Mrssmithscatchysongs

Mrssmithscatchysongs Teaching reading 📕 and math 🧮
Using my Catchy Songs &
Silly & Engaging Ways

This Powerful Classroom Art Exposes a Teacher’s Most Heartbreaking ConflictThis striking illustration lays bare an impos...
06/21/2026

This Powerful Classroom Art Exposes a Teacher’s Most Heartbreaking Conflict
This striking illustration lays bare an impossible daily dilemma every American classroom teacher faces: no single disruptive student should erase the learning opportunities for an entire group of peers.
The visual metaphor hits hard. The large blue rug labeled “Education” holds 29 focused, eager students quietly reading and learning, while one angry child yanks the fabric apart, pulling the teacher’s full attention away from the rest of the class. Educators deeply care for every student, including those struggling with big emotions, trauma, or poor self-regulation. They want to offer patience, intervention, and support to the child acting out, yet they cannot abandon the other kids who showed up ready to grow.
School systems have steadily stripped teachers of meaningful disciplinary tools, forcing instructors to prioritize de-escalation over consistent classroom boundaries. Hours of valuable reading, math, and social-emotional lesson time vanish each week while teachers pause instruction to manage repeated outbursts. The quiet, hardworking students suffer the biggest loss: their focus is broken, their progress slows, and they lose the uninterrupted teaching time they rightfully deserve.
Equity does not mean sacrificing the many to accommodate one. True fairness requires schools to provide dedicated counselors, behavior specialists, and clear consequences so teachers can protect learning for every child in the room.
If you’re a teacher, how often have you watched your whole class’s lesson derailed by one student’s repeated disruptions?

The Summer Break Myth Everyone Gets Wrong About TeachersThe tired claim that teachers enjoy endless, easy summer vacatio...
06/21/2026

The Summer Break Myth Everyone Gets Wrong About Teachers
The tired claim that teachers enjoy endless, easy summer vacation ignores one brutal reality: educators cram a full year’s workload into just ten school months, making that break a necessary recovery period, not a free holiday.
Most American teachers clock far more than standard 40-hour workweeks from August to May. Their days start long before the first bell, filled with lesson prep, classroom setup, and student check-ins. After dismissal, grading, parent emails, paperwork, IEP documentation, and curriculum revisions follow them home every single night. Weekends vanish into planning, field trip coordination, and catching up on unfinished admin work. They carry mental stress from student trauma, behavioral conflicts, and high-stakes testing pressure that burns out their physical and emotional energy at an accelerated rate.
Summer is rarely pure downtime for educators. Many spend weeks attending mandatory professional development, rewriting curricula, organizing next year’s classroom, or picking up second jobs to supplement low teacher salaries. The short break exists simply to reset minds and bodies drained by ten nonstop months of overloaded classroom labor.
Critics who mock teacher summer time overlook how compressed and exhausting their school-year workload truly is. This break is compensation for uncompensated overtime, not a luxury perk.
If you’re a teacher, what summer task takes up most of your supposed “time off” before the new school year begins?

The National “Teacher Shortage” Is a Total Misleading MisnomerThe widespread claim of a national teacher shortage comple...
06/21/2026

The National “Teacher Shortage” Is a Total Misleading Misnomer
The widespread claim of a national teacher shortage completely misses the full, painful reality facing American public education today. This straightforward text dismantles the false narrative and lays bare the real crisis driving veteran educators out of classrooms nationwide.
We are not running out of trained, certified teachers. Thousands of highly qualified, experienced educators hold full teaching credentials yet choose to leave the profession entirely each year. Many spend just a handful of years in schools before walking away for good, while seasoned career instructors retire early or shift to non-classroom jobs entirely. The true gap is not a lack of people certified to teach—it is a devastating shortage of fair pay, basic professional respect, and the simple space to focus on actual classroom instruction.
American teachers carry an impossible load: low salaries that fail to match their specialized training, constant public criticism, endless non-teaching paperwork, mandatory after-hours labor, unaddressed student behavioral chaos, and demands to fill roles as counselors, social workers, and caregivers with zero extra support. Instead of being trusted experts who lead lessons, they are buried under tasks that pull them away from connecting with students and delivering meaningful education.
Until schools raise teacher pay, restore professional autonomy, and cut back on burdensome extra duties, talented educators will keep abandoning the field, and the so-called “staff shortage” will only grow worse.
If you are a former teacher who left the classroom, what missing piece—fair pay, respect, or time to teach—pushed you to walk away?

⚠️ WHEN DID TEACHER SAFETY BECOME OPTIONAL?A student throws something.A student puts their hands on a teacher.A student ...
06/21/2026

⚠️ WHEN DID TEACHER SAFETY BECOME OPTIONAL?
A student throws something.
A student puts their hands on a teacher.
A student makes a threat that is specific and credible and terrifying.
And the process that follows is not primarily about the safety of the teacher.
It is about the student.
What was the student experiencing that led to this moment.
What could the teacher have done differently to de-escalate before it reached this point.
What restorative process will be put in place so the student can return to the classroom.
And the teacher sits through that process.
Still in the building.
Maybe still in that room.
Expected to be professional and regulated and ready to teach the next period while also processing what just happened to her body and her sense of safety in the space where she spends most of her waking hours.
In any other workplace a physical incident involving an employee triggers a serious protocol about that employee's safety and wellbeing.
In schools it often triggers a serious protocol about what the other party was going through.
Both things can matter.
But the teacher matters too.
Signed, Elle. A former teacher who realized she deserved to feel safe at work and that the system she was in did not actually agree.

I found these YEARS ago from First Grade Bangs and have used them every opportunity I can! I was struggling a lot with h...
06/20/2026

I found these YEARS ago from First Grade Bangs and have used them every opportunity I can!
I was struggling a lot with having students use their strategies. I was seeing that it wasn’t *just* laziness but also not being sure what or where to highlight. It seemed that the whole passage was being highlighted. Not helpful.
Long story short, I made a few sets of these and started using them DAILY in small group! The kids loved them and were really starting to catch on to “what to highlight” and “when to highlight!”
For my own sanity, I keep the highlighters at my table. Many have come with their own set and had me help label them! That is GREAT!
I highly recommend using this strategy though! It has helped students want to use their strategies so much more!
Comment HIGHLIGHTERS if you would like FREE download for the highlighters!
I will link the Sharpie Highlighters I use in the comments.

This is a GREAT way to have students talk about ANY breaks (summer, winter, spring, or even the weekends!) I’m big on li...
06/20/2026

This is a GREAT way to have students talk about ANY breaks (summer, winter, spring, or even the weekends!) I’m big on list making with writing. I believe struggling writers feel most confident when asked to write a list. So it’s done A LOT. I like it too because I can say, “find one thing on your list and write about it!”
In this example, they might write about how they would NEVER want to go skydiving because they are scared of heights. Ooor, they might want to write about how cool it would be to go skydiving!
Either way—1. They didn’t feel insecure about their break because no one is taking about fancy vacations, etc! 2. They felt confident because list making is taking baby steps into a bigger task. 3. Now, they have something bigger to write about!
Just saw this on my camera roll and thought…it doesn’t have to be just summer! The “what you did NOT do” is a fun/engaging prompt for any time off of school! Plus, they come up with the funniest answers! “I did not fly an airplane to Mars” was a favorite that one of my students wrote. 🤣

Teachers don't get paid for summer. Their nine-and-a-half months of salary is stretched across twelve months so they don...
06/20/2026

Teachers don't get paid for summer. Their nine-and-a-half months of salary is stretched across twelve months so they don't go broke. That's not a benefit. That's financial survival.
The "long summer break" narrative is one of the most persistent myths about teaching—and it costs educators real money and stability. While people imagine teachers lounging on beaches, many are working second jobs, doing unpaid curriculum prep, or simply trying to make their paychecks last through months without income.
This isn't a complaint dressed up as inspiration. It's a fact that should reshape how we talk about teacher compensation. When we acknowledge what's actually happening, we can't pretend the current system is fair. Teachers deserve salaries paid over the actual months they work, or compensation that genuinely reflects the full scope of their labor. Until that changes, the gap between how we talk about valuing teachers and how we actually support them remains a chasm.

Frances Shaw, an 80-year-old Louisiana teacher who spent more than half a century in the classroom has been honored with...
06/20/2026

Frances Shaw, an 80-year-old Louisiana teacher who spent more than half a century in the classroom has been honored with a series of major community awards after returning from retirement to help fill a teacher shortage.
Frances Shaw, the daughter of sharecroppers, began teaching at Northside High School in Lafayette more than 50 years ago. She was among the first Black teachers to help integrate the school. Although she retired in 2012, Shaw came back last year after hearing the school was struggling to find enough educators.
“I’m kind of the igniter”
Read more in the comments...

This Open Letter Exposes Why Teachers Hate Making Parent Behavior CallsThis honest handwritten note lays out a critical ...
06/20/2026

This Open Letter Exposes Why Teachers Hate Making Parent Behavior Calls
This honest handwritten note lays out a critical truth most caregivers overlook: teachers have zero time or motive to fabricate negative stories about their students’ classroom conduct.
Every American educator’s daily schedule is crammed full from bell to bell. They juggle lesson delivery, small-group instruction, grading, paperwork, and constant student supervision all at once. Making a parent phone call takes precious minutes away from teaching, and it’s never a task teachers look forward to. There is no reward, satisfaction, or gain for a teacher to invent lies about misbehavior. If they reach out to share struggles with a child’s actions, it is only because the issue has become disruptive, unsafe, or too severe to resolve within the classroom alone.
Many parents automatically dismiss teacher feedback, assuming staff are overreacting or targeting their kid unfairly. This lack of trust creates a massive barrier to teamwork between home and school. Teachers rely on parental partnership to correct harmful habits, but doubt from guardians makes it nearly impossible to create consistent expectations for students. Educators would far rather spend their energy celebrating student wins than making uncomfortable disciplinary calls. They only pick up the phone when all in-class intervention strategies have already failed.
Mutual trust between teachers and parents is non-negotiable for student growth.
If you are a teacher, what parent reaction after a behavior call left you feeling the most unheard and unsupported?

A loud classroom doesn't always mean misbehaving. Sometimes it means talking, laughing, and loving learning.That's the c...
06/20/2026

A loud classroom doesn't always mean misbehaving. Sometimes it means talking, laughing, and loving learning.
That's the classroom we should be fighting for — not the silent, compliant one where kids are afraid to think out loud. Noise is a sign of engagement. It's messy and beautiful and exactly what learning should sound like.

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