Why The Phrase ‘He’s Just Being Lazy’ Irritates Me As A Teacher + What To Say Instead
Last month, I sat across from a mom and her 7th grade son at a fall parent-teacher conference, my half-decaf coffee gone lukewarm, Javi’s crumpled progress report spread between us. When I pointed out he’d only turned in 4 out of 11 math homework assignments, Javi stared at the scuffed toe of his sneakers and his mom sighed. “I know,” she said. “He’s just being lazy, right?”
I felt that familiar, irrational twist in my chest. I know she didn’t mean anything by it. I know after a long day of work and juggling three kids, it’s an easy shorthand for a problem that feels bigger than she can handle. But still, my jaw tightened. I glanced over at Javi, who’d just gone from slouched to completely folded into his hoodie, the corner of a dinosaur drawing peeking out of his notebook – the same drawing he’d spent 20 minutes perfecting during free reading the week before. If he was so lazy, why did he spend that much time getting the T-Rex’s claw curve just right?
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this phrase, and it won’t be the last. I’ve been teaching middle school for 12 years, and I can count on one hand the number of kids I’ve met who actually fit the label “lazy” – kids who don’t care about anything enough to try. Almost every time I hear that word, it’s covering up something else. Early in my career, I had a 5th grade student named Mia who never turned in homework, always dawdled on group work, and every teacher on the team agreed she was lazy. It took six months for someone to realize she couldn’t see the board. She couldn’t read the printed worksheets we sent home, and she was too embarrassed to say anything. A $10 pair of drugstore glasses from the school health clinic fixed 90% of her “laziness” overnight. More recently, I had a 10th grader who couldn’t finish a single essay, even when he talked for 10 minutes about how much he loved the topic. Turned out he had undiagnosed ADHD, and his working memory was too overloaded to get all his ideas from his head onto the page. That wasn’t laziness, that was a brain working differently.
Back to Javi. After his mom left that day, I pulled him aside after class, didn’t mention the conference, just asked what was up with the homework. He shrugged for a minute, then mumbled that the only internet at his house is on his mom’s tablet, and his little brother needs it to do his own homework after dinner. He can’t read the small text on his old cracked phone, so he can’t pull up the assignment. That’s it. That was the whole problem. He wasn’t sitting around playing video games instead of doing work. He had no way to access the work.
That’s the thing about calling a kid lazy. It stops the search before it even starts. If you decide the problem is their character, that they’re just a lazy person, you don’t look for the actual, fixable barrier in their way. It’s easy to get irritated about it, even irrationally so, because the price of that shortcut is a kid’s self-esteem and progress. The good news is, swapping that phrase out for something else doesn’t take a lot of extra work, and it almost always leads to a solution faster than judgment does.
First, instead of saying “you’re being lazy” or “they’re just lazy”, ask one simple question: “What’s getting in your way?” That’s it. It doesn’t add 30 minutes to your evening, it just opens the door to the real problem. For Javi, that question led to an easy fix: I started sending home a printed copy of every homework assignment with him, so he doesn’t need to pull it up online. He’s turned in every assignment for three weeks straight now.
Another small shift I recommend: If your kid is staring at a homework sheet for 20 minutes not working, don’t default to lazy. Split the task into a tiny first step, and say “let’s just do the first two problems together, then we can take a 5 minute break.” More often than not, what looks like laziness is overwhelm. The task feels too big, so the kid freezes up, and that freezing looks like not caring. I’ve seen that with straight A students and struggling students alike. A whole page of 20 math problems can feel impossible to a 12 year old, but two problems feels doable.
For teachers, one small change I’ve made that keeps me from falling into the lazy trap: when I’m entering notes about a missing assignment, I don’t allow myself to write “lazy” anymore. I write “no device to access assignment” or “said he forgot it in his locker” or even “didn’t turn in, reason unknown.” That small shift reminds me to follow up later, instead of writing the kid off before I know the full story.
I get it, though. When you’re a parent working 10 hour days, or a teacher grading 100 papers a week, it’s exhausting to dig for the problem every single time. I’ve caught myself thinking that lazy shorthand when I’m tired too, so I don’t judge people for it. But that doesn’t stop it from irritating me, every single time. I’ve seen too many kids walk away from conferences believing they’re actually lazy, because the adults in their life said it so many times. That’s the quiet damage that tiny little phrase does that no one talks about much.
Javi got a B on his last math homework, and he taped his finished dinosaur drawing to my classroom door last week. I still hear “he’s just lazy” at least once a month, sometimes from other teachers, sometimes from parents. It still gives me that same irrational little twist in my chest. Some days, I have the energy to walk people through what I’ve seen, and ask them to try asking the question instead. Some days, I just nod and pivot to talking about the small, concrete thing we can fix. It’s not always neat, it doesn’t always work. But it’s always better than writing a kid off before you even know what’s getting in their way.
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