Teaching Middle School Every Day Will Definitely Not Go Your Way (Or Give You Any Pay)

“Hey. There is no way that I just heard what I think I did.” The silence was deafening as the dissatisfaction exploded within the busy, concrete-bordered room. As the message echoed throughout the sound-proof enclosure, the array of Middle School students - one of who was the problem - remained meandering all around the packed area as they blabbered and ranted about undecipherable Generation Alpha slang as much as they could. The students simply let the ferocious message slide into the consistently empty recycling bin.

The person of significance who the group was collectively ignoring without any reflective consideration was their Science teacher. Although she was relatively new to the teaching scene, her colleagues had already made up their mind; they considered her a nice, lenient person in most situations who becomes powerfully strict when the simplest, lowest standard of societal ethics is violated. The teacher, armed with long, dark brunette hair and a height slightly taller than the average Middle School student, would easily become provoked if students were disruptive or harmful in any of her classes.

As the heat from her words radiated across the classroom, the construction ground that was the classroom collapsed into a silent forest with nothing to observe besides the dormant Middle School students who finally decided to shut their mouths.

“That word that I just heard? Weird. Disgusting. Ew. You know better than to say this gibberish. Now get out of my classroom, and I will talk to you tomorrow,” the teacher unwillingly continued, significantly emphasizing the consequences of blurting hurtful phrases out loud. She was hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst event that could happen: the students erupting into madness, each providing a new and valid argument on why her experienced, professional decision was wrong.

“I didn’t do nothing. That useless, nerdy guy who sat next to me yelled that word out at you,” one of the students snapped back forcefully yet with false confidence, cracks showing in every single word he spoke. As he repeated the sentence with the same targeting phrases he always exclaimed, he clumsily attempted to restrain himself from mocking the frowning teacher standing right in front of his face. A small malicious smile started to form on his pimple-filled, oily face; his mind floated off into a nearly empty void filled with sparse signs of a retaliation plot against the teacher.

Suddenly, he noticed that she was eyeing him up and down - his hopes of escaping extra work for another day deflated and crushed into nothingness.

“Oh no. I am absolutely in trouble. The teacher is better at this than I thought,” the student came to a difficult, stressful realization as he continued to externally act out his false lies at a level he considered ‘good enough’. He expanded on the idea, initiating a plan to scan the surroundings of the room as an emergency tactic to avoid anything close to eye contact. This included the hanging lights on the ceiling, full of different shapes and sizes; it also included the teacher’s thick, open binder full of student worksheets ready to be graded at any moment.

“I don’t care at all about what you think has happened. You yelled that word right at my face, and I know that. I’m tired of this. Now go,” the teacher firmly responded, tightly clinging on to the fragile rope of truth. Unexpectedly, her response came with a slight hint of a yawn, which she still managed to tone down; she did not wish to ever embarrass herself in front of children who laughed at everything which had zero meaning, including any teacher’s spontaneous tinge of tiredness.

Soon enough, the large, busy mob of students left the room in an absolute hurry to play the most demanding video games on their luxurious, high-end gaming PCs equipped with the latest top-of-the-line GPUs. Some were in a rush to beat Elden Ring, of which they bought with the gaming gifts they earned through Microsoft Rewards; others had their minds set on driving a perfectly American police car within Roblox. The students who weren’t so dissolved into Generation Alpha’s unlikeable content had formed their own unique group, taking their iPads and Nintendo Switches to create an innovative Minecraft server featuring many builds. 

Left behind in the now silent and peaceful room was the Science teacher, who had resumed the treacherous journey of working hours on end without a single refill of energy; it would culminate on the irresistible itch to fall into the never-ending pit of deep sleep. She was in the process of grading an exabyte-sized folder of Lab reports submitted by her Grade 8 students that same day.

“I am so tired from grading all these reports… especially reading the whole of that one with 3,000 words. Why do these kids keep ruining the day every time it seems perfectly peaceful beforehand? I just want to turn those lights off and go to sleep here,” she pondered and reflected on the work she had done up until that point in time, where exasperation weighed heavily on her mind. The teacher struggled with all her might to hold on to her computer screen as her eyes were ever so slightly closer to a fully shut state.

The Science teacher happened to have her computer’s Do Not Disturb mode off by complete, utter accident. She was in the midst of skimming through one submission, filled with particularly high-quality work by a student who wasn’t particularly skilled at scientific literacy, when a small notification slid into view from the top right corner of the laptop’s relatively readable screen. As she slowly stared at the small, translucent rounded rectangle which had only appeared a split second before, her heart started to pump blood at rates just as high as during her horrifying experience in a debate competition eleven years ago. A severe scheduling emergency had arrived at her doorstep.

Gone was the somewhat trivial stage act of dealing with a singular student without anyone else around; a full show, more repetitive and tiring than teaching the uncivilized Middle Schoolers how to behave, now loomed over the microscopic footprint of the Science teacher. This road block, quadruple the size of the grand Burj Khalifa, stood on the unstable path to fulfilling her brain’s minor yet disruptive addiction to sleeping. This was the dreaded weekly Cluster Meeting, where every single staff member has to take all of their confidence and attempt (usually ending up in the state of a catastrophe) to conquer the most disturbing fear of all: presentation and judgment by peers, who they work with on the astronomically rare occasion of every single work day.

The Science teacher had been informed many weeks prior that she would host this week’s cluster meeting, planned as a session to foster positive interactions between the miniscule Middle School team and a small, transparent droplet in the roaring oceans that is High School staff, while serving as a platform to discuss students’ work in regards to Math and Science. As her phone buzzed, she absentmindedly scrolled through her central hub of messages and scams. Her eyes widened as she received the long, winding message on one of the school’s highly worshiped messaging platforms. She mentally kicked herself on account of her procrastination over the utilization of the school’s towering mountains of Surface Pro laptops for Grade 8’s next Lab Report; it was the same grade that nearly always causes ever-present pain in every teacher’s eardrums to linger for thousands of hours after class. After all, she had to make a clear, conscious, and correct decision for that group of disruptive toddlers by the very next day.

“Nah. I’m not dealing with this task now. I’m still busy with other stuff,” she spat out after a choice was made to focus on the sleep that she desperately seeked for. In mere seconds, the teacher decided to throw the plan for the cluster meeting to the back of her head and procrastinate for as much time as she wished for; she would obviously be able to complete the seemingly basic task in the nearly infinite timespan of 3 weeks. Every time a colleague - sometimes even the principal - went up to her and checked on her supposedly nearly-complete agenda, which was supposed to be more detailed than a Van Gogh’s painting, she always reassured them with a slight alteration of the same short phrase: “I’m working on it.”

In reality, she mentally swiped the task that her higher-ups kindly requested that she do in order to keep her precious job; she did not have the ability to even remotely imagine a scenario where she had an empty balance in every single credit and debit card she currently owned. On the day of the meeting, when she was once again informed by her somewhat empathetic colleagues - this time the Middle School Math teacher, who was also a key leader in the multilayered and complex topic which would presumably be discussed during the meeting - she finally came to the difficult realization that she would need a working agenda in order to keep her sanity and financial income, which was already filled with complications due to an ongoing inflation event, continually stable.

Thankfully, she already had a major, serious topic in mind that she immediately needed to discuss, and it just happened to be about the same Lab Report which hoarded her attention and sparked the uncivilized debate between her and the unhygienic, immature children. As the memory resurfaced in her mind, pungent wafts of Axe body spray intermixed with unwashed teeth and the pervasive scent of mold-filled spaghetti turned her stomach with force. Now that the Lab Reports snatched the short and bitter preparation time away from the teacher, the dull, plastic clock was accelerating on the scale of a quartic curve, ready to rip away any last slice of the weathered time sponge remaining on the rusty plate.

“Hi! Is the meeting ready yet? People are coming in now.”

The Science teacher nearly vaulted out of her small, gray chair, but managed to resist her sudden impulse of tenseness. She stared at the nearly illegible scribbles of notes that she held in her hands, reflecting with a streak of pride and confidence to herself, “This is important. I am fully ready. I will present as well as I can. Same attitude as with that Science Fair project back in Middle School, okay?” The teacher stood up just as she would in front of a dozen or two of her students, took a breath deeper than the Mariana Trench, and started speaking.

“Earlier today, one of my students cheated in my Lab Report. He did not copy from other students, nor did he fake any of the data. He did something completely unprecedented and never seen before in this school - or in this entire school district, I assume,” the teacher recollected with ease in a clear format, of which she hoped with the little experience she had that it was simple enough to digest for her colleagues.

With the notable exception of the school’s exceptionally proficient IT manager, every single staff member in the minuscule, unsortable, and densely populated Science classroom opened their mouths to the point their lips started to become unacceptably sore. Every one of their brains were lagging behind their visual inputs by tens of thousands of milliseconds, and their minds were frozen in place, simply stopped by the unparalleled force of the Science teacher’s impactful words.

When the staff finally thawed from their deep stupor, the classroom became a completely incomprehensible yet magnificent mess of ear-blasting staccato phrases and shattered word salads; the uncontrollably irritating Grade 8s paled by comparison.

“What on earth happened?”

“Why don’t you tell the principal to investigate?”

“Was he secretly getting his parents to do his work?”

“Are you sure he actually cheated?”

“Don’t be like those pesky Grade 8s. Just stop!”

Questions battered the Science teacher from seemingly every direction imaginable, stretching her consciousness across complicated, invisible axes of higher dimensions. Although a small spark of fire started to burn within her brain, causing a crack in her already fragile focus, the teacher still tried to stop its viral spread with every method she could think of. After channeling her inner yogi, with numerous doses of heavy breathing exercises, she had mostly returned to a slightly calmer, more prepared state within her own mind.

“That student was using this new trendy thing that the kids in my class like to call ‘ChatGPT’ for some reason. I don’t know what it is, or who created it, but I noticed that it was spitting out huge chunks of words after the student entered a simple, short sentence into his computer. The student then copied it over to the lab report and told me it was his work. I was watching him carefully, so I caught this,” the teacher elaborated with vital information as her words continued to flow like a calm river, exiting without interruption through her mouth, something she had never hypothesized she would do in her entire life just a year ago.

The noise level in the classroom dropped off a kilometer-tall cliff; not a single person sitting down made any sign of even the quietest sounds that exist. In addition to the ambient sounds of the perfectly polished, newly-installed air conditioning system, the only sounds that the Science teacher could hear were the faint noises of outside chatter filtering through the solid, insulative walls. These voices, akin to the mindless twitters of sparsely positioned mice, enveloped the Middle School Science room as it became the focus of the coherent presenter. It was almost as if she was peacefully meditating at the exact center of a sprawling field of ripe, golden wheat.

This was, however, not exactly an uplifting, bird-filled field in the rural Great Plains of America. It was a maelstrom of a pressure cooker full of professional teachers and staff, and as anyone would expect, someone was about to speak up and fill the delicate vacuum that the Science teacher had created while describing a muddy, murky narrative of the Lab report incident.

“ChatGPT is a Generative AI program -” the school’s IT manager attempted to explain in a simple yet accurate way without any disruptions.

“A wh- what?” One of the participant teachers questioned in a desperate attempt to get a hold of the full picture days before anyone else could.

“A Generative AI program. If you don’t know what that means, let me explain. Basically, a Generative AI program is a sort of ‘machine’ where a short, concise input gets turned into an output. The output depends on what the input requests this ‘machine’ to do. In more technical terms, this input is called a prompt. Here’s an example: when someone writes the prompt ‘what is an electron in very simple middle school terms’ and sends it into the ‘machine’, it will generate - that’s where the name comes from - an output that might look like ‘An electron is a particle with a charge of -1. Its weight is 0. In an atom, it orbits the nucleus, which is made up of protons and neutrons.’ It’s sort of like a brain that knows everything, but coded in a computer,” the IT manager continued, this time keeping in mind the importance of simplicity in an explanation about computers for a team of older staff who were generally not tech-savvy at all.

“A brain? So it’s conscious?” Another teacher questioned as he trembled in front of the staff and pondered fearfully, “Don’t tell me they made a know-it-all living computer that is the perfect cheating device…”

“No. It’s not conscious. It just seems like it is, but it is not. You could say that it’s a clever illusion of some kind, but behind the scenes it’s really just a lot of complicated math,” the well-trained IT manager responded, satisfying the teacher’s urge to open a Pandora’s Box about current-day AI without actually revealing its towers of mouthwatering contents.

“So can ChatGPT create a whole lab report?” The Science teacher finally spat out after carefully observing and listening to the easy-to-digest, well-crafted responses from the IT manager.

“Definitely, but keep in mind that this ‘machine’ does make lots of mistakes. In the IT industry we call these ‘hallucinations’, similar to what the human brain - especially the brains of teachers who are always confused about the names of different students - do many, many times a day.”

“That… that is something that I think should be strictly banned. My smelly, pungent cohort has probably been cheating on every assignment with this newfangled thingy of sorts,” the Science teacher responded with her mouth wide open, attempting to make out if she was awarding A grades to students who were astronomical units away from deserving anything close to it. With a sudden bitter realization that many more students across the school may have succumbed to the wildly popular trend of using the mysterious machine known as Generative AI, she nervously shifted her head a small angle to the left and made a critical announcement to the wide, cramped rows of staff she stood in front of.

“The cluster meeting is over. Thank you for listening and participating.”

Within the struggling minds of the gasping audience, a cacophony of thoughts, questions, and answers spontaneously popped in and out of existence, akin to the positively-charged proton’s sea of complex, random quarks. Some of these ideas were relevant concerns that students within other classes were committing the same crimes; others were random particles that were unrelated to the presented topics and would annihilate at any second. As the out-of-the-blue decision bombarded every one of the staff members, thoughts spewed forth from the void of imagination at speeds where a person on crutches could circumnavigate the Earth in a single second.

The unresearched effects of this uncanny phenomenon flew past the staff members’ delicate brains at blistering speeds; it formed an instantaneous moment in time where memories - and perhaps more mysteriously, geometric patterns and mathematical formulas - flooded the senses of the people leaving the real world and entering a portal through to their own imagination. When the staff team’s frontal cortices received their daily supplement of electrical shock and activated after what seemed like eons of time, all of the tingling, unexplainable feelings in their minds were emptied into nothingness, leaving behind a wall of flesh collectively staring at the Science teacher.

“Alright. That was unexpected. Let’s go.”

As soon as the staff members snapped back into reality, they had reduced their confusion and stupidity to an absolute minimum. The only boulder which remained sturdily stacked on top of each and every teacher was a concern over the students in their own classrooms. These violent children predictably played uninteresting, wasteful computer video games, encompassing the four titles infamous at the pressure cooker of a school for their distinct property of forcefully and swiftly burgling everyone’s rotting, corroding attention: War Thunder, Roblox, Pokemon Platinum, and player03.com. It had become so overwhelming that it became more unacceptable than the students’ indistinguishable odor, which was already comparable to the world’s most unmaintained landfill. An uncountable amount of effort forever marching towards a mysterious mathematical limit was put on this unsolvable paradox; it became so pressuring to avoid that the teachers eventually gave in, dumping their integrity in the same landfill filled with colorless gases that made up each and every distinct smell of the effects of the students’ growth hormones.

Thankfully, to ever so slightly relieve the anxiety boiling within their memory-less heads, the teachers had a tried-and-true solution: communicate with each other while interweaving a few dozen jokes and references (not the ones commonly referred to by the severely uncultured students who are addicted to short form content) to uplift the mood. The methodology was not perfect, however, as shown by the failed application during the mind-bending announcement at the meeting itself. Once the level of the uncontrollableness within the childlike, disorganized mess started to return to earth, many hoped the classic spell would once again work property; to get close enough (in an experienced person’s words, definitely not enough) to the goal of being settled and calm, they would have to take action.

In the Science teacher’s clever mind, however, there was a different concern, one of which was not thought of by a single other person currently located within the school complex. It was so unthinkably sophisticated that not even Einstein could dream of it or the tremendous impacts it could have on the future trajectory of the budget-minded school. As she shakily considered the puzzling problems that lay ahead, a sentence appeared in her mind, word by word:

“Please… don’t misinform the school and get more people in trouble than they actually deserve. I don’t want smart kids being discredited for bad things they didn’t do.”