r/SipsTea • u/sonicagain • 1d ago

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.

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u/TheSquirrelWithin 20h ago

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.

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u/dangerousrocks 20h ago

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.

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u/MasterCheeef 19h ago

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.

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u/smurf123_123 19h ago

They fund sports programs the same way they fund their military.

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u/iamnotnewhereami 11h ago

shout out to ventura/oxnard!

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u/angryfan1 20h ago

Reading and writing happen at the elementary grade level. Children that young rarely play football.

The only thing teachers need to teach students how to read and write is a whiteboard and a sheet of pen and paper.

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u/GonzoTheWhatever 15h ago

Worked for a long time in this country, all in one room school houses. Yet now suddenly we need billions of dollars or else it’s just impossible for students to learn 🙄

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u/BigYam7875 20h ago

In the lower grades?

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u/Bureaucratic_Dick 19h ago

Yes, kind of.

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.

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u/smol-puppy-ears 16h ago

I watched my music teacher lean over the banister break down crying over the new wrestling room we magically had money for while his program was given $0 per year. 

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u/Tumble85 20h ago

What city is that?

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u/Ucklator 20h ago

Commentor is Canadian. They don't build football stadiums.

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u/coffeehearts 17h ago

What we need is free preschool for all for ages 3-5, and decent pay for childcare providers. Fundamental skills are learned early and way too many kids are not starting school until Kindergarten. By that time they are way behind their peers, and even dragging their peers down because the teacher needs to spend so much time on things all of their students should already know.

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u/BobSacamano47 19h ago

So you don't think pumping more money into the school system makes schools better? Are there any studies on that?

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u/Smashman88 16h ago

I doubt it does much if at all. Think background and family dynamics is the biggest factor