Seven Things I Realized Teaching High School That I Didn't Know When I Was In It

(Yes, there will be a quiz on this.)

The following observations are based on my experience as a student at a suburban public high school in Massachusetts and a teacher at a screened public high school in Manhattan. Everything I express below is my own opinion, and may not be representative of the views of all educators.

That said, there is a lot here that I wish I’d known as a student, and that those in my classes would have taken to heart…

1. There is no correlation between a student’s academic performance and how much the teacher likes them (or possibly an inverse correlation).

Perhaps the single greatest misconception reflected in my own and my students’ behavior: the faulty assumption that a teacher’s approval is best won by just doing really really well in their class.

To be sure, my view here may be informed by my teaching context, in which most students were fairly motivated learners to begin with—but this, at least, I can say as a blanket statement: Many kids with bad grades are an absolute joy to teach, and many smart kids are pretttyy fucking annoying.

Of course, I was aware as a high school student that other smart kids could be annoying—most often because they were know-it-alls, or insistent on comparing grades. (I’m sure I was guilty of these things myself at times.) What I failed to realize was the extent to which my teachers were every bit as put off by these behaviors as I was. Conversely, I figured no teacher could really like the slackers who (I assumed) lacked either the interest or ability to succeed in their classes: Given a choice, wouldn’t a math teacher want to work with students who were themselves math whizzes?

What this view neglects is that the greatest intrinsic reward of teaching is, well, helping kids learn. And generally speaking, the kids who need the most help learning are not the ones with the highest grades. In fact, as with adults, the main factors that make students fun to work with all run pretty orthogonal to academic ability: humor, gregariousness, work ethic, empathy, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong. There are also plenty of low performers who are a pain in the ass—just as there are plenty of high performers who are perfectly humble and charismatic. But when I think about my favorite students (I think even in high school I knew teachers had unspoken favorites?), they tend to tilt toward the low-to-average performers.

For the overachievers, I don’t think this knowledge would make much difference, except maybe to help chill them out a bit. It’s the self-blaming strugglers—the ones who have clearly internalized their bad grades—that really break my heart. These are the underconfident students who you know come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or who you suspect have an undiagnosed learning disability, or who just haven’t figured out how to manage their time effectively; the ones you want to pull aside to let them know you’re a big fan—you actually enjoy teaching them more because they’re a bit of a mess, and you know how to help.

But for obvious reasons, you can’t really tell them that—and even if you could, they probably wouldn’t believe you. So you settle for genuine interest and enthusiasm, and you try not to give anyone preferential treatment, and in the end, most kids seem to get the message that the teacher likes them—which, most of the time, is true.

2. Yes, teachers gossip about students.

I’ll never forget learning about the 9th-grade boys who stacked a bunch of chairs in a bathroom stall. Or the student who got busted for trying to have someone else take his SAT for him. Or the kid who showed up for a class on the Holocaust and was clearly—and here I quote directly from his teacher— “stoned out of his gourd.” (Was that, like, fun for him…? we wondered.)

While these anecdotes are mostly amusing, I do imagine more students might think twice before cheating, acting out, or any other number of bad decisions, if they realized the extent to which their reputations followed them from class to class. People talk—and teachers are people.

3. The biggest academic gap is between those who turn in all the work and those who turn in some of it.

As a student who turned in all my work (even if some of it was half-assed), I was clueless about the extent to which this is not the norm in a lot of cases. I had always thought that the biggest determinant of grades, imperfect as they were, was how well you performed on assignments: The “smart” kids got As, maybe the occasional B; the “dumb” or “lazy” kids got Cs, Ds, and Fs.

I don’t want to suggest that ability plays no role in grades at all. I can certainly think of students whose literacy level—through whatever genetic or environmental bad luck—was so far below their peers that no amount of effort was ever going to earn them an A in my class. (Again, many of these students were my absolute favorites to teach.)

But it was exceedingly rare for a student who turned in all their work on time to earn less than a B+ in my class—and many reliable but otherwise unremarkable students earned an A- or even an A.

The reason for this is largely mathematical: Zeros tank averages. If you get an 80, an 85, and a 90 on three papers, your average is a B (255/3 = 85). If you get a 99, a 99, and a 0, your average is a D (198/3 = 66). And needless to say, the type of student who gets a 99 on one paper isn’t usually going to completely miss another one. (As far as I can tell, most students who struggle with motivation or executive functioning are writing at about the level of their peers—which is to say they earn B or A-range grades on the assignments they do turn in.)

For this reason, some have made the case that teachers shouldn’t give out zeros at all, and should instead award fifties for uncompleted assignments. To be honest, I never quite reached this point in my own grading system—largely due to an inability to get over the half-credit-for-doing-literally-nothing!? mental hurdle. (I’m also sympathetic to the idea that perhaps there should be a harsher penalty for failing to even try than trying but doing a bad job? Though whether kids are actually internalizing this lesson is another story…) Perhaps one day I’ll return to the high school classroom and figure out a grading system that appropriately weights these various considerations.

In any event, most teachers in most schools in America surely do still give zeros to non-submitters. As long as this is the case, those who miss multiple homework assignments, let alone a major assessment, will do categorically worse than those who turn in everything.

4. By themselves, grades serve only to compare students to one another—not to give individuals useful feedback about their own performance.

Cynical and unsavory, I know. But the more you think about it, the less the grades-are-for-the-student’s-benefit logic holds up.

If you squint, the individual feedback assumption sort of works for tests and quizzes: A 90% on your Spanish test means you’ve gotten 9 out of 10 questions correct, which is true for anyone who takes the exam.

But what does that 90% actually mean? Are you 9/10ths of the way to Spanish fluency? Are you in the 90th percentile of Spanish speakers around the globe? Of course not. It’s just a number that can be matched up against the numbers of other people in the class. You can’t do anything with that information alone, other than tack it up on your refrigerator and feel good about yourself.

And things really begin to break down when we start dealing with subjective measures: Does that A+ you got on your 8th-grade history paper mean you were a better writer than the one who got an A on her college thesis? I sure hope not.

Consider that when our goal is just to improve at something, we don’t need grades: No one is quizzing you on those cooking videos you watch; your soccer coach doesn’t give you a grade on your dribbling. Decoupled from qualitative feedback, a grade tells us virtually nothing about our strengths and weaknesses, or what we can do to improve. To return to two earlier examples, all a truly motivated Spanish or history student would need to know for learning purposes is what patterns of mistakes they were making (e.g., You’re not conjugating the imperfect tense correctly; your topic sentences are unclear).

Grades can of course be useful to students as a form of signaling—but this does not mean they are meritocratic. Like any measure that has become a target, GPAs are subject to all sorts of hacks and biases (see lesson #3), but under the current college admissions system, they seem unlikely to go away anytime soon.

(There are a few examples of high schools, mostly independent ones, that use qualitative feedback instead of grades; personally, I find it hard to imagine how this could ever scale. After students have arrived at college, you could make the case that grades aren’t strictly necessary: Future employers arguably have enough other information to make hiring decisions without knowing anyone’s GPA. But I shudder to imagine undergraduate admissions offices trying to do their jobs without this summary statistic.)

Ultimately, while it’s not uncommon for high school teachers to look down upon the grade-obsessed with a mix of bemusement and irritation, I’m very sympathetic to these students: Their anxiety is a rational response to the harsh reality that top grades are a contested resource—one with great predictive power for their access to different universities, which are themselves major predictors of life outcomes.

5. It's completely legitimate for a teacher to take a month to return an assignment.

When I was in high school, one of my biggest pet peeves was the teachers who would whine that there were thirty of us and only one of them. Big deal, I’d think. We have to go to school. You chose this as your job.

True, teachers voluntarily entered into a profession that requires them to evaluate student work. What I never really engaged with, though, were the actual labor demands imposed on them by the student-teacher ratio at a typical public school. Sure, grading might be time-consuming—but how many hours could it really take?

A lot actually, I would say having done it. To drive this point home: How many minutes would you think reasonable for a teacher to spend giving feedback on a single essay? Or how much time would you want me to spend looking at a piece of writing you gave me to look at?

Before teaching, I might have estimated 15 minutes as sufficient for actual substantive feedback—3 minutes to skim through for general flow/structure; another 5 to read it thoroughly; 7 minutes to give detailed comments and type up a little cover sheet. Of course, this process could easily be expanded to half an hour or more if one wanted to really dig into someone’s essay. (I actually switched to recorded video feedback during COVID because it proved more efficient.)

Now consider that my typical teaching load was about 125 students. If I spent the (laughably luxurious) half-hour per essay, that’s 125 students * 30 minutes / 60 minutes or 62.5 hours—on top of lesson-planning and teaching classes. For just one academic unit. If I cut that down to the fast-but-respectable 15 minutes/essay, that’s ~31 hours of grading to fit in somehow.

In reality, 5 minutes/essay was the fastest I found humanly possible by the end, and I usually spent closer to 10—just to give truly bare bones feedback. This comes out to somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 total hours of grading per major assessment (not including breaks). If I stayed after school, I could sometimes fit those hours in over the course of two weeks—but certainly nothing less than that. (It’s true that teachers often have their classes split between two grade levels, which makes it possible to strategically stagger due dates; I typically had all one grade level, though.)

As a teacher, I would have loved to turn assignments around to students in under a week. I know that a month's delay between submission and feedback is terrible for learning: By the time most kids got their essays back, they barely remembered what they wrote! But there were only so many hours in the week—and only so much I was willing to pick up the slack in an education system that fails to adequately compensate teachers for the time they put in.

(Related: Sometimes students ask if teachers actually read their essays. I certainly did, BUT due to the necessity of just getting through the stack, certain parts got way more attention than others: the thesis, the beginning of each paragraph, the essay’s first and last sentence. Unfortunately, I think a byproduct of this reality is that it often is to high school students’ advantage to write formulaic essays, rather than strive for truly original compositions. No matter how much a teacher might value creativity, they only have so much mental bandwidth; by the time I’m on my third consecutive hour of grading, I’m just happy for anything that reduces cognitive load and facilitates my comprehension.)

6. Your teacher is as happy as you are to throw on a movie.

If I’d bothered to simulate what was going on in my teacher’s head when we watched some documentary the day before Thanksgiving, I’d have guessed a mix of laziness and resignation. Ah well, they might think. Guess we’re not going to be able to get any real work done today. Might as well play something educational!

What a movie day actually is is great. I could just hang out and text my friends, or get some grading done (see rant above) without having to worry about planning a lesson for that period. The only reason I didn’t play movies more often is because I actually cared about, you know, educating my students or whatever. (That and I didn’t want to start getting complaints from parents.)

7. Your teacher is a much bigger figure in your life than you are in theirs.

Again, this is mostly just the numbers: High school students have five core subjects per year, maybe a few electives, with a single teacher for each of them; teachers get 100+ new kids every September.

This isn’t to say that my students didn’t have an impact on me. I have so many wonderful memories of the debates and discussions we had in my class—the jokes and connections my students made in real time. I remember the incredible work they produced: skits and podcasts and original songs. I remember the ones who struggled, and the ones who passed away.

But the truth is, there are no singular students who changed the course of my life the way some of my teachers did.

I think that if they had to contend with this, it would be a sort of deflating realization for most students to have. But it doesn’t have to be. If you’re lucky, you get to be that person for someone else, and change the lives of students of your own—a responsibility that, for all its frustrations, remains the most exciting, rewarding job I have ever had.

TL;DR

Students are likable, or gossip-worthy, for reasons largely unrelated to academic ability.

Teachers spend a lot of time grading in an inherently competitive system that values whether students turn in something over how good that something is. For this reason, teachers appreciate an easy day as much as the next person.

Despite all this, being a central figure in kids’ lives is incredibly meaningful, and you should absolutely try teaching if you get the chance.

Thanks to Theo for edits.