“Y’all Don’t Got a Teacher Today” — Educator Matches Students' Energy After No One Participates

A teacher wanted to give her students a hard lesson about gratitude and appreciation, but mostly about how any kind of achievement with other people is a two-way street.

The educator, who posts on TikTok under the handle @lazylearningland, recorded herself matching her students' energy during a particularly uninspired lesson.

The lack of inspiration, however, doesn't come from the teacher herself, who is excitedly attempting to instruct her students about specific mathematics concepts. The kids in her class, unfortunately, weren't all that intrigued by the subject matter and made no attempts to collaborate.

That's when she decided to let them figure it out for themselves. Watch how she goes about it below.

"So what is 1 squared, how would I do 1 squared?" the teacher says at the front of the class as she demonstrates how to solve math problems on the smartboard.

"That's the same as saying 1 times 1," she instructs, going about the lesson.

She begins drawing what that problem looks like to her other students, "Now I have to do my multiplication. What is a negative times a negative?"

Numerous kids speak out in response to her question: "Positive," they say.

"Negative times negative is a positive," she states, continuing to do her work on the board.

"Now, what's 4 times 9?" she asks the class — crickets. No one in the class seems willing to give her an answer. "What's 9 times 4?" she asks the students again. None of them are attempting to tell her the response to her query.

At this point in the clip, a text overlay hovering above the teacher indicates what's going on in the room. She says that in the classroom filled with 11th and 12th graders who have calculators right in front of them, her students don't seem that enthused about giving her the correct answer to the problem.

"So don't none of y'all got nothing to say no more?" she asks the classroom. "Y'all just gonna look at me? Some of y'all even got calculators on your desk. And y'all not even punching it in your calculator?" She then nods her head and puts down the marker after saying, "All right, bet."

"So I'm gonna stop right here. Y'all are gonna figure this out and your paper's due at the end of the period for a quiz grade. Y'all have each other, but you can't ask me for jack, diddly squat. You got your notes and you got each other. When y'all wanna be students, then you'll get a teacher. Until then, you're on your own," she says to the class.

"Good luck," she says before walking away from the board.

It didn't take long for the students to approach the teacher and ask for some assistance.

"Now they realize they messed up and need my help," she writes in another on-screen caption. In another portion of the video, she films herself seated at her desk as a student approaches her asking for assistance with the assignment.

She doesn't hold back, "You mean when I was up there and trying to help y'all and y'all didn't want to say nothing about what was 9 x 4 and now you want me to help you? Like when y'all become students, then I become a teacher. But y'all don't got a teacher today because none of my students showed up in class today."

The TikToker then asks the student to engage in a skit with her, "So y'all are on your own. You know what? Let me show y'all what y'all look like to me."

She then instructs the student to ask her for help with the problem. The student complies. She then sits and stares blankly, not responding to them for a few seconds.

"Right, I'm giving back that same energy so you can go take a seat; you can rely on your classmates and we'll try this again tomorrow. Appreciate you, thanks," she says to the student before the clip cuts out.

Several TikTokers who responded to the video applauded the way she handled the situation, many of them teachers. One said that they were actively attempting to teach their students to abandon "learned helplessness."

Another said that she often tells her students that she earned her own degree and she's not about to earn it for them so they need to be able to put in the work for themselves.

Someone else said that when they found themselves in a situation similar to @lazylearningland's, that they ended up staring at their students in silence for six minutes until one of their students answered their question: "I stared at mine in complete silence for six minutes one day until someone finally answered my question. I’m stubborn and I’ve got all the time in the world."