere inside Detroit, a place that was wracked with violence for the whole time I was a grad assistant.

My first assignment was meant to ease people into writing on the college level: it doesn’t matter what it is, just talk about something you really know, and I mean *really know*.

His essay stunned me. He recounted a time the previous year when he and three friends were walking down a main Detroit thoroughfare, going home from high school. A pickup truck suddenly stopped abreast of them and two men in the truck opened fire on the students. Two were killed. My student was spared. The truck sped off. Nobody was tracked or arrested.

Since we had only 17 per class, our pattern was to hold one-on-one conferences after each paper. Despite my white, suburban background (which I knew without a single doubt totally disqualified me), I decided to forge ahead.

When he showed up, we just looked at each other. Finally, I said, “I don’t know what to say. This is very moving, and I’m sorry you went through this.”

He sat quietly for a long time. Then he asked, “Mr. Gehman, why would anyone do this?”

A lot went through my mind. Detroit’s black population had soared during World War II as workers funneled north into the Willow Run Bomber Plant and the hundreds of vehicle and munitions factories popped up all around Detroit.

Long-timers were suspicious, the crime rate had gone up, anger festered. Making it worse (or at least limiting abilities to co-exist), the bottom layer in and around Detroit had no truck with education…

Maybe it was this anger that was boiling over. Maybe it was the inability of the ignorant to accept people other than their own. Maybe it was just in the air, ingrained in Detroit, always a brawling lake port and stifling, death-dealing heavy industry hive.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes no sense.”

I don’t remember how it ended or how I temporarily escaped the obvious realities of his life. I remember that he became a far better than average writer in less than a semester.

But I’ve never been able to escape his lesson, even though I don’t really know what that lesson was.

That some students found me to be intimidating.

That’s something I learned from my first student evaluations at the end of the semester. I was shocked. I thought I was kind, gentle, friendly, … Intimidating? I knew I could not be the teacher I wanted to be if students felt that way.

Incidentally, the department chair wasn’t concerned at all. I actually ranked very high in the reviews, despite that comment. Maybe most professors got comments like that. But I didn’t like it.

It was a long trial and error process, one in which I worked to try to understand better the students point of view, not just about the subject, but about interactions with the professor. I think I made substantial progress, since for the last two decades there have been no mentions on the year-end evaluations of me being intimidating.

One student asked if she can have a private tutoring session after school so I agreed. Feeling honored and proud that a student is asking for a 1-on-1 session, I was so eager to stay an extra 30 mins after school just for her.

She arrived in the classroom and sat down with her head down. I thought she was sad or had a bad day. I pulled up next to her and opened up with “How’s your day?”

“Not so good, Mr. Lam,” said the student. “My dad is threatening to take away my phone if I don’t make grades.”

“But, you just started 9th grade a few weeks ago. You’re doing okay so far in my class,” I responded.

“It’s not just your class, but all of my classes. If I don’t make grades, my dad will take away my phone and I’ll never get it back.” She said with the look of someone about to lose the most precious thing in life.

I spent the next 30 minutes calming her down about her phone situation, grades, and dad. I was ready to leave, but I wanted to wrap this issue up. I asked her “What’s more important? Grades or phone?”

“My phone.”

I don’t know what it is that made this student so dependent on her phone. I understood how cool it was to even carry a phone when I was in middle school, but this was during the dumb phone era. Nowadays? It’s everywhere. I can’t tell if a student is happy to look down at their seat or just double-tapping that Instagram photo secretly.

I learned that this student prioritizes differently from me. She is more concerned about the phone than grades but she can’t see past what’s in front of her. I wanted to tell her that losing a phone is not the end of the world and she should try to see what her dad was doing - the phone is just motivation to maintain her grades.

After that day, the student did not improve in my class. She stopped asking for help after class. She sat with some distracting students and could not focus. Yes, she also was on her phone a lot in class. I was as much responsible for her demise in my class as anyone around her. I tried talking to her about her grades and poor behavior. It was as if she stopped fearing poor grades and losing phone privileges.

TL;DR: Tried reasoning with a student about grades over phone privileges. Student eventually stopped caring about what anyone thinks of her educational well-being. Nothing more dangerous to a teacher than a student that doesn’t care about herself.

The harshest truth my students ever taught me is that it’s impossible to be entirely objective while teaching.

Some students are simply more engaged in class.

Some students are incredibly attractive.

Some students are routinely brilliant with their answers.

Some students ask the right questions.

I try my best not to favor such students with more attention than others. In fact, I often go the other way, being much stricter on those I feel a bias toward.

I stop myself returning the smile of the attractive student with an involuntary goofy grin, reserving it for the ones who are left-out in class. I hide the names on answer sheets while grading to prevent myself favoring students who’ve previously written great answers with a more cursory reading, while at the same time preventing myself being more intense on students who’ve given me bad answers before. In a hundred little ways, I try not to let my subconscious feelings translate into an outward bias.

I suppose in many ways being 3–4 years older than my students is tough because I relate to them on so many levels. Preventing this from clouding my judgement is the hardest thing about being a teacher.