Why A Teacher Would Call Kids Idiots And Cut Corners Grading: What Parents Should Know
I was leaning over the bleachers last month grabbing my daughter Lila’s shin guards after soccer practice when she tilted her phone toward me and said, “That’s my AP Bio teacher. He posted this this morning.” The clip was 17 seconds, shot from the driver’s seat of a beat-up pickup in the school parking lot. The man held a gas station coffee in one hand, laughed into the camera, and said, “Spent my Sunday night grading unit tests. Got lazy—y’all won’t tell anyone, right? I’m sure my class is full of idiots, won’t notice I made the answers long when they were supposed to be short. Half of them didn’t even study anyway, what’re they gonna catch me on?”
A mosquito bit my calf through my leggings, and the smell of Gatorade and cut grass stuck to my shirt. I stared at the screen for a second, my first thought being that this was exactly the kind of thing that goes viral and gets a person fired before anyone asks any questions. Lila said half the junior class had already shared it in the school group chat, and the principal had sent a home email by lunch saying he was on administrative leave pending investigation.
I texted the clip to my group chat of local parents, and one of them, Sarah, who teaches 11th grade English at the same high school, texted back 10 minutes later: “Don’t hit share just yet. Do you know how many preps Hale has? Five. 147 kids total. They cut his grading aide two years ago when the budget got cut. He also coaches debate, which is unpaid. He’s not excusing what he said, but I get the lazy grading part.”
We met for takeout pizza a couple days later to talk it through, because I’d always assumed lazy, disrespectful grading came from bad teachers, not anything bigger. Sarah said she’d been there three years ago, when she had 160 kids and was grading 30 essays a week on top of detention duty and yearbook advising. She’d once pasted the same generic feedback on 12 different personal narratives just to get them turned back in time for progress reports. She’d never called her kids idiots, but she’d thought, more than once, that no one would read the feedback anyway, so what did it matter?
The thing no one talks about when a story like this blows up is that cutting corners on grading isn’t always about being lazy or hating kids. It’s about math. If you have 150 short answer questions to grade, and you’re expected to turn them around in three days so you can post grades before the marking period closes, you have two options: either give up your entire weekend, skip your own kid’s soccer game, and write individual feedback for every single one, or cut a corner. When you do that enough times, the frustration builds up, and sometimes you say something ugly on camera that you never would have said in front of a student or parent. That doesn’t excuse calling kids idiots—full stop. But it explains why it happens, way more often than any of us want to admit.
For parents who find themselves in this situation, or just notice their kid is getting vague, unhelpful feedback on assignments, the first small step I’ve started doing is pretty simple: if Lila brings home a test with generic, useless feedback, I don’t shoot off an angry email to the principal demanding action. I send a one-sentence email to the teacher: “Can you tell me one specific change Lila could make to her answer here to get full credit next time?” It’s short, it’s not confrontational, and it forces the teacher to give actual input without demanding they redo 10 hours of work in a day. If half a dozen parents do that for a teacher, it also sends a quiet signal that kids and families actually care about feedback, which makes it harder to cut that corner next time.
If you’re on the PTA or your school’s site council, there’s an even more concrete thing you can do: push to cap the number of students per teacher at 120, and bring back part-time grading aides for high school teachers. That’s not some vague “we need more funding” ask. Most districts have small discretionary budgets that can cover a $15 an hour aide for 10 hours a week, if the board prioritizes it. We did that at our middle school two years ago, and teachers turned around grading two days faster on average, and parent complaints about feedback dropped by 40%. That’s actual change, not just a protest on social media.
For teachers who are feeling overwhelmed right now, there’s a low-friction trick Sarah shared that she uses now: instead of writing a long paragraph of generic feedback, just write one specific word and one question. For example, if a kid misses the point of a short answer on cell division, you write “Clarity” and “What part of mitosis did you struggle with here?” That takes 10 seconds per answer, it’s way more useful to the kid than a 3-sentence generic paste job, and it cuts your grading time in half. It’s not a fix for overloaded rosters, but it’s a small stopgap that works better than crossing your fingers and hoping no one notices you cut a corner.
A couple weeks after the clip went viral, Mr. Hale resigned. The district didn’t fight it, they just wanted the whole thing to go away. His AP Bio class got split between three other teachers, so each of those teachers got 10 more students added to their rosters right in the middle of the semester. Lila got moved to a different section, and last week she brought home her first midterm from the new class. It had no feedback at all, just a big letter grade scrawled at the top. She shrugged and said “At least it’s graded, I guess.”
We’re still working with the PTA to get the student cap and aide funding on the next school board agenda. It’s slow, and half the board doesn’t want to talk about it because they’re worried about the budget. No one’s gotten fired over this new problem, and it hasn’t gone viral. But it’s the same problem, just without the rude quote to make it noticeable. We’ll keep chipping away at it. It’s the only thing that’s ever going to fix it.
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