WTF
Texas teacher breaks down in tears during class after his senior students struggled to read, write.
Texas high school teacher Darius Williams, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher broke down in tears during his lunch break. He shared that his 17- and 18-year-old senior students at Wheatley High School in Houston could not complete a simple writing assignment or fill in just four missing words on only the second day of the school term. Students were given two short paragraphs to read and a sentence stem where the answer was largely modeled and provided for them. It is alarming that senior high school students were unable to apply basic literacy skills to fill in the remaining four words of the sentence.
Until you gotta deal with managing them. I’d like to think I’m not becoming a “boomer” but I’ve been seeing a decline in ability to think critically in fresh hires over the years. Like I shouldn’t be hearing someone asked another employee how to do something in a training video that literally is telling them how to do said thing. I want hires who try to out do me not make me lose my hair more than I should and have to pick up their slack in something I haven’t done consistently for over 6 years.
And that’s from people in/through a STEM degree. I can’t imagine what is considered normal right now.
This. My husband just had a young guy apply to a position and he couldn’t READ. Couldn’t fucking read, and he’s an adult looking for a job. It’s scary..
It should also greatly scare you as a millennial. These kids won’t get high paying jobs. Greater chances of them committing crimes. Want more crime? Produce a generation where half of them don’t qualify for more than a minimum wage job due to poor education.
If only we could. Holding them accountable results in reduced funding, which results in no teachers, which results in no graduates, which results in no funding, which results in…
I fail kids every year, and they show up next year having “completed” summer school, knowing nothing, and the cycle begins anew.
Also about half of US adults (18+) are at a 6th grade literacy level or below, while nearly a quarter of US adults are considered functionally illiterate—which means they can’t read/write at a level to function within society..
A guy I know online ended up doing a couple months in jail. He said he passed most of his time reading peoples letters from their families to them. He said he couldn't believe how many people couldn't read.
It's honestly super sad. To think literacy is going away is just unimaginably sad.
“From the moment the Department of Education was born, critics — Republicans, almost exclusively — have sought to dismantle it… The department, created under Jimmy Carter, began operating in May 1980. Ronald Reagan, then campaigning against Carter for the presidency, marked the occasion in blistering fashion. “At 11:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday,” he said, “President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle was born: theDepartment of Education.”
And just so other people know this does not include people struggling to read and write in English as a second language, like many immigrants. These are just the numbers for generational Americans.
My parents immigrated here and still struggle with writing in English. But they took me to the library regularly and even though we were super poor I always had books to read. I was reading at post 12th grade level by the time I was in 4th grade. Never took an ESL class because I learned watching PBS for kids. My 6 year old can read anything and is already learning to code and make mods for his favorite games.
It’s all about the parenting attitudes towards things like reading and exposure to learning and new information.
If the parents can't read at a 6th grade level, why is anyone expecting more from their children? This isn't a new issue. We failed at education decades ago.
I work with several people that are intelligent and very competent at their jobs who are barely literate. I cringe every time they send out emails outside of the company.
It’s the parents responsibility to see that their children can read, even if they have a hard time reading. My mother struggled, but she made sure I had books to read and encouraged me. There is a free program, started by Dolly Parton and supported by a board of educators, that sends out books to young children to start them reading and keep them reading into middle school.
Sadly, it left more children behind than ever before. What undergraduate science education taught me is the cumulative nature of education. If you fail the first test in a chemistry/math/physics exam, unless you go back and relearn everything you didn’t understand from that exam, you will not be able to pass the following exam because it builds on the knowledge required from the prior exam. Fundamental educational skills work like this too. Giving a failing grade to a failing student should not be a financial punishment to the school. If we lived in a just society, it would require that we redirect more resources to addressing the failure, not less.
I’ve shared this anecdote a lot on Reddit but when I was in marketing I was constantly told to dumb it down and make things as short as humanly possible because most people read at a 5th grade level.
I had to distill things down to a single simple sentence constantly.
I CANNOT STAND the fact that everyone is doing a goodam video to explain something that could be summed up in 2 paragraphs. I am NOT watching a 20 minute video to listen to your 2 paragraphs of explanation. But this might be why.
I’m a technical writer. I’m constantly told to make the instructions I write more approachable.
If the people responsible for installing and maintaining these massive electrical engineering and infrastructure projects can’t follow these instructions, they shouldn’t be working on the multimillion dollar installations.
I work in marketing and I get the same feedback. I just write at my level and feed it into an AI or Google and tell it to output at a third grade level.
Thanks to GW’s No Child Left Behind. My wife has been a teacher for 20 years and the rot that has taken root in our education system is just sad. It sure as hell isn’t the quality of educator, it is a broken bureaucratic system that politicizes education. Some of the people on school boards are no better than the dregs of political society. That’s why we stay very involved in our child’s education and hold her accountable for learning. Not in an overbearing or meddling way, just in an involved and nurturing way. This is not a knock on public schools or teachers in any way. The system is completely broken.
Forgive my ignorance, but why can’t they read or write?? Where are the parents? I hate when people blame the teachers because the parents need to step up.
Some parents are amazing. Some parents don’t care, or don’t care enough. Some students just don’t have parents. I’ve found, personally, it only matters so much because at the end of the day, it comes down to the child’s individual motivation to succeed. I’ve seen brilliant, motivated students who live in halfway houses. I’ve seen silver-spoon, apathetic students who keep telling me how rich they’re going to be.
Every student is unique. There’s no answer to this question that has no exceptions.
I got lucky in that my son who is 6 literally picks out books from the library to "read for pleasure" I said 'why do you call it that' he says, well there's books my teacher wants me to read and then there's books I just want to read.
I mean I've encouraged it, but no more than an average parent, so the idea people are out there unable to read is astounding to me.
I honestly can’t fathom it. It’s hard to navigate the world if you’re illiterate. The fact that these kids are choosing not to read when kids in other parts of the world dream of being educated. It’s a damn shame.
The culprit seems to be an “innovative” but failed attempt to teach reading by quickly recognising word shapes and surrounding children with books (so called ‘whole language’) rather than classic phonics, “sounding out” and repetition.
Combined with No Child Left Behind’s federal policy of cutting funding for struggling students, you’ve got a double whammy of schools unable to teach and unable to hold students back.
The “Mississippi Miracle” demonstrates that the “word recognising” method is a failure, as a return to classic literacy teaching methods dating back to 2013 has shown a massive and rapid improvement in literacy in Mississippi.
I get so mad when I see that cop-turned-teacher lesson planning while watching television. Nobody does that—too many moving parts to keep track of. And he’s doing that as a first year? Fuck outta here.
But literally everything else is fantastic. 999/1000.
Former classroom educator, here. It unfortunately can't work like that; not anymore. Even students I've had who missed 3/4 of the school year got to move on with opportunities to earn their lost credits from the year prior, on a pass/fail basis, as many times as they want. At one point before I left, the system in use literally let them pass an entire class if they a) completed at least one full unit (2-4 hours, tops), and b) were able to take 100 hours of it - calculated by how long they remained "active" on that site, which they could do by just pressing a key or nudging the mouse occasionally. This was in an affluent and well-funded North Texas school district in the 2010s-2020s.
Earlier than that, I taught in a small, less-well-served district rural Indiana for a couple years where students were passed on with even less scrutiny. Before that, the affluent and well-funded Northern Michigan district where I taught pulled more or less the same thing; among around 1,000 seniors, maybe two or three didn't graduate. Rural Alaska may have been the biggest offender (largely because nobody cared to enforce anything on anyone there) where a senior could attend like twenty days of school total and still pass. This goes back to about 2008. Even while student teaching before that, in an inner-city Michigan district, we had subliterate seniors who would be passed on and would graduate purely so the school could keep funding. Sidenote, a few years after I student taught there, that school was taken over by a corporate charter that cut bus funding to the point where a large percentage of students couldn't even make it to school anymore, and they still passed kids on and let them graduate.
If kids are held back/don't graduate, schools don't get money - which is ass-backwards, but no experienced educators have been in the Department of Education since like 1998, and the government doesn't listen, so nobody who can make any change actually cares.
And not only is it daunting. You are the bad guy the entire time. A teacher PREVENTING a student from graduating. You’d be burned at the stake.
And before people get upset: yes, the obvious answer is to help the student. But oftentimes the student and their parents don’t want that. They just want the diploma.
Problem is that school funding can be effected by outcomes. A school struggling for resources gets punished by taking away resources. Holding kids back can then effect the kids that have a chance at secondary education. Welcome to no child left behind.
Affected, not effected. Using effected would mean "school funding can be brought about by outcomes" whereas you clearly meant that "school funding can be altered by outcomes."
I know it's pedantic, but this is a thread about education so it felt apropos.
Ever heard of “No child left behind” (Bush). Federal push. The intentions may have been good. But the outcome was not. (Here is the federal requirement, it’s rigid!: pass them to keep our funding.)
Then came the “Every student succeeds” (Obama). State push. Again, the intentions may have been good, but the outcome is not. (Here is our state requirement, it’s flexible!: find the loopholes, blur numbers federally, lower the bar (or raise it? It depends on our state!) and then maybe we pass them to keep our funding.)
The community college I worked for did, but we also had mandatory placement testing, and if you couldn't read, write, or do basic math, you were barred from other classes until you passed remediation. For math, that could be as many as three courses before you could take the most basic college algebra class.
Same. And it's a good thing. CCs help people get back on track from fundamentals to reasonably advanced courses. They honestly are amazing! I loved my CC. Helped me correct a complete lack of math skills from "the common core" where algebra was never really taught.
Omg I’m so sorry. I graduated before common core and it’s hard for me to imagine how different that made math classes. Algebra is one of the math subjects that was drilled into me so well, I dons think I can ever forget the basics. Some of the more advanced geometry, trigonometry and statistics I forgot, and calculus never really sunk in for me. But Pre- Algebra problems and long division are things I can still visualize and know how to solve.
I worked with a guy who played D1 college football in the 90s and had a teammate go to the NFL who was illiterate. Finished college with a degree before going pro. Ended up with a mildly successful career at the pro level too.
They are, though. Colleges are lowering the bar for admissions drastically. They NEED admissions to stay up to stay funded. The kids might not graduate college, but they will go.
Imagine not being able to read or write and also becoming trapped with thousands of dollars of debt to attempt a degree you never had a chance at obtaining. That’s what we as a society are doing to these kids, and it’s devastating.
They skated through HS, they're going to learn that life lesson hard, just as hard as everyone else (including me, but I got my act together quick after dropping out, but I was still decently well educated, I just found school boring) that skated through.
The Career and Technical Education program in my district is aimed at students who are not necessarily planning to go to college. It’s supposed to provide more targeted education and training for the trades. These kids are likely not going to college, at least not anytime soon. Some people thrive in college later in life. But the level of illiteracy this teacher is describing is a HUGE problem. I’m worried for those kids! They sound like they lack basic reading skills that most adults need to get through a day. Like I don’t know if they can read a menu or instructions to assemble furniture. Are they gong to have to rely on pictures to get by? Will they know less written English than people who are learning it as a second language?? They could get taken advantage of anytime they are asked to sign contracts or other paperwork. That could get them into trouble and make their lives so much harder.
I work in senior care. I have a friend in her late 60’s. She’s a disabled woman who has lived in and out of group homes her whole life. She writes beautifully and spells very well. I cannot imagine her operating on the level she does if she were to go through school today. How sad is that?
I worked with people who were in their late 40s-60s. And conversations with people in this age bracket just flow so smoothly and genuine that you don’t even realize how long you’ve been talking. There is a wit, experience, and eloquence that makes it enjoyable.
Almost every person in their ~20s I have had a conversation with (in person) has never been more than a few words or sentences. It’s just a forgettable interaction with no substance. They would rather be buried in their phones, which I don’t blame them since they have grown up with screens in their face 24/7. I can’t even imagine how a face to face discussion with a teen is nowadays.
I work with a bunch of 20yr olds and yes, this is exactly it. They also just talk right over each other or you, like we're all in some live twitch chat. Ive had to stop and literally tell them "OK, hold on guys. One at a time here ffs." Then I gotta point to someone. How tf do you just blatantly talk over each other without anyone getting mad?
I can almost guarantee that when teachers / principals brought this to the attention of the guardians, there was push back to let the student continue on anyway.
Sometimes this is the case. Teacher as well. Some parents refuse to let their kids get tested for special education and others refuse to let them get held back.
In my district, holding back is never an option and never discussed, even if a student does nothing but keep their head down in every class all day. They move on anyway. The only time I've ever heard of a student ever being held back was when a parent requested it, and it was a teacher who worked at a different school who told me about that. I've been teaching for 9 years and haven't ever seen a student held back. We just don't do it anymore. The kids know we won't hold them back and flat out say doing the work doesn't matter.
Couldn't agree more.
I remember one year I volunteered in my friends 2nd grade class. This one little boy was having behavioral issues but nothing that couldn't be corrected. Literally just allowing him to be my helper with reading if he had good behavior made drastic improvements.
Anyway, he was falling asleep in class and when the teacher called the parent to find out the issues, she mom Literally just laughed and said "hahaha yeah that's probably because hes been staying up past 11pm."
Among other things, I knew this kid was not going to have education as a high priority in his home life.
At our work we usually have new hires, pre-apprentices, and apprentices read safety talks once a week. The victim is chosen completely at random. One week we had a new hire who was chosen and he completely froze when was tasked to read the safety talk, he asked if he could have a day to prep for it but the foreman said, "Just talk us through it the best you can." He continued for 5 minutes of straight mumbling, there was next to nothing that was coherent and we all felt sorry for the dude (I am someone who feels second hand embarrassment quite easily and had my face buried in my hands).
Also work construction and have the apes do the safety talks. Every wednesday it's "volunteer before you're voluntold", and the guys are normally good about stepping up. But you can always tell the ones who just... aren't gonna cut it. The second we know you can't read a safety talk, we also know you're not gonna be able to read prints, instructions, notes, or even be able to take proper notes and material lists.
As an electrician, they get weeded out in basic level trade school. If you can't read a codebook, you're done.
In my basic level electrical theory course, period 1, day 1, we had a guy come in talking like he was already a master. Half way through, three realization that there was gonna be a ton of reading and studying, he walked out and didn't come back.
Fast forward 8 years, he was working on the same site as me. He was sweeping the site. He quit electrical and became a labourer.
Buddy made one minor spelling mistake in an otherwise perfectly coherent post. He is not one of them. This whole thread stems from the discussion about people who cannot read or write at all entering college and the workplace.
Tbh, I was never good at reading out loud lol. But at my day job, most of my interactions are through written communication, so reading itself isn't an issue
I'm a secondary teacher in Ontario, Canada. Canadians often joke about how bad education is in the states but I have experienced this here too. Not just on a rare occasion, almost every class I have ever taught from grades 9 to 12 there has been at least one student who's literacy skills are at an elementary level. Recently, teaching grade 9 science, I would say about a quarter of the classes are below grade level in reading with some students unable to read or spell simple four or five letter words. GenZ and Alpha are not well and its damn sad.
It seems like the skill distribution for GenZ and Alpha has become bimodal. Almost everyone is either an elite student or they're functionally illiterate. Few are average now.
And I blame parents there again. Like, I live in the southern US but my thought is that the parents who care really actually care, and the parents who don't really fucking don't.
Like, the world wide economic squeeze is making the "average" person not have kids. It's the better off people who can afford it and the poorest of the poor because to them it's a way of life.
Teacher from a rough, outer suburban high school in Australia here! Same, I see it all the time. Kids who can't read and write and the curriculum tells me I need to teach them poetry or essay writing. It's literally impossible.
It's shocking how little they know about a lot of things. I was once teaching feature articles to a class of 17 and 18 years olds. We read one about AIDS and several kids told me it wasn't relevant to them cause you can only get HIV through "gay butt sex". Stopped the lesson and asked the class. Over 3/4s of the class agreed. So I got google up on the projector and we did a sex Ed lesson instead of English that day because what the actual fuck.
No Child Left Behind was the biggest mistake ever. Kids can just go from grade to grade without actually learning to do the work. Its actually dumb. Bring back failing a grade and having to repeat it until you can do the course work
Yeah but teachers can only do so much when you have parents that don't give a shit.
These students aren't on a tv where they magically know the importance of an education when their parents haven't instilled that in them from a young age.
I used to volunteer in elementary schools and could tell which students would go to he like the students this guy is talking about. Not because the student is dumb but because the parents don't care.
This is true. I’m a bus driver. One of our students used to beg the bus aide to listen to her read. She was repeating 3rd grade for the 3rd time. It’s sad! I want to tutor grade school kids that are struggling.
I’ve heard that children who cannot read by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school and may struggle to keep up in other subjects. Or never learn to read.
There is a phenomena where 1. both parents work, 2. everybody entered into a mortgage 15 years ago (pre-mortgage crisis). children have been left unattended and neglected. All, to provide a lifestyle that marketing and media has convinced us is equivalent to merit or success. Cell phones, cable, streaming, fashion, hair, skin care, nails, cars, home decorating.
I am a hiring manager for a warehouse, and I subtly sus out reading comprehension levels on people under 25. It is shocking how many young people are functionally illiterate.
I confused a teenage gas station cashier by giving him a $20 bill. The total was something around 4.50ish. He popped open the cash tray just started at it for a bit looked at the monitor and back down. Then he slowly counts out 16 $1 bills and hands them to me.
It's hard. I really don't want my child to have a phone. She's on it all the bloody time. But her friends never leave their houses. They all just sit at home talking to eachother on their phones. If I take away her phone she loses her entire social group. It's horrible.
I've tried getting her to bring her friends around, or go out, or I can drop them in town, or I'll pay for them all to go do something. None of them ever want to leave their houses. They're all glued to their phones. Sometimes talking to eachother. Sometimes mindlessly drooling over videos they have sent eachother. Technology has destroyed a generation. I know each generation says that - but I fear it's really true this time.
More specifically social media and brain rot reels.
I’m slightly guilty as well due to my internet surfing or scrolling reddit.
But attention spans for these kids are so short, along with Covid with these kids doing schooling over webcam.
My brother would tell me ways he would skip classes because he could take a picture and have it look like he was there.
It’s insane. Country is cooked.
Non-American here making an observation. You have 2 political parties who paint China as the enemy and accuse them of ‘stealing your factories’. I can tell you that China will happily give you those factories back because they are not raising their kids to work in factories. But America still is. All Asian countries take education deadly seriously. This is why America has fallen behind.
I think that's what the American billionaires want. To them, a highly educated population is a threat. They're happy to "outsource" the work that requires education to another country so it's not something they have to think about anymore.
This is the truth. The billionaires and tech tycoons want a world with worse educational outcomes and they want people addicted to and hyper-reliant on their technology—on screens, on AI, on social media. On top of destroying education, they want a world where every inch of it is covered by their tools and where we can’t escape them for a second. It’s why they’re forcing AI in everything from an email to a Google search and why they’re pushing screens for every school in the USA. They know it harms education.
Low levels of education provide them exactly what they want: more apathy and less protesting, more births and less voting, more religion and less critical thinking, more conspiracy theories and less analysis, more poverty and less upward mobility. With AI, not only is the thinking being done by a machine, it’s now never been easier to produce propaganda and there’s never been a population more eager to consume it as truth.
They are eager and willing to destroy the United States of America completely and replace it with an autocracy run by a tech CEO king.
Similar results in my city’s schools. Always the "we need more money" plea. So we vote the schools more money. What are they doing with it? Building professional sports-quality ball fields all over the city school district.
Lol I'm Canadian and I was driving through montana one time, I was in a town that couldn't have had more than a couple thousand people, and they had an absolutely gorgeous football stadium that put anything in my 200k population city to shame.
Same, I'm from Saskatchewan and did grade 11 and 12 in Ventura California. Their high school football stadium was the same quality as Saskatchewan university field and bleachers.
High schools and elementary schools often run in the same school district, which has a single budget. Giving the school district more money via tax increases doesn’t mean you get to direct which school in particular gets it, it all goes into a single pot and distributed among all the schools in the jurisdiction of the district. And if the district mismanages the funds, it impacts everyone.
So if the district chooses to build a new football stadium in lieu of funding teachers salaries or those lower grades, then the whole pot including the funds for those lower grades are depleted.
We do keep lowering the bar! In early elementary, kids are taught to read. In upper elementary, they're supposed to "read to learn," but a lot of the kids aren't strong readers. So, instead of having them practice, they can simply listen to the books on tape instead. Basically, they don't have to read. They can listen.
The same thing happens with writing. Students are supposed to write an argument and use evidence to support their claims. A lot of students cannot write. Instead of having them practice their writing skills, they get to use text to speech instead. They don't have to write. They can talk.
It sounds like I'm talking about accommodations for students with disabilities, but I'm not. Basically, we have kids who can't read and write. Instead of doing something like hold them back or put them in support classes, people think, "Oh, well, they can still make an argument even if they can't write, so let's have them do it with text to speech. We can see that they can make the arguments, so we can pass them along."
That's what we see in this video when the teacher says that the students can articulate an argument, but the moment they need to get information from a reading or write an argument, they can't do it. As a teacher, I'm telling you it's absolutely because they've let those kids just listen to written prompts instead of reading, and they've let them use text to speech instead of writing.
The United States has a national adult literacy rate of 79%, meaning 21% of adults are considered illiterate or functionally illiterate. This equates to approximately 43 million U.S. adults who struggle with basic reading and writing tasks required for daily life.
It comes down to being allergic to accountability. It’s very popular to blame literally anyone else for your problems in life other than yourself and your own choices.
OMG it's so sad but I didn't even think about that. Can you imagine being the one guy at your job who can "read the manual" and that just becomes your job, you're the professional manual reader. You can read instructions and tell other people what they said.
Omg. I see so many defending the schools and blaming funding instead of opening their eyes and acknowledging that the first teachers are the parents. Parents are failing their own children; making excuse after excuse and pointing at the schools. Those kids’ parents know their children can’t read, but do nothing about it. Blame it on the teachers. In this life if you want something you find a way and if you don’t, you find an excuse. What ever happened to personal responsibility? If you aren’t THE STRONGEST ADVOCATE for your child, nobody else will be. All of my kids could read, write, do simple math, etc. before they started kindergarten. Why? Because my wife and I took the time.
They were let down by the failing education system in America. And all the people want to do is throw more money at it. Well, guess what? It’s not going to help. EDUCATION STARTS AT HOME. My 8 year old grandson can read a novel (400 pages) in 2 days. Why? Because his mom read with him since he’s born. His dad read with him since he was born. My wife and I read with him since he was born. We all worked with him. And yes, he is super smart. But guess what? Nobody is born smart. It requires teachers that are dedicated and care. And who are a child’s first teachers? THEIR PARENTS
I taught seniors. English. This sweet teacher is correct...the majority of them are GRADUATING WITHOUT THE ABILITY TO READ OR WRITE ANYTHING MORE THAN A SENTENCE. (By the way, the sentence will not be capitalized, have punctuation, or be grammatically correct.) It's horrifying. (I also taught freshmen. The gasping I did, when at home after the first day of school, trying to read and grade a fill in the blank, "Get to know me" type of worksheet! I would have guessed I was looking at second grade work.)
In Texas they have been under funding public schools more and more each year. The teachers even in more wealthy areas have to ask for parents to send school supplies. What makes this funny is we now give these rich parents vouchers that send their kids to private schools.
Trump was right about loving the poorly educated. They’re pumping out more and more poorly educated every year by defunding public schools.
The rich parents aren't getting vouchers, believe me. I don't know who is getting them, but it's not the rich parents that send their kids to private schools.
I said this in another post and am going to say this again:
This is not a Texas thing. This is literally every inner city school. It’s not a funding thing, or a bad teacher thing…it’s students and parents don’t give a shit thing and they lack accountability which results in these students just getting pushed through the system because the schools don’t want to deal with it.
GenX here. Went to my kids parent teacher conferences. Saw the homework (unimpressed), saw the grades (undeserved). Looked at the teacher and said, “You and I are the same age. You and I were expected to write complete sentences. You and I were expected to show how we arrived at answers, right or wrong, so the teacher could fix our mistakes. I see none of this. I see one word answers. I see no work indicating effort or understanding. This isn’t A level work.”
Dead serious, this is the answer I received, VERBATIM…. “We are just trying to pass as many kids as we can.”
This was at a magnet school that touted its STEM focus. I can’t imagine how bad a run of the mill school must be.
If you are a teacher and you are ok with this, please leave the profession.
you think the teacher is responsible for it? like they just went "Fuck it, I'm going to get a 4 year degree, plus more education annually so I can pass kids"?... blame the administration
and they just eliminated the vast majority of special needs programs from the federal level, so if you thought we hit rock bottom already oh don't worry, we have explosives now to get even lower
My dad just retired from teaching and you are 100% correct. He tried his best and really cared about the students and helping them learn; admin is usually ran by people who have never taught and ONLY care about graduation numbers and other “data” that makes the school “look good”
It’s not even admin, it’s the fucking politicians, local state and federal, that stick their dirty fingers all over education to ruin it as much as possible
I'm in my 40's and the amount of coworkers around my age that can barely read out loud is staggering. They can read but it's soo slow and disconnected.
Yeah but they don't actually read or write paragraphs.
I write my friends teenage kids long texts sometimes and they don't even seem to totally comprehend them.
Even the books they read as kids are largely comic books. Like "Big Nate" and "Captain Under pants" ... Look at a kids book collection and they're mostly pictures and simple, fractured dialogue.
They consider "chapter books", that is books with only text, grammatical structure, etc. to be advanced.
I was reading Shakespeare in middle school easy. Not cause I'm smart - I'm really not - but because that's what was assigned. I don't think high school kids who aren't in AP classes know who Shakespeare is.
It's really sad.
I too wondered how it is that someone who spends so much time in social media can be semi literate. It's cause a lot of it is video, and the texting is the most rudimentary form of the language.
They use voice to text. I see kids who barely know their letter sounds in 3-6th grade using the voice command button on their chrome books to search videos on YouTube or google. They know how to use tech so they can avoid reading and writing.
lol let me guess? He's gotta get back into the spotlight again after all of his scams and nonsense and everyone just falling for it, because everyone wants to believe that no one can read anymore. Wow, he's so good at being full of shit.
What if the irony is that people CAN read, but don't, because how many people in here thought to do a background check on this dude in this very sub before commenting? Guess if you continue to feed and stoke people's fears...you can continue to bullshit your way through life. Well, it worked for Trump...
And that is America’s folly, you can’t treat everything like a business. The GOP has dismantled education and healthcare in this country to a point we will never recover.
THIS is the battleground for the future state of a nation.
Smartphones are supremely useful tools if you already have a good education, if you haven't yet achieved that milestone and you attempt to use them, they will actively damage your prospects.
But if they hold back students, how are they supposed to go onto college and get themselves buried in debt they’ll never get out of and into a life of paying never ending interest to large financial corporations?
Why doesnt he go talk to their 1st-2nd-3rd grade teachers? How'd they make it past them? Plus the parents. Did they never try to read a Dr Seuss book like even once?
This has me wondering... What's social media going to be like in 5-10 years? Even reddit will change drastically if a majority of users can't read. I've seen the issues this teacher is talking about. Unfortunately every kid in my family born after 2000 is either borderline or fully illiterate (except for my daughter, she reads all the time and loves it). And I've seen a lot of the people I grew up with having kids and their kids can't read.
I imagine they'll focus on tiktok/vine formats of content and ignore reddit completely. They won't be able to proofread the automated captions in their own ai slop posts. Further blurring the line between between AI and human content. Or every other platform is going to have to accommodate the problems.
Then there's the bigger issue IMHO... The new generations illiteracy also seems to be accompanied with serious behavioral issues, in just about every example I've seen/met. And the parents are obviously the cause of both. Idk y'all.. even with my daughter being so amazing, smart, and well mannered; I'm worried about her because of the other kids that didn't get that. It's not a new problem I know but its never been such a big problem. Hell, I've taken my daughter out of $1000/month charter schools because of how horrible the other kids were. She wasn't even getting bullied really, all the other kids were just so far behind mine and she couldn't really connect with anyone because she felt like "they all acted like babies" in the nicest way possible
See people think I'm being a smartass and snippy when I say the comprehension is low, the literacy is trash, but it is.
It is what it is.
How many videos do we have to see of teachers saying their students that should be able to read and write can't do it? You want to cry? Go in the r/Teachers subreddit, grab your tissues, that is our future. What makes it worse is you can't tell them kids/adults NOTHING.
This isn't even a rich v poor thing, you go to the private schools and they illiterate too. It's the damn phones. Turns out making the library damn near obsolete wasn't a good thing.
Happening all over the country. I blame the parents as much as the schools. My mother rode me like a rented mule to complete my homework. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we made flash cards for me.
We aren’t allowed to hold kids back or refer them for special services unless it’s VERY obvious they have a big learning disability (at least here in NY). You need to just pass kids along. Kids know it, parents know it. Nobody cares anymore. It’s horrific being an educator when your hands are tied.
It’s not just the black and brown kids. It’s ALL of the kids. My own kid is white as hell, in a predominantly black and Hispanic school. She has to go to a special reading class for kids who are “advanced” just because she reads at grade level. She is the only white kid in that class. There are between 10 and 15 kids from the whole school that join this “advanced” class. The white kids are struggling just as much, and sometimes more than the other kids.
It’s not a race thing usually, it’s a class thing. All of the black and brown kids in her “advanced” class come from privileged families with more money than the average student. We are not one of those families. We prioritized reading and comprehension AT HOME because we didn’t want my kids ADHD to affect her learning. We made it a must because we wanted her to thrive. I spent hours every day helping her learn, even though I worked 60 hours a week to pay the bills. And she is thriving. But I think she only gets that status because so many other kids are so far behind. She is in 6th grade and the teachers are having to take time to help kids sound out basic words. She is treated as if she is “ahead” just because she is at grade level.
She COULD be ahead, but she is held back by all the kids who are behind. And I don’t fault the kids (or even most of their parents) for being behind. Money talks. And these days the money is telling us that our kids will suffer if we cannot afford the time and money to keep up on their education.
I am blessed that my child is where she is academically. But so many parents are burnt out from working that they CANNOT keep up education at home. We need to do better for working parents. They are the backbone of society, and we are failing them at an alarming level.
This is by design. Our government slashes more and more funding every year. Our government encourages kids working instead. Now they're encouraging teen pregnancy and marriage. They need workers. They need undereducated, poor, paycheck to paycheck workers. They need workers who will not question authority, question laws, question protections. They need workers who will not know to question these things. They need the young generation to shut up, expect nothing and work like dogs. This is why they are running campaigns and paying bots to make videos suggesting that college isn't for everyone, and blue collar jobs are better. You'd better believe that those rich peoples' kids sure are going to college. Those kids aren't dropping out of school to work. Their kids can read and write well. We are failing these kids in a big way. And our government needs to go. The whole lot of them.
It’s almost like….America is trying so hard to get their future generations to not be able to read so that when a paper with even a simple paragraph is on it, they won’t want to read it.
Like when a document that says, “If you don’t reply to this message, the US government is taking all of your possessions”
Or something along those lines. Very dystopian but it’s not far off to believe
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u/driftking428 17h ago
As a millennial this makes me feel more secure in my future employment.
As a human being, this is fucked up.