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Fully six of yesterday's ten most active threads were threads that I have already discussed. That barely leaves me enough for today's post. The first about which I'll talk was the second most active thread yesterday. Titled, "MCPS teachers - what would you tell parents in your class(es) if you could?" and posted in the "Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)" forum, the thread is meant, as the title suggests, to invite input from Montgomery County Public Schools teachers about what they would tell parents if they had the opportunity. The thread begins with warnings that teachers are very busy, have very little extra time, and cannot do all that they would want. A parent responds to one of these posts by describing the teacher in question as a "failure in [the teacher's] life's work." In many ways, this is current state of MCPS boiled down to its most essential essence. Teachers warning that they are being stretched too thin and being called "failures" by parents in response. The real cherry on the cake is that just four posts later that very same poster responded by describing herself as a "distraught" parent who was beng "taunted" by teachers and painting herself entirely as the victim of bullying teachers. If this is the situation with which teachers are dealing — and by all accounts it is — no wonder they are quitting in droves. Who wants to deal with this kind of parent? But, the poster didn't stop there. When other posters patiently explained that anyone reading the school forums on DCUM would know that there is a teacher shortage and that the remaining teachers face severe resource constraints and the poster should be supportive rather than combative, the poster rejected the message. Instead, she replied saying that she was an "outsider to the special needs parenting community" — the exactly opposite of what she previously suggested — and accused teachers of being abusive and "narcissists" who gaslight parents. This poster is not representative of all the parents who post in the thread and, hopefully, is not representative of most parents with whom teachers have to interact, but it wouldn't take too many parents like this one to completely poison things. In addition to this poster, other parents seize this thread as an opportunity to air their grievances with teachers. Ignoring that this is the compete opposite of the intention of the thread, one poster suggested that they discuss the teachers' union and school closures during the pandemic. It's been clear for some time that there is a cohort of parents who are no longer able to discuss any other aspect of schools and education and, like a scratched record that repeatedly replays the same few notes, fixate on school closures regardless of the context. It really seems like many school systems are entering a vicious circle in which teachers are stressed to breaking, parents are more than willing to break them, and more teachers quit causing those remaining to be stretched even thinner. I'm not sure that this pattern can be reversed until the kids that experienced school closures have aged out and taken their parents with them.