Teacher Misery

by Jane Morris

  What can be even more hurtful than threats are the sexual comments a teacher receives. A former coworker of mine is gorgeous. Her ratings include comments such as, “She’s like really pretty; she’s the bait (slang for sexy); so hawt (hot), etc.” This really embarrasses her. Her online ratings aren’t the only inappropriate things she encounters. She gets disgusting anonymous emails from students that describe what they want to do to her. She even had students throw condoms at her when she turned around to write on the board. Sadly, yet not surprisingly, she is one of the 50% of teachers who left the profession.

  Many organizations have asked for this site to be taken down, including the National Union of Teachers in the U.K. and New York State United Teachers (NYSUT). In the U.S. and U.K., the request was denied on free speech grounds, yet in France the courts ruled in favor of the teachers’ unions. The decision was made after citing “incitement to public disorder.”[7] The education minister “totally supported teachers whose difficult mission will not be the object of anonymous attacks on the internet.”[8]

  On a side note, there is also a college and graduate school version of this website called ratemyprofessor.com. While you would think this would be a website with more mature options for rating one’s professor, there is still the chance to rate your professor’s hotness. If they receive a certain amount of hotness votes, they actually get a little hot tamale icon next to their name in their school’s listing of professors. According to the website, “Choosing the best courses and professors is a rite of passage for every student, and connecting with peers on the site has become a key way for millions of students to navigate this process.” Clearly, whether or not a professor is “hot” is an essential part of the course selection process.

  While the site itself may not be very mature, one can assume that the level of ratings and comments would be, since the audience is older and seemingly wiser than middle and high school students. Yet the comments often have the same immature and abusive tone, they are just more creative and well written. For example, a former English professor of mine received the following comment,

  “There's just something off about him that I can't put my finger on. He smiles, but there's no warmth there. Just a terrible emptiness like you'd find in the rusting hull of a ship forgotten at the bottom of a dead sea. Something must have happened to him to make him this way.” While my former professor might find this comment hurtful, I’m sure the “he’s super sexy” comment would make up for it.

  Many students choose to speak directly to the professor on this site, although they still remain anonymous. A student wrote the following to a professor, “Get over yourself. You teach below average and this nation needs more than mediocre teachers. Sheesh, deflate that ego and look in the mirror. A speck of dust in the universe…” Now maybe this woman has pretty tough skin and wouldn’t let this bother her. But she’d have to be made of stone to let the following comment roll off of her: “You should see this woman naked. Take her class then ask her out, she'll go for it, always does.”

  While many people may think that these websites are not taken seriously and are merely a place for disgruntled students to vent, they are in fact taken quite seriously, by students choosing classes, parents and even schools during the hiring process. A student commented that “Anyone who would enroll in this professor’s class after consulting rate my professor is either a social misfit or a psychopath. It’s like jumping in front of a train although you saw it coming.” And he or she is not in the minority. A student reporter for Santa Clara University states that, “Many of my peers would tell me how they chose a class solely based on the ratings a teacher received on the website or how easy or difficult a teacher was judged to be. I found it surprising and somewhat scary that people would take comments on an anonymous website so seriously.”[9]

  Besides students taking the reviews so seriously, some administrators do as well. A math teacher claims that he had a principal who felt that this website was a valid part of the teacher's personnel folder. The teachers all went online and promptly became brilliant teachers by anonymously rating themselves several times. It was after the students wrote scathing reviews of the principal that she finally decided to reconsider. Another teacher was actually asked about his ratings during an interview for a teaching position.

  Sites like Rate My Teacher are basically forums for cyberbullying. Recently, three Eastern Michigan University professors had no idea that while they were teaching they were being verbally attacked by the Honors College students sitting in their class. Students shared nasty comments on their phones via Yik Yak, a smartphone application that lets people anonymously post brief comments on virtual bulletin boards. Since the app appeared in November 2013, it has been causing chaos in schools as a result of students’ posting violent threats, racial slurs, and malicious gossip. At the end of the class, a student pulled one of the professors aside and showed her a record of the comments the students were making during her class. They had written more than 100 disparaging posts, “including sexual remarks, references to them using ‘bitch’ and a vulgar term for female anatomy, and insults about their appearance and teaching.”[10] After class, one of the professors sent emails with screenshots of some of the worst messages to university officials, urging them to take some sort of action. “I have been defamed, my reputation besmirched. I have been sexually harassed and verbally abused,” she wrote. “I am about ready to hire a lawyer.” The school responded by cancelling the class. They felt the comments students were making showed the unpopularity of the course and the professors who taught it and removed it from the course offerings. There was no investigation into the comments that were made.

  Threats of violence towards teachers can get even worse than that. In her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Danielle Keats Citron, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Law, discusses Yik Yak posts from students about their teachers. One disturbing post she had seen referenced a lecture by another professor. “It said, ‘If this woman doesn’t stop talking, I’m going to rape her,’” Ms. Citron recounted. “As these threads popped up, once these rape conversations started, it got worse. It got more graphic.”[11]

  But even without harmful sites and apps like this, due to the easy anonymity of the internet, cyberbullying of teachers is inevitable. For example, students will often make a fake email through Yahoo or Gmail and send anonymous comments to teachers. As a teacher of 12th grade English, I have one of the only classes that might prevent a student from graduating. In their senior year, many students simply stop coming to school. If they fail most of their classes, they will still graduate, but English is a requirement for graduation. Thus, it is perceived to be under my jurisdiction whether or not a failing student will graduate, and not the responsibility of the student. Students who realize that they are not going to graduate too late in the semester often become infuriated and harass the teacher. They see the teacher as the one thing that is holding them back from graduation. While they can’t threaten you to pass them anonymously, they get their revenge in other ways. It was during this exact situation that a colleague had a huge “F” scraped into the hood of his car.

  During graduation, I saw a student who had failed my class walk across the stage. A few days later I received an email from an anonymous source that read, “Fuck you! I graduated! You stupid bitch!”

  If you’re thinking, “It wasn’t like that in school when I was growing up,” or “It wasn’t like that when I was a teacher,” you may not realize how dramatically things have changed in the last few years. Parents feel more entitled than ever, and they are raising their kids to be extremely entitled as well. A former director of the Parents' Program at Cornell University has studied what is referred to as “helicopter parenting.” Her research shows that this type of behavior started to appear on college campuses in the 1990s. “College admissions offices began to complain that parents insisted on sitting in on their child's admission interview. Some admissions officials started t
o suspect that parents of prospective students wrote their essays.” She states that overbearing parents have become a huge problem for colleges and universities.[12] Wealthier parents may even pay to have someone write their kid’s college application essay for them. We are talking about an essay that is typically one to two pages in length, and is meant to show evidence of the student’s writing ability, personality and values. According to the Common Application, an organization used by more than 500 universities to facilitate the application process, the purpose of the personal essay is to “help you distinguish yourself in your own voice.”[13] It is ironic (and outrageous) that some students have someone else write this for them.

  One summer I had a job at a test prep organization “helping” rising high school seniors with their college applications and mainly, their essays. I was told that I would be helping students generate a topic and editing their essays. Although it felt a tad unethical, as long as the student did the majority of the work I felt it was okay. But I dealt with kids who couldn't or wouldn't write anything, or wrote very poorly, and no matter how much I tried to push them in the right direction, at the end of the day, this was what they were capable of. But I was told that if a student couldn’t or wouldn’t write, I would need to just do it for them.

  Clearly these kids had everything done for them their whole lives. And now I was going to write their college application essays (which are supposed to be about meaningful experiences they've had which have shaped who they are as human beings), and all because their parents had money… Enough to pay $250 an hour for this service (of which I only received about 15%)!

  Some parents will even escort their son or daughter to a job interview, call a manager to ask why their kid didn’t get the job, and call to campaign for a higher salary for their child.[14]

  If a parent is willing to call their adult child’s workplace to advocate for them, it is no surprise that they had harassed teachers and administration until they got what they felt their child deserved. It is a cycle of never-ending entitlement that leads to mediocrity. It starts with a parent pestering a teacher to get an undeserved grade for their child. Then they manipulate their kid’s way into college, or they get into college with grades they didn’t earn. Next, when the kid gets a job for skills and education that look good on paper but weren’t actually merited, they end up losing their job. And so far, parents cannot save a kid from being fired for poor work performance… at least not yet.

  CLASSROOM EXCHANGES

  (You just can’t make this shit up)

  ME: Does anyone else have any questions? Yes Bea, go ahead.

  BEA: What have you been eating lately?

  ME: Excuse me?

  BEA: Have you been eating a lot of junk food?

  ME: What does this have to do with anything?

  BEA: It’s just that you look like you’re putting on a lot of weight, so I was just wondering what you’ve been eating.

  ME: That’s not appropriate Bea. Please go into the hallway.

  BEA: But you asked if we had any questions, so I asked a question.

  ME: I don’t care Bea, that question is not appropriate. Go into the hallway.

  BEA: Okay, I was just curious.

  ME: What do you think the character’s motivation was for-

  CECIL: This book sucks.

  ME: Well maybe if you would actually read the book…

  CECIL: Well maybe if you would actually read my dick…

  ME: Cecil get out.

  CECIL: Okay.

  No, Cecil didn’t get in trouble for this, by the way.

  ME: Does anyone have any questions before I hand out the test?

  GILBERT: Yeah I have a question.

  ME: Okay, go ahead.

  GILBERT: How come you never wear tight shirts?

  ME: What kind of question is that?

  GILBERT: You’re always wearing these shirts that look like what pregnant ladies wear. Why don’t you ever wear anything tight?

  ME: That’s not an appropriate question. And this is what’s in style!

  ME: Tell me, what is your version of the American dream?

  JUANITA: What’s your American dream, Ms. Morris?

  ME: It’s being here with all of you Juanita.

  GIUSEPPE: Yeah, right. Don’t you want money? Teachers make like no money.

  ME: We make enough to survive.

  GIUSEPPE: How much do you make?

  ME: That’s private.

  SHEILA: Actually your salary is considered public information since you are a public servant.

  ME: What?

  SHEILA: (to the class) You can just go on the school district’s webpage and look up her salary.

  GIUSEPPE: Really? Cool!

  ME: Good, go ahead. I don’t care. Can we get back to the discussion I was trying to have?

  Five minutes later

  ME: So how do you think the American dream has evolved from the 1950s to today?

  GIUSEPPE: (having just looked up my salary on his phone under his desk) How many years have you been teaching?

  ME: This is my first year. Why?

  GIUSEPPE: That’s not bad loot, but I’d need a lot more, like enough to get-

  ME: Did you just look up my salary?

  ESTHER: How much she make?

  ME: Don’t even think about saying it.

  SHEILA: But it’s public information.

  ME: Yes, I know Shelia. I just don’t think we need to discuss it right now. This is very disrespectful.

  GIUSEPPE: Why?

  ESTHER: Yeah, why? I’ll tell you what I make at Target. I been a cashier for two years and they just bumped me up to-

  ME: That’s not the point.

  GIUSEPPE: I make a lot of dough mowing lawns in the summer. And after school I clean stuff at the old people home. They pay me almost ten an hour.

  ME: That’s good. I’m glad.

  GIUSEPPE: But if I was your age, I’d need to make a lot more than that.

  ESTHER: Than what? How much?

  BO: Just tell us already.

  Giuseppe whispers to Esther, who announces my salary to the class.

  BO: That’s a lot of money!

  SHEILA: No it’s not! That’s like, nothing. My dad makes like fifty times more than that.

  ME: Alright I’ve had it. Take out your books and silently read Act 2.

  ME: So who is “The Lord of the Flies?”

  BALKI: Your mom.

  ME Really? The lord of the flies is my mom?

  BALKI: Yup.

  ME: I don’t think that’s possible. My mom has never even left the East Coast, and the story takes place on an island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean.

  BALKI: Yeah, whatever. It’s your mom.

  ME: Plus, this book was published around the time my mom was born. So was she like an infant version of the lord of the flies?

  BALKI: Yup.

  ME: Great. Thanks for clarifying.

  ME: Are there any questions before we start the test?

  MORDECHAI: Is it considered inappropriate for a student to ask a teacher about their sex life?

  ME: Yes, extremely inappropriate.

  MORDECHAI: Never mind.

  ME: Okay everyone. Take out your journals so I can give you homework points.

  OTTO: Wait, what do you mean? We get points for this?

  ME: Yes, as I explained last class, your first assignment is merely to bring in a journal.

  OTTO: And we get points for that?

  ME: Yes, because I’m sick of students not having their journals.

  OTTO: So if I don’t have it then I get a zero?

  ME: Yes.

  OTTO: But that’s bullshit.

  ME: Excuse me?

  OTTO: This is bullshit.

  ME: Okay, you need to leave the class.

  OTTO: (standing up and speaking to the class) Don’t you guys think this is bullshit?

  RUFUS: Dude, sit down.

  OTTO: No. This is bullshit. She can’t give me
a zero for not having my notebook!

  ME: Otto, leave right now. Go to your administrator.

  OTTO: Good. I’m gonna tell her about this bullshit.

  Otto leaves and comes back ten minutes later. He throws a paper onto my desk, gets his stuff, and walks out. The paper is from the administrator saying that he was switched into another English class.

  ME: Tell me about a song that had powerful words. How did it change you?

  BERNIE: The lyrics to Macklemore’s song “Same Love” changed me because he said that he thought he was gay in third grade but then realized he’s not.

  FRUMA: You can’t realize you’re gay and then change your mind.

  BERNIE: Yes you can.

  EARLINE: It’s not that hard to figure out. If you like dick then you’re gay!

  ME: Okay that’s enough. That was super inappropriate.

  CARLITO: Yo, what’d she just say? I wasn’t listening.

  ME: Nothing. Let’s move on.

  WILFRED: Dude, she said if you like to suck dick then you’re a fag!

  EARLINE: That’s not what I said. You don’t have to have-

  CARLITO: That’s hilarious! If you like sucking dick… ahahahaha!

  ME: Alright, all of you get out.

  ME: Hello everyone. Welcome to 11th grade English.