Why Are English Teachers So Mean And Rude For No Reason? A Teacher And Parent Explains
I was slouched against a cinder block wall outside my daughter Lila’s 11th grade English classroom last fall, picking at a loose flake of blue paint, when she kicked the toe of her scuffed Vans into the concrete and said it again: “Mr. Torres is just mean for no reason.”
I’d heard this same complaint once a week for a month already. He’d snapped at a boy in the back row for asking to repeat the homework assignment. He’d cut Lila off mid-sentence when she was sharing her thoughts on To Kill a Mockingbird in whole-class discussion. He’d given her a C on a personal narrative she’d stayed up until 1 a.m. writing about her grandma’s move across the country, and when she’d asked why, he’d just pointed to the rubric and said “no textual evidence” before turning to help another student. Lila left that interaction crying, convinced he just didn’t like her.
As a former high school English teacher myself, I should have jumped in to defend the profession right away. But I didn’t. I remembered what it felt like to stand at the front of a room after three straight nights of grading 30 essays each, when my oldest was a teething toddler and I’d gotten four hours of sleep total. I remembered snapping at a kid once just for asking if I’d graded his paper yet, in the hallway between classes, and then going into the teacher’s lounge and hiding in the supply closet for five minutes because I felt so awful about it. That kid went home telling his mom I was rude for no reason, I’d bet.
When it was our turn for parent-teacher conferences, I walked in expecting to meet a gruff, unlikable guy. What I found was a 30-something with ink-stained fingers from grading with a fountain pen, a coffee mug that read “Comma Correct Police”, and stacks of student essays teetering on every corner of his desk. A 7-year-old’s drawing of a dinosaur was taped to his computer monitor. He pulled out Lila’s narrative within the first 30 seconds, flipped to the back, and pointed to all the comments I hadn’t seen: “This story feels so honest, I cried reading the part about baking cookies with your grandma. The grade is for meeting the unit requirements, not for how good the story is.”
I brought up Lila’s complaint directly: She says you’re rude a lot, and don’t give anyone a break. He leaned back in his chair and sighed, ran a hand through his messy hair. He told me he has 152 students this semester, four different class preps, and the district cut his planning period by 10 minutes two years ago to cover a budget gap. He grades three to four essays a night, most weeknights, after he drives his own kid to soccer practice and eats dinner. The boy he snapped at for asking to repeat the assignment? He’d asked three times already that period, after the assignment was written on the whiteboard, posted to Google Classroom, and read aloud twice. When he cuts kids off mid-discussion? He has 45 minutes for class, 25 kids, and if one person rambles for 10 minutes about their TikTok take on Gatsby, 15 other kids never get to speak at all. The C on Lila’s paper? The unit was all about supporting claims with textual evidence, they’d practiced it for three weeks, and Lila turned it in two days late without asking for an extension. “I could have been nicer about explaining it,” he said. “I was running late for a meeting after class that day. I get it, that came off rude.”
That’s the thing no one talks about, right? English teaching isn’t like other subjects. You can’t bubble in an answer or grade a stack of multiple choice tests in 20 minutes. Every essay you read is a little piece of someone’s kid, and you have to give feedback on it, and hold them to standards, and do that 150 times over. What looks like mean, unprovoked rudeness is almost always just overwork bleeding through. What feels personal to a kid is almost never about them.
That doesn’t mean it’s okay, of course. But there are small, concrete things parents can do to get to the bottom of it, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the teacher is just a bad person. First, next time your kid comes home saying their English teacher is mean for no reason, don’t just ask “what did they do to you?” Ask “what happened in the 10 minutes before that?” When I asked Lila that after the conference, she remembered Mr. Torres had already had to tell three other kids to be quiet that same class period before he snapped at her for being late. She’d forgotten that part, because she was focused on how his tone felt. Second, encourage your kid to go talk to them directly, after class, with a simple question: “I’m confused about my grade/why you reacted that way, can we chat for two minutes?” Lila did this a week after the conference, and came home saying Mr. Torres apologized for being so short with her, explained the rubric again, and even let her revise the paper for a higher grade if she added the required evidence. Third, if you do need to reach out to the teacher, start with “my kid came home feeling like things felt tense in class, can you help me understand what’s going on?” instead of opening with a complaint about rudeness. Most teachers will soften right away, because they’re already stressed enough, and they don’t want conflict.
For teachers reading this, the small thing I always wish I’d done more of is just name it out loud. If you’re having a bad week, behind on grading, tired, just say 10 seconds at the start of class: “I’m a little more rushed than usual this week, so if I come off short, that’s my bad, not anything you did.” It takes no time, and it changes how kids see you.
Last month, Lila stayed after school for 25 minutes past dismissal to work on her research paper with Mr. Torres. She came home with a granola bar he’d given her because she missed the bus, and said he told her a story about his own grandma who moved to Florida when he was 16, and how he still writes her letters every week. She still complains that he’s way too strict about comma splices, and that he calls on people even when they don’t raise their hand. But she hasn’t called him mean for no reason in months.
Most of the time, the rudeness that feels unprovoked isn’t about you, or your kid. It’s just the weight of a job that asks one person to hold hundreds of stories every semester, grade them all on time, and make it look easy. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior, but it explains it. And a lot of the time, all it takes is a two minute conversation to shift everything.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Are English Teachers So Mean And Rude For No Reason