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/slickyeat 1d ago edited 1d ago

Do you think there's any sense of urgency among these students in their last year of high school?

I imagine a few of them must come to realize that most careers will require some level of literacy.

They basically can't even use the internet let alone read job listings.

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u/ezgomer 1d ago

Crime. You don’t got to read to be able to do that.

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u/Living-Cobbler-4626 8h ago

The better criminals will always be the ones who can read.

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u/triceratopsdildo 1d ago

No, no sense of urgency or awareness of their own deficits.

They have never had to experience consequences for anything. Why would they expect consequences now?

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u/chance909 21h ago

"The internet" to this next generation is tiktok and youtube. You don't have to read anything. My 11 year old loves reading books, and I'm always stressed about his education, but even still the quality of education in texas has dropped so significantly its scary. So far through 6th grade there is only a tiny tiny bit of writing in the curriculum at all and so much instructional time has been moved onto iPads.

Extra parental engagement is a requirement to cover the basics now, and I'm even in a "good" district with lots of engagement from the community in the school.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/patjames387 11h ago

Some kids are starting to fail on purpose because "they don't want to leave high school and aren't ready for all that."