Are you for real? You want to get two students expelled for your illegal conduct? Do these students have medical issues that smoking can worsen?

A am a teacher and an asthmatic. I cannot be around any smokers because smoke triggers my asthma attacks. I have family members who smoke. I do not visit their homes because I refuse to subject myself to asthma attacks for the sake of family unity. If they come to my house, there is no smoking on my property. I do not want to clean up their cigarette butts from my property. As a young child, I had to spend too many nights in the ER with bad asthma attacks because my parents did not want to upset the family.

As for being a teacher, you are a credentialed teacher and I presume are in the US. That credential means you have a very high duty of care for the students you are in charge of. You have to follow federal laws, state laws, local laws, and district policies. You can be sanctioned by the Federal Office of Civil Rights if your smoking harmed the health of any student who has a health issue identified in an IEP or 504 plan and missed educational opportunities because you were smoking on school grounds and in their presence. Then there is the fact that Federal law prohibits tobacco use on any K-12 campus in the US if that district receives any Federal Money. Almost all public schools and some private schools receive Federal money. Many states also have laws that prohibit the use of tobacco on school grounds.

As a credentialed teacher, you are held to a higher moral standard than the average person and can lose your credential over activities that are legal but reflect poorly on your ethical or moral standards (look at the number of teachers losing their credentials for having an only fans account). Encouraging the use of tobacco or drugs by students falls into that category and smoking in front of your students at school is the same as promoting smoking.

As a government employee, that is exactly what public school teachers are, you have fewer rights than your students do. You cannot say whatever you want. You cannot do whatever you want. You are limited to the same extend that government is limited in what it can do. When a student cusses you out, you cannot respond in kind, if you do, you can also face disciplinary action because you are the adult and professional.

If you cannot handle the great responsibilities that are a part of teaching, then please leave the profession. Teachers are getting a bad enough rap due to the few bad teachers that make the news. The media rarely focuses on those of up that go over and beyond every day to do a job that many would not last more than a day or two doing and dealing with issues that our students bring to school because their parents have stopped parenting.

If you cannot go the entire school day with out a cigarette, see your doctor to get on the patch or find another job, your students need a better teacher.

Jesus, is that you? OMG, you’re back! Good thing you’ll NEVER do anything that could come back to bite you in the ass.

Why do you hate your teacher? You don’t really give a shit if he smoked pot or not, so what is it that you are unhappy with him about? Too much homework? Does he expect too much from you? I can see that would be a problem for you if no one has ever expected anything from you. Don’t worry, you’ll only have to put up with him for a little while…. unless you can figure out how to destroy his life before the end of the semester. After all the only fit punishment for inconveniencing you should be death, or at least the destruction of his career and/or life. After all, he deserves it.

The most a principal could probably do is assign the student to some kind of smoking cessation class. That isn’t likely to happen.

Once a student is at home, he or she is pretty much outside of the school’s influence except in a few cases, each of which requires that the student’s actions somehow impact the school. As an example, if the student was cyber-bullying another student, getting into a fight off campus with another student, causing some kind of inter-school turmoil (stealing another school’s mascot for example), etc.

I don’t think a principal would really get involved in such an issue, regardless of how much he might want to do so.

A smoker is a person addicted to nicotine. Her addiction means your teacher ‘has’ to have her cigarette regularly, otherwise she fears her world ( read- nervous system ) will go beserk on her and she won’t be able to cope.

Inconveniently, she has to stand outside the school precinct to smoke. Have pity on her. She is a slave to her nicotine addiction. Most adult people passing know what that addiction means, and have avoided it. She is a sucker!

A nicotine addiction sucks, and there is no upside to smoking. It costs money, time, convenience, and your good health. The only people who benefit from it are the tobacco industry and their marketing friends.

But for some strange reasons some people ‘think’ ( vain hope ) their life is better, they are cool, part of the scene, with it, hip, whatever, if they are smokers.

But they are merely slaves to that nasty, tarry, monster and master, nicotine.

So why would you want to join them, to be another sucker?

Schools are the proverbial toothless tiger when it comes to rule infractions like smoking. It's legal to smoke, and it's also legal to stand outside behind the bushes. On the same token, it's legal for the principal to have you sit in his office where he busts your chops for half an hour, and it's also legal for him to call your parents and interrupt their workday while he gleefully tells them all about how he caught you red-handed with the Marlboro Man, making you roll your eyes and crave yet another cigarette.

Seriously now, the most they can possibly do is give you an hour detention. If they try to suspend you for smoking, you can refer to the first paragraph of my answer with an attorney, and the next day you'll walk into your first period class and find an ashtray on your desk.

Newsflash: every adult in your life does or has done something "illicit", and smoking weed is one of the least illicit things an adult can do. It's actually, dare I say it? Practically harmless. Worry about teachers who are seducing and molesting students. Worry about teachers who are cruel and pick on students, maybe sometimes because of their race, or gender, or religion. Those are teachers that deserve to get fired.
Your teacher made an error in not being like most adults, pretending to be spotlessly clean-living, and instead decided to extend the courtesy of frankness to you. Unfortunately for him, he drastically underestimated your maturity.
Leave your teacher -and his ability to pay his bills, support his family, etc- ALONE.

How do you expect total strangers to know?

Ask your teacher. Just be aware that doing so may turn what’s intended to be an informal confiscation and verbal warning into something that teacher will have to formally record and then involve your parents with, just as was probably supposed to happen.

Just learn the lessons. Don’t smoke, don’t smoke at school, and if you’re stupid enough to keep smoking then make certain to not get caught. I’ll give you a tip: no quantity of strong-smelling mints or menthol sweets/gum can hide cigarette breath. Just like spraying Lysol onto a dog shit makes it smell like Lysol and dog shit.

As a former radiographer and as a former radiotherapist, I have seen thousands of patients only barely into their twenties with terminal cancers of the mouth, tongue, throat, and lungs, all caused because they thought that in an age where the risks of smoking are entirely obvious, they thought that smoking was a good idea. Those cancers don’t always only affect older smokers.

Here Is your explanation.

My teacher embarrassed me in class for standing up and going to the pencil sharpener to go sharpen them and made me sit on the floor. While I was sitting on the floor I needed to get a drink of water so I stood up grabbed my water battle and she yelled at me to go sit in the corner. The weird thing is I’m a sixth grader. I also apologized to the other team for I team being mean to them and the teacher said you be sorry if you don’t stop talking.

Here is what I think happened.

You continually irritate your teacher by sharpening your pencil when she is addressing the class. When you do this, you disrupt the learning environment for others. You also interrupt her presentation of material.

You are battling the teacher through small, stupid things and likely feel you have a few ridiculously childish victories.

Even when she told you to sit down, you had to get water, although you must admit you could have waited.

THREATENED? Don’t you think this is a moronic exaggeration? When your teacher said that you would be sorry, she was not threatening you. No gun to the head. No pitchfork to the gut. No knife to the throat.

She meant detention, trip to the office, or a call home to mommy. And you know this.

You are not a victim. You are an inexperienced poor actor needing attention when you are away from mommy.

Attention seeking behaviour makes you look like you are not smart enough to know you cannot win this.

Big time, and it’s not even a close call.

Pretty much every public school teacher’s employment in the US is subject to the terms of a union contract. This contract will invariably include some clause about improper or inappropriate behavior being grounds for termination. This does not even have to be behavior with students, and its quite likely that a teacher, say, caught making a pass at a parent, being drunk in public, or doing about a zillion other things that normal (but perhaps ill-advised) adults do every day would still be fired.

This will vary a bit from district to district, with some being more strict and others being more permissive in terms of what is considered fireable.

However, ALL of them would include anything even remotely smacking of inappropriate behavior with students as an immediate, no-questions-asked, do not pass go, do not collect $200 grounds for termination. This could be something as innocuous as happening to run into a student at a mall and sharing a meal with them; giving a student a ride home in a private vehicle (with no inappropriate behavior ensuing whatsoever, and even if there were extenuating circumstances such as you know the student’s family socially and the weather was bad), texting a student privately even for completely legitimate school related reasons, etc. I’m not saying all of these would invariably get a teacher fired, but any or all of them could.

School districts, not without good reason, are VERY strongly motivated to avoid even the merest appearance of impropriety between their sanctioned adult employees and the children they are entrusted to supervise.

Smoking weed with middle school aged students is so far over the line of what may or may not be considered improper that you could no longer see that line with a telescope.

They are, at most, 14. You are an educator entrusted with their care. Your possible legal allowance to smoke pot in the state is entirely irrelevant. If a school administrator had one of those trapdoors in their office leading to a greased chute that would send you whizzing out of the building along with your hope of future employment, they would most certainly employ it with blinding haste in a scenario like this.

If you saw and reported that a teacher was smoking at school, not much will happen since it’s not against the law for an adult to smoke. However, as an assistant principal at a California high school, I can tell you that most school districts have a smoke-free policy that has no “teeth” for enforcement other than for students.

If someone reported to me that a teacher was observed smoking on campus, after interviewing the reporter I would speak with the teacher privately. Whether they confess or not, I would tell them not to do this in the future. I cannot take any disciplinary action against the teacher without evidence. I, or another administrator, would need to witness the smoking or catch it on one of our 24 surveillance cameras.

Since the teacher has now been warned, if they are caught smoking on campus at anytime in the future, they can now be disciplined for insubordination (not for smoking).

You have no idea how lucky you are you have a teacher that cares about you. You can stop smoking if you want to. Ask your parents to take you to your doctor or make a doctor’s appointment and ask your doctor for help to quit smoking. It is not too late to do that. You can reverse some of the damage and stop the progression of damage if you do it now. Go for it, this is your chance to get off those cancer sticks. And it is not just cancer, it is emphysema, asthma, heart disease, strokes that are caused by cigarette smoking. You can prevent these from happening in your 40s and live to be in your 70s or later if you stop smoking now. Choose.

They can and it’s totally legal in most countries but smoking inside or in a public place is often banned. However when I was in high school two of my teachers died of cigarettes so personally I hate it and I think it’s disgusting. In a rare case of historic irony Mr Bullock who was my school tutor in high school actively tried to dissuade us from attending an anti smoking presentation in school. In his words some of those images of people with throat cancer ‘are pretty horrible.’ And you know what he was right they were pretty horrible - they showed us pictures of people’s whose faces had literally collapsed in on themselves as a result of cancer. Some of them had needed extensive reconstruction surgery which left them with a Frankensteinian like appearance. Other pictures were of the enormous tumours that had had to be cut out. And I’m telling you now it was some of those most vomit worthy stuff I had ever seen. But you know what it worked. Nobody from my old former year group has ever smoked. A few months after the presentation Mr Bullock was dead. He died as a result of lung cancer caused by smoking and his death deeply upset me at the time. There can’t actually be any worse of a warning than that not to smoke. A year or so later Mr Briggs a history teacher of mine was also dead. Briggs actually quit smoking in late life but not before the damage was already done. Briggs was left unable to breathe or lift his arms in the end and was left supported by a life support machine. However his family ultimately made the controversial decision to terminate his life support. Obviously I know this because it was explained to me in a school assembly following his death. Back home in South Wales you can find kids as young as 7 years old smoking even though it’s illegal and even though it’s really bad for them. Not only is it illegal for 7 year olds to smoke in the UK it’s illegal to sell to them or to facilitate their use. You have to be 18. Also it’s a legal requirement to have the words SMOKING KILLS printed on each packet. I’ll add one last comment - one of my former teacher’s who might still be alive - Mr W I would see him outside of school every morning smoking. Him and Mr Bullock and also my art teacher. And I’ll be honest I always thought it looked sad and depressing. If a teacher is experiencing stress there’s other ways to deal with it than smoking. If your students see that you smoke or if they smell the cigarette smoke on you what’s to stop them from thinking: ‘oh that teacher does it - smoking is cool. Let’s all do it.’ Oh and yeah my manager at my education company in Vietnam he smokes like there’s no tomorrow. He is a real nice man otherwise and he always knows everything and exactly what he is doing all the time. Nonetheless I can’t stop myself looking sideways at him from time to time when I notice he has gone for a smoke break either in the office or just before his lesson at school or at break time. And I’ll be honest it’s heartbreaking because I am thinking of Mr Bullock and some of the last words he ever said to me. Lung cancer is ‘pretty horrible.’ Well yes sir it is. And let’s be honest here you would know about that wouldn’t you?

Edit: my uncle also died from smoking too much cigarettes but he wasn’t a teacher he was a farmer - just not a very good one because he was bone idle lazy and let his wife order him around all the time. Like Mr Briggs my uncle Alan also tried quitting when he got too old. It worked and he actually was healthy for a few years but then he suddenly died of heart attack. Had he quit maybe a few decades earlier he would have been alright. But he didn’t for some stupid reason. And yes it was stupid because rather than hanging out with his family and going on holiday and doing the things that he liked right now as of this moment he is in a graveyard. The parts that are left of him anyway and it’s nobody’s fault but his.

I’m a high school student and I’ve been smoking for a few years. I always smoke before school and throughout all of the teachers I’ve had (that have obviously smelt the cigarettes) none of them have said anything to me or my parents. I’m sure if a dean or someone with authority caught you in the act or had suspicions they may question you and your parents. When I was in the eighth grade a student even brought it up to our workshop teacher and he did not take any actions. To sum this all up, teachers are not required to tell your parents or deans unless they catch you in the act, but if they have suspicions it depends on the personality of the teacher.

I hope this helps, - Anonymous

• Write a complaint to the teacher, or have your parents write a complaint letter to the teacher.
• Talk to him/her to ask why they are acting like that, in their office, make sure you take a good friend, or 2 good friends or your parents. Don’t be alone with this teacher. Steer clear of them in the corridor.
• If you think he/she is seriously dangerous, perhaps leave the school.
• Have you provoked the teacher?
• It might be safer to avoid them, than complain to the principle,
• If you feel safe to complain, arrange for your parents to complain to the teacher or principle, which ever seems the best to you.
• If you have good intuition, listen to your intuition about what to do.

To my knowledge, this is actually the case in schools I’ve worked at - no smoking is allowed on the school territory, regardless of who you are.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t any smoking, at least from students. Having been in high school myself, I recall going for a smoke just outside of school territory, for example the lawn of a house right across the street or right outside the fence where you can’t be seen or in the bus stop. People still smoke, just not on school territory. As for teachers, I didn’t know any who did and right now I know that maybe one of my colleagues smokes - perhaps I don’t know because I don’t really smoke myself.

I think it is fine to ban things that are illegal anyway - if smoking and drinking is illegal for students then those things should be banned from school. As for teachers, I think smoking and drinking on school grounds is a little weird - you need to find a better way of coping with stress, something that doesn’t hurt your body.

You asked, so I’ll answer with some questions.

You say smoking is legal. Does that mean you’re over 18?

That said, does your school have rules about smoking on campus? If it’s a smoke-free campus, that supersedes any legalities, as the campus is private property. I assume you signed some sort of behavioral contract, something along the lines of following all school rules. In that case, you are not allowed to smoke on campus.

Are you a boarder? I ask because as the child of smokers, I know how hard it would be go 24 hours without smoking. Are you sneaking off to smoke? Sneaking out at night? Is that the deal?

If none of this is the case (smoking allowed on campus, you go home at night, etc.), why is it important for you to tell your teachers? What you do legally and/or off campus is not essential for them to know. Why would you bring this up?

Finally, I imagine that if you smoke with any regularity, they already know, because they can smell it on you.

That depends on your school’s rules on things like smoking. If smoking and possession of tobacco products is strictly forbidden, and it probably is since you say you are in middle school, you broke the rules. So yes, your teacher is required to report your infraction. Being nice has nothing to do with it. The teacher is obligated to enforce all school rules and can get fired for not doing so. Now, perhaps the teacher really didn’t get a good look at you and what you were doing so he might have not reported it because he wasn’t sure. Or maybe he did report it and the decided to not punish you.

What will happen to you? That also depends on the school’s disciplinary rules. You might be given detentions or suspended for a week. Or it could be more serious. You could be expelled or sent to a special school for disciplinary cases. Or maybe you will just be given a very strong warning.