I'm B.A.D. Teacher, M.Ed. Sixteen-plus years in K-12 public school classrooms, a master's in Educational Leadership, and still teaching. I write under one banner: B.A.D.—Brilliant and Dedicated. The system calls you a bad teacher the moment you stop nodding along to get along. Bet. I'll wear it. Brilliant and dedicated aren't the opposite of bad. Some days, they're the same person, in the same room, refusing to shut up.

This started as a way to say what people in the building already know and won't say. I say what's necessary when it's necessary, and I'll write it down, too. It turned into something bigger: a record of what happens when educators walk into systems that were never built to keep the promises made to them. I document the culture teachers actually enter, the leadership that manages up while the room falls apart, and the machine that grinds careers into paperwork.

"Just because administrators grin with you doesn't mean they're in with you."

— B.A.D. TCHR

I write like a journalist because I was trained as one: degreed, declarative, sourced, and unwilling to look away. Raw and uncut when it needs to be, never reckless. That's a choice, not a temper. You get honesty without the wreckage, and the institutions I write about get their own documents read back to them.

This is a profession documented from the inside, by someone who stayed when leaving would've been easier