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Stepdaughter got fired yesterday from her job at my kids' school. Apparently there were four main issues:
1.) Her group never got anywhere on time
2.) She couldn't/wouldn't communicate what was going on with other adults
3.) She routinely drifted into inappropriate conversation topics with her kids--never sexual, but often death-related, like how the -icide in suicide can also be found in matricide, patricide, etc. Not awful, but not something all parents want her going on about with their kids. She'd been warned and continued to do it.
4.) She was yelling at the kids constantly, in a shaming and aggressive way.
The first three don't surprise me in the slightest. The last, however, was stunning to me when I first heard of it (again, there were multiple warnings, and the program director even reached out to me as a friend to find out if there was anything else going on,) but in retrospect it's obvious that she was screaming at the kids because that's how her mother treated her. We're waiting for the right moment to gently share this insight with her, when she's not still teary over getting fired.
The thing is, we knew she had no ability to project authority and would not be a good teacher in the long run. She had said before that one of the reasons she thought she would make a good middle school teacher is that she could be a great friend to all of them. We told her that's absolutely not what makes a good middle school teacher, but she insisted being a great listener was critical because, "Every teacher I ever had said to me, 'you know, if there's ever anything going on that you want to talk about, you can tell me.'" Well, no shit, honey--anyone can see you have major emotional problems, and they were only saying that to you, not to the kids with a fully-developed ego. To which she replied that she didn't act like a depressed unstable kid in school, she was more like [insert half a dozen super-obvious maladjusted attention-seeking socially-inappropriate behaviors here.]
Anyway, it's not necessarily a bad thing overall, hence the "tad apprehensive" thread, because we knew she needed to get off this teacher career path and onto something more suitable, and she also needed the experience of getting fired to convince her that the real world has real consequences. But we thought it would be more like, "Ugh, these kids are so annoying, I think I want to quit," not "You are so terrible at this we can't even let you stay on for a seventh week." The thing we thought would get her fired, oversleeping, has not yet been an issue, except that now that she's been fired from the job she really cared about, there's a distinct possibility she'll say "fuck this other job" and stop getting out of bed for it.
Meanwhile her first driving instructor passive-aggressively fired us, but now that she has all this room in her schedule we could probably find another one. Sometimes she's fine on the road, and sometimes she tries to change lanes into the car directly beside her and doesn't stop until I grab the wheel. But at least I have one fewer place to escort her to every day...
TL;DR - Stepdaughter got fired, which was inevitable, but the brutality of it may be too much for her to handle. I'm sick of cleaning up her mother's mess and I'm not anywhere near finished yet.
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