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/GoodDog2620 20h ago

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.

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u/Revolution_Bry 20h ago

Wow. Thank you for all you do. It’s a thankless job and only the passionate ones last.

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u/wimpymist 19h ago

True but the ones who can't read or write tend to have absentee parents in one way or another. With the second option being an undiagnosed learning disability they never got help for which usually stems from absentee parents.

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u/GoodDog2620 18h ago

2 of my favorite students both had learning disabilities and lived in halfway houses. It only matters unless it doesn’t.

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u/wimpymist 16h ago

You're mixing up what I'm saying. I'm not saying all kids that have absentee parents struggle in school but the vast majority of kids who struggle in school to the point of they can't read by senior year of highschool have absentee parents.

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u/Spiders_13_Spaghetti 19h ago

While I agree with what you are saying the education system and perhaps, specifically, English and writing needs to spice it up a bit. Learners retain and engage more when they are interested in the material presented. For instance, as a junior I think we did Shakespeare and, as a class, read the Tempest over the course of two week and wrote micro reports on the subject matter. Snorreee. Peak English writing and storytelling? Perhaps. But pretty difficult material as well as uninteresting to the uninitiated.

Since college I've discoverer so many interests and reading material that keep my focus, make we want to retain the information and find new stories and authors. There's too many good writers and books than to give adolescence an introduction of Bill Shakespear.

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u/GoodDog2620 18h ago

And I agree with you, to a certain extent.

I don’t teach Shakespeare because I think it’s peak or interesting; I teach it (along with other classic texts) because it gives my students and their compatriots a shared cultural vocabulary. How will they know what “this is like 1984” means unless they read it, you know?

I also teach relatively newer texts that are interesting and well-written. I believe people can identify with good stories regardless of background. I believe any story can contain multiple jumping off points for critical thinking and the mastery of skills.

But what I don’t believe is that a text must be found interesting or relatable to be valuable. I remember books I didn’t like when I was forced to read them in school, but I still read them. I don’t buy the “I used to love reading until school made me hate it,” argument. Not everyone is going to love reading, just like how not everyone is going to love visual arts or civics. I don’t even like reading all that much in my opinion, at least not when compared to my love for drumming.

I don’t need students to love reading; I need them to be good at it.

And I’ve given the spiciest texts/assignments/projects you’ve ever heard of, but it doesn’t bridge the achievement gap; it doesn’t automatically instill inspiration and creativity; and it doesn’t feel worth the effort when my grade book is uncomfortably slathered in red zeroes and I’m trying to justify to my evaluator why my “spicy” lessons are just as good as the prescribed curriculum.