As a teacher, what is the harshest truth a student has ever taught you?

These are all personal to me, obviously. Harsh things my students have taught me:

• I have psychological issues about my appearance because of my own experiences as a student in middle school and the mean things my classmates said and did to me. Students still do not always have the filter that adults have to not say mean things. There is a are specific thing about me that I do not like. My students sometimes ask me about those specific things, in front of everyone. Like, “Mr. Barth… What’s wrong with your _____”? I have to tell them it’s a rude question, and quickly change the subject.
• Slow learners (we call the reluctant or struggling learners) really hold back the rest of the class, especially at the middle school level. I have students reading Don Quixote sitting next to students who struggle with understanding comic books. The system is entirely unfair to advanced learners. They are not allowed to excel too much beyond their slower peers, because of logistics (there aren’t enough teachers for advanced classes), and to keep the slower learners and their parents happy.
• Speaking of which, there are a lot of people with children who should not be parents. Period.
• Full inclusion of special education students, which has been the trend for the last 15 years, is not always a good idea. It’s not always best for the student or the rest of the class.
• • If a student has a special ed diagnosis that includes a very shortened lifespan, they shouldn’t force that student into school at all. I’ve had students with severe cerebral palsy who couldn’t talk or move their limbs, and whose life expectancy was “late teens”. Why the hell are they in my stupid English class? I know why. It makes adults feel good to be “inclusive”, and it make the parents feel better that their child had a “normal childhood”. I’ve taught five students like this, who all died before finishing high school. I just keep thinking of the time they wasted on this planet struggling through classwork about subjects and predicates in sentences.

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