📝 AITAH for telling my neighboring teacher to leave my class alone?

By Tricky_Second2551 • Score: 2 • April 11, 2025 1:09 AM


 Am I the Ahole for telling my neighboring teacher to stop interfering with my class? 

Throwaway because yeah. So I’m a 3rd year teacher at a junior high school. I teach 6th grade English (11-12 year olds) and I love it. It can be frustrating and exhausting, but I really do enjoy it. This issue with my neighbor teacher (NT) started last year. NT has taught for maybe 6-8 years I believe. We were hired into the district the same year. For a little backstory I had set up a new teacher group chat with our crew of new hires that we’d go to dinner/drinks with sometimes. I then found out there was a separate group chat when I started seeing pics of the whole group doing activities that I knew nothing about. These were mostly run by NT and her best friend. Next year NT ended up getting to do a co-taught class (one general ed and one special ed teacher with a mix of kids) with her best friend. They would send messages to the principals if they thought my class was too loud and I’d have a confused principal coming in my class to “help out” when my kids were just casually working. The principal would just take a look around, shrug at me and tell me to make sure kids didn’t get too loud, and leave. My neighbor’s co-teacher/bff left the school at the end of the year, and the principal visits stopped. I had asked NT about it last year, saying things like why don’t you just talk to me if you think we’re too loud and she backtracked and said she had no issues and that it was all her bff. This year it was mostly quiet for maybe 2 months. NT got another co-taught hour with a mix of general and special education kids for one period. That same period I have a class that isn’t co-taught, but has about 7 kids with special education services/504 plans. Not to mention many that don’t qualify for services but have diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and anger management problems. A few times during the year this neighbor teacher of mine would randomly unlock my classroom door to stick her head in my room. Sometimes she’d just stare, or she’d yell at my kids to knock it off or be quiet. I was annoyed a bit because the times she’d “check on us” were times when my kids were having meltdowns/manifestations of disabilities. By the time she’d come in the kids were already back to work with the issue handled, or the student acting out was given a pass to a counselor. NT has escalated coming into my room the last few months. She even sent a few messages, saying her kids can’t handle the disruptions from our room because it’s her co-taught hour, and we need to manage our volume better. Sometimes I responded to these to try to diffuse the situation, but I started ignoring them after the 6th one tbh. I started tracking how often she was stepping in, and in just a couple of months she was in my room 10+ times. I wrote notes about what was going on in those situations, and every single time it was either an accident (like when she yelled at my kids when I tripped and hit the wall to catch myself) or a situation where a kid was being disruptive and was already taken care of. And I want to make it clear my kids aren’t all innocent, gosh no. Sometimes they are just being buttholes and being disruptive. In those circumstances when there’s an incident I assign the proper discipline, and have even had students removed by a principal if needed. But rest assured on those occasions my neighbor will come poking her head into my room to say we’re disruptive. Like no kidding man I already gave the kid a lecture and detention! NT doing this has led to my students being more disrupted than they were by the inciting incident, because now they’re asking me things like, “Does that class hate us?” Or “Is that teacher your opp?” (Had to ask a kid, means opponent/enemy.) Then I have to try to calm them down so they don’t think there’s drama to be had lol. Eventually I had enough. I had a kid recently with some emotional management struggles act out because they were mad they didn’t get a seat they wanted. I have a rolling table in my room, and they took the table and pushed it so that it rolled into the wall. I had a talk with the kiddo, and they took a pass to calm down and chat with their counselor. A couple minutes later and she sends her co-teacher into my class to “Make sure there wasn’t a sub and that my kids were supervised since they’re so out of control.” I was pissed. My kids had moved on and were quietly chatting while finishing up a small group activity. But now with another teacher in the room they were getting rowdy and whispering to each other about “that class that hates us.” I don’t even know what I said to the co-teacher, I think I just muttered that clearly we were fine and she could leave. After some deliberation I sent an email to my dear neighbor, asking them to please stay out of my classroom. I explained what happened on the day she thought my kids were “out of control” and how it wasn’t productive to have her in my room trying to intervene. I explained that I would never walk into her room when I hear shenanigans because I respect her and know that she’s a professional that can handle her own kids and discipline. I told her I felt she wasn’t giving me that same respect, and was undermining me in front of my kids by trying to assert herself and tell them what to do. I also explained that I realized we had different teaching styles. She’s a very no-noise, lights dimmed, total silence type of teacher. And that’s fine! I however think my English class is a class that demands conversations. We often do discussions with partners or groups, line when I ask them to share a journal or discuss some questions on a story. And of course as this is a class of 25+ 11-12 year olds sometimes they’re unaware of how loud they talk. I probably say “let’s tone it down folks” about 20 times an hour lol. So while absolutely they do get too loud sometimes, when that happens I take care to quiet them down or even assign detentions if kids won’t quiet down. I’m still a newish teacher so I know my classroom management can be improved, and it’s something I’ve worked very hard at these last 3 years. I feel like I’ve improved a lot since my first year of chaos, but having NT interfere is giving me horrible anxiety and making me feel like I must just be an awful teacher. I’ve been so stressed that I could cry whenever that specific CPA’s period rolls around. (Note that she doesn’t do it for any other hour?) So anyway, I sent her an email and now she wants to meet to talk in person (oh my poor anxiety lol) and I’m just wondering am I in the wrong to tell her to leave my class alone? I just don’t feel it’s helpful or necessary for her to keep coming into my room, even if maybe she thinks it’s helpful or something. I also want to mention my other neighboring teacher hasn’t complained once. So I can’t be that awful right? Also excuse my formatting, not sure how this looks when posted from mobile!

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