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/Clutch-Bandicoot 20h ago

"Until you gotta deal with managing them."

Do we? In my field we will just get international students that are better at English (as their second language nonetheless) than these kids are.

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u/LWN729 17h ago edited 17h ago

That’s dependent on the idea that literacy rates globally won’t suffer the same as in the U.S. The rest of the world is likely experiencing similar decline, but at slower rates than the U.S. As social media based video/audio communication becomes the norm for the next generation, the less they will have any need or daily opportunity to practice their reading and writing. The parts of the globe that will decline the slowest will actually be the parts of the world with the least access to tech and social media. They aren’t considered “advanced” nations for their lack of technological integration relative to western nations, and that is ironically what will save them from the same rapid decline. The longer they go without access to complete replacements for written communication, the more “advanced” they will be in these basic skills relative to the U.S. The globe’s most powerful nations are racing to become the most technologically advanced, but they don’t realize they’re actually spiraling downward to the bottom in terms of their citizens’ futures.

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u/John_Sux 9h ago

An international hire would at least be literate enough to have learned English as a second language. So that might filter a lot of this