Theatre Kid Guilt is Real and This Reddit Story Shows Why

by Chris Peterson

I read an interesting ‘AITA” Reddit post this week from a former high school theatre student asking if they were wrong for “getting” their theatre teacher fired, and more than anything, it just made me feel for them. 

In the post, they describe a teacher who allegedly used guilt to manage students, reacted badly when students expressed discomfort, and created an environment that felt increasingly unhealthy.

“For our first show, she proposed something that she wrote herself,” she said. “For one of the parts, she wanted us to pant and bark like dogs, to which we expressed our uncomfortability. She took that as a personal attack and started manipulating us into thinking that we were the problem by saying she worked hard on the play and that we couldn't put it on anymore.”

The student eventually went to the principal, and the teacher was later let go. They also clarified that while students had some input in the hiring process, they were not part of the final employment decision. 

The student continued, “I've been harping on this for a few years, and wondering if me letting the principal know was a bad thing or not. Should I have talked with her even though she wouldn't listen? Should I have been more direct or something of the sort where she wouldn't feel as bad or whatnot?”

What I kept coming back to, though, was not whether this person was “the assh*le.” It was how many former theatre kids probably read that and immediately understood the guilt. Because that is such a theatre-kid thing, isn’t it? To replay something from years ago and wonder if you ruined everything just by saying out loud that something felt off.

My instinct is that this student probably did help initiate a closer look. That seems very possible. But that is different from being responsible for the firing itself. Based on the post, the principal made that decision after hearing the concern, and that usually means an adult in authority looked at the bigger picture and made a call from there. The student may have opened the door, but they were not the one standing in the office making employment decisions. 

I think that distinction matters a lot. There is a big difference between “I shared something that concerned me” and “I personally caused this person to lose their job.” Those are not the same thing, even if they are easy to blur together when you are young, sensitive, and probably still carrying some leftover theatre-program emotional damage like the rest of us.

Also, students are not supposed to be the ones quietly managing adult behavior in theatre. If a theatre teacher is making students uncomfortable, taking feedback personally, or creating an atmosphere where kids feel manipulated instead of supported, that is exactly the kind of thing a school should know about. And schools are supposed to do something with information like that. In this case, the post describes the teacher responding poorly to students’ discomfort over material in her original play, making students feel bad over absences tied to emergencies, and saying things that made them feel responsible for whether she stayed at the school. 

So, the student should not blame themselves for the teacher’s firing. At most, they may have been one part of why the school took a harder look. But if a teacher was actually fired, that decision belonged to the adults running the school, and it was almost certainly based on more than one student privately wondering if something was wrong. That is a much healthier way to understand it, and probably a much fairer one too.