Why Would A Teacher Say Their Class Is Full Of Idiots? What I Learned From A Surprising Parent-Teacher Chat
The chocolate chip cookie crumbs stuck to the edge of the folding table as I sat down across from Javi’s 8th grade math teacher last September. It was the first parent-teacher conference of the year, and I’d jotted down a quick note to bring up the weird answer key mix-up Javi had laughed about over dinner two nights before: all the short answer responses on the key ran multiple paragraphs, while the long essay prompts got one-sentence answers. It looked like a simple copy-paste error.
When I mentioned it, Ms. Lopez rubbed the back of her neck, snorted, and leaned back in her chair. “That wasn’t a mistake,” she said. “I did that on purpose. I’m sure my class is full of idiots and would not notice that I made the answers long where they should be short and short where they should be long.”
I froze mid-sip, coffee leaking through the lid onto my wrist. I’d heard plenty of frustrating teacher comments over the years, as a part-time para at the local elementary school and a mom of two middle schoolers, but nothing this blunt. Before I could figure out how to respond, she kept talking. She’d spent 11 years teaching middle school math, she said, and this year was the worst she’d seen for homework copying. She posts all review sheets and answer keys on Google Classroom so kids can study at their own pace, but over the first month of school, she’d realized 75% of her class just copied the answer key straight into their homework packet the second she posted it. They didn’t work through the problems first, they didn’t check their work, they just copied and turned it in. Flipping the answer lengths was her low-stakes test: who was actually paying attention, and who was just copying mindlessly. Only three kids noticed. Javi was one of them.
That’s when the shock faded, and the frustration I felt turned into something else: recognition. Ms. Lopez had a first grader at home who’d had three ear infections in the last month, she’d mentioned it earlier in the conference. She grades 120 tests a week on her couch after her kid goes to bed, and she gets three or four emails a day from parents asking why their kid’s grade is a B instead of an A. This wasn’t a teacher who hated her students. It was a tired person who’d run out of patience, and said the rude, unfiltered thing out loud that most teachers only think to themselves when no parents are around.
When I got home that night, I asked Javi what he thought about it. He shrugged, grabbed a granola bar off the counter, and said most of his friends do copy homework. Between two hours of soccer practice every day, two other tests a week, and chores around the house, a lot of them just don’t have time to work through every math review problem. They know copying is wrong, but it’s the only way to keep up with all the work they’re given. He gets it, he said, he just doesn’t do it because he likes math.
That’s the thing no one talks about much when we get into arguments online about bad teachers or lazy kids: most of the time, this kind of messy, ugly moment comes from two groups of people being overwhelmed at the same time. Ms. Lopez isn’t a terrible teacher for saying that. She’s a person who tried everything she could think of to get kids to engage, and when that didn’t work, she tried a messy, flawed experiment and vented her frustration in a moment of weakness.
If there’s anything I’ve taken away from that conversation, it’s that the first step when you hear something like this isn’t to run to the principal to file a complaint. It’s to pause and ask what’s actually going on. For parents, that means if your kid comes home talking about a teacher saying something shocking, don’t fire off an angry email before you get context. I’ve started asking two simple questions when my kids bring stuff like this home: “What do you think made them say that?” and “How many other people noticed what was going on?” Those two questions give you way more context than any secondhand story, and they keep you from overreacting to a tired offhand comment.
For teachers who find themselves as frustrated as Ms. Lopez was, the small fixes she tried after that experiment work a lot better than messy tests like this. Instead of posting the full answer key a week before the test, she posts it 24 hours before, after all homework is due. That gives kids time to study after they’ve done the work, but no time to copy it before turning it in. She also started leaving half the answers off the key, and has kids check their work with a partner in class the day before the test. Both changes take less than five extra minutes of prep a week, and she told me last month that the number of kids actually doing their own work went up almost 40% in a semester.
It’s not a perfect solution. There are still kids who copy homework, and there are still days when Ms. Lopez is tired and makes a frustrated comment in the teacher’s lounge. Last week Javi came home saying she brought glazed donuts for the whole class after everyone averaged 10 points higher on the midterm than they did on the first test. She still jokes about how half the kids aren’t paying attention, but now she’s got a small system that works a little better, and we all know where she’s coming from.
No one gets a classroom full of perfectly engaged kids and perfectly planned lessons every day. Sometimes tired people say rude things they don’t entirely mean, and the best thing you can do is stop long enough to figure out why before you judge. It doesn’t fix all the problems in the school system, but it makes these messy, awkward moments a little easier to navigate for everyone.
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