from Hacker News

"My dad says: people like you don't matter anymore."

by redbell on 10/10/25, 1:28 PM with 32 comments

• by MarkusWandel on 10/10/25, 1:45 PM

  Many, many years ago, in high school. Grade 12, advanced math, first day, and the wrestling coach walks in. We only knew him as the wrestling coach and the advanced math bunch wasn't exactly gym jocks. Ho ho ho. Someone for fun tackled him from behind. He effortlessly swung him over his shoulder and deposited him on the table. And he was a really good math teacher too. Who knew?

  Fun times. You can kill this sort of spirit dead with excessive bureaucracy, metrics and lawsuit culture. Luckily for me, that wasn't a thing yet, back then.

• by incomingpain on 10/10/25, 1:43 PM

  I'm fairly confident that's a fake story written by AI.

  10 em dashes, and ai formatting.

  Almost every sentence ends with a dramatic punchline.

  >Watching a child sound out their first sentence felt like magic.

  It's remarkably written for that viralness.

  >My name is Mrs. Clara Holt, and for four decades, I taught kindergarten in a small Denver suburb. Today, I stacked the last box on my desk and locked the door behind me.

  What human would transition like this in something so well written for viral spread?

  https://x.com/grok/status/1976363124010910160

  Someone else asked Grok; but nah, that's not even tinkered with AI, that's just copy and paste AI.

  The thing that interests me here. Copy Pasta just got a huge upgrade with AI; or perhaps another viewpoint is that copypasta is dead. You dont need to copy pasta anymore because of AI.

• by JohnFen on 10/10/25, 1:38 PM

  That teacher started teaching at about the time a friend of mine started schooling to become a teacher. She came across her own grade school teacher who inspired her to make that career choice and thanked him.

  His response to hearing that she was going into the field was to look her straight in the eyes and say "For your own sake, get out."

  She became a teacher anyway and a few years ago told me "he was right, I should have listened."

• by teiferer on 10/10/25, 1:57 PM

  A bit sad that this is flagged. Sure it's likely fake, but I like the beginning discussion around that. Those discussions are important too.

• by billy99k on 10/10/25, 2:04 PM

  I have children in early elementary and I'm not seeing any of this. Many things are still on paper, library books (and reading) are the norm, and kids are mostly happy.

  Sure, tablets are a part of learning, but I would expect this in our digital age.

  If you have this many issues teaching children, you might need to try a different line of work.

• by commandlinefan on 10/10/25, 1:44 PM

  Teachers have been saying that since I started kindergarten in 1980. It's kind of lost its bite for me by now.

• by josefritzishere on 10/10/25, 1:53 PM

  This is the most important problem to solve for the future of America.

• by xtiansimon on 10/11/25, 1:04 PM

  WTF. As others say, this is prolly fake—

  ‘The little reading corner I once built, full of soft beanbags and paper stars, was replaced by data charts and “learning metrics.”’

  But the rest sounds like a nightmare:

  ‘… filling out digital reports to protect myself from angry emails or lawsuits. I’ve been yelled at by parents in front of twenty-five children…’

  Fiction is good when it conjures a scene or personality. I’m feeling the pain described here.

  On a ChatGPT related note—

  I was asked to write an online recommendation for someone a few weeks ago. I started by thinking I could just bang it out. Wrote a list, but I struggled imagine a structure in 2-3 paragraphs. So, it sat on my desktop for several weeks. Bonk! Obviously a candidate for chatGPT.

  The results included a few unexpectedly good sentences, but most importantly I got the arc of my recommendation. I reworded, cut and trimmed and was happy with the result.

  I predict with ChatGPT, whining about writing a recommendation is a thing of the past.

• by silexia on 10/10/25, 2:32 PM

  Top down, central authority never works. Look at the disaster we have in education. End the federal government control and allow school choice for family's everywhere.

• by SirMaster on 10/10/25, 1:50 PM

  This just reads like someone who didn't evolve and adapt to the changing landscape of education. I know multiple young teachers who love teaching and love their classrooms and students etc, and they seem to have adapted or are adapting just fine to the changing education landscape.

  As much as we would like things to stay the same, we all have to learn to adapt to the changing landscape of our various careers and jobs etc.

  That's just my opinion.