“This teacher gave me a bad grade. She must hate me.”
“Why hasn’t this teacher responded yet?”
“He’s so boring. She’s so strict. They’re all so mean.”
“I hate my teacher…”

Students shouldn’t hate their teachers – but they do. “Is teaching as underpaid and underappreciated as they say? Yes, and yes,” said user BeNotDecievedGal6_7 from a Reddit post titled, “Are Teachers Underappreciated and Overworked?” Yet many people – including parents and other adults that are not a part of the education system – don’t know that, and the lack of knowledge on the real struggle of teachers is where misconceptions, stereotypes, and misrepresentations arise. There is a great disconnection that seriously needs to be addressed, because there are too many things that most people don’t understand about teachers. As a student myself, I understand where my fellow peers come from. School is not easy to get through. Work is very difficult to get through at times. Let me ask you this: Does this not apply to teachers? Don’t they realistically work harder than most other people do in other careers?

Students only see teachers as demanding, insensitive bosses that are only there to make life harder for them at school. Students believe that they deserve better when in reality, teachers are the one that should be valued and respected the most. The lack of respect that students give to teachers is a result of mandatory education, common misunderstandings from lack of communication, and superficial false information portrayed by the media. In reality, teacher’s spend days in and out working extensive hours, struggle with financial strains, and the emotional toll that all wear on them over time. Alongside the daily discouragement they get from students, it affects their performance and morale over time. With these explanations in mind, we should find ways to encourage and communicate with our teachers, instead of complaining about what we lack in our education experience and automatically placing the blame on our teachers.

Since school is a mandatory obligation for children across the US, they have a hard time comprehending its value. They fail to see that school is a preparation for not only a future career, but a future where they have to work to live. If students don’t know how to work, they won’t know how to live. The expectation that success can easily come to them if they’re popular and simply “talented” without any work put behind it is an illusion set up by modern media. Teachers dedicated to their craft know this too well, and do everything they can to make it simpler for students to learn without removing the value of hard work from it. But students see this as a personal attack, a way for the teachers to be mean to them and force them under unnecessarily strict regulations. Not only this isn’t true, but students aren’t the only ones who struggle with sometimes intense rules: teachers struggle with the regulations set up by the education system. Even if the teacher were to be comfortable enough to allow some leniency, it can’t happen most of the time because of the directives they’re expected to follow as a part of their job.

Yet throughout the history of popular media, teachers have always been portrayed negatively. “On average, he found, teachers get a bad rap in these depictions: They are shown as lonely and financially struggling at home, while in the classroom they’re boring, lazy, antagonistic, or abusive” (Education Week). A simple correction or warning from the teacher may appear to the student as a direct attack to who they are because of these effects. People – not simply the media in itself – have an influence on our perception, whether we’re aware of it or not. “A study found that attitudes towards teachers tend to be similar to the student’s attitudes toward other authority figures, such as parents and police officers. However, this only tells us that students that are respectful towards their parents are the students that are respectful toward their teachers” (Piqosity). Anybody can give us a false lens of what a teacher is like, and thus influence one’s reaction to anything that challenges a student’s effort – or lack thereof. Many fail to see that teachers may be one of the most struggling workers in the country, if not the world.

Although California teachers have the highest average pay for the job in the whole country, this doesn’t mean that they’re able to make ends meet. According to their summary provided from the Economic Policy Institute, “Teacher pay has suffered a sharp decline compared with the pay of other college-educated workers. On average, teachers made 26.4% less than other similarly educated professionals in 2022—the lowest level since 1960.” It may not seem crucial if all one sees is the teacher giving lectures and work for the students to do. But what many don’t see is that the majority of their work goes into planning, scheduling, grading, responding to countless emails, and meetings with other school staff. “In the new national survey released [September 18, 2023], K-12 public school teachers report feeling overworked and underpaid. On average, they estimate working 53 hours a week—seven more hours than the typical working adult (RAND conducted a separate survey of all working adults). Only 24 percent of teachers are satisfied with their total weekly hours worked, compared with 55 percent of working adults” (NeaToday). This is excluding the fact that teachers have lives of their own, many with families they have to provide for, straining their material resources, state of health, and mental capacity to spend time with family and friends and enjoy their lives outside of work.

The majority of students are highly insensitive to all of this, “[feeling] the teacher’s lecturing style is self-centered, unable to see that the teacher is just following protocol” (Piqosity). They feel like the teacher is out to get them, do not understand them, and that the teacher isn’t taking into account their struggles. In some cases, I’d agree that there are some teachers that are only there to get by, leading to an absence of care for the students through not providing enough support and guidance. Or be too strict and demanding, it does happen. But what excuse do we have as students to not give a sense of respect to our teachers? It’s okay to not like someone’s method of teaching, but it is not okay to be blatantly rude to them or each other and not face consequences for it. As I close this article, if readers get anything out of this message, please do not forget how demanding and devalued a teacher’s job is. Go out and exercise yourself to keep your negative comments to yourself, take a moment to look past their job role, and observe your teacher as a human being like all of us.

And genuinely thank them for their hard work to do all the work they do. It makes a bigger impact than you may realize.

Resource Links
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/msgc5k/is_teaching_really_as_underpaid_and_unappreciated/
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-students-hate-their-teachers-so-much-nowadays-What-happened-to-mutual-respect-between-student-and-teacher-when-it-comes-to-teaching-learning-environment
https://www.piqosity.com/why-do-some-students-hate-their-teachers/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1b6o9z3/told_by_admin_its_ok_for_students_to_say_they/
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/fictional-teachers-on-tv-can-skew-public-perception/2024/10#:~:text=On%20screen%2C%20teachers%20are%20often%20portrayed%20negatively&text=On%20average%2C%20he%20found%2C%20teachers,lazy%20%2C%20antagonistic%2C%20or%20abusive%20.
https://www.psu.edu/news/education/story/teachers-across-globe-feel-undervalued-researchers-find#:~:text=The%20results%2C%20Byun%20said%2C%20indicated,feeling%20valued%20by%20the%20media.
https://www.gallup.com/education/609422/overworked-undervalued-retaining-top-educators.aspx#:~:text=Unfair%20treatment%20can%20include%20perceived,between%20teachers%20and%20their%20superiors.
https://thewhshatchet.org/teaching-is-an-underrated-job/#:~:text=Teachers%20have%20more%20impact%20than,have%20not%20known%20about%20before.
https://tyroneeagleeyenews.com/life-as-a-teacher-undervalued-and-unappreciated/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/msgc5k/is_teaching_really_as_underpaid_and_unappreciated/
https://www.quora.com/Are-teachers-underappreciated-and-overworked
https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-in-2022/#:~:text=For%20all%20teachers%2C%20the%20penalty,that%20teachers%20earned%20in%201996.
https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/california-teachers-despite-being-highest-paid-in-the-nation-still-struggling-to-make-ends-meet/3519345/
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-teachers-in-California-complain-so-much-when-many-make-over-100k-a-year
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sacramento/comments/1d1j7w0/i_knew_teachers_were_underpaid_but_damn/
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/survey-teachers-work-more-hours-week-other-working-adults
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-teachers-arent-burnt-out-they-are-being-set-up-to-fail/2023/05
https://www.devlinpeck.com/content/teacher-burnout-statistics
https://fortune.com/well/article/american-teachers-burned-out-stressed-underpaid/
https://arhsharbinger.com/35456/opinion/the-united-states-is-in-a-teaching-crisis-teachers-are-overworked-underpaid/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2022/03/28/the-life-of-a-teacher-and-why-its-beyond-hard/