Teachers do not get enough credit for all the hard work they do both in and out of the classroom. They put so much of their time, love, and patience into helping our children develop their minds and become good human beings. This can be hard to do if students’ parents aren’t willing to enter a meaningful partnership with the kids’ teachers.
A teacher posted a photo in Reddit’s Mildly Infuriating forum that made a lot of adults upset. The classroom was trashed with toys all over the floor and not a single child present to help clean it up. The photo was captioned, “My classroom after a preschool tantrum.” But it wasn’t a bunch of kids who made the mess, it was allegedly one child, and the teacher doesn’t seem to be getting much help from the parents.
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The picture is chaotic.
We aren’t talking about a block here and an action figure there, the floor is positively covered. And the bins that the toys belong in are left empty on the shelves. We were overwhelmed just looking at it, and then we read text under the photo, “3.5 year old. The parents insist the child's behavior is not the problem.”
After that, we understood why the pic ended up in the Mildly Infuriating subreddit. It also made us sad that the teacher had to deal with all of this mess on their own.
A lot of Redditors agreed.
The post has more than 3,000 comments and they were overwhelmingly supportive of the teacher. Plenty were shocked that this was the work of a single child.
“I thought this meant a class of preschoolers but you’re talking one kid ,” someone wrote and plenty agreed.
“Same here I thought this was the destruction of many, dang that was one kid ,” another comment reads.
And there was so much love for the teacher, like this comment: “Childcare workers are a special kind of person. I worked in it for years (I still work with tiny humans but not a teacher). for some reason I decided that I liked going in every day with my two coteachers and be absolutely run by a group of 18 two year olds lol stuff stops being infuriating.”
Some people felt like the parents needed to step up for their child.
In a follow-up post, the teacher clarified, saying that they were not blaming the child for the behavior. “The child is not being blamed; the parents are. They refuse to acknowledge any problems, refuse to work with us on plans to help their child, refuse to believe that their kid said/did anything," the teacher wrote.
It’s unclear whether the child’s behavior at school is the same as at home, but some Redditors felt like it's a parenting issue, too.
"Their kids are never the problem," someone pointed out. "Not even if they are an absolute unit like this kid."
Others wanted the parents to take care of the mess.
“If the parents were decent they would make the kid clean up after class,” someone wrote.
"Agreed," someone chimed in. "Somehow the parents need to be a significant part of the clean up and helping this kid. Really sad for the kid and teacher."
Plenty of education professionals felt the teacher’s pain.
This type of thing isn’t isolated to the classroom.
One school employee recalled: “I worked in a school cafeteria and an 8 year old started throwing a tantrum, throwing things, dumping things on the floor, hitting things, completely out of control. The Assistant Principal said to ‘just let him tire himself out’ . They kept all of the other students in there watching this, many of the younger ones were crying. When the cafeteria supervisor tried to step in they insisted she stay out of it.”
And it happens on the bus, as one driver admitted.
“I'm a bus aide and I've gotten bitten, chunks of skin removed from my hands, kicked in my eye and spat at from one child,” the person wrote. "This was just last week, two days straight. The entire transportation department KNOWS about this kid. They refuse to do anything about it. The parents are degenerates at best and can only scream and use their fists."
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One person offered some helpful advice.
This teacher obviously can’t do this all on their own. They need help from the family and the administration.
A specialist offered some tips: “Hi! Intervention Specialist here! This should require specially designed instruction as to not impact the learning/safety of other students. Please document and refer this student for an FIE if they don’t have one already. If they do, contact case manager and document the amount of instructional time that was lost, interventions used to deter behavior, and parent contact. Make sure it’s all in writing and documented and express the compromised safety and lack of learning due to this students behavior. If I were principal of that student, I would be making steps towards a self-contained classroom placement with the safety of others in mind.”
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
