The class that made me wish I had a different career.
Jessie Rezba teaches mathematics at Herscher High School in Illinois. Twenty years in the classroom, National Board Certified, and a union leader whose job includes being wary of anything that watches teachers. She had a class last year that made her want to leave teaching from burnout. She tried Socrait to relieve the burden of tracking behavior with her most difficult class and had some unexpected surprises along the way.
Coming back to the wild west
Jessie had been out on leave when the school year began. She walked back in partway through to a class that had no floor under it.
The children were feral and I was going crazy… trying to figure out what I was doing.I would end the period of a two-hour block class not knowing what had happened at the start of the block that day.
The class ran in two-hour blocks. Long enough that the beginning of a period could disappear before she reached the end of it. Many teachers know this challenge of trying to retain what happened in class until the time they have to write it down. At the suggestion of a fellow teacher, she tried Socrait with the class that was pushing her over the edge.
The full moon day
One day stands out from the rest. Late April or early May. The class had been impossible, and by the end of the block she had honestly lost the thread of how bad the start had been.
After a day when they were absolute wild demons—maybe it was a full moon—I read the data and thought, That didn’t happen today. Then I realized: Oh wow. That was today.
That is what a hard class does to you. It is so loud while it is happening that it erases itself before you sit down to write it up. The data was still there when her memory was not.
The behaviors were so off the wall that I had forgotten by the end what I dealt with at the beginning. Socrait takes the behavior tracking off your mind. Socrait listens while you teach and collects it for you, bias-free.
The names, and what the students did with them
Socrait was easy for her to implement, she just turned on the app and taught like normal. Socrait listens while teachers teach, and connects the observations, warnings, and praise about a student to the “voice names” entered for the class. When teachers say a student’s voice name (the name they call them out loud, not their full legal name), Socrait connects the context and tracks it. For Jessie, saying names out loud was the first thing that changed. The behavioral tallies and observations came with it giving her new insight into how she saw her class.
Socrait taught me how to say students’ names. And in doing so, I was able to lean into Socrait for the data. It was eye-opening to me, and it was eye-opening to the students to see the data—how many times I had to say a name in either a disciplinary way or a praise way.
Jessie shared with her class that she was using a new tool to help her remember her day. A few curious students asked to see their own tallies for praises and warnings. Then the class did something nobody set up for them.
The students got into it. They loved seeing how many times I said each name, and they created their own self-competition: Can I have the least amount of negatives and the most amount of praises?
Jessie Rezba’s student got into a competition for praise.
Something to bring to the principal
Jessie has been teaching long enough to know how a teacher’s account tends to get received. This time she was not walking in with a memory or a mood. She had the tallies, observations, and student patterns in Socrait.
I needed something tangible to tell the parents.
Having that bias-free data from Socrait to share with admin and parents—just the facts, just the tallies—takes away any chance for someone to say, ‘That’s just your feelings’ or ‘That’s just your emotions.’ Because it wasn’t. It was emotion-free. And that was powerful.
Walking in without the dread
The part she did not expect was what it did to the next morning. She stopped carrying the whole day home in her head.
I was no longer constantly thinking about discipline. I could just exist in the moment and not actively try to remember the bad. Socrait remembered it for me.
I didn’t dread the next day. I could walk in, teach, and walk out.
What a union leader watches for
Jessie has taught across two decades and is under her fifth principal at her current school. Administrative climates change, sometimes for the better and sometimes not, and she has worked through both. So have the teachers she represents. Some of them carry fresh wounds from administrations that used information against them, which is exactly why a tool that listens in class can read, at first, as one more way to be watched.
She had that worry too when you first heard about Socrait. What soothed her was knowing it was built by a teacher for teachers. Dr. Maria H. Andersen built Socrait as a teacher-first tool with un-biased data as the centerpiece. There is no narrative in it for someone to bend. It is a count, a document of observations, a summary of events and context and the teacher is the one who holds it.
So that’s what makes me feel safe with Socrait as a union leader, it’s just the numbers. Positives and negatives.
The data from Socrait that let her stand in front of a parent or a principal is the same data that is hard to turn against a teacher, because there is nothing in it to interpret. That is also why she now hands it to the colleagues who are reaching the point she reached.
Jessie Rezba explains why Socrait feels safe.
Jessie Rezba shares about reaching her burnout point.
I’ve shared Socrait with them. I’m hoping for them it helps alleviate that burnout, alleviate that frustration like it did with me. It worked last year when I was reaching my burnout point.
It is the same thread that ran through her whole year. A teacher’s word gets treated as a feeling until there is something underneath it. For her students, for her principal, and for her union, Socrait has the reliable data she can count on.
Jessie Rezba describes what changed for her with Socrait.
By May
By spring, the class she had dreaded was one she liked. She does not hedge about why.
By May, I loved the class. And I truly attribute it to Socrait. My only change was involving Socrait. And hands down, that made me a true believer.
By May, I was actually a little sad to see them go.
What Socrait keeps, and what it doesn’t
Socrait listens while you teach and turns what you say into behavior and praise notes, engagement and participation notes, a class summary, parent email drafts, reminders, and attendance signals. The audio is never stored. Student names are anonymized and are never sent to the language model. We do not sell student or teacher data, and we are FERPA-compliant, registered by the independent evaluator iKeepSafe.
Teachers are in control of their data. Read Socrait’s privacy policy
If you are in the year Jessie was in
This is the tool she says made the difference. Give yourself a chance to teach in the moment, and not have to carry the day with you in your head.
Teachers, try Socrait for free. Create an account here to get started.