Woman Tells Her Teacher Daughter Not To Buy 'Unnecessary' Items For Her Students — 'Buying Stuff For Her Classroom Makes All Of Us Look Bad'
She's picking what's best for her class, while her mom is picking what's best for her ego.
twinsterphoto, ozgurdonmaz, Comstock, Bongkarngraphic | Canva A mom recently got into an argument with her daughter. Both of them are teachers. The problem is regarding their classrooms and the different ways they seem to tackle the expenses that come with teaching children and maintaining a shared space for education with them.
The mom is a first-grade teacher while her daughter teaches preschool. Although she doesn’t mention how long she’s been teaching, she claims that this would be her daughter’s second year of teaching. Since she has seniority, she feels like she’s right about the way her daughter should handle spending money on her classroom.
The mom told her teacher daughter not to buy 'unnecessary items' for her students.
Specifically, she points out that her spending habits are making all other teachers in the world look bad, as the title reads “AITA for telling my daughter not to spend money on her classroom because it makes the rest of us look bad?”
“When she started working at the school, I noticed she was running to the dollar tree or Walmart to grab little things for her classroom like hair ties, stickers, beads, and string,” she wrote in her post. “She said she didn't mind because it was all cheap and made her job easier.”
Photo: Reddit
However, the school opened up a new location where her daughter would work from 12-6:30 p.m. every day, handling the only classroom in the building. Now, she spends way more time looking on Nextdoor, a hyperlocal market app, and buying things for her classroom.
Some of the things she took upon herself to buy are: “24 outfits to store in her class (3 in each size from 2-5 for boys and girls) in case the parents forget to send new clothes, she has a box of pull-ups in case a kid has an accident and doesn't have a spare pair of underwear, she has extra snacks, she has extra jackets and socks, a pack of combs and brushes, extra nap bedding, and bins of what she calls ‘stalling activities’ (easy things she can pull out when she needs to stall).”
That’s quite the laundry list of items, and they all seem to be improving the quality of life for the kids in her class, but her mom has a problem with these spending habits and how they make her feel. “She even has Halloween costumes in case one of her students doesn't have one and she gives away the blankets and jackets if she thinks a student needs them,” the mom wrote.
She feels like it’s unnecessary, and argues that her daughter should listen to the principal who also says it’s unnecessary, but she wants to do what’s best for her students.
Photo: Ksenia Chernaya / Pexels
But the mother shouldn’t be worrying about her daughter’s classroom; instead, she should stay focused on her own.
One of the lines she wrote in her post was very telling, saying, “She says it's different because I work at a $30k+ per year private school and she teaches in a more lower-income community but I still told her it's not her responsibility.”
What her daughter is doing is providing a higher-quality, safe haven for kids who — as she said — may be less better off than kids who can afford private schools.
As one commenter pointed out, who exactly is this going to look bad to? They don’t even work in the same school, so the reality of the situation appears to be that it looks bad on herself.
“The only [judgment] she's feeling right now is her own [self-judgment]. She's realized that she's a worse, less caring person than her daughter, and it's easier for her to try to hide the evidence by convincing her daughter to be less charitable than for her to make herself the kind of person she wishes she was,” another commenter shared.
Albeit a little harsh, they’ve touched on an important concept that the mother should use for introspection when trying to understand how she was in the wrong for this.
Teachers don’t always need to go above and beyond for their kids. Sometimes, the schools provide them with everything they need, or maybe sometimes it’s out of the teacher’s reach, to begin with, but the important thing for all teachers should be operating in the best interest of the kids they’re supposed to be educating.
That seems to be what her daughter is doing anyway.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor for YourTango who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.