Elementary School Teacher

One of the times that really just hurt my heart the most was I had a student who brought a gun to school. This was in South Carolina and he had tried his best to do everything the right way. There was Pete, there was a guy who was bullying him and his friends and he had done what you're supposed to do. He went to the teacher. We went to administration. They had punished the student and it just kept going and he felt that was the only way that he could stop it. Now he didn't shoot it and it ended up being not a real gun. It was like a target practice pistol, but it just jerked my heart out that it was something I could have maybe done more to stop and that's what he chose to do.

By far the hardest experience I have dealt with as a teacher is having a sixth grader die at my school. I taught sixth grade and we, the three sixth grade teachers were really tight and we traded kids all the time and they really were all our kids and we had a student die in a horrible accident and he got hurt and so I had to tell my kids that he was really hurt and that he was in the hospital and then a couple of days later he died and telling my class that he had died is one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Listening to the kids crying, the sound that they made when they were crying is burned into my memory forever. So you will definitely experience that if you've taught long enough. I've dealt with it three times at my school but that's the only time it was on my grade level.

I think on a completely different note, another really hard experience are those kiddos who come from very challenging homes and backgrounds. I have had to make phone calls to the state because of child abuse that's happening with some of my students. I've had to talk with parents about very difficult situations here at school with their student. Some of these sweet, precious kids come from just horrific homes and that by far the hardest experiences. They are growing up in just such tragic places or environments and their only safe place where they truly feel love and value is here within our school and within my classroom and it's so hard to send them home at the end of each day knowing where they're going. I have one this year that is hungry all the time. She repeatedly asks for food and so every weekend because I am worried that she won't have food, I send home a bag with her with essentials to get her through the weekend because she is constantly asking right when she gets to school. Luckily, we have free lunches and breakfast for all students and so I make sure that she at least gets those two meals a day but she has expressed to me that she goes to bed hungry often. I also have students that come wearing the same clothes over and over and over again. Luckily, we have a washer and dryer here and so there's been times when I have sent coats to be washed with my classroom assistant or I have provided clothing for these sweet kids. So just seeing the challenges and the struggles that these sweet kids go through, those are the hardest experiences for me.

I work in a community where there is a lot of trauma and a lot of poverty, and so the hardest experience is watching my students, the children that I love, go through these hard experiences at home, whether they don't have enough food or whether they've been abused physically or mentally or emotionally. So that's my hardest experience, is having to report hardships that are happening to my students and then helping support them through having kind of a heavy load to carry as young children.

As an elementary PE teacher, we fight for our classroom, which is our gym. Seems that people want to come in and use it whenever they want to. There's a lot of, not a lot of communicating, and so that makes it tricky. People don't look at us with the respect as, you know, other teachers, and so for us it's a lot of fighting for our space to teach, and our class sizes are ginormous. I see every 45 minutes, I see 60 to 70 kids in a very small gym, and so those are some of the hardest experiences that I have.

I think the hardest experience as a teacher is not being able to reach a kid and not being able to help a kid that you want. And sometimes it's just personality conflicts between that kid and the teacher. Everybody doesn't like you. Sometimes it's an understanding where they just don't get it and you've tried different approaches and they still just don't get it. Sometimes it's a parent issue where the parents don't support what's happening and so they express that to kids and then kids don't feel like they need to do anything or it doesn't matter because the parent didn't think it was important either. That's the hardest part is just not getting through all the time.

Some of the hardest experiences that I have had have been with kids that come to me not knowing how to be a student. They have not been to preschool, they have not had any real world experience knowing how to be social with others, and so by far the hardest experiences are those little kiddos that have grown up the first five years of life on their iPads or other digital devices and then when they come to me they're expected to know how to share and how to sit still and how to hold a pencil and do all sorts of different learning and because of that then the behaviors escalate. Children throw temper tantrums, they'll throw things and things flare up because they simply have not learned how to be told no or how to have boundaries or rules or what expectations are and so that can be very challenging.

Hi, my name is Angela Burke and I teach second grade at a local public school here in Tumwater or Olympia, Washington. For me, my hardest experiences are with discipline. We have some children who have just come from harder home lives and have had some rough experiences and they just don't have the same tools that other students have because they haven't been raised in the same loving, caring, nurturing environment. So these children lash out, they are rude, they can be nasty, not only to one another, but to you as a teacher. And it's hard sometimes to not take it personally, to get yelled at, criticized, put down, hit, pushed, kicked, and to realize that they're really not lashing out at you, they're lashing out at their situation, their home life, their feelings and experiences sometimes are just too big for their little bodies to handle.