Scythe

Alright folks strap in this one’s a doozy. TLDR at the end.

My (19M) sister (17F) is a senior in high school and this year she’s taking AP English Literature and Composition (hereby abbreviated as ap lit). For my non American buddies, this is essentially the highest level English class in most public high schools. This is a notoriously difficult exam and my sister’s extremely nervous for it. However, her teacher (23F) is. Well. To put it bluntly, the most gen z #relatable tiktoker in the world. This is the first English class AND the first AP class she’s ever taught. The only other high school class she’s taught was physics (not even honors). Her only qualification to teach the class is that she got a 5 on the exam when she took it in high school.

She is demonstrably bad at her job. Her motivation to teach English this year was, quote: “Taylor Swift is SUCH a poet she’s one of the main reasons I wanted to be an English teacher” if that gives you the vibes. And yes, she spent two class periods making students analyze a Taylor Swift song.

To list some other offenses, she: encouraged the propagation of the Hellen Keller was fake conspiracy, recommended using Harry Potter as a resource for the AP lit exam (citing that it’s one of her favorite book series of all time), telling students she will not help them with college applications (despite this being a very common and expected thing for senior English teachers to do here), and telling students to watch the movie adaptations of recommended novels WITHOUT reading them, and then to use the Wikipedia summary to compare and contrast the two. She also regularly misspells things in class which is great for a language teacher.

And I wasn’t kidding about the tiktoker thing. That’s her main passion, posting outfit/makeup tiktoks. This includes doing it in her class about all her teachercore fits.

My sister complains about her constantly, and as someone who’s has to deal with seriously traumatic harassment from teachers in the past, my first reaction was that she should report her. However, the problem is, last time she caught a student complaining about her, she punished the whole class by making them take a ridiculously hard pop quiz because “her feelings were hurt”. A very responsible and adult reaction /s. So, my sister is worried that if I confront her or the administration, the class will be punished.

While I understand my sister’s fear, I just don’t think the teacher should be allowed to get away with her behavior. I understand that the teacher is young (she’s barely 4 years older than me!) and should be allowed to make mistakes, but starting off her English teaching career at the highest high school level of English classes. My sister is now having to seek additional tutoring because the class is massively under preparing her for the exam.

TLDR: My sister’s English teacher is really bad at her job and underpreparing her for a difficult national test. I want to tell the school about this behavior but my sister is worried that she’ll punish the class.

So, WIBTA if I reported her to the administration? And if so, people of tumblr do you have other ideas because I’ve hit a wall.

This is rage bait! They monitor new teachers etc.

I wish. As some commenters suggested, our distract has a lack of teachers and a surplus of students. A lot of the teachers in our district will even work at multiple high schools in the same district. The only reason she was hired in the first place is the previous AP lit teacher retired.

That’s part of the reason I’m hesitant to report as well, because if I tell people my sister thinks that either 

A) teacher will get a slap on the wrist and take it out of the students

B) if some punishment actually happens to teacher there might be no replacement and then they have no teacher. My sister would prefer a garbage teacher to no teacher.

Tell your parents about this?

My parents both work full time jobs and honestly I didn’t want to burden them. They’re dealing with more serious personal stuff right now regarding my brother and this feels really stupid and petty in comparison. If this escalated further I definitely will try to involve them though.

There’s wrong with making pop culture references in class!

I agree! I think it can help them connect to the material. But the grading of AP Lit exams is quite strict and telling people to reference pop culture on their tests is a recipe for disaster. Depending on the grader that could easily be a fail. My problem isn’t that she’s a swiftie (my feelings on Taylor Swift are incredibly neutral) my problem is that she’s spent more time analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics in class than actual poetry they could see on the test.

I try to be really light hearted and goofy when venting so I brought in a lot of the fandom BS, but that’s really not my problem. I’m an anime fan so like. Glass houses and whatever.

Will I report her?

I plan to BUT only once I get my sister’s consent. I care more about her feeling safe than the teacher being reprimanded.

and for some extra stuff, here’s a few bits of my sister venting about her that I didn’t include in the original post. This is just from this week.

Also tumblr: