Not a teacher, but when I was in school, I remember one kid asking the teacher if there was life after death. She said she wasn’t sure and the kid responded “I hope there is because I want to see my sister again”
This wasnt a question, but when my mom was a teacher she said every kid was so excited about Thanksgiving coming up. One kid was like “I’m not sure what we’re doing” in a sad voice. His parents were going through a divorce. She said she felt so bad for him.
I wasn’t a question, but I had a toddler tell me that Mommy loved her baby sister the most. I promised her Mommy loved her just as much as new baby. Mommy just had to spend a lot of time helping new baby because she couldn’t do things like big sister could. I asked big sister, “Do you know who new baby loves most in the whole wide world? You!!” That’s cheered her up a bit. We made sure to tell the mom about the conversation so she could reassure the toddler herself that she was loved. Poor darling.
This was before I was a teacher and I was a nanny for a very dysfunctional family. There were many moments really with these kids. Mind you I worked for this family for 10 years, started as a teen until I finished up my masters degree.
I had tucked in the eldest, he was 7 at the time and I had worked there for 4years. Gave him a kiss and told him I loved him (might be controversial but I spent everyday with these children, as a teen just picking them up from school and until the went to bed/the entire weekend, and after I turned 18 I moved in with the family, I loved these kids like they were my own siblings/kids). He grabbed my hand and went “why do you love me? Mom and Dad don’t, I’m a bad kid.”
He was a handful I won’t lie, got into trouble a lot at school and a short temper, he’s an adult now and was diagnosed with Adhd recently which I think contributed. I’m sure it didn’t help that the parents were only really around one day a week and even then they would often ask me to look after the kids for a bit so they could go to the movies/a restaurant etc.
I assured him his parents loved him, and that he was a very loveable boy and that even the loveliest of people make mistakes and can behave badly but that didn’t make them less loved. I hugged him one more time and left the room but god I had to push down the lump in my throat for a bit.
Not sure if my reaction had been the best but I was a 20yo definitely not equipped for this kind of situation. These people had 4 kids if you’d believe it. Twins who were 1 when I started working there and a newborn, literally only a few days old. I’m still in close-contact with all of them, the youngest now 17.
Not a teacher, but on the opposite end of the interaction. It was around the end of the year and me and some other students were hanging in the Psychology teacher’s room (high school). I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but I flippantly mentioned how my sister used to beat me up. Hit me, kick me, hold me down and spit on me, slam my head into the hardwood floor, talking about it like a funny anecdote. Then everyone went quiet and my teacher just said ‘(Name), I am.. so sorry.’ I said ‘Wait, is that not normal?’
Not a teacher, but I was engaged to the kids father.
Kid was sitting on the stairs looking like someone kicked his puppy. 9yo on the verge of tears
Me what’s wrong?
Him: Dad just yelled at me for having a drink in the room when I wasn’t supposed to, but I didn’t do it. (We were at aunt’s house)
Me: well you don’t live here so you don’t know all the rules, it would be ok if you did. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Him: but I really didn’t do it, and dad won’t listen to me!
Me: Ok I’ll listen. what’s really going on? You’re awfully upset about a stain on a carpet.
Him: it’s not that, it’s like he never listens. He knows he won’t get me back if he keeps drinking around me, but he won’t stop it. Sometimes I think he likes beer more than me.
Me:… Well I can say that your dad and I love you very much. And you’re right he sometimes makes bad choices. We will have to work together to help him make better ones in the future.
Shortly after this I got pregnant and the kid decided he hated the entire idea. In retrospect I can see how shtty he must have felt. The new baby would get to live with dad, and I might not be as willing to listen to him and be on his side in the future. On top of that the new baby was going to have a Mom who very much wanted it… I feel a little guilty that I cut all contact when I left. Dude was an abusive alcoholic who refused to try to get sober. I had to walk away.
This wasn’t a question, but I had a 11th grader tell me that he wasn’t used to people caring about how well he did at school. (This was after I was encouraging him to do an assignment.)
I was reading a book where a mouse runs away from his family and after he ran away there was a line about “there’s not a daddy to play with me”. One girl kinda burst out laughing and said “daddies don’t play!” I quickly redirected before some other kid could say “my daddy plays with me”. Another time I had a kid say “we just moved into a new house with a new daddy” The home lives these kids have just break my heart.
I worked at a special ed preschool. The four year old boy had missed a week of school. We found out he had pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital. When he came back to school, he asked me, “did you know that when you’re in the hospital you can eat and eat until you’re full?” I knew his family struggled financially, as most of our students’ families did. But hearing him say that really broke me up.
I started sending him home with extra food as often as I could.
I ws doing eye exams at a school, kindergartners. This little girl was next, and I asked her to read the chart, she couldn’t. We tried both eyes, distance, I did everything. I looked at her, she smiled back at me the sweetest tenderest smile, and I said, baby you haven’t been able to see anything the teacher has shown you and nobody picked up on it, how was that?
I heard one student casually mention that their parents were scary and would mercilessly kill and bury their siblings bodies in the backyard then moved on as if it was completely normal. He talked about extremely depraved things all the time, like all the time although was oddly intelligent in pointing out how everything we do is pointless and deceitful.
The first boy was being picked up by his grandma, he hung on to me for dear life. He didn’t want to go home to his parents. “Why can’t you be my mom?!” Turns out they were going through a divorce, and he found out his mom didn’t want full custody, but 50/50. He thought she hated him.
Second girl, I was babysitting through the church. Her mom told me she needed to go to court and fight to keep her kids out of her ex’s life. When she came home drunk as a skunk at 4pm, I had to go home, this little girl kept crying I couldn’t go, that I was her mommy. Her little “why are you going?!” Breaks my heart every time I think of her. She was so mad at me, she never spoke to me again. I called CPS.
Third boy, was in the care of his aunt. I can’t go into his story without becoming so angry I want to break something, so I won’t. She came to get him, and he went into full melt down mode. The kicking, screaming, throwing toys, and punches. The aunt just stood there, having seen it a million times, and waited. I remove the toys around him, knelt down, and sang to him the circle time song from that day. He really liked it at circle so I thought why not, it wouldn’t hurt. After the third repeat, he calmed down and became himself again. He looked up at his aunt and said “can she come home with us?” He just had this desperate plea in his voice, the hurt in his face, it was just so much.
I think about these three sometimes, and I truly hope they’re doing well now.
11 year old kid said “you don’t even know me- how can you care about someone you don’t even know?” He’s the most sad kid- who is so hard on himself and doesn’t have many close friends. You can tell he gets no love at home. You just want to adopt them all- breaks your heart in half.
“Do you think my dad can stay with us now, because he has no more legs?” asked by an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who came to Germany with his mother when the war began. His father stayed behind to fight.
i was in an ED room as a white teacher with all black students. one of the kids would pet my hair a lot. one day he said something like “why can’t my hair be nice and smooth like this?” and it just broke my heart to know that was what he’d been thinking all this time.
I made cookies online using Messenger with the poorest of poor refugee children calling in from another country. When I said ‘so who’s going to now eat them?’ – joking it would be me as they were made in my kitchen – one of the girls who had absolutely nothing said ‘why don’t you go out on the street and find some really, really poor people to give them too?’ These beautiful kids had nothing but were just so absolutely selfless.
I’ve had some real heart wrencher situations with students, but not so much about things that they said. Also, I teach high school, and they hide a lot more. So the one that cut me the most was a student I had this past year who was autistic. Whenever he would email me or ask me questions about irregular school day activities, he would apologize profusely for bothering me. I told him time and time again that he wasn’t bothering me and had no reason to apologize, but I also know that it was something lodged in his brain that he would have to overcome on his own.
My sister taught 2nd grade & we both volunteered for the summer program at her elementary every year. For the Father’s Day craft, I was supervising the glitter station while the kids did an illustrated letter to their dad. This beautiful little girl with the most infectious laugh and such a sweet heart has written on her paper:
“Dear Dad, I love you a lot more than you love me.”
💔 The thing is even if it factually wasn’t true, something got that beautiful little girl believing that it was.
She was an adorable little 5 year old with big brown eyes. She looked up at me while we crouched under the classroom coat rack and asked why we have to lock the door and hide in the dark
I was running the Sunday school at my parents’ church when I was a teenager. I had a 2yo who couldn’t even properly pronounce the words he was saying swear at me. His dad was right there and he sort of chuckled and said “don’t say that”. When the kid was out of earshot I told the dad that in the future, he should avoid laughing in situations like this because at 2, he may or may not understand and remember your words, but he will remember your reaction. If the adults around him laugh at what he says and does, he’s likely to do it even more.
Well next week, the kid’s older sister comes to me and tells me that their dad asked her to tell me that her brother was adequately punished after getting home for what he said to me. I asked what she meant by adequate punishment and the poor kid had been locked alone in the bathroom for 2 HOURS.
I felt his dad would probably not listen to me at that point because I was a teenager without my own kids, so I asked another church leader to intervene by mediating a discussion between me and the parents. We had that intervention and the parents started approaching parenting in a more balanced way. They weren’t great parents after that either, but they stopped being abusive.
The kid still had a lot of emotional and behavioral issues for a while. When he was 4, he had a sort of breakthrough moment with me when he fully realized that I wasn’t going to be mad at him for acting out and that I was going to be a constant presence in his emotional support system. His behaviour improved drastically after that day because he would come to me and ask for help if he felt any big feelings that he didn’t know how to express. His parents even started calling me to ask if I was willing to come over and help sometimes during the week.
When I was about to move away for university, I announced that in the church and brought little parting gifts for all the kids. That day after class, he (now 7yo) came and snuggled my arm and said he would be good now and he would also help the younger kids be good. I told him he was already good, and having a lot of energy and not being able to sit still doesn’t make him a bad kid. I thanked him for promising to take care of the newer kids, but I said that it wasn’t his job to do that, but I would tell the new teacher that he wanted to help.
It broke me a little when he told me that he knows he’s been a bad kid but he would be good in the future and remember everything he learned from me. He was never a bad kid. He was a kid doing his best in a bad home situation, with parents who took offence when I suggested he should be screened for ADHD.
I teach unaccompanied foreign minors. Generally, they are pretty tough teenage boys. They have experienced a long journey of wandering, strewn with various forms of violence and injustice. They have a very hard, surly shell.
After a while together, when trust is established, some just ask for a little innocent hug. Just for a moment, they are children again. Children who haven’t seen their mother/father for months or years and who just need a moment of tenderness. Every time it happens, my heart breaks for them.
My sister is currently a student teacher and shared this with me. There’s a girl in like 2nd grade who had lost her parents and staying with their grandma who was sick. Now she’s important but I need to explain this other kid. There’s this little boy who had moved to the area from Washington and he missed Washington. Okay the story this little boy states he misses his dad because he’s in heaven. The little girl goes to comfort the boy and it was really sweet. The boy restates that his dad isn’t dead but in Washington and the little girl takes it like a champ and continues to talk with bro.
It was a year five class (10-11 year olds) in a multicultural school in Sydney. They said it so sadly.
Not only was I stunned at how observant they were, but I remembered lamenting that I gave up on my acting career years earlier for that same reason, and that little had changed.
Now it has been another eight years since I taught. There has been some progress, but it’s still a bit inconsistent.
This doesn’t exactly fit but I taught freshmen US History as a White woman in a district with predominantly Black students. My first year I asked the kids on their first day what they disliked about history class. I’ll never forget it – this student looked at me in the eye and said “You lie.” And I had to tell him he was right and that I’d try my best to fight against that narrative but I swear to you – his face and the way he said that… I’ll never forget it.
A couple of years ago we got our first ever forest fire smoke in our city. No one knew what to do differently with the terrible smog, so we kinda did what we always did. We just stayed inside at recess i guess.
Anywho. I was an ECE teacher, working every day with preschoolers. And one of the little girls whom i knew usually walked to school every day was coughing a lot. We were in the gym and she was just trying to play normally…. running and throwing balls…. but she was coughing. After 30 minutes we were back in the classroom. And she was still coughing occasionally. Eventually she looked at me. Tears in her eyes. And asked me. “Why won’t I stop coughing?” That freaking broke me.
She is better now. Thank goodness the smoke didn’t have lasting effects. As someone who also walked/biked to the school, breathing had become physically painful. Lasting a couple of weeks. I can hardly imagine the pain and panic that 3yo was having…
My mom had a kid ask “Can I talk to you after class?” She then proceeded to tell my mom that her dad was sexually abusing her. My mom was really late coming home that day.
Right after the orange one got elected the first time, I worked in a school for the SPED department that had a good percentage of Latino/a/e students. A Guatemalan female student asked me if she and her family are going to get deported.
That was our first interaction and she barely spoke English. I honestly didn’t know how to answer, so I just said if he tried, he’d have to go through me.
The family went back to Guatemala over that winter break (2016) and I have not seen or heard from them since. I hope you and your family are doing ok, L. You are a good and kind hearted person.
On 9/11 while watching the towers fall on the TVS, I asked my fifth grade teacher point-blank: is my mom going to be okay? She’s in Manhattan on a work trip today. I have never seen the color go out of someone’s face so quickly my lord
(She’s fine! She has never spoken about what happened that day!)
I am not a teacher but was an ASL student. My teacher told us a story of a deaf/hearing impaired child (8 yo) who is learning how to sign asked/signed to the teacher, “When I grow, I’ll be able to hear right? I am excited!”
My teacher had to hide her tears and made me feel bad for taking my life for granted.
I’m not a teacher but I remember a couple years ago in school the silent guy in the class one time shared that he had been living on the street for the last 3 weeks. Absolutely broke my heart knowing that he was being bullied too for smelling bad.
We talked about immigration and how it is talked about politically in Norway – and one of the children (16) shared his story on how he fled from his country. How he had to sit on his knees at one point, with a gun to his head.
It made a lasting impact on me, and my view on how to talk about the human aspect of those fleeing. But it sent chills down my spine of how many similar stories there probably is with people fleeing from civil wars in Africa.
I honestly want to include everyone and help them all, but our countries integration system is medium minus functioning…!
Not technically a teacher, but I volunteered at a primary school when I was in 10th. One kid was telling me how he’d never actually met his dad – supposedly he moved to Africa (we were in England) when he was still a baby and his mom called his dad a moron all the time.
Not heartbreaking, but made me pretty sad.
Another 10 year old was saying he was going to kill himself when he couldn’t do the math questions. Promptly reported that back to the school who said they knew he had a bad situation at home and would look into it.
A little girl who said she wanted to make a present for her mother as she worked really hard all the time and didn’t get a lot of nice things.
I was an ex teacher and used to hold monthly birthday celebrations for the class with pizzas and a birthday cake. One month, a 17 yo girl told me that this was the first ever birthday cake she has gotten in her life – even if it was shared with a few other peers.
I went back to the staffroom and cried in my cubicle. I grew up poor too, but it still hit me pretty hard.
I’m a teaching assistant but earlier this year, there was a kid I was working with who was a problem kid – anger issues, refusal to work, blah blah. He was about 14. We bonded over the both of us liking metal music, and I would give him recommendations. I was unfortunately removed from that school because agency work sucks, but the DAY i was removed, he very quietly said “I hope you’re here long term, you’re the only person who doesn’t look at me and see a failure.”
I hope he listens to the bands I showed him and knows that there’s someone in his corner. That school is no good for him, they just see him as trouble.
Just one from the other side. I am an adoptive parent, and our youngest, around 6 years old and had been with us a year and a half, started coming home with snacks from school. He said they gave them to him. Well, we contacted his teacher and his aid (had some special needs), and they told us that he said that we don’t have any snacks. We were horrified as he always had a fruit basket and up to 20 choices. He is 16 now and still a handful. He goes with me shopping so he can help decide what snacks and food we buy. Makes dinner for the family once a week. Getting to be a good cook.
No question but I stood before class very briefly years ago and a young girl wanted to tell how her weekend went. She said they planned to go to a theme park. That’s nice. “Yeah but eventually we didn’t go.” Oh why not? “My mom and dad were having another argument. Daddy drank too much again and mum doesn’t like that so she was angry at him and they had a fight so we decided to stay home.”
It was the pure casual way she told the story that broke my heart. She wasn’t even disappointed, she didn’t even think she was telling something that’s not ok. She thought that was just how families were.
I worked with recent immigrants and refugees. I told my students that I would be moving to Japan the next year, and the next day, one student asked me, “Do you know about the lost generation? Do you know about the suicide rates?”
He asked me a few more questions about some of the downsides of living in Japan. Come to find out he had spent hours researching Japan and wanted me to know about every facet. He told me he knew nothing about America when he was made to move here and was terrified of the country and its people, so he wanted me to be prepared when I moved. I cried in my car
I taught one semester of first-year seminar. The university I worked for needed part-time instructors, and I thought the stipend of extra money would be helpful. This was in 2021, so it was a freshman class who had just graduated during the thick of the pandemic.
My class was about 17 kids. Around October, I noticed one of the kids started missing more. He said he was going through a hard time, but wanted to catch up. I said I didn’t want to fail him and was willing to work with him, but we’d need to work out a schedule so he could realistically catch up with a passing grade. He’d do an assignment here and there but was rapidly falling behind.
November comes and he surprises me by showing up near the end of one class period. He asks if he can talk to me after I dismiss everyone, I say sure. We sit down and I can tell he’s trying not to break down. He says something like he didn’t think it was going to be this hard, but he’s been struggling in his classes. It’s been hard for him to be in class, to focus on his coursework, and it just feels like too much. He doesn’t disclose everything, but says he’s been to a doctor and has really bad light sensitivity and migraines resulting from it that would feel debilitating. He had been to the office on campus for accommodations but because it was so late in the semester, he felt like the damage had been done and he was going to have to do everything over again.
I reassured him that even if he was delayed by a semester, it was better he knew now about his diagnosis and how to accommodate it rather than continuing to hurt himself in other ways. He could potentially do more online courses, or look into lenses that help reduce fluorescent lighting. He seemed like he was in slightly better spirits, and then he said:
“I came to tell you because I feel like you’re the only teacher that cares about what happens to me.”
That broke my heart. I had to swallow the lump in my throat and reassure him I did care, I was happy he felt comfortable talking to me, and I would do what I could to help. But man, hearing that he thought I was the only one that even gave a shit about him…that tore me up.
When I was teaching elementary school, one boy — very quiet and thoughtful — came up to me after class and asked: “If I do well in school, will my dad come back home?”
I just froze. He said it so calmly, which somehow made it even more heartbreaking. I later learned his father had left the family a few months earlier, and the boy truly believed that if he became “good enough,” his dad might come back.
I work with children and young people and this happened, probably about 13-14 years ago. 12 year old boy from a well known, very messed up family that was abusive and lived in squalor was regularly attending the youth project and came in with a cut on his arm one day.
This cut had evidently been acquired several days before and was completely untreated. I don’t think the boy had had a wash in days, clothes were stinking and the wound was definitely infected and slightly festering. Anyway, it was causing him pain and he asked me to look at it.
I did so and I also cleaned the area around it while explaining that he needs to show his mum and ask to go to the doctors (general consensus amongst staff was that she knew, but had dismissed it).
I mentioned that germs could get into his blood and make him very ill (wasn’t going to say he could actually die) and that if it got very bad then the doctors might have to do some serious surgery and he could end up losing his arm.
First question out of his mouth: ‘Would it grow back’?
At 12 years old you would expect that child to understand that humans can’t re-grow limbs. My heart broke that his understanding of the human body was so poor due to lack of parenting and consistency in access to education.
A phone call was placed to his mum and a letter sent home. It got treated, but we were fully prepared to inform social services about the neglect (they were already aware of the family).
A year later and I actually took his 16 year old brother up to A+E (the emergency room) because he had an infected cut on his leg and we could see the red line radiating up from the cut which is a massive ‘Oh, fuck’ warning. Pretty sure the hospital referred to social services for that one.
I was a day camp counselor for 3-4 year olds. This girl accidentally knocked over her water bottle and it spilled everywhere. She immediately started sobbing, terrified. I helped her calm down and explained that it was okay, she didn’t do anything wrong. She made a little mistake, but there’s an easy way to fix it. I took her over to the paper towel dispenser and we cleaned it up together. The next day, the same thing happened, but she didn’t cry as much and I told her mom she needed a better water bottle (it was not replaced). A couple days later, it happened again, but the girl didn’t cry, she just went up to me and told me she needed some paper towels.
Pretty sure she gets yelled/hit for every mistake she makes at home.
I was teaching English at a community college while in grad school and it was Election Day. I let all my students out early to vote and offered them extra credit if they brought back an “I Voted” sticker. As we were letting out, an adult student who I enjoyed having in class came up and discreetly asked, “What if we can’t vote?”
“You aren’t going to have enough time today?” I said.
After thinking a bit, he said, “I mean I’m not allowed to vote.”
“Everyone allowed to vote,” I said, “it’s your unalienable right.” I was confused, since he was clearly a native born American.
He spoke in a hushed voice, even though the room was now empty: “You can’t vote in Kentucky, if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony.”
I was shocked. This was over fifteen years ago and I was new to Kentucky. I had never heard this; it wasn’t a law where I was from. He was such a good, thoughtful, intelligent student; it simultaneously broke my heart and opened my eyes.
I let him know that I would think of another comparable way to earn bonus points and he thanked me and left.
To rob someone of their right to determine who governs them even though they’ve paid their debt to society is sinister and degrading. It became clear to me too that such policies were rooted in racism. That moment honestly shifted my understanding of almost everything.
I used to volunteer in a reading program (pre-Covid) through my employer where we read books to small children at local elementary schools. One year I was assigned one of the poorer schools in the area and the subject matter was electricity. One little girl raised her hand and said “the electricity man turned the lights off at my house” I sat there stunned and didn’t know what to say.
I’ve had too many to count but two immediately come to mind – about 5 years ago when I taught elementary, my student’s dad was deported. As she was leaving for the day, she looked up at me and said “you’re my dad now.” I was and still am heartbroken for her.
At the end of this past school year, I was discussing mental health with my juniors. I made some sort of remark about leaning on family & friends when we are struggling and one of my boys asked “What if your parents don’t love you?” Despite being one of the sweetest students I’ve ever had, he’d been kicked out of his house and was briefly homeless before moving in with other relatives.
I’m currently doing my student teaching for my ECE Bachelor’s degree and every semester I have a few students who will occasionally ask if they can come home with me whenever I’m grabbing my stuff to leave for the day. I always give them a hug and tell them “No you can’t come home with me but I’ll be back tomorrow” just to let them know they’ll see me again. On my last day of this semester, one of the students who would always ask if she could come home with me would not stop crying because it was my last day in the classroom. While hugging me and crying uncontrollably she said stuff like “Why do you have to go? It’s not fair. I’m gonna miss you. Why can’t you keep coming back?” She was basically pleading for me to stay and continue to come to their classroom until their last day of school. It was a lot to explain to a first grader how student teaching in college classes works, so all I could say is “I’ll miss you too but my classes are over so I can’t come here anymore.” I felt so bad. I went to my car and cried a bit. I had never had a student cry like that because I was leaving. Some of the students I encounter grow so attached to me. It really sucks having to leave them when my semester is over.
Not a question but out on the playground all the children running around playing their usual games and a helicopter flew overhead. All the kids except two continued to play, the kids who suddenly stopped in their tracks and looked up scared were newly arrived kids from a war zone in Ukraine where things flying overhead could have resulted in explosions. It made me so sad thinking of them cowering in bunkers before they got to the safety of Ireland.
” I don’t want to go home. Please don’t sent me home.” I had one kid run out of class and hiding behind a tree, because he needed a stern talking of the principal and maybe had to be sent home for day. He hid behind that tree and started yelling and screaming that he didn’t want to go home and “please please don’t send me home” . This was shortly before the CPS investigation for dad and stepmom hitting this child. Everytime the dad got a notification that this kid misbehaved in class he hit the child to discipline him. But it only got worse and he acted out even more. That’s when he told people what happened at home and we were able to get them help. The dad was absolutely helpless to manage his child and the child got mistreated and abandoned and by his mother before that. Dad went to court get custody of him, so he wanted his son to be with him but was clueless and helpless. They got help and things are better now but it was a rough time.
“Have you heard something from my dad? He didn’t call for weeks and I don’t where he is.” Another child was in a bit of a separation war going on at home. Both parents said things to each other in front of the no child that should never ever hear about their parents. ( bitch, whore, useless, cheater). Police was involved, things got thrown around around and broke. One time dad moved out to his girlfriend/mistress abandoned mom and kid at their house and cut contact for a couple of weeks. Dad wanted to get mom complacent to his abuse through financial abuse. He cut payments for the house and mom had to pay on her own. At the same time mom had to adjust her working hours around the time when child was at school. At that time kid asked us adults at school if we had heard any news of the father or if we had his adress. Kid even wanted to go to administration to ask if they had any contact information of him. Kid was worried because dad didn’t even contact his child. But dad moved back in, mom shut up, and they pretend that everything is fine for now.
“my dad locks my mom in the bedroom when she did something my dad didn’t like sometimes” that was during a project for children’s rights and there was a poster like a in picture book with many incidents or situations that are bad for children. War, playground bullying, starvation, hitting children etc. The children could say what came to their minds. This kid is of Muslim background. What actually broke me is he didn’t even flinch out gave any indication that he thought this was bad thing. It hadn’t occurred to him that this was not normal or OK.
This is all in elementary school and the ages were 7btp 9 years old at that point.
Special ed teacher in middle school. There is this boy, first grade, that Is speachless every time I recall something he mentioned.
You remembered?
Of course, I listen to you!
No one ever does…
And he grins with his beautiful smile
Not in class, but I had a student disclose really serious sexual abuse to me. When the social workers and police were done talking to her at school and had decided they needed to take her to get a video statement, they told her she’d be leaving. She looked right at me and asked in this little voice, “Is aussieteacher coming too?”
I went with her in the social worker’s car, and staged with her until the detective drove me home at 7 pm. One of the other detectives told me that not everyone would have gone with her, but I don’t know how anyone could have sent that little kid off on her own with the cops. Especially not after she asked if you were coming with her.
I’m a psychologist for the equivalent of CPS in my country, but my work is more focused on giving reparatory therapy to kids who have been in bad situations. I have a case (still after 2 years when the most you can be is one) of 2 siblings severely neglected and emotionally abused by their mother (another can of worms of its own) and we had to remove the little girl (the boy already was removed for trying to kill his sister) of the home because the mother threatened to crash on the road and kill both of them, she ended getting into the psych ward on suicide watch for this.
One week in therapy we were talking about the situation and she looked at me with such sadness, after all that reality was all she knew all her life, we moved her with her dad but he was alienated from her by the mother and never formed a proper relationship with her and asked me “if my mom works hard enough on being good, can i be with her again?”
That broke my heart, because we had been trying for her to improve (the mom) working together with a social worker trying to urge her to change the dynamics at home that made the boy finally attempt again his sister, to go and get mental health help (we have direct contact with the psych unit at the hospital), but she was combative, never came to work sessions, insulted us, said that she was a good mom and we were all against her.
Now that she is on her father’s care she looks cleaner, with presentable clothes and smiles more, but every session she asks me to go back to mom and his brother, because she misses them and because even now she has a hard time seeing that none of that is normal.
We’re still working on improving the broken bond with dad, so she can finally get a happy and stable home.
Once we were talking about family in my class and I picked one of my students to answer me to a related question but once he couldn’t answer it he said this: “I am sorry teacher, my parents died when i was 3 and I can’t relate to this question.. Can you please pick someone else?” he sat down with tears in his eyes and it absolutely broke my heart because I didn’t know it and i asked him question really related to his relationship with parents.
I had my college-age students doing a research paper, and one of them wanted to research the effectiveness of spanking children as a disciplinary measure. Fine, works for me. We sat down to talk about how she could find sources and I asked her why she was so interested in the topic. She said, “Well, I don’t think it was good for me when my mother made me go out back and cut my own switch to be spanked with.”
I just kind of stared at her for a minute – like, what fucking century did you grow up in? – then said I was sorry to hear that and warned her about personal bias on the topic.
I teach in a large middle school and every two years we do a “wellbeing” questionnaire with lots of questions (anonymous) about all aspects of their lives to find out worrying areas or things we need to work on.
They do the quiz in the school computer rooms and submit online.
One year, I was supervising my first year class (7th grade) when one of the girls put up her hand and asked me if for the question “Have you had sexual relations with anyone?”, she should answer if it was rape?
I taught at a high school along the US-Mexico border. After Trump got elected in 2016, I had a student ask me if they were going to separate her family and what would happen if they did.
It’s never questions for me. But what’s broken my heart hundreds of times is when I lift my hand up to HIGH FIVE and they flinch. Kills me every time. Don’t hit your kids.
I used to teach HS math, and for a couple of years I taught “consumer math.” This is the math you always wished you learned in school – taxes, writing checks, loans, credit cards, etc. Honestly should be required for everyone, but instead it was the class for seniors who had failed a math class somewhere along the line and needed another credit to graduate. Often times it was the second math class they were taking their senior year.
The school I taught in was technically suburban, but a very diverse demographic, and some neighbourhoods were very much in the city.
We got to the lessons about mortgages and how payments work, PMI, all that sort of stuff. One of the kids asked me, “why are we learning this? we’re never going to own houses.” Just devastating.
And hard to respond back to, you can try to tell them things can be different, but all their lives they saw their parent(s) working multiple jobs just to pay rent and get by.
Comments
Why I don’t have a dad
Do you eat together as a family every night?
They’re always asking for food, but one kid said he didn’t eat for three days straight and it just broke my heart
‘Are you gonna keep it?’ What one of my second grade kiddos said after I told the class I was pregnant. 😥
Not a teacher, but when I was in school, I remember one kid asking the teacher if there was life after death. She said she wasn’t sure and the kid responded “I hope there is because I want to see my sister again”
This wasnt a question, but when my mom was a teacher she said every kid was so excited about Thanksgiving coming up. One kid was like “I’m not sure what we’re doing” in a sad voice. His parents were going through a divorce. She said she felt so bad for him.
I wasn’t a question, but I had a toddler tell me that Mommy loved her baby sister the most. I promised her Mommy loved her just as much as new baby. Mommy just had to spend a lot of time helping new baby because she couldn’t do things like big sister could. I asked big sister, “Do you know who new baby loves most in the whole wide world? You!!” That’s cheered her up a bit. We made sure to tell the mom about the conversation so she could reassure the toddler herself that she was loved. Poor darling.
Why Did My Parents Get Me Cowboys Tickets for Christmas,
Poor Kid
Will you take me home and let me live with you? I was a student teacher.
This was before I was a teacher and I was a nanny for a very dysfunctional family. There were many moments really with these kids. Mind you I worked for this family for 10 years, started as a teen until I finished up my masters degree.
I had tucked in the eldest, he was 7 at the time and I had worked there for 4years. Gave him a kiss and told him I loved him (might be controversial but I spent everyday with these children, as a teen just picking them up from school and until the went to bed/the entire weekend, and after I turned 18 I moved in with the family, I loved these kids like they were my own siblings/kids). He grabbed my hand and went “why do you love me? Mom and Dad don’t, I’m a bad kid.”
He was a handful I won’t lie, got into trouble a lot at school and a short temper, he’s an adult now and was diagnosed with Adhd recently which I think contributed. I’m sure it didn’t help that the parents were only really around one day a week and even then they would often ask me to look after the kids for a bit so they could go to the movies/a restaurant etc.
I assured him his parents loved him, and that he was a very loveable boy and that even the loveliest of people make mistakes and can behave badly but that didn’t make them less loved. I hugged him one more time and left the room but god I had to push down the lump in my throat for a bit.
Not sure if my reaction had been the best but I was a 20yo definitely not equipped for this kind of situation. These people had 4 kids if you’d believe it. Twins who were 1 when I started working there and a newborn, literally only a few days old. I’m still in close-contact with all of them, the youngest now 17.
Early 2000s. Third grade student asks “Will you be my Dad?” I later learned that he was in foster care and that it wasn’t going well.
Not a teacher, but on the opposite end of the interaction. It was around the end of the year and me and some other students were hanging in the Psychology teacher’s room (high school). I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but I flippantly mentioned how my sister used to beat me up. Hit me, kick me, hold me down and spit on me, slam my head into the hardwood floor, talking about it like a funny anecdote. Then everyone went quiet and my teacher just said ‘(Name), I am.. so sorry.’ I said ‘Wait, is that not normal?’
I swear you could have heard a pin drop…
After telling me that she wanted to off herself because she doesn’t like her life she said, “maybe you could be my mom”. She was 7.
Not a teacher, but I was engaged to the kids father.
Kid was sitting on the stairs looking like someone kicked his puppy. 9yo on the verge of tears
Me what’s wrong?
Him: Dad just yelled at me for having a drink in the room when I wasn’t supposed to, but I didn’t do it. (We were at aunt’s house)
Me: well you don’t live here so you don’t know all the rules, it would be ok if you did. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Him: but I really didn’t do it, and dad won’t listen to me!
Me: Ok I’ll listen. what’s really going on? You’re awfully upset about a stain on a carpet.
Him: it’s not that, it’s like he never listens. He knows he won’t get me back if he keeps drinking around me, but he won’t stop it. Sometimes I think he likes beer more than me.
Me:… Well I can say that your dad and I love you very much. And you’re right he sometimes makes bad choices. We will have to work together to help him make better ones in the future.
Shortly after this I got pregnant and the kid decided he hated the entire idea. In retrospect I can see how shtty he must have felt. The new baby would get to live with dad, and I might not be as willing to listen to him and be on his side in the future. On top of that the new baby was going to have a Mom who very much wanted it… I feel a little guilty that I cut all contact when I left. Dude was an abusive alcoholic who refused to try to get sober. I had to walk away.
This wasn’t a question, but I had a 11th grader tell me that he wasn’t used to people caring about how well he did at school. (This was after I was encouraging him to do an assignment.)
I was reading a book where a mouse runs away from his family and after he ran away there was a line about “there’s not a daddy to play with me”. One girl kinda burst out laughing and said “daddies don’t play!” I quickly redirected before some other kid could say “my daddy plays with me”. Another time I had a kid say “we just moved into a new house with a new daddy” The home lives these kids have just break my heart.
All these stories are so heartbreaking. I wish everyone could have their own Ms. Honey.
I worked at a special ed preschool. The four year old boy had missed a week of school. We found out he had pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital. When he came back to school, he asked me, “did you know that when you’re in the hospital you can eat and eat until you’re full?” I knew his family struggled financially, as most of our students’ families did. But hearing him say that really broke me up.
I started sending him home with extra food as often as I could.
I ws doing eye exams at a school, kindergartners. This little girl was next, and I asked her to read the chart, she couldn’t. We tried both eyes, distance, I did everything. I looked at her, she smiled back at me the sweetest tenderest smile, and I said, baby you haven’t been able to see anything the teacher has shown you and nobody picked up on it, how was that?
I heard one student casually mention that their parents were scary and would mercilessly kill and bury their siblings bodies in the backyard then moved on as if it was completely normal. He talked about extremely depraved things all the time, like all the time although was oddly intelligent in pointing out how everything we do is pointless and deceitful.
Three of them
Im an ex-ece teacher.
The first boy was being picked up by his grandma, he hung on to me for dear life. He didn’t want to go home to his parents. “Why can’t you be my mom?!” Turns out they were going through a divorce, and he found out his mom didn’t want full custody, but 50/50. He thought she hated him.
Second girl, I was babysitting through the church. Her mom told me she needed to go to court and fight to keep her kids out of her ex’s life. When she came home drunk as a skunk at 4pm, I had to go home, this little girl kept crying I couldn’t go, that I was her mommy. Her little “why are you going?!” Breaks my heart every time I think of her. She was so mad at me, she never spoke to me again. I called CPS.
Third boy, was in the care of his aunt. I can’t go into his story without becoming so angry I want to break something, so I won’t. She came to get him, and he went into full melt down mode. The kicking, screaming, throwing toys, and punches. The aunt just stood there, having seen it a million times, and waited. I remove the toys around him, knelt down, and sang to him the circle time song from that day. He really liked it at circle so I thought why not, it wouldn’t hurt. After the third repeat, he calmed down and became himself again. He looked up at his aunt and said “can she come home with us?” He just had this desperate plea in his voice, the hurt in his face, it was just so much.
I think about these three sometimes, and I truly hope they’re doing well now.
When I taught prek-3, had a little girl who would go on this wild, screaming tantrums, yelling, among other things, “I hate you, I hate you”.
One day, I hit the end of my rope and said “Libby, I love you.”
It stopped her cold in her tracks. Freaking 3 years old and being told I love you shocked her so much, she stopped screaming.
11 year old kid said “you don’t even know me- how can you care about someone you don’t even know?” He’s the most sad kid- who is so hard on himself and doesn’t have many close friends. You can tell he gets no love at home. You just want to adopt them all- breaks your heart in half.
“Do you think my dad can stay with us now, because he has no more legs?” asked by an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who came to Germany with his mother when the war began. His father stayed behind to fight.
i was in an ED room as a white teacher with all black students. one of the kids would pet my hair a lot. one day he said something like “why can’t my hair be nice and smooth like this?” and it just broke my heart to know that was what he’d been thinking all this time.
I made cookies online using Messenger with the poorest of poor refugee children calling in from another country. When I said ‘so who’s going to now eat them?’ – joking it would be me as they were made in my kitchen – one of the girls who had absolutely nothing said ‘why don’t you go out on the street and find some really, really poor people to give them too?’ These beautiful kids had nothing but were just so absolutely selfless.
I’ve had some real heart wrencher situations with students, but not so much about things that they said. Also, I teach high school, and they hide a lot more. So the one that cut me the most was a student I had this past year who was autistic. Whenever he would email me or ask me questions about irregular school day activities, he would apologize profusely for bothering me. I told him time and time again that he wasn’t bothering me and had no reason to apologize, but I also know that it was something lodged in his brain that he would have to overcome on his own.
Could you ask …. not to scream at me, since he’s not my father?
And with that it was clear where her struggles with male authority came from
Is there anything good about being an adult?
My sister taught 2nd grade & we both volunteered for the summer program at her elementary every year. For the Father’s Day craft, I was supervising the glitter station while the kids did an illustrated letter to their dad. This beautiful little girl with the most infectious laugh and such a sweet heart has written on her paper:
“Dear Dad, I love you a lot more than you love me.”
💔 The thing is even if it factually wasn’t true, something got that beautiful little girl believing that it was.
She was an adorable little 5 year old with big brown eyes. She looked up at me while we crouched under the classroom coat rack and asked why we have to lock the door and hide in the dark
I was running the Sunday school at my parents’ church when I was a teenager. I had a 2yo who couldn’t even properly pronounce the words he was saying swear at me. His dad was right there and he sort of chuckled and said “don’t say that”. When the kid was out of earshot I told the dad that in the future, he should avoid laughing in situations like this because at 2, he may or may not understand and remember your words, but he will remember your reaction. If the adults around him laugh at what he says and does, he’s likely to do it even more.
Well next week, the kid’s older sister comes to me and tells me that their dad asked her to tell me that her brother was adequately punished after getting home for what he said to me. I asked what she meant by adequate punishment and the poor kid had been locked alone in the bathroom for 2 HOURS.
I felt his dad would probably not listen to me at that point because I was a teenager without my own kids, so I asked another church leader to intervene by mediating a discussion between me and the parents. We had that intervention and the parents started approaching parenting in a more balanced way. They weren’t great parents after that either, but they stopped being abusive.
The kid still had a lot of emotional and behavioral issues for a while. When he was 4, he had a sort of breakthrough moment with me when he fully realized that I wasn’t going to be mad at him for acting out and that I was going to be a constant presence in his emotional support system. His behaviour improved drastically after that day because he would come to me and ask for help if he felt any big feelings that he didn’t know how to express. His parents even started calling me to ask if I was willing to come over and help sometimes during the week.
When I was about to move away for university, I announced that in the church and brought little parting gifts for all the kids. That day after class, he (now 7yo) came and snuggled my arm and said he would be good now and he would also help the younger kids be good. I told him he was already good, and having a lot of energy and not being able to sit still doesn’t make him a bad kid. I thanked him for promising to take care of the newer kids, but I said that it wasn’t his job to do that, but I would tell the new teacher that he wanted to help.
It broke me a little when he told me that he knows he’s been a bad kid but he would be good in the future and remember everything he learned from me. He was never a bad kid. He was a kid doing his best in a bad home situation, with parents who took offence when I suggested he should be screened for ADHD.
I teach unaccompanied foreign minors. Generally, they are pretty tough teenage boys. They have experienced a long journey of wandering, strewn with various forms of violence and injustice. They have a very hard, surly shell.
After a while together, when trust is established, some just ask for a little innocent hug. Just for a moment, they are children again. Children who haven’t seen their mother/father for months or years and who just need a moment of tenderness. Every time it happens, my heart breaks for them.
My sister is currently a student teacher and shared this with me. There’s a girl in like 2nd grade who had lost her parents and staying with their grandma who was sick. Now she’s important but I need to explain this other kid. There’s this little boy who had moved to the area from Washington and he missed Washington. Okay the story this little boy states he misses his dad because he’s in heaven. The little girl goes to comfort the boy and it was really sweet. The boy restates that his dad isn’t dead but in Washington and the little girl takes it like a champ and continues to talk with bro.
“They never put Asians on TV.”
It was a year five class (10-11 year olds) in a multicultural school in Sydney. They said it so sadly.
Not only was I stunned at how observant they were, but I remembered lamenting that I gave up on my acting career years earlier for that same reason, and that little had changed.
Now it has been another eight years since I taught. There has been some progress, but it’s still a bit inconsistent.
This doesn’t exactly fit but I taught freshmen US History as a White woman in a district with predominantly Black students. My first year I asked the kids on their first day what they disliked about history class. I’ll never forget it – this student looked at me in the eye and said “You lie.” And I had to tell him he was right and that I’d try my best to fight against that narrative but I swear to you – his face and the way he said that… I’ll never forget it.
A couple of years ago we got our first ever forest fire smoke in our city. No one knew what to do differently with the terrible smog, so we kinda did what we always did. We just stayed inside at recess i guess.
Anywho. I was an ECE teacher, working every day with preschoolers. And one of the little girls whom i knew usually walked to school every day was coughing a lot. We were in the gym and she was just trying to play normally…. running and throwing balls…. but she was coughing. After 30 minutes we were back in the classroom. And she was still coughing occasionally. Eventually she looked at me. Tears in her eyes. And asked me. “Why won’t I stop coughing?” That freaking broke me.
She is better now. Thank goodness the smoke didn’t have lasting effects. As someone who also walked/biked to the school, breathing had become physically painful. Lasting a couple of weeks. I can hardly imagine the pain and panic that 3yo was having…
My mom had a kid ask “Can I talk to you after class?” She then proceeded to tell my mom that her dad was sexually abusing her. My mom was really late coming home that day.
Fifth grade boy with severe PTSD from intense abuse. Every time a truck would go by or there was any loud noise, he would ask if we were safe.
Was teaching health for schools that couldn’t afford to hire health teachers.
Got asked: “What if you got pregnant but your parents want you to get rid of it and you don’t want to?” Kid was 14.
Right after the orange one got elected the first time, I worked in a school for the SPED department that had a good percentage of Latino/a/e students. A Guatemalan female student asked me if she and her family are going to get deported.
That was our first interaction and she barely spoke English. I honestly didn’t know how to answer, so I just said if he tried, he’d have to go through me.
The family went back to Guatemala over that winter break (2016) and I have not seen or heard from them since. I hope you and your family are doing ok, L. You are a good and kind hearted person.
On 9/11 while watching the towers fall on the TVS, I asked my fifth grade teacher point-blank: is my mom going to be okay? She’s in Manhattan on a work trip today. I have never seen the color go out of someone’s face so quickly my lord
(She’s fine! She has never spoken about what happened that day!)
I am not a teacher but was an ASL student. My teacher told us a story of a deaf/hearing impaired child (8 yo) who is learning how to sign asked/signed to the teacher, “When I grow, I’ll be able to hear right? I am excited!”
My teacher had to hide her tears and made me feel bad for taking my life for granted.
“Can I sleep at the school with you?”
“No, I’m going home at the end of the day”
“Can I go home with you?”
The kid’s parents were there to pick him up because he was sick and he stood in the corner crying and refusing to leave then was asking me the above
I’m not a teacher but I remember a couple years ago in school the silent guy in the class one time shared that he had been living on the street for the last 3 weeks. Absolutely broke my heart knowing that he was being bullied too for smelling bad.
We talked about immigration and how it is talked about politically in Norway – and one of the children (16) shared his story on how he fled from his country. How he had to sit on his knees at one point, with a gun to his head.
It made a lasting impact on me, and my view on how to talk about the human aspect of those fleeing. But it sent chills down my spine of how many similar stories there probably is with people fleeing from civil wars in Africa.
I honestly want to include everyone and help them all, but our countries integration system is medium minus functioning…!
Not technically a teacher, but I volunteered at a primary school when I was in 10th. One kid was telling me how he’d never actually met his dad – supposedly he moved to Africa (we were in England) when he was still a baby and his mom called his dad a moron all the time.
Not heartbreaking, but made me pretty sad.
Another 10 year old was saying he was going to kill himself when he couldn’t do the math questions. Promptly reported that back to the school who said they knew he had a bad situation at home and would look into it.
A little girl who said she wanted to make a present for her mother as she worked really hard all the time and didn’t get a lot of nice things.
I was an ex teacher and used to hold monthly birthday celebrations for the class with pizzas and a birthday cake. One month, a 17 yo girl told me that this was the first ever birthday cake she has gotten in her life – even if it was shared with a few other peers.
I went back to the staffroom and cried in my cubicle. I grew up poor too, but it still hit me pretty hard.
I’m a teaching assistant but earlier this year, there was a kid I was working with who was a problem kid – anger issues, refusal to work, blah blah. He was about 14. We bonded over the both of us liking metal music, and I would give him recommendations. I was unfortunately removed from that school because agency work sucks, but the DAY i was removed, he very quietly said “I hope you’re here long term, you’re the only person who doesn’t look at me and see a failure.”
I hope he listens to the bands I showed him and knows that there’s someone in his corner. That school is no good for him, they just see him as trouble.
Just one from the other side. I am an adoptive parent, and our youngest, around 6 years old and had been with us a year and a half, started coming home with snacks from school. He said they gave them to him. Well, we contacted his teacher and his aid (had some special needs), and they told us that he said that we don’t have any snacks. We were horrified as he always had a fruit basket and up to 20 choices. He is 16 now and still a handful. He goes with me shopping so he can help decide what snacks and food we buy. Makes dinner for the family once a week. Getting to be a good cook.
No question but I stood before class very briefly years ago and a young girl wanted to tell how her weekend went. She said they planned to go to a theme park. That’s nice. “Yeah but eventually we didn’t go.” Oh why not? “My mom and dad were having another argument. Daddy drank too much again and mum doesn’t like that so she was angry at him and they had a fight so we decided to stay home.”
It was the pure casual way she told the story that broke my heart. She wasn’t even disappointed, she didn’t even think she was telling something that’s not ok. She thought that was just how families were.
I worked with recent immigrants and refugees. I told my students that I would be moving to Japan the next year, and the next day, one student asked me, “Do you know about the lost generation? Do you know about the suicide rates?”
He asked me a few more questions about some of the downsides of living in Japan. Come to find out he had spent hours researching Japan and wanted me to know about every facet. He told me he knew nothing about America when he was made to move here and was terrified of the country and its people, so he wanted me to be prepared when I moved. I cried in my car
A kid once asked if we could skip lunch because they didn’t have any food to bring.
A good friend of mine (teacher) told me once a kid asked him “if i’m really good every day, will my mom come back?”
His mom had left months ago
I taught one semester of first-year seminar. The university I worked for needed part-time instructors, and I thought the stipend of extra money would be helpful. This was in 2021, so it was a freshman class who had just graduated during the thick of the pandemic.
My class was about 17 kids. Around October, I noticed one of the kids started missing more. He said he was going through a hard time, but wanted to catch up. I said I didn’t want to fail him and was willing to work with him, but we’d need to work out a schedule so he could realistically catch up with a passing grade. He’d do an assignment here and there but was rapidly falling behind.
November comes and he surprises me by showing up near the end of one class period. He asks if he can talk to me after I dismiss everyone, I say sure. We sit down and I can tell he’s trying not to break down. He says something like he didn’t think it was going to be this hard, but he’s been struggling in his classes. It’s been hard for him to be in class, to focus on his coursework, and it just feels like too much. He doesn’t disclose everything, but says he’s been to a doctor and has really bad light sensitivity and migraines resulting from it that would feel debilitating. He had been to the office on campus for accommodations but because it was so late in the semester, he felt like the damage had been done and he was going to have to do everything over again.
I reassured him that even if he was delayed by a semester, it was better he knew now about his diagnosis and how to accommodate it rather than continuing to hurt himself in other ways. He could potentially do more online courses, or look into lenses that help reduce fluorescent lighting. He seemed like he was in slightly better spirits, and then he said:
“I came to tell you because I feel like you’re the only teacher that cares about what happens to me.”
That broke my heart. I had to swallow the lump in my throat and reassure him I did care, I was happy he felt comfortable talking to me, and I would do what I could to help. But man, hearing that he thought I was the only one that even gave a shit about him…that tore me up.
When I was teaching elementary school, one boy — very quiet and thoughtful — came up to me after class and asked:
“If I do well in school, will my dad come back home?”
I just froze. He said it so calmly, which somehow made it even more heartbreaking. I later learned his father had left the family a few months earlier, and the boy truly believed that if he became “good enough,” his dad might come back.
I work with children and young people and this happened, probably about 13-14 years ago. 12 year old boy from a well known, very messed up family that was abusive and lived in squalor was regularly attending the youth project and came in with a cut on his arm one day.
This cut had evidently been acquired several days before and was completely untreated. I don’t think the boy had had a wash in days, clothes were stinking and the wound was definitely infected and slightly festering. Anyway, it was causing him pain and he asked me to look at it.
I did so and I also cleaned the area around it while explaining that he needs to show his mum and ask to go to the doctors (general consensus amongst staff was that she knew, but had dismissed it).
I mentioned that germs could get into his blood and make him very ill (wasn’t going to say he could actually die) and that if it got very bad then the doctors might have to do some serious surgery and he could end up losing his arm.
First question out of his mouth: ‘Would it grow back’?
At 12 years old you would expect that child to understand that humans can’t re-grow limbs. My heart broke that his understanding of the human body was so poor due to lack of parenting and consistency in access to education.
A phone call was placed to his mum and a letter sent home. It got treated, but we were fully prepared to inform social services about the neglect (they were already aware of the family).
A year later and I actually took his 16 year old brother up to A+E (the emergency room) because he had an infected cut on his leg and we could see the red line radiating up from the cut which is a massive ‘Oh, fuck’ warning. Pretty sure the hospital referred to social services for that one.
I had one ask “what would happen if a shooter came in here with a gun?”. She looked genuinely scared.
I was a day camp counselor for 3-4 year olds. This girl accidentally knocked over her water bottle and it spilled everywhere. She immediately started sobbing, terrified. I helped her calm down and explained that it was okay, she didn’t do anything wrong. She made a little mistake, but there’s an easy way to fix it. I took her over to the paper towel dispenser and we cleaned it up together. The next day, the same thing happened, but she didn’t cry as much and I told her mom she needed a better water bottle (it was not replaced). A couple days later, it happened again, but the girl didn’t cry, she just went up to me and told me she needed some paper towels.
Pretty sure she gets yelled/hit for every mistake she makes at home.
I was teaching English at a community college while in grad school and it was Election Day. I let all my students out early to vote and offered them extra credit if they brought back an “I Voted” sticker. As we were letting out, an adult student who I enjoyed having in class came up and discreetly asked, “What if we can’t vote?”
“You aren’t going to have enough time today?” I said.
After thinking a bit, he said, “I mean I’m not allowed to vote.”
“Everyone allowed to vote,” I said, “it’s your unalienable right.” I was confused, since he was clearly a native born American.
He spoke in a hushed voice, even though the room was now empty: “You can’t vote in Kentucky, if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony.”
I was shocked. This was over fifteen years ago and I was new to Kentucky. I had never heard this; it wasn’t a law where I was from. He was such a good, thoughtful, intelligent student; it simultaneously broke my heart and opened my eyes.
I let him know that I would think of another comparable way to earn bonus points and he thanked me and left.
To rob someone of their right to determine who governs them even though they’ve paid their debt to society is sinister and degrading. It became clear to me too that such policies were rooted in racism. That moment honestly shifted my understanding of almost everything.
I used to volunteer in a reading program (pre-Covid) through my employer where we read books to small children at local elementary schools. One year I was assigned one of the poorer schools in the area and the subject matter was electricity. One little girl raised her hand and said “the electricity man turned the lights off at my house” I sat there stunned and didn’t know what to say.
I’ve had too many to count but two immediately come to mind – about 5 years ago when I taught elementary, my student’s dad was deported. As she was leaving for the day, she looked up at me and said “you’re my dad now.” I was and still am heartbroken for her.
At the end of this past school year, I was discussing mental health with my juniors. I made some sort of remark about leaning on family & friends when we are struggling and one of my boys asked “What if your parents don’t love you?” Despite being one of the sweetest students I’ve ever had, he’d been kicked out of his house and was briefly homeless before moving in with other relatives.
I’m currently doing my student teaching for my ECE Bachelor’s degree and every semester I have a few students who will occasionally ask if they can come home with me whenever I’m grabbing my stuff to leave for the day. I always give them a hug and tell them “No you can’t come home with me but I’ll be back tomorrow” just to let them know they’ll see me again. On my last day of this semester, one of the students who would always ask if she could come home with me would not stop crying because it was my last day in the classroom. While hugging me and crying uncontrollably she said stuff like “Why do you have to go? It’s not fair. I’m gonna miss you. Why can’t you keep coming back?” She was basically pleading for me to stay and continue to come to their classroom until their last day of school. It was a lot to explain to a first grader how student teaching in college classes works, so all I could say is “I’ll miss you too but my classes are over so I can’t come here anymore.” I felt so bad. I went to my car and cried a bit. I had never had a student cry like that because I was leaving. Some of the students I encounter grow so attached to me. It really sucks having to leave them when my semester is over.
Not a question but out on the playground all the children running around playing their usual games and a helicopter flew overhead. All the kids except two continued to play, the kids who suddenly stopped in their tracks and looked up scared were newly arrived kids from a war zone in Ukraine where things flying overhead could have resulted in explosions. It made me so sad thinking of them cowering in bunkers before they got to the safety of Ireland.
” I don’t want to go home. Please don’t sent me home.” I had one kid run out of class and hiding behind a tree, because he needed a stern talking of the principal and maybe had to be sent home for day. He hid behind that tree and started yelling and screaming that he didn’t want to go home and “please please don’t send me home” . This was shortly before the CPS investigation for dad and stepmom hitting this child. Everytime the dad got a notification that this kid misbehaved in class he hit the child to discipline him. But it only got worse and he acted out even more. That’s when he told people what happened at home and we were able to get them help. The dad was absolutely helpless to manage his child and the child got mistreated and abandoned and by his mother before that. Dad went to court get custody of him, so he wanted his son to be with him but was clueless and helpless. They got help and things are better now but it was a rough time.
“Have you heard something from my dad? He didn’t call for weeks and I don’t where he is.” Another child was in a bit of a separation war going on at home. Both parents said things to each other in front of the no child that should never ever hear about their parents. ( bitch, whore, useless, cheater). Police was involved, things got thrown around around and broke. One time dad moved out to his girlfriend/mistress abandoned mom and kid at their house and cut contact for a couple of weeks. Dad wanted to get mom complacent to his abuse through financial abuse. He cut payments for the house and mom had to pay on her own. At the same time mom had to adjust her working hours around the time when child was at school. At that time kid asked us adults at school if we had heard any news of the father or if we had his adress. Kid even wanted to go to administration to ask if they had any contact information of him. Kid was worried because dad didn’t even contact his child. But dad moved back in, mom shut up, and they pretend that everything is fine for now.
“my dad locks my mom in the bedroom when she did something my dad didn’t like sometimes” that was during a project for children’s rights and there was a poster like a in picture book with many incidents or situations that are bad for children. War, playground bullying, starvation, hitting children etc. The children could say what came to their minds. This kid is of Muslim background. What actually broke me is he didn’t even flinch out gave any indication that he thought this was bad thing. It hadn’t occurred to him that this was not normal or OK.
This is all in elementary school and the ages were 7btp 9 years old at that point.
I wish I had one of you in my life growing up. God bless you all.
Special ed teacher in middle school. There is this boy, first grade, that Is speachless every time I recall something he mentioned.
You remembered?
Of course, I listen to you!
No one ever does…
And he grins with his beautiful smile
Not in class, but I had a student disclose really serious sexual abuse to me. When the social workers and police were done talking to her at school and had decided they needed to take her to get a video statement, they told her she’d be leaving. She looked right at me and asked in this little voice, “Is aussieteacher coming too?”
I went with her in the social worker’s car, and staged with her until the detective drove me home at 7 pm. One of the other detectives told me that not everyone would have gone with her, but I don’t know how anyone could have sent that little kid off on her own with the cops. Especially not after she asked if you were coming with her.
I’m a psychologist for the equivalent of CPS in my country, but my work is more focused on giving reparatory therapy to kids who have been in bad situations. I have a case (still after 2 years when the most you can be is one) of 2 siblings severely neglected and emotionally abused by their mother (another can of worms of its own) and we had to remove the little girl (the boy already was removed for trying to kill his sister) of the home because the mother threatened to crash on the road and kill both of them, she ended getting into the psych ward on suicide watch for this.
One week in therapy we were talking about the situation and she looked at me with such sadness, after all that reality was all she knew all her life, we moved her with her dad but he was alienated from her by the mother and never formed a proper relationship with her and asked me “if my mom works hard enough on being good, can i be with her again?”
That broke my heart, because we had been trying for her to improve (the mom) working together with a social worker trying to urge her to change the dynamics at home that made the boy finally attempt again his sister, to go and get mental health help (we have direct contact with the psych unit at the hospital), but she was combative, never came to work sessions, insulted us, said that she was a good mom and we were all against her.
Now that she is on her father’s care she looks cleaner, with presentable clothes and smiles more, but every session she asks me to go back to mom and his brother, because she misses them and because even now she has a hard time seeing that none of that is normal.
We’re still working on improving the broken bond with dad, so she can finally get a happy and stable home.
Once we were talking about family in my class and I picked one of my students to answer me to a related question but once he couldn’t answer it he said this: “I am sorry teacher, my parents died when i was 3 and I can’t relate to this question.. Can you please pick someone else?” he sat down with tears in his eyes and it absolutely broke my heart because I didn’t know it and i asked him question really related to his relationship with parents.
Not a question, but:
I had my college-age students doing a research paper, and one of them wanted to research the effectiveness of spanking children as a disciplinary measure. Fine, works for me. We sat down to talk about how she could find sources and I asked her why she was so interested in the topic. She said, “Well, I don’t think it was good for me when my mother made me go out back and cut my own switch to be spanked with.”
I just kind of stared at her for a minute – like, what fucking century did you grow up in? – then said I was sorry to hear that and warned her about personal bias on the topic.
I teach in a large middle school and every two years we do a “wellbeing” questionnaire with lots of questions (anonymous) about all aspects of their lives to find out worrying areas or things we need to work on.
They do the quiz in the school computer rooms and submit online.
One year, I was supervising my first year class (7th grade) when one of the girls put up her hand and asked me if for the question “Have you had sexual relations with anyone?”, she should answer if it was rape?
That floored me, I must say .
I taught at a high school along the US-Mexico border. After Trump got elected in 2016, I had a student ask me if they were going to separate her family and what would happen if they did.
It’s never questions for me. But what’s broken my heart hundreds of times is when I lift my hand up to HIGH FIVE and they flinch. Kills me every time. Don’t hit your kids.
“Can I hold your hand?”
This was said by a very young student who had just returned to school after seeing her mother murdered.
“Are we going to die?”
Said by a second grader who had only recently come to the States during a lockdown drill.
It feels like there’s nowhere these kids can be safe sometimes.
I used to teach HS math, and for a couple of years I taught “consumer math.” This is the math you always wished you learned in school – taxes, writing checks, loans, credit cards, etc. Honestly should be required for everyone, but instead it was the class for seniors who had failed a math class somewhere along the line and needed another credit to graduate. Often times it was the second math class they were taking their senior year.
The school I taught in was technically suburban, but a very diverse demographic, and some neighbourhoods were very much in the city.
We got to the lessons about mortgages and how payments work, PMI, all that sort of stuff. One of the kids asked me, “why are we learning this? we’re never going to own houses.” Just devastating.
And hard to respond back to, you can try to tell them things can be different, but all their lives they saw their parent(s) working multiple jobs just to pay rent and get by.