Is It Okay to Resent Admin Telling Teachers to ‘Pour Their Lives Into Kids’? A Teacher’s Perspective
It’s 3:49 on a Wednesday afternoon, and I’m picking rainbow sprinkles off the leftover birthday cupcake a student left on my desk during the first all-staff meeting of the year. My grading bin is propped under my folding chair, I already texted my partner to pick up my 7-year-old from chess club without me, and our principal is leaning against the library podium, soft smile in place, saying the line we all knew was coming. “This year, these kids need more than just lesson plans and test prep,” she says. “We need every single one of you to pour your lives into them. Show up early, stay late, make it to their weekend games, answer their texts when they’re upset over summer break. That’s the work that changes lives.”
Five minutes later, the meeting wraps. The four members of the core admin team grab their custom branded leather tote bags (the rest of us got thin canvas ones with the school logo at orientation) and head for the door. The assistant principal pauses to high-five the dean of students, and I overhear: “Don’t forget, leadership dinner at that new oyster bar out west. Carpool leaves in 10 minutes.” A first-year special education teacher, who’s spent the whole meeting scribbling notes about understaffed para support, raises her hand and asks if all staff are invited, since the back-to-school retreat was marked on the shared calendar for that night. The principal laughs, light, like it’s a silly question. “Oh, honey, this is just our core leadership check-in. We’ll share the big takeaways with you all next month.” Then they’re gone, and the rest of us are left folding chairs, comparing notes about which notebooks and cleaning supplies we still have to buy out of our own paychecks, and not saying the thing everyone is thinking.
That first-year teacher turned to me a minute later, notebook still open to her list of requests, and said, “Wait, are we not leadership? I thought we were all on the same team here.” I didn’t have a good answer. I just handed her the rest of the cupcake, because that’s the kind of small backup frontline staff give each other when the people in charge don’t bother. I drove home stuck in school zone traffic after that, turning the line over in my head, and the first clear thought I had was: Am I a bad person for resenting this?
I’ve been teaching 4th grade at this school for six years now. I’ve stayed until 7 PM on a weeknight helping a student finish a history diorama because his mom works two housekeeping jobs and couldn’t drop him off early to work on it. I keep a bin of extra socks, granola bars, and hair ties by my door for kids who show up without them. I make it to as many weekend soccer games and dance recitals as I can fit around my own kid’s schedule, and I answer parent emails at 9 PM most nights because that’s when most working parents get 10 quiet minutes to check in. I don’t do any of that because someone ordered me to pour my life into the job. I do it because that’s what you do when you spend 7 hours a day with 9-year-olds who show up with all kinds of gaps no lesson plan can fix.
But that line, paired with watching the admin team pile into an SUV for a dinner no one else would ever be invited to, left a bitter taste. I talked to my mom about it that weekend—she taught 2nd grade for 32 years at a public school an hour away—and she laughed and said that exact line was standard when she started in 1987. The only difference, she said, is that admin didn’t post photos of their private golf retreats and winery dinners on the school Instagram back then.
A lot of parents I talk to at conferences only hear this rhetoric in newsletters and social media posts, and never see the double standard behind the scenes. They don’t see that admin gets 50% more unstructured prep time than classroom teachers, that their professional development days are often just catered lunches and off-site outings, that they vote themselves small performance bonuses every year while we debate for 20 minutes at PTA whether we can afford new crayons for every kindergarten desk. The framing shifts blame neatly: if kids don’t get the support they need, it’s never because admin spent federal intervention money on new office furniture for their suite. It’s because individual teachers aren’t pouring enough of their own time and money into the gap.
For a long time I bought into that, and the resentment just felt like proof I was selfish, or not cut out for the job. It took a group of three other classroom teachers sitting around my kitchen table complaining about that same oyster bar dinner last year to work out what actually helps, for us and for kids.
First, we stopped treating uncompensated extra work as a moral requirement. I now have a hard stop at 4:30 PM three days a week, no exceptions, so I can make it to my own kid’s soccer practice. I still stay late when a student needs extra help, but it’s my call, not a demand from someone who leaves the building at 4 sharp every Friday. I have a saved email draft for after-hours parent messages that says, “Thanks for reaching out! I’ll review this and get back to you during my planning period tomorrow” so I don’t feel pressured to draft a full response from my couch while I help with my own kid’s homework. That one small change cut my after-hours work time by almost half, and I haven’t had a single parent complain.
We also stopped trying to get invited to admin’s exclusive club. Instead, we meet for 45 minutes once a month in my classroom after school, bring cheap chips and iced tea, and hash out one specific, documented problem we want fixed. We don’t show up to admin meetings with vague rants about understaffing; we show up with a list of 12 specific instances from the past month where a student didn’t get required support because no para was available, and a request for two extra paid para hours a week. We got that request approved last semester. We still don’t get invited to the oyster dinners, but we got the thing that actually helps kids.
For parents who want to cut through this talk, the step is simpler than you might think. The next time PTA asks you to donate cash for classroom snacks or volunteer your weekend to run a school event, ask one question: What is admin pulling from their annual discretionary hospitality or leadership budget to cover this? Last year, our PTA asked every family to donate $10 to cover classroom snack costs, and one parent asked that exact question at a public meeting. Admin reallocated $2,000 from their $12,000 annual leadership event budget to cover snacks for the whole school within a week.
This year, admin still says the “pour your lives” line at every all-staff meeting. They still don’t invite classroom staff to their monthly dinners. Last month, I had to leave a meeting 10 minutes early to make it to my kid’s tap recital, and the principal made a passing comment about people not being “all in” for the school community. I just nodded and walked out. I got to the recital, watched my kid mess up the final step and wave at me from the stage, and came back to work the next day to do the actual work that matters. I still feel that sharp little twinge of resentment sometimes, when I’m setting up for the fall festival on a Saturday and see their winery trip photos pop up in my feed. I don’t feel guilty about it anymore, though. Resentment doesn’t mean I don’t care about the kids. It just means I’m done pretending the double standard doesn’t exist.
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