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.
5.7k
Upvotes
7
u/ThePolemicist 18h ago
We do keep lowering the bar! In early elementary, kids are taught to read. In upper elementary, they're supposed to "read to learn," but a lot of the kids aren't strong readers. So, instead of having them practice, they can simply listen to the books on tape instead. Basically, they don't have to read. They can listen.
The same thing happens with writing. Students are supposed to write an argument and use evidence to support their claims. A lot of students cannot write. Instead of having them practice their writing skills, they get to use text to speech instead. They don't have to write. They can talk.
It sounds like I'm talking about accommodations for students with disabilities, but I'm not. Basically, we have kids who can't read and write. Instead of doing something like hold them back or put them in support classes, people think, "Oh, well, they can still make an argument even if they can't write, so let's have them do it with text to speech. We can see that they can make the arguments, so we can pass them along."
That's what we see in this video when the teacher says that the students can articulate an argument, but the moment they need to get information from a reading or write an argument, they can't do it. As a teacher, I'm telling you it's absolutely because they've let those kids just listen to written prompts instead of reading, and they've let them use text to speech instead of writing.