It is difficult to argue that a teacher is a more well-paid career choice. They need to keep sane because they get the summers off and a few breaks in between. The stress level is through the roof, the pay isn’t very rewarding, and their work hours still expand long outside the classroom.
When your students are little menaces, it’s worse. For one teacher, her students, as well as some of their parents, made Julie Marburger, a sixth-grade teacher at Cedar Creek Intermediate School in Texas, want to pull every strand of her hair out. She decided to quit her job and possibly even her career as a teacher because it was so bad.
Her breaking point was when she posted about the incident on her Facebook page.
“Parents have become far too disrespectful, and their children are even worse,” she wrote. “One parent today thought it was wrong of me to hold her son accountable for his behavior and decided to very rudely tell me so, in front of her son.”
A lot of jaw-dropping photos were added to the post to give clarity to the kinds of things she deals with every day. The photos included textbooks that were torn up, broken bookshelves, electronics thrown on the ground, and someone stuck on the window sill.
“Keep in mind that many of the items damaged or destroyed by my students are my personal possessions or I purchased myself because I have NO classroom budget,” she wrote. “I have finally had enough of the disregard for personal and school property and am drawing a line in the sand on a myriad of behaviors that I am through tolerating.”
She said that nearly half of her students are failing due to missing assignments, even after many calls to their parents. “Most of these students and their parents haven’t seemed to care about this over the past three months,” she wrote.
She had a few words to say to her parents at the end of her post:
“People absolutely HAVE to stop coddling and enabling their children,” she stated. “It’s not fair to society, and more importantly, is not fair to the children to teach them this is okay. It will not serve them towards a successful and happy life.”
“Any passion for this work I once had has been wrung completely out of me. Maybe I can be the voice of reason. THIS HAS TO STOP,” she ended the post.
The post was shared 350,000 times before Marburger deleted it. After two years of teaching, she plans to leave at the end of the school year.
There are more photos and the entire post here.
Do you agree with Marburger that parents don’t hold their student’s reckless behavior accountable? Would you let her go?
