So you went into teaching after mastering in journalism? No pedagogical education? No knowledge how to teach ELA? This is partly your fault, but then again, from what I’ve heard, schools of education nowadays mostly peddle vacuous messages like fighting “white privilege” and “male dominance” instead of actual pedagogy. In any case, you knowingly dived into teaching unprepared.

Then the process itself: Handouts? Worksheets? Copying machines? Constant tests? No textbooks? No well-defined and dare I say, national, curricula? Stupid pointless meetings? “New” idiotic techniques from paid consultants? The system is anti-teachers and anti-students. In the good old days every student would have a textbook and a clean notebook (not a workbook) so they would have a whole year of material in front of them (no needs for daily handouts) and they would learn how to handwrite, how to copy math problems from textbook to their notebooks, how to solve them step by step on a clean sheet of paper. The system used in schools presently is conducive to neither learning nor teaching, it favors publishers of workbooks and companies like Google and Facebook.

The public school system as it exists is rotten. And it keeps getting worse.