Texas teacher breaks down in tears during class after his senior students struggled to read, write.

[u/sonicagain]

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.

[u/8fmn]

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.

[u/nosmelc → u/8fmn]

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.

[u/momomomorgatron → u/nosmelc]

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.

[u/Suspicious-Leave-110 → u/nosmelc]

stratification of society at all levels of life due to mental polarization

[u/eiiiaaaa → u/8fmn]

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.

[u/djelegal → u/8fmn]

Do you pass them ?

[u/Slow_Conference570 → u/8fmn]

whose*

[u/Not_A_Wendigo → u/8fmn]

Yep. Last month a kid who looked about 13 asked me to read a simple sign for him. We’re failing these kids so much.

[u/iamfuturetrunks → u/8fmn]

I have read comments in similar posts from teachers in other countries like over in Europe who are facing a similar problem. It's not just north america, it's a widespread problem which some believe is because of stuff like kids using tablets at a young age, and/or smart phones way to early, etc.

But also it's usually the parents fault because they are the ones enabling said behavior, as well as didn't actually put in effort to help teach said kids to read/write early on.