Student teachers are just that, teachers who are still students themselves learning how to become good teachers. When a student teacher has control of the class, they don’t always handle the situation well.

In today’s story, a student teacher in a high school English class tells one student that this answer to a question is wrong even though the question could be open to interpretation.

After that, the student decides to comply with the teacher’s requests but exert the minimum amount of effort required.

See how the student’s reaction impacted the teacher’s behavior…

I’ll call your bluff and take the marks

When I was in high school I wasn’t very good at writing essays in English. I knew all the concepts but flushing out a few pages of BS wasn’t something I could do in 45 minutes of class time.

For a few weeks we had a student teacher completing her Prac block.

Knowing that kids circle substitute and student teachers like sharks she didn’t take any nonsense but overcompensated and more than a few of the kids in my class checked out or outright antagonised her.

This just made her more hostile to the smart aleck teenagers we were.

OP tried to participate in class.

For me, check out was when I tried to answer a question about the use of a very specific term in a poem about WW1 soldiers.

The author used “wheeled chair” instead of “wheelchair”.

I put my hand up and gave some interpretation that made sense, and I was always told there’s no wrong answers in these sorts of discussions.

As a reward for participating I was treated to a fairly harsh “No. You’re wrong”… noted.

OP decided to stop trying in English class.

So we have to complete an essay on what we’ve learnt the last few weeks and the question is along the lines of “How did the author make you feel when reading (text)?”.

Me, having mentally checked out of English class, not being good at that sort of thing and being the kid I was wrote out a couple paragraphs summarising the message of the text and saying that I didn’t feel anything when reading it.

The next Monday we get our essays back and I’ve got a 5/25. More than I thought so those two paragraphs must have been pretty good.

The teacher lectured OP about the essay.

The prac teacher takes me outside and goes on about how she’s disappointed and I could have done better and how everyone else wrote two or three pages but I didn’t get half a page done.

It all seemed pretty disingenuous to me because she hadn’t shied away from telling me or anyone else when we were wrong.

She asked why I wrote that.

I replied that I genuinely didn’t have an emotional reaction to it. Why lie?

OP declined the offer to redo the essay.

She then says I have the choice to either take the fail or rewrite the essay next class.

“Ok, I’ll take the grade. No point wasting time”.

Her face dropped a bit and she took a while to reply “Really? Are you sure?”

“Yep, I’m no good at this sort of thing remember. I didn’t get it right in class so why would that change overnight?”

OP was required to redo the essay.

Defeated, she sent me back to class and went next door for a few minutes.

A little while later I was called out again to speak with my actual teacher.

She asked me why I didn’t think I could do better and what didn’t I understand about the question.

After talking for a while she said that I will HAVE to retake the essay with a new text and question. One that was worded so I couldn’t just say “I didn’t”.

The prac teacher changed her teaching methods.

In the end I wrote around two pages and passed, just.

The prac teacher was there for another two weeks or so and I noticed a few things.

First, she didn’t react with outright contempt when someone gave an answer that wasn’t what she wanted.

Second, she didn’t try try to play a game of wits against any more self sabotaging teenagers.

And… a story about OP’s real teacher.

Bonus story about my actual teacher.

She was younger and really nice but now that I’m older I think she was one of those sensitive but naive sorts of people.

We had to come up with a tv pilot episode and read it out to the class. One kid read out the first episode of Burn Notice word for word.

Top marks and a heap of praise

It’s great that the prac teacher seemed to learn not to be so negative to students. Telling a student they have the wrong answer about a question where they were told there were no wrong answers would be quite defeating.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

You can’t be forced to feel a certain way.

This reader can relate to this story…

This sounds like a great teacher…

OP should feel thankful.

These students were told to do the same work twice.

It sounds like that student teacher had a lot to learn!

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.