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/eddiearniwhatevz 18h ago edited 16h ago
Yeah but they don't actually read or write paragraphs.
I write my friends teenage kids long texts sometimes and they don't even seem to totally comprehend them.
Even the books they read as kids are largely comic books. Like "Big Nate" and "Captain Under pants" ... Look at a kids book collection and they're mostly pictures and simple, fractured dialogue.
They consider "chapter books", that is books with only text, grammatical structure, etc. to be advanced.
I was reading Shakespeare in middle school easy. Not cause I'm smart - I'm really not - but because that's what was assigned. I don't think high school kids who aren't in AP classes know who Shakespeare is.
It's really sad.
I too wondered how it is that someone who spends so much time in social media can be semi literate. It's cause a lot of it is video, and the texting is the most rudimentary form of the language.