On a regular day in a regular classroom LD teacher Mrs. Diane Durham goes through her everyday announcements shoe goes through in the mornings. Standing in the front of the class letting her students move on to their class work, Fluttering about the room Durham asked each individual student to explain when exactly they had to work on, so if they needed it she would be there to assist them. Watching Durham you’d think that her students would be getting out their books and papers.
Only four students out of eleven move.
The clock strikes 8:23AM and three students exit the class, moving on to work study on the first floor of the building. The remaining five of eight students turn towards each other and begin to talk, joke, and yell from across the room. Durham walks around asking for portal checks, instructing the kids that they should be working on their missing assignments. Not one of the kids move, they merely reply with snooty remarks and varied pathetic sounding excuses.
Durham is getting upset now, that much is obvious based on the snide remarks one junior whispers to a senior, and the sophomore pushing their binder away onto the floor. Durham coaxes them into bringing out their assignments yet they still ignore her insisting on actually starting any of them. The remarks are getting increasingly vocal with each passing minute, pushing each other, throwing things, or swearing at their phones. Durham gets into an argument with one sophomore who refuses to move from his position laid out on the table.
“I don’t wanna do this,” he whines. “I’m tired and It’s stupid as hell.”
“You need to!” Durham says. “You have more than five missing assignments for math!”
“So what? It’s not like any of that s*** is hurting my grade.”
“Dear, I just don’t want you to get too far behind where you can’t catch up,” Durham says.
“I don’t give a f***!”
Durham goes to continue talking but another female LD teacher walks into the room, the student immediately notices her and asks if he could go to her room instead of being in Durham’s.
“I like you better,” he says.
After shooting him down with a flat no she mentions how the student’s math teacher has mentioned that he could get the information he needed for class from the website provided in him syllabus. Durham instantly agreed, saying how she’d brought that suggestion up already but he’d said that they couldn’t. She was just trying to help him.
When both Durham and the other LD teacher leave the room the four students who’d been listening to the fighting turned to the sophomore and complained about how teachers changed when in the room with a fellow instructor. They continued voicing their harsh opinions of “two-faced teachers” and how they got yelled at for no reason even after Durham had returned. Nothing changes throughout the entire block up until the bell rings and each student files out at their own pace into the hallway for passing time.
This sort of behavior goes on to almost a day-to-day basis.
As writers on an online school newspaper we may not have the right to judge or have a say in how each individual student at BHS behaves during class. Everyone has their own routine of whether they do the work school is made to give you or not. Though what being on a newspaper, and fellow students, we are afforded a wonderful little thing called an opinion. Teachers, whether or not they’re an IEP teacher, and LD teacher, a social worker, or a regular class instructor, do not make enough money to put up with the type of crap kids can put them through everyday.
Let us explain a few things about teachers.
Teachers are some of the most disrespected people on this planet in their profession. Events all over the news of kids cursing at them, walking out on them, hitting them, spitting in their face. Here are some quotes from students that came up from more people than we care to admit:
“No one can tell me what to do; It’s my life.”
“At home I don’t get to do a lot of stuff, my parents are really controlling. So at school no one should be controlling me.”
“I simply don’t care what I do in school.”
“I do it because I want to see how teachers react, and it’s funny to see them get angry.”
This is ridiculous.
While this glimpse of a time in Durham’s class was not newsworthy, or the worst thing heard or seen that’s happened in a school, it is an unacceptable display of behavior from older people acting like little brats. Teachers are here to teach you, they’re here to help you, they’re here for you. Young people don’t understand that them walking out of a class like a child when they’re told to stop playing Candy Crush during a lesson. Or getting physical by throwing a trash can at their heads and scream in their face. These events are intolerable and it makes us as fellow students ashamed that we are lumped into the same group as they are.
“While I don’t condone the disrespectful behavior I’m shown by my case load of kids,” Durham said. “I don’t blame them. They can say whatever they want but I’m here to do a job. That’s how It’s going to stay.”
