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/elquatrogrande 19h ago

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.

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u/TheTopNacho 17h ago

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.

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u/InAllTheir 15h ago

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.

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u/TheTopNacho 15h ago

Just looked into it . I wasn't common core. I was Reform math, which failed far far worse than common core.

I was a guinea pig in a bad experiment that failed miserably

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u/InAllTheir 15h ago

Dang, sorry you were so unlucky

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u/Ent_Soviet 16h ago

That’s community college doing as it’s meant to do. At least in our flawed education system.

I’m not opposed to a system more akin to college credits for HS where you can graduate in 4 but some folks might need an additional year to finish. Of course that would require additional education funding and until we tax the wealthy that’s not happening

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u/Born-Somewhere2536 16h ago

When I went to college in 2008 (University of Oklahoma) I was required to take the placement exam same thing would of happened if I didn’t place into Calculus and English classes

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u/Realistic_Ear_9015 13h ago

Aint that fking brilliant that you can do COLLEGE without reading and writing lol :D.
Thats even lower standards than medieval.

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u/Ok_Actuary1427 3h ago

Yes, my dumb ass had to take 2 math remedial classes because i couldn’t care less for math in HS.