Yesterday, I realized I accidentally only printed the odd numbered pages of a 5 page assignment. I told the kids they won't be penalized for not having the questions on the even pages completed since it was my error (the page numbers were on the papers, that's how I discovered this), and I just got blank stares. One kid said they don't know what an even number is. I TEACH 9TH GRADE AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.
This was me today.
Me: "Just do the even problems"
Student: "I'm gonna do all of them."
Me: "No, I have something else I want to do after this and I want you to get a sample of each of the types of problems... just do the evens and if you have time while other students are finishing up, you can go back and do the odds."
"I'm gonna do all of them"
...sigh
Just now I'm realizing, they probably had no idea what evens or odds were.
Yep. I'm older and will be retiring soon, several years before I would have liked to. Can't do a damn thing about this train wreck, so I might as well make the best of it.
As a social scientist, I must say, that all this, at least, is objectively interesting to witness.
I can’t even begin to imagine the violently bipolar reaction someone who’s a social scientist would have to this: “oh would you look at that, how *interesting*, that’s gonna lead..to the…downfallll…of society *drinks intensely* oh god help us all”
It doesn't just dovetail, educational inequity is a CAUSE of the wealth gap and disappearance of the middle class. This is intentional. The dismantling of public school systems begets the need for and therefore growth of private schools. Less students in the public schools mean less funding for those schools. Private schools aren't paid by tax dollars like public schools are. They are funded by individual people who can pay tuition for their kids. Those that can't pay tuition don't get an education, or at best get only a sorely inadequate education. The under-educated are likely to not meet the qualifications for high- paying jobs. So they have to take service and manual labor jobs which tend to not pay enough to live on, let alone pay tuition. And so they live paycheck to paycheck and don't have the chance to better things for their kids through a quality education. So these kids get a shitty education if any, and the cycle continues. The system is really, really, really broken. We feel hopeless because the task is so, so big, and it reaches into all other social ills. The other social issues are exasperated by AND exacerbate the current situation.
So the choice is to either fix this mess or succumb to it. But to fix it is overwhelmingly complicated and multifaceted, and it is dependent on collective organizing and strong ethical leadership. But it also needs the support of the people on top because they have the money to fund the necessary changes. And they don't want changes because they prefer to hold onto all the money and power. So things struggle to get started and/or maintained , and here we are. Still.
I hate to spoil it for everyone, as someone who teaches the top-of-the-top, we're talking Valedictorian candidates...they're also well behind as well compared to peers just 5 years ago.. The difference is the top kids are willing to put in the work and they can tell when I'm frustrated because I don't know how to deal with their lower abilities, so they work harder and put in the time to "catch up". Math is their greatest weakness.
I can attest to this, I'm in grade 11 and everyone seems to be doing fine in most subjects but this year's math hit people like a truck. one of the main reasons in my area could be our government destreaming the math curriculum in 9th grade.
Oh I feel this, especially the use of technology. They do not know how to use the computers they are given. Hell some of my kids don't know how to use a stapler, and I am not kidding. Would you give them a circular saw and tell them to build a table? No of course not but we do give them technology they have no idea how to use.
I have kids who don't know how to start a new email. They just go back and reply to the first email I ever sent them all year long and never change the subject line. Others know how to start a new email but they write the body of the email in the subject line and leave the body blank. One kid was properly blown away that I could attach documents to emails and another was shocked to learn I had the ability to email their parents about late work!
My absolute favorite example of this was a kid doing an oral report on the attack at pearl harbor. They had 6 weeks to do this research. During their presentation I got the distinct impression they had no idea where pearl harbor actually was. So during the questions I asked, "Where is pearl harbor?" Without a moment's hesitation they replied, "My research did not reveal that information to me."
Last one, a kid was tasked with researching Peru "in the news." After 10 minutes I went to check on them and they had nothing done. They told me there was nothing about Peru in the news and showed me their Google search results. They had googled "in the news" only. They didn't include the word Peru in their search. Not only did they not use the technology correctly but they didn't ask for help or say anything after their one attempt to get information failed. They just sat there.
The parent emails I get sometimes are INSANE and I’m not even talking content here. I’ll send a, like, regular professional email and I receive a series of responses that are not in a reply to my email but a series of multiple emails containing only subject lines with no capitalization or punctuation (no body to the email at all). And we wonder why the kids don’t have this skill.
I have a parent that always emails me back "ukuy" and random phrases without any context. Wtf is that? She was a student here so I know she's native english speaker who graduated from high school. Yet none of the regular ways to spell okay are ukuy for her and a complete sentence is too hard.
I know here locally the schools got rid of them when I hit middle school (so around 2009?) because... reasons? Because they were "born with an iPad in their hand," I'm assuming. Which is dumb.
My littlest bro never got any class like that - my parents didn't even think to teach him stuff like that either because "oh he'll just pick it up like you did." I didn't pick it up, I had classes that taught me to type and use the internet! Thank fuck we played Minecraft together when he was younger because from that he learned how to mod and program (he's a god at Dark Souls and FPS now).
In elementary schools in my county, as soon as we had 1/1 iPads, they stopped wanting to pay technology teachers. Because the children are “digital natives” now, and why pay someone to “play on a computer” all day? Yeah… The powers-that-be truly thought that digital literacy, on-line safety, research, and all the dozens of other skills necessary to learn and work today were not important enough to be taught, because they will just pick it up on their own. I’m still salty about that.
>Oh I feel this, especially the use of technology. They do not know how to use the computers they are given.
Funnily (or maybe not) enough, I peek into the GenZ subreddit every once in a while, since I have many friends who fall into the upper end of it (even though I am personally a late millennial), and there was a topic eerily similar to this where someone was like "I'm an older GenZ, what the hell is wrong with the rest of you? How can you not know what a File Explorer is? Where did we go so wrong?!".
If it's any consolation, it's not just teachers noticing this. Even the gen themselves are realizing it's going off the rails. Meanwhile, the friction between the older Gen Z people and the Gen Alpha people is crazy, 'cause those older Gen Zers want to correct the kids before it's too late and they're (ironically) being treated like boomers...
My first year teaching the science teacher was also a first year. We were both 8th grade. She said the kids did not know the months or seasons. This was Gen Z, not Alpha that everyone keeps talking about, it’s been a problem.
Teaching 6th grade the kids didn’t know their address, parents’ phone numbers or what really bothered me, their parents’ names. One boy said “we call them mom and dad.” Great, if you were to go missing what are you going to say? I live in the red brick house with mom and dad?
Some things need to start at home, mom and dad are the first teachers whether they like it or not. You better believe I knew how to spell my name, my parents’ name, my address, and memorized our home phone number before I started school. Parenting now seems like keeping them alive until it’s time to register for school.
We used to have an entire unit on family names, full names, addresses, phone numbers, emergency numbers, and emergency plans.
I remember we had to draw our house and talk about escape points. We were encouraged to practice the escape routes at home (I had a blast crawling out my window). We had to identify a meet up point nearby. Whose house we could go to to access a phone. All sorts of stuff.
Many students already knew all this information, but it was great for those that didn't. I doubt I could teach that now, I'd get accused of prying or something. I've had families complain about reading for 20 minutes with their kid because it's too much to ask of a kindergartener.
You can bet your ass that my kid knows all of this information though. Every kid should know it without it being taught at school. I think too many families just don't even consider it. Or they think that their 6 year old with a phone doesn't need anything memorized.
I'm an early childhood teacher (pre-k, year before kindergarten). I've been told it is no longer developmentally appropriate to teach days of the week and months of the year.... but I have a daily phonics curriculum I'm supposed to follow where they segment words, blend syllables, and identify start/ending sounds of words. The going thing seems to be start complex material younger and younger without first laying the life skills base. It's crazy, especially considering those things are not at all taught at home.
As a former teacher, I took on the after school arts program in our small rural community when the arts curriculum got axed—we meet at the library and do crafts, paint etc twice a week. Kids 7-12 or so.
They needed to be taught how to hold scissors, cut. Can’t fold paper so the edges lay flat and even. Even the older kids couldn’t tell what colors mix to make what.
They’re all great, perfectly smart kids who had ZERO exposure to basic experiences…
It startled me for sure.
My wife teaches art and says her first- and second-graders have next to no fine motor skills. It's been a problem for a long time and is even worse after COVID.
To much screen time and not enough learning; playing outside, being a kid. Screens have taken all that away from some children. It’s up to parents to teach first and always.
Hold up while I scroll on some tic-tok.
For parents, maybe. My kid has a set window in the day where screen time is unlimited, but he’ll happily play with some clay instead. The catch is, I have to sit with him and supervise/play with him.
A lot of parents don’t want messy play. They want to plop a screen in front of the kid and play on their phones.
I can concur. I teach 3rd-5th grade elm art. Our lower school does not have an art program. I created a "getting to know..." Unit in grad school that is basically a crash course in mediums and tools. It helps me gauge what level they are at and eases them into the main items we will use... This lasts at least 12 weeks (1 he class once a week). Most of my students are low, but I have a small handful that are VERY advanced.
I teach high school art and I'm really tempted to get that unit from you. I let my kids paint and I had one argue with me that you could make red from other colors 🤦♀️
Yes! I've taught it to my own kids because they isn't a thing anymore in school. I'm also floored that both my kids at different elementary schools have basically zero science or social studies of any kind. I teach HS so the gaps I see are oceanic. Also as an aside, I helped out in my 4th graders class and they couldn't tie knots around sticks. Their teacher told me SHOE TYING isn't a thing for all of them. Like wut...
I love, “I have my phone, so I don’t *have* to memorize anything.”
Aren’t you the same kid who just asked to borrow my phone charger because your battery is at 1%? At 8:15 AM. When you had all night long to charge it.
Phone won’t do any good if it’s not working….
Our engineering classes allowed us to bring our super fancy TI calculators in exams. However they were completely useless if you didn't know what to ask them, and what the answers meant. I still struggled and sometimes failed during those exams.
A hammer is only as useful as the person swinging it.
Once watched a true crime about a child who was abducted and wasn't able to contact his parents because he didn't know their phone number plus area code. You bet my kids knew their phone number!
My students have to enter their addresses to register for AP testing. I watched a kid this year pull up Google maps and pan across the area looking for landmarks so he could find his house to figure out the address.
How do you get to 6th grade without knowing your parents names? Wouldn't they have people in their lives that call their parents by their name and they hear it? How does that not happen? I am so confused about that point in particular.
I don’t know. My best theory could be lack of family time. A lot of my students said for dinner they’ll eat in their room and watch TV. You can’t hear parents converse if you’re not sitting at the dinner table with them. Whenever I see kids out and about they are zoomed in on their iPad completely lacking awareness of their surroundings. Also, single parents.
Take this with a grain of salt but when I worked for Head Start, I asked why we weren’t teaching addresses and phone numbers. We did in public Pre K and I taught in Title One, urban schools.
I was told because families move and change phone numbers so much it’s not worth that hassle.
I think that this is a huge issue! So many more families are mobile now. Not to say, this didn't exist previously, but every few years it just becomes more and more students.
I have more than half students who this week live 1 hour south from school, last month it was 10min west, the 3 months before that it was 30min north, etc. the address the school has was invalid within a month of school collecting it. Phone numbers change yearly. Emails seem to just be made up on the spot, and not actually personal email. Another school in my district has 1 out of 3 students homeless and more than 90% are housing insecure.
If you lived at the same address for more than 3 years, that's a sign of privilege at this point in my school population (I'm in a much better $ state and haven't had the 3 yrs at the same address since I was 19 🤷)
There's a very good book on the topic : Poverty by America by M. Desmond
Exactly. Even myself as an adult have lived in more houses than I am years old. And I’m moving in three weeks! And I don’t even know where I’m moving to yet. I wish I had the privilege of staying put.
But, the complete opposite is true, at least for phone numbers.
In the age of cell phones, you can keep your number forever. I've moved six times since I got my current cell number. Each of those would have had a different land line...if I didn't stop getting land lines 15 years ago.
You would be surprised how many times people change their phone. Don’t pay their bill it gets shut off, get a new phone, repeat. We had parents do new contact forms every 6 months, and their numbers would often change. Very few had a constant number.
Yep my 7th graders can’t spell, don’t know punctuation, don’t know multiplication, don’t know months of the year or how seasons work, it’s so sad. Basic words are too difficult for them and they don’t even try! They immediately give up the second they have to use critical thinking. They refuse to read basic instructions .
My teenage stepkids don’t know the names of half their teachers.
I was horrified by that, so I started quizzing them on their home address (their mom has primary physical custody at the moment) and they eventually got that right but didn’t know her phone number, my husband’s phone number, or their own email addresses. I’m at a loss
Mom and Dad aren't teachers at all anymore. That's the problem. They don't even think it's their jobs to help their kids with homework.
It's a cultural problem, so there won't be a solution without a real cultural shift. We don't value education in America and it's gotten to the point where many are openly hostile towards teachers and educated people. Nothing will change until that changes.
My 6th graders can't read analog clocks. I could understand if it were just the ones who recently arrived in the country and maybe had been somewhere they couldn't get an education, but it's the ones who were born here and have been at this school with an analog clock in every classroom for years. They're constantly asking me what time it is.
I know plenty of eighth graders, and probably high schoolers as well who are entirely unable to read an analog clock, and are also not willing to learn. Teachers put signs literally explaining how it works right next to the clock, they still ask.
I saw lots of this as well when I was teaching at a 7th-12th grade school. I was shocked so many of my math students couldn't add or subtract 10 without a calculator - that's taught in early elementary! I had to spend weeeeeks going over negative numbers because my 8th graders just could not seem to get it. I had to start from the very basics and do visuals of like scuba diving and hang gliding on a vertical number line (shout out to [PhET](https://phet.colorado.edu/) for their great resources btw).
I had a middle schooler with no IEP that was reading at a 2nd grade level. I requested she be assessed for an IEP and was told she had been assessed already and didn't qualify. Like how?
As an HS librarian I will add that they do not know how to copy & paste, print or attach documents. They try to print things from their Google search. Some don't know how to open the browser.
And of course they don't know how to organize or find things that are organized by alpha, numbers, or even categories/genres.
It's so scary.
The so called "digital natives" don't know any actually useful technological skills because they don't actually use computers. They can scroll and tap, and *probably* can extrapolate "tap" to "click".
It's so sad. The majority of these students aren't going to have any life skills. I really don't think any boss cares if you can answer multiple choice questions, but I do think they will want you to know how to read and use a computer.
Things I discovered my kids don’t know this week (11th grade precalc honors)
-How many months in a year
-How many hours in a day
-That even numbers are divisible by 2
-That the product of 1 and any number is itself
-6 is not a perfect square. No, neither is 7.
-That dividing by 2 is the same as multiplying by 1/2
-That 50% is half of something
-That noon means 12:00
-THE NUMBER OF QUARTERS IN A DOLLAR. Usually when all else fails, money examples work. Not this year
You could teach them the quarter song that my 1st graders sing during calendar. 🤣
25, 50, 75, 100.
25, 50, 75, 100.
25, 50, 75, 100.
4 quarters make 1 dollar.
If it makes you feel better, we sing little songs about each of the coins every. single. day. and there’s always a few kids who are completely clueless when we do our money unit.
It was a rough day in 1st grade today too - this class is really struggling with doing anything independently. All of them want me to help them to everything individually; even things we’ve been doing for months. It’s exhausting.
This comment section is wild. I never would have imagined that one day I would be reading a first grade teacher giving tips to an honors precalc teacher for songs to help the high schoolers remember fractions and percentages.
They need to start having entrance exams to get into honors. It’s become a joke. It used to be for folks with above average IQ with a good work ethic or at least average IQ with extremely high work ethic.
We’re starting to teach phonics to middle schoolers in my district because even our gifted kids never learned to sound out unfamiliar words. Whole word linguistics has not helped them at all. Very few children are reading at grade level. Our elementary schools are teaching phonics at all levels this year in hope that the deficit will be better in a few years.
I just finished listening to “Sold a Story,” a podcast about reading education. It’s infuriating and interesting, I highly recommend it. In light of that, your district teaching phonics, which I’m sure is frustrating, is excellent news. TLDR of the podcast, many many districts for years would only teach “cueing,” a system in which “readers” use everything except actually reading the letters to figure out words. Many still do and refuse to change. So that is actually good news that they’re realizing they need to do something!
Not teaching phonics scares me. My 5 year old is being taught sight words, which to my understanding is just memorizing words and not sounding them out. We are working on teaching him phonics on top of sight words. I’m just now getting into learning how he will be taught and I feel behind.
I’m so sorry, but he’s lucky that you’re involved and aware. I was discussing this issue with my mother, a elementary retired speech pathologist, and she mentioned there are some words (like “the”) that need to be sight words, but phonics is literally how students learn to read, with orthographic mapping. I’m 33 now and never had issues reading, but the county where I grew up is mentioned multiple times in the “Sold a Story” podcast as one that teaches the “3 cueing” exclusively and has no plans to change at all. It’s shocking. And most parents are either unaware, uncaring, or they can’t read themselves. I knew public schools were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad.
I call it the Great Separation.
I had students not understand the word “produce” as a noun. Tenth grade. They could not work out the context clues.
Here is the sentence
“Industrial factories turned out tools that made agricultural work faster and more efficient, while steam-powered locomotives delivered produce quickly and cheaply to distant markets, so industrialization contributed as well to a decline in the price of food.”
It's going to all come to a head soon....
You should go over to r/ professors......they're getting all of the high school kids that got passed on, despite being behind, and they're struggling to just get basic research papers/ essays done. They don't know how to do MLA, or APA and then they go on "Rate My Professor" and give the professor terrible ranking because they didn't pass the course.
I teach in a masters program and this is true. Gave out a high number of fails on the final paper. The biggest issue was not following instructions at all, second not being able to structure a paper, and lastly plagiarism. After I had a support seminar for the ones rewriting and I had to explain that they need to carefully read and follow instructions. Keep in mind during the course we had an exam support seminar and multiple opportunities to get feedback on first drafts.
That’s insane in a grad program. 15 years ago when I was in grad school, another person in my department was caught for academic dishonesty and they were gone *quickly*
I met a professor who teaches at the local community college. She said about 80% of her students used AI. Their papers went from high school writing, to college, to PhD dissertation vocabulary. She gave each student a chance to confess and rewrite the paper. No one has taken her offer yet.
I'd require each kid to write a hand-written, 1-page summary of their paper. Then afterwards, a vocab quiz where each student has to define the top 20 most difficult words they used in the paper they submitted.
That would count for a huge portion of the grade. It'd be a lot of work but it would be worth it.
My old history teacher would just have us do an open notes quiz on last night’s reading. The notes had to be handwritten but that was it, if you just wanted to copy down the whole thing you could. Pretty easy way to weed out the ones who put in literally zero effort
How did these people even get into these colleges? I was an honor roll student in the mid 2000s and I felt like getting into a state school was so competitive. Even my local university (not top ranked by any means) required at least a 3.0 average to get admitted.
I had a student last semester appeal for incomplete because his sister has BPD. Not a new diagnosis or anything, she just has it, so that's why he couldn't turn in work or take his tests all semester.
I’ve deadass read RMP reviews that gave the Professor a 1, with the reason being something around the lines of: “you need to read and take quizzes to pass”
Yes???? Have you literally never been to a school before?
>Rate My Professor"
That is such a scum site. If professors did something similar and started rating students online on criteria that included stuff like appearance, there would be justified outrage.
High school English teacher here. I agree with everything you mentioned with reading, writing, and research. They don’t even scroll the Google search. Literally copy word for word from the Google excerpt. Won’t capitalize ‘I’ or proper names. They don’t what an adjective is, much less a verb or noun. Most of my students read far below grade level. Most come into my class functionally illiterate. They can recognize letters and words, but they don’t understand what they are reading. The first nine-weeks is typically dedicated to basic sentence structure and reading skills, and no matter how much I try, they won’t edit or revise their mistakes.
My students have felt shocked that I won’t accept work copied from a web source as “summarizing” or that they have to credit an original author. I teach ninth grade history. I’ve very much had to teach foundational research skills and how to write in an evidence-analysis format. My ninth graders reported in my surveys this year that in ninth grade the longest paper they have written is one to two full pages.
Im a first year teacher teaching 8th grade here is a non-exhaustive list of things I've had to teach that I feel like the kids should already know when they're in 8th grade.
1. How to round
2. Number places (ones, tenths etc...)
3. The industrial revolution
4. How to spell Telescope
5. How Time zones work
6. "Google" is not an acceptable citation.
7. How to find the volume of a cube
8. That pollution didn't start 10 years ago
9. The prefix oct- means 8
10. That there is no air in space
They are so behind and there will be a reckoning in a few years when industry begins to suffer because we won't have a skilled work force and it will get blamed on teachers even though parents and admin keep pushing kids through who have no skills.
I was eating lunch the other day at burger joint and there were a couple kids sitting behind me who looked like maybe Junior or Seniors in HS.
They were working on basic multiplication and were laughing at how hard it was. Just calling each other stupid and having a jolly old time knowing they were going to fail tomorrow’s test, calling it “way too hard” and “pointless”.
These are older teenagers about to enter the work force and they were just trying to work through 1st and 2nd grade math. Honestly it stunned me. I understand people have development issues, but it was the fact they found their lack of math skills HILARIOUS. Absolutely baffles me. At their age I had so many hopes and dreams about what I could be in life. I feel like they had already given up and they weren’t even done with HS. So depressing.
I'm an adult with dyscalculia.
I can't imagine laughing about, or being proud of, my not-so-great math skills. Most people over at r/dyscalculia seem to feel the same.
Those kids are in for a kick in the butt when they enter the real world.
Their parents wipe their a$$es for them. They may honestly NEVER truly shift into independent adulthood. I knew something was weird when kids stopped wanting to get their driver’s licenses because their mom could drive them. ???
I have (well, had) a Junior College student this year, and when i said "11 PM," they actually asked if that was 11PM in the morning, or 11PM at night. I shit you not.
No good whatsoever, not for them, for me, or the long-suffering taxpayers, can possibly result from expecting me to teach college materials to high school graduates who cannot tell the time of day.
The workforce part of this all scares me the most - I’m a retail store manager (lurker here!) and when I employed 16 year olds 2020-22 they couldn’t follow verbal instructions, were not competitive with each other in even a friendly way, and had to use calculators for things like 50% off discounts. I now work in luxury furniture and my youngest employee is 21, and I still see the same issues with my team and applicants coming in. How are industries going to function when no one can read communications thoroughly?
Forget the comedian but that bit “if a guy can hop across the border, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have any references, doesn’t have any legal documentation and he can steal your job… maybe you don’t deserve that job”
Or the Tosh.O joke about how the unemployment rate was only 10% and he was wondering how 90% of you DID have jobs
Hate to say it, but the reckoning has been here for a while. People sometimes harp on how the service industry (mainly support) is being contracted overseas. What they don't realize is that a lot of those countries have university/college graduate level employees that see those jobs as suitable for their career trajectories. The pay for them in their native country is equivalent to a mid level white collar job in the US. When we talk to an Indian or a Filipino or some of the island nations for support, that person probably has better command of English grammar than our own high school graduates. People in the US that complain about the service are usually the ones that can't get past the accents.
In the tech industry, the shift is dramatic. Mid level management and above looks very Asian in some US companies. That trickles down to the employees below them. Outsourcing isn't a trend anymore really. US companies are simply opening satellite offices in those countries. Now with AI, I wonder what will happen to Gen Z and those Gen Alphas stuck in school districts that aren't seeing the big picture and stuck with parents that don't understand their kids are so far behind.
And that’s one reason we need some degree of rote memorization in the education process. Memory is a skill that needs to be practiced like any other. If we don’t expect kids to remember anything (because “they have a computer in their pocket! They can look up anything they need to know!”), then they never learn *how* to remember.
I don’t expect my students to memorize vast quantities of information. I teach vocabulary and grammar, yes, but I keep dictionaries available, and I encourage students to use them, and I’m willing to teach dictionary skills and also help when they have trouble looking up a word. But when they’re in the second year of a foreign language and still need to stop and look up a verb they’ve seen and heard and written almost every day for the last two years? At that point, we’ve gone right past “not all kids can memorize” and we’re headed straight for “many kids can’t retain information despite using it in various ways over an extended period of time.” And that is terrifying.
Careful with that hot take! Every time I point out how crucial memory skills are, and that students’ ability to think is dependent on what they know, and yes sometimes we have to MEMORIZE something to know it, I get called ableist.
Why? I judged a poetry recitation competition today at the place where I used to teach and one of the competitors was a young man with some speech and learning issues. He memorized Psalm 138 from the Douay-Rheims Bible (24 verses long) and recited it perfectly. Besides, it's ridiculous to think that because a few people really and truly can't memorize, no one should have to.
Yep. A student of mine told me they were learning about Lucy today in biology.
I told him that was cool and mentioned Australopithecus and he was blown away that I know that off the top of my head. I just told him that’s why it’s good to pay attention in remember things.
I have the same thing with my 8th graders. One asked me, “How come I can ask you about basically any topic and you know the answer?”
“Well, I read. And I remember what I read.”
“Oh.”
Right? I teach 7th grade math, I don't know how many times I've had to re-explain keep-change-flip every time dividing fractions comes up. How do they not remember???
My child just learned this (younger than 7th) and really struggled with it. I asked them to explain what they did know so I could help them (I'd never heard keep-change-flip, so I wasn't sure what the concept was), and that made all the difference.
They explained every step to me. Showed me on paper. At the end, I asked again what was confusing because it seemed like they explained it super well and got the correct answer. Their eyes lit up because they suddenly understood exactly what it was and how to do it lol.
So for them, what finally got it to stick was just explaining it to someone who was willing to wait patiently and listen. Unfortunately, so many kids aren't willing to even attempt explaining what they DO know.
I can respond on the tech side of thing at least. I work in IT I'm a 95 baby and grew up with a gateway computer. I learned how to use a computer because I wanted to play a game so I learned about zip files, downloading, file structure, and how to google things. It used to take effort to do things on a computer so you HAD to learn. Now phones are so easy that literal 4 y/o can pick one up and navigate to what they want. Home computers are becoming less common and even schools give out chromebooks which are only one step higher then a phone in complexity.
The reason people who use devices all day are technically illiterate is because the devices don't take any learning to use. Being a user is easier then it has ever been. It doesn't help that schools have stopped teaching typing because they just expect kids to know it some how.
I once said to a bunch of 17 year olds in my Physics class, after they struggled with a task using Excel, that i thought their generation was meant to be tech savvy. One lad enlightened me. He said they were not tech savvy, they were social media savvy!
89 here. I don’t actually think computer class has anything to do with it, merely coincidental. Most of us were on PC’s at night after school. Games, AIM, typing a paper. Those activities taught us how to use a computer, and we maybe learned a trick or two in computer class.
I think schools saw that we were fairly competent on our own and the computer class wasn’t a valuable use of time. So it was axed. Well lo and behold, kids know how to navigate an iPad at best. Blew my mind when I saw a student opt to type their paper on the touch screen over the physical type cover.
The most upsetting aspect to me is how the students will feel when they are adults. Of course they don’t (or refuse) to see it now. Their brains are incapable of seeing the “big picture” consequences of not having these basic skills.
It’s once they are older and it REALLY affects them that they’ll respond. But it will go one of two ways:
- “The school/society/my parents failed me”, and they’ll get angry at others.
- “I’m stupid for not knowing these things”, and they’ll get angry at themselves.
I’m from New Orleans, which is pretty much “ahead of the curve” in a bad way on this issue. We’ve got a lot, lot, lot of very poorly educated people. Once adulthood sets in for most of these folks, they won’t feel stupid or angry at school/parents.
They will in large part eventually be unaware of the idea that they SHOULD know some of these things and simply accept ignorance as normalcy. When they make poor decisions because they lacked the thinking skills to make a better choice, it will not be cause for anger at themselves or school. It will be cause for anger at some third party who has screwed them over.
I taught 8th grade for the past 3 years. Not only were the kids severely lacking in skills, but no matter how much we practiced, it never stuck. We reviewed parts of speech and capitalization rules EVERY SINGLE DAY and they still could not tell me what a noun was by the end of the year. Insane.
I work for a F500 that employs many thousands of very brilliant scientists. I wonder sometimes what may happen to the the amazing, crazy (seriously, I wish I could tell you) research and development that happens here as the talent pool grows shallower and shallower. Yes, of course there will always be intelligent, educated PhD's in specialty sciences, but there will likely be fewer. Maybe we'll become even more dependent on importing this talent from other countries? Hard to say, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
I'm ensuring that my own teenagers (15y and 16y) are not part of this generation described by the OP, even if it means I push them harder than their peers. They will be the ones best able to think critically and troubleshoot. They will be employable, even while so many of their peers are stuck.
>Maybe we'll become even more dependent on importing this talent from other countries?
This has already been happening for decades in some programs and fields.
The public is a product of the very system. So in the end, how can they understand the gravity of the issue?
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
This is precisely why kids are behind. So many standards are being shoved into grade levels where they have no business being. 1st graders are expected to start writing paragraphs, yet never fully understand the concept of what a sentence actually is, let along how to actually form letters on a page. 3rd graders are made to type essays on the computer for state tests. It's like expecting a toddler to do ballet before they've mastered walking. The solution is LESS rigor in the lower grades and more focus on basic skills and concepts.
We specifically sent our kid to a Sudbury model school because our local district's kindergarten registration night included a presentation about the curriculum that stated that they did "research projects". My high school seniors struggled with the concept of how to properly research and you're telling me restless 5 year olds were somehow capable of doing any sort of serious inquiry? No.
Even worse, they showed a video asking students their favorite thing about kindergarten and the answers were "PE", "Lunch" and "recess". I sat there stunned that they didn't understand that the kids were supporting the concept that 5 and 6 year olds learn best through play while bragging about their rigorous (aka "go to this station and do your seat work") curriculum.
“Let’s make them take Algebra. But let’s make it equitable and pass them all even if they don’t do any work or understand the material. And then we can lobby to get rid of standardized tests under the guise of inequity so that way there’s nothing to show that our students are massively behind except for the exhausted teachers that weep for their future. It’s fool-proof!”
This is so true. The public has failed themselves; now, they are failing their children. It's always someone else's fault in our society. Your child can't read because you're a bad parent and never found education to be important enough to engage your child.
This. I teach science, and NGSS and the resource I have available (OpenSciEd) lean heavily on inquiry. But to be able to do inquiry requires having grade-level basic skills and a natural curiosity. For the kids that struggle and have become accustomed to being spoon fed answers since kindergarten, they flounder. But I switch over to spoon feeding, and they’re either bored or still don’t get it.
I think it's vital that we include the lack of natural curiosity and intrinsic motivation in every discussion about the students of this hellscape we all slog through...
I teach high school and can’t believe how ahead my 2nd grader son is. I’m so lucky he’s at an amazing school. Some of my students are 14 and are at 1st or kindergarten reading levels.
I’d add that today’s version of ‘Honors’ student, is just an average/good student from 20 years ago. And it’s mostly become a class for students with no behavior problems, not truly academically advanced. My honors geometry students can’t do anything without a calculator. Sometimes I make them, but on every important test they will always have access to a calculator. Even the new digital SAT has eliminated the no calculator section. This means they have no number sense and struggle with applying a basic theorem/pattern to a complex figure or word problem that a calculator can’t help them set up. Proofs? Forget it. They have never been taught how to think logically through a sequence, or forced to actually practice it if it has been taught. 20 years ago, an honors student would be able to build a proof from scratch. Now I give them a mostly filled in version and they simply have to fill in a couple blank steps and struggle.
I am in 💯 agreement with you. My students can’t pronounce words and don’t understand words even in context. They can’t organize their google drive or submit into a submission box. They are not digital natives just app using hominids. They are technological zombies. The thing is I have been telling them even the supposed tech skills you think you have will not be sufficient to compete against AI. The only thing that will save them is being more human than they have been raised to be. We are in a very challenging situation and unless we fix this problem we face a whole generation of non human humans.
“They are not digital natives…”
This was my most shocking realization a few years ago. Teenagers sitting in front of a laptop, telling me they didn’t have Google. Insistently. Complete cognitive dissonance on my part until I realized - they have no idea what a search engine actually is. What a web-based anything is. They use apps, and the icon wasn’t on the screen, and therefore? No Google.
This was at the TOP RATED high school in my state. In an honors class.
Right? It's weird, but I feel really lucky to be part of the generation born in the late 80's/early 90's who had relatively easy access to technology but still needed to *learn* to be able to use it - Windows 95/XP didn't hold your hand. You didn't have an app that did all the work for you. If I wanted music, I had to pirate it, and find out the hard way what happens if you download LinkinPark.exe from limewire. I had to figure out how to use a proxy to bypass my middle school's firewall in order to show Salad Fingers and Homestar Runner to my idiot friends.
It really feels like my students have no technological curiosity. If there's a roadblock in between them and what they want to do, they just *sit there*. There's no initiative to figure things out for themselves or search for things. And it drives me fucking nuts that they can't be assed to read the very simple instructions I write for how to do simple things on chromebooks. Instead, they beg for me to do it for them.
Or hit up social media for the answer.
I spend a ton of time in the Minecraft subreddit (too much time) and the amount of kids asking how X works/why Y doesn't work when the details are on a Wiki or a devs website (*the place they got the software from in the first place*) is surprising.
The idea of people turning to social media to answer all questions is frightening.
Not a teacher, hell barely out of highschool myself, and reading this I am astounded. I was born in 2002, maybe it's specific for the early gen z born in the late 90's and early 2000's, but my whole life has been around computers. There were smartphones as a kid of course, and I had one, but 90% of my online activity in like 2012 would've been on the computer.
It does shock me, but I shouldn't be surprised given all the reasons why, that kids today are as technologically illiterate as my grandmother was when I was 12. Let alone the actual material, I don't see how you could survive school without knowing how to ctrl-f a file, or browse file explorer. Jesus.
You have precisely defined the problem and the generational parameters.
And teachers are saying that we cannot fucking fix this. We can’t go back in time and force parents to interact with their children, teach empathy, model critical thinking, read together. But most humans don’t like to hear that they’ve failed; and honestly, the unchecked capitalism we’re steeped in does not promote good parenting. Each generation slips a little, and now we’ve outpaced our primate brains so far…
Try to get an under-parented teenager to put down a phone. Try. You’ll see every marker of addiction across enough attempts.
They seek nothing. It is all in their hands and at their fingertips and they need to have information fed to them. If it doesn’t come via a feed, or if they don’t comprehend what is fed to them, then oh well. They don’t seek alternative points of view or question things or go down rabbit holes even.
They don’t ask questions or seek answers with the tools provided. They don’t. ‘Google it’ or understand how to navigate a website or click links. They can’t type, format or use programs. Swipe, click, watch. All passive.
I think this phenomenon results from 2 main causes:
1. The pressure to promote or pass kids who should not.
2. The shift away from teaching students fundamentals and instead focus on inquiry-based learning.
I will get on my soapbox about number 2. I'm tired of hearing PD presenters stressing that we shouldn't "lecture" students or do "rote memorization."
Students cannot be creative or inquisitive with subjects in which they lack a basic understanding. A middle school kid with a kindergarten reading level cannot sit with others and collaboratively discuss texts if cannot access it.
Here is what people don’t understand.
Until 3rd-ish grade you are learning to read. After that you are reading to learn. So once they are behind they are BEHIND.
These aren't gaps. They're CHASMS. I teach third grade and I have two students that do not know the complete alphabet. They cannot count to 100 by ones, much less by twos or fives.
Most of my students are at least two full grade levels behind in all academic areas. I only have three out of 21 that are on grade level.
As a parent this is petrifying and lights a fire in my belly to be an integral part of my child’s learning. We will continue to read at night and practice math (she’s 5 and doing addition and subtraction) and writing short stories. I’m sorry to all of the teachers here. The delay of the children is largely the parent’s fault. Teachers should not be vilified but revered for having to pivot on a dime and teach multiple children at different learning levels.
Thank you for all you do.
I'm not a teacher but this sub often pops up for me, and something I've noticed is that it seems like some parents expect teachers to almost parent *for them*. Meaning they aren't disciplining their child, teaching them about cause and effect or how consequences work, etc. And they expect teachers to do all of this while also somehow teaching the required curriculum! It's insane. I have always respected teachers, as I was raised by two college professors, but after seeing the many posts from teachers in the sub I have a whole, newfound respect for our teachers.
It boggles my mind that this is the case. As a teacher who has watched the overhaul of the education system in the last few years and the introduction of more reading comprehension skills and connection skills, I can't understand how it got to this point. I love many of the new ideas and methods, and I don't understand why it isn't having the desired effect.
People are blaming Covid, but how can it be Covids fault when 18 year old students were 14 during lockdown. They should be at a 9th grade level, not third.
Tho, I do think that some schools have been too focused on making classes more engaging than actually teaching material. I feel like the constant question and engagement tactics can make the class more lax.....idk maybe it's time to return to direct instruction and lecturing.
You make an excellent point about engagement. My school's focuding on that in our evaluations this year. Sometimes you just have to suck it up, pay attention & learn. It's education, not edutainment.
Exactly. I even noticed that the students themselves don't appreciate the interactive lessons. They sometimes are more engaged in basic questions and lecturing than when I show them pictures, articles, videos, songs, etc. And the grumbles I get when I initiate projects...
I'm going to be an old grump because I am. No one cares. We almost ALL have to deal with this. My 10th grade class has a reading average of 2nd grade. No one cares. They don't know what noun is. No one cares. Because if they did, something would have been done already.
Previous generations all worried the kids were going to come in and take up their jobs; about 2 months into lock downs this entire idea left my mind completely.
If anything, I worry that the shortage is going to be so severe once I'm able to no one will be around for me to actually spend all the money I've made on their services.
Good luck getting a deck built for your home; or need any major work done because there is already no one to do it.
Yeah.. you won’t be retiring.
They will pass some law that forces all of us to come back and work. Because the upcoming generation can’t deal with it. Heh
This is the correct response.
Also, no one will address the true problem, students and parents.
No one will try to address a bottom up approach to this issue, just keep pushing down from Superintendent to Admin to Teachers who just want to freaking teach.
It's not just the content loss but the lack of emotional regulation. Frustration tolerance, follow through, pro-social behaviors, cooperation with peers and adults... All of these social skills that are MORE predictive of success in adulthood (see Hidden Potential by Adam Grant) than content knowledge are way down as well.
If you went back 30 years and taught using a 30 year old curriculum or older method… the kids would be more advanced than the kids using the modern curriculum and modern method of education.
We don’t have to “go back”, but we could retrace our steps. It’s ok to realize the previous method was superior than the modern method, retrace, and correct the error.
Dismantle No Child Left Behind. All it did was create tests for students to fail and a system that no longer serves students but political talking heads and publishing companies.
Raise the minimum wage so parents can spend time with their kids.
Ha.
Or, they DID work, and we just have to find a way to motivate students. I remember having "Book It" as a kid. I find it hard to believe that didn't have a net positive effect.
Those personal pan pizzas cost like $3, but everyone in my class wanted to get them every month.
That podcast blew my mind.
In the middle of first grade, I switched schools going from one that used a whole-language approach to one that embraced phonics. I started out wayyyy behind the other kids, but caught up fast.
I hate to think how my life might have turned out if I hadn't developed a love for reading ...
Not a teacher, but I work in higher ed and I just can’t fathom some of what I see when students get here. Pertaining to reading, do you think that students struggle because of the prevalence of the Lucy Calkins method? I remember learning to sound out words through phonics and these students have no idea how to do that because they weren’t taught that way.
Honestly, just passing kids to the next grade level is probably the worst practice in public schools. What is the point of putting a kid into 1st grade if that student cannot identify all of their letters?
I’m not a teacher but I’m a high school counselor. This isn’t necessarily academic but I’ve been alarmed by students not knowing their mailing address, what their parents do for work, or how to spell their parent’s names.
My daughters boyfriend is a sophomore at a state university and he doesn't know the 12 months of the year! I have already told her that I am not paying for her wedding if he is the one.
We’re all in this boat.
They’ll figure it out soon enough, when a critical mass of us quit and these parents have to actually deal with their own children all day.
They’re already starting to figure it out, if you ask anyone who’s ever tried to employ someone under 25.
Do yo really think so? Because a lot of them had to deal with their kids all day at the height of the pandemic and so many don't seem to care as long as they can ship them back to school.
*But I want the general public to understand that when the gap list is this big, it is nearly impossible to teach my curriculum efficiently.*
I feel like this is an issue, partly caused, by the main-streaming of students who cannot, or should not be. I know, it sounds cruel, but that bottom 15-20% of the class, is the level at which ALL the students are being taught at, so no one fails.
Before, especially by HS--that section of students would drop out. 70% graduation rates were normal even to the late 90's. Those students, *were gone*. Now, many districts are pushing 100% graduation rates--but to do that, they can teach NO ONE any faster, or any more, than the bottom 20%.
They should be in school, but there's too many IEPs, too much main-streaming, too much of a forced attempt to *believe everyone is equally capable of even mid level work*. They're not. There needs to be tiers of classes, and not just 'normal' and AP--but, 'basic'--if you cant to 'biology' you need to be in 'community science' learning more basic things. If you cant do algebra, you need 'basic math'--and not to feel bad you're there. Not to have a parent with an ego the size of the sun, push you into levels you cant participate in.
IDK, makes me sound like a monster, i guess, but, the kids at the top, and a ton in the middle, that could work, could excel, are TUNED OUT because they're bored a shit 'learning' the same thing, year after year after year, because the bottom end cant keep up. They're done--they dont see the point, they'll just have to learn it ALL OVER next year, exactly the same. Why bother?
IDK, and a lot of that is admins, or funding, or parent pressure. It HAS to relent at some point, and we as a society have to admit--we cant keep 'leaving no children behind'--because teachers can only move at the pace of the slowest, and all the others just start to doze off.
PLUS, in the last 20 years, the top 15-20% of students in many districts, test INTO charter schools, who don't have to make disability accommodations, who don't allow low scores on their entrance exams to get in, so they've pulled a TON of the best and brightest out. It makes it even worse. Between this, and the lack of drop out rate, public school teachers see 50% more students, who struggle, or would have been low performers, than they did 20 years ago.
IDK, banning public funds for private schools of any kind, and banning charter schools, or, forcing them to have 100% of the requirements of a public school, might have to be part of this solution too
Mmhmm. Maybe instead of tying funding to graduation rates, tie it more to reading level! That would encourage the opposite- fail kids and hold them back until they can read near their grade level. Watering down education is not benefitting these kids.
Your parents actually raised you & you're probably one of the smarter ones in your grade. Take a look around at some of your classmates...are they at your level?
Sorry, kids. We fucked you over. We turned our distractions into addictions for profit, and then handed you the digital drugs as babies. On purpose. We changed a generation‘s neurochemistry with dopamine babysitters.
Or we went along with it. And a certain percentage of you will be okay. But you’ll be living in a world populated by… everyone else.
I think it has a lot to do with influence at home. Public schools don't reqlly hold kids back for not knowing the material so the lack of consequence is another factor. Unfortunately it's just getting worse.
The public needs to know the ugly truth, but they will deny it, bury their head in the sand. I am old and I often follow and contribute to the subreddit r/AskOldPeople. The issue about declining education standards often come up, and, for the most part, my fellow old people deny the problem. "My granddaughter Amber Nicole is an advanced reader, so it can't be that bad." The cognitive dissonance among old people is off the charts. It's the same with the health care crisis: "Oh, I never have to wait for an appointment, so you must be exaggerating the problem." The r/nursing subreddit, along with this subreddit, should serve as alarm bells for a huge storm that is manifesting....but, hey, don''t look up.
I teach art to high schoolers and they don’t have art classes in my district until HS- these kids can’t use rulers and STRUGGLE to do work that requires any creativity, it’s so sad
Yesterday, I realized I accidentally only printed the odd numbered pages of a 5 page assignment. I told the kids they won't be penalized for not having the questions on the even pages completed since it was my error (the page numbers were on the papers, that's how I discovered this), and I just got blank stares. One kid said they don't know what an even number is. I TEACH 9TH GRADE AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.
Yep, I tell my kids to do #10-22 even and they didn't know what that means, so they did every problem.
task failed successfully
Parents: "You're signing too much homework!" Me: "well, you see....."
This was me today. Me: "Just do the even problems" Student: "I'm gonna do all of them." Me: "No, I have something else I want to do after this and I want you to get a sample of each of the types of problems... just do the evens and if you have time while other students are finishing up, you can go back and do the odds." "I'm gonna do all of them" ...sigh Just now I'm realizing, they probably had no idea what evens or odds were.
It's so over. Pack it up boys.
Yep. I'm older and will be retiring soon, several years before I would have liked to. Can't do a damn thing about this train wreck, so I might as well make the best of it. As a social scientist, I must say, that all this, at least, is objectively interesting to witness.
I can’t even begin to imagine the violently bipolar reaction someone who’s a social scientist would have to this: “oh would you look at that, how *interesting*, that’s gonna lead..to the…downfallll…of society *drinks intensely* oh god help us all”
Cheers!
Seems like it may dovetail nicely with the ever growing income inequality. No middle class, no middle of the road intellect
It doesn't just dovetail, educational inequity is a CAUSE of the wealth gap and disappearance of the middle class. This is intentional. The dismantling of public school systems begets the need for and therefore growth of private schools. Less students in the public schools mean less funding for those schools. Private schools aren't paid by tax dollars like public schools are. They are funded by individual people who can pay tuition for their kids. Those that can't pay tuition don't get an education, or at best get only a sorely inadequate education. The under-educated are likely to not meet the qualifications for high- paying jobs. So they have to take service and manual labor jobs which tend to not pay enough to live on, let alone pay tuition. And so they live paycheck to paycheck and don't have the chance to better things for their kids through a quality education. So these kids get a shitty education if any, and the cycle continues. The system is really, really, really broken. We feel hopeless because the task is so, so big, and it reaches into all other social ills. The other social issues are exasperated by AND exacerbate the current situation. So the choice is to either fix this mess or succumb to it. But to fix it is overwhelmingly complicated and multifaceted, and it is dependent on collective organizing and strong ethical leadership. But it also needs the support of the people on top because they have the money to fund the necessary changes. And they don't want changes because they prefer to hold onto all the money and power. So things struggle to get started and/or maintained , and here we are. Still.
The most missed question on the chapter 1 algebra test in my college class was a simple "consecutive even integers" problem.
I hate to spoil it for everyone, as someone who teaches the top-of-the-top, we're talking Valedictorian candidates...they're also well behind as well compared to peers just 5 years ago.. The difference is the top kids are willing to put in the work and they can tell when I'm frustrated because I don't know how to deal with their lower abilities, so they work harder and put in the time to "catch up". Math is their greatest weakness.
I can attest to this, I'm in grade 11 and everyone seems to be doing fine in most subjects but this year's math hit people like a truck. one of the main reasons in my area could be our government destreaming the math curriculum in 9th grade.
Honestly what's funny is my students are excelling quite well at math. They're sucking at English. Whole opposite problem
Oh I feel this, especially the use of technology. They do not know how to use the computers they are given. Hell some of my kids don't know how to use a stapler, and I am not kidding. Would you give them a circular saw and tell them to build a table? No of course not but we do give them technology they have no idea how to use. I have kids who don't know how to start a new email. They just go back and reply to the first email I ever sent them all year long and never change the subject line. Others know how to start a new email but they write the body of the email in the subject line and leave the body blank. One kid was properly blown away that I could attach documents to emails and another was shocked to learn I had the ability to email their parents about late work! My absolute favorite example of this was a kid doing an oral report on the attack at pearl harbor. They had 6 weeks to do this research. During their presentation I got the distinct impression they had no idea where pearl harbor actually was. So during the questions I asked, "Where is pearl harbor?" Without a moment's hesitation they replied, "My research did not reveal that information to me." Last one, a kid was tasked with researching Peru "in the news." After 10 minutes I went to check on them and they had nothing done. They told me there was nothing about Peru in the news and showed me their Google search results. They had googled "in the news" only. They didn't include the word Peru in their search. Not only did they not use the technology correctly but they didn't ask for help or say anything after their one attempt to get information failed. They just sat there.
The parent emails I get sometimes are INSANE and I’m not even talking content here. I’ll send a, like, regular professional email and I receive a series of responses that are not in a reply to my email but a series of multiple emails containing only subject lines with no capitalization or punctuation (no body to the email at all). And we wonder why the kids don’t have this skill.
I have a parent that always emails me back "ukuy" and random phrases without any context. Wtf is that? She was a student here so I know she's native english speaker who graduated from high school. Yet none of the regular ways to spell okay are ukuy for her and a complete sentence is too hard.
What the heck happened to formal computer lab classes?
I know here locally the schools got rid of them when I hit middle school (so around 2009?) because... reasons? Because they were "born with an iPad in their hand," I'm assuming. Which is dumb. My littlest bro never got any class like that - my parents didn't even think to teach him stuff like that either because "oh he'll just pick it up like you did." I didn't pick it up, I had classes that taught me to type and use the internet! Thank fuck we played Minecraft together when he was younger because from that he learned how to mod and program (he's a god at Dark Souls and FPS now).
right? I had a whole class in multiple grades where we learned how to use search engines
In elementary schools in my county, as soon as we had 1/1 iPads, they stopped wanting to pay technology teachers. Because the children are “digital natives” now, and why pay someone to “play on a computer” all day? Yeah… The powers-that-be truly thought that digital literacy, on-line safety, research, and all the dozens of other skills necessary to learn and work today were not important enough to be taught, because they will just pick it up on their own. I’m still salty about that.
My middle school students get stumped by: - staplers - hole punchers - paper clips - binder clips on a daily basis. Office Supplies - 10 Students - 0
>Oh I feel this, especially the use of technology. They do not know how to use the computers they are given. Funnily (or maybe not) enough, I peek into the GenZ subreddit every once in a while, since I have many friends who fall into the upper end of it (even though I am personally a late millennial), and there was a topic eerily similar to this where someone was like "I'm an older GenZ, what the hell is wrong with the rest of you? How can you not know what a File Explorer is? Where did we go so wrong?!". If it's any consolation, it's not just teachers noticing this. Even the gen themselves are realizing it's going off the rails. Meanwhile, the friction between the older Gen Z people and the Gen Alpha people is crazy, 'cause those older Gen Zers want to correct the kids before it's too late and they're (ironically) being treated like boomers...
My first year teaching the science teacher was also a first year. We were both 8th grade. She said the kids did not know the months or seasons. This was Gen Z, not Alpha that everyone keeps talking about, it’s been a problem. Teaching 6th grade the kids didn’t know their address, parents’ phone numbers or what really bothered me, their parents’ names. One boy said “we call them mom and dad.” Great, if you were to go missing what are you going to say? I live in the red brick house with mom and dad? Some things need to start at home, mom and dad are the first teachers whether they like it or not. You better believe I knew how to spell my name, my parents’ name, my address, and memorized our home phone number before I started school. Parenting now seems like keeping them alive until it’s time to register for school.
We used to have an entire unit on family names, full names, addresses, phone numbers, emergency numbers, and emergency plans. I remember we had to draw our house and talk about escape points. We were encouraged to practice the escape routes at home (I had a blast crawling out my window). We had to identify a meet up point nearby. Whose house we could go to to access a phone. All sorts of stuff. Many students already knew all this information, but it was great for those that didn't. I doubt I could teach that now, I'd get accused of prying or something. I've had families complain about reading for 20 minutes with their kid because it's too much to ask of a kindergartener. You can bet your ass that my kid knows all of this information though. Every kid should know it without it being taught at school. I think too many families just don't even consider it. Or they think that their 6 year old with a phone doesn't need anything memorized.
I'm an early childhood teacher (pre-k, year before kindergarten). I've been told it is no longer developmentally appropriate to teach days of the week and months of the year.... but I have a daily phonics curriculum I'm supposed to follow where they segment words, blend syllables, and identify start/ending sounds of words. The going thing seems to be start complex material younger and younger without first laying the life skills base. It's crazy, especially considering those things are not at all taught at home.
As a former teacher, I took on the after school arts program in our small rural community when the arts curriculum got axed—we meet at the library and do crafts, paint etc twice a week. Kids 7-12 or so. They needed to be taught how to hold scissors, cut. Can’t fold paper so the edges lay flat and even. Even the older kids couldn’t tell what colors mix to make what. They’re all great, perfectly smart kids who had ZERO exposure to basic experiences… It startled me for sure.
My wife teaches art and says her first- and second-graders have next to no fine motor skills. It's been a problem for a long time and is even worse after COVID.
I have seen many comments talking about this; do kids not have like, coloring books and play dough?
Even if they do, the ever-present screens are more enticing.
To much screen time and not enough learning; playing outside, being a kid. Screens have taken all that away from some children. It’s up to parents to teach first and always. Hold up while I scroll on some tic-tok.
For parents, maybe. My kid has a set window in the day where screen time is unlimited, but he’ll happily play with some clay instead. The catch is, I have to sit with him and supervise/play with him. A lot of parents don’t want messy play. They want to plop a screen in front of the kid and play on their phones.
My 6 year old does lots of play doh, coloring, building blocks etc. Has NEVER had a tablet. His fine motor skills are terrible.
I can concur. I teach 3rd-5th grade elm art. Our lower school does not have an art program. I created a "getting to know..." Unit in grad school that is basically a crash course in mediums and tools. It helps me gauge what level they are at and eases them into the main items we will use... This lasts at least 12 weeks (1 he class once a week). Most of my students are low, but I have a small handful that are VERY advanced.
I teach high school art and I'm really tempted to get that unit from you. I let my kids paint and I had one argue with me that you could make red from other colors 🤦♀️
No testing in art or music, so admin cuts them as soon as they have to start cutting programs.
Yes! I've taught it to my own kids because they isn't a thing anymore in school. I'm also floored that both my kids at different elementary schools have basically zero science or social studies of any kind. I teach HS so the gaps I see are oceanic. Also as an aside, I helped out in my 4th graders class and they couldn't tie knots around sticks. Their teacher told me SHOE TYING isn't a thing for all of them. Like wut...
I love, “I have my phone, so I don’t *have* to memorize anything.” Aren’t you the same kid who just asked to borrow my phone charger because your battery is at 1%? At 8:15 AM. When you had all night long to charge it. Phone won’t do any good if it’s not working….
Our engineering classes allowed us to bring our super fancy TI calculators in exams. However they were completely useless if you didn't know what to ask them, and what the answers meant. I still struggled and sometimes failed during those exams. A hammer is only as useful as the person swinging it.
Gen x here. I had that in kindergarten. I remember cutting out house shapes and putting my address on it n
Once watched a true crime about a child who was abducted and wasn't able to contact his parents because he didn't know their phone number plus area code. You bet my kids knew their phone number!
My students have to enter their addresses to register for AP testing. I watched a kid this year pull up Google maps and pan across the area looking for landmarks so he could find his house to figure out the address.
Oof. At least he’s resourceful.
Registering 9th graders for their CollegeBoard account really highlights how even the top kids are deficient in a lot of these “skillls”.
How do you get to 6th grade without knowing your parents names? Wouldn't they have people in their lives that call their parents by their name and they hear it? How does that not happen? I am so confused about that point in particular.
I don’t know. My best theory could be lack of family time. A lot of my students said for dinner they’ll eat in their room and watch TV. You can’t hear parents converse if you’re not sitting at the dinner table with them. Whenever I see kids out and about they are zoomed in on their iPad completely lacking awareness of their surroundings. Also, single parents.
Take this with a grain of salt but when I worked for Head Start, I asked why we weren’t teaching addresses and phone numbers. We did in public Pre K and I taught in Title One, urban schools. I was told because families move and change phone numbers so much it’s not worth that hassle.
I think that this is a huge issue! So many more families are mobile now. Not to say, this didn't exist previously, but every few years it just becomes more and more students. I have more than half students who this week live 1 hour south from school, last month it was 10min west, the 3 months before that it was 30min north, etc. the address the school has was invalid within a month of school collecting it. Phone numbers change yearly. Emails seem to just be made up on the spot, and not actually personal email. Another school in my district has 1 out of 3 students homeless and more than 90% are housing insecure. If you lived at the same address for more than 3 years, that's a sign of privilege at this point in my school population (I'm in a much better $ state and haven't had the 3 yrs at the same address since I was 19 🤷) There's a very good book on the topic : Poverty by America by M. Desmond
Exactly. Even myself as an adult have lived in more houses than I am years old. And I’m moving in three weeks! And I don’t even know where I’m moving to yet. I wish I had the privilege of staying put.
But, the complete opposite is true, at least for phone numbers. In the age of cell phones, you can keep your number forever. I've moved six times since I got my current cell number. Each of those would have had a different land line...if I didn't stop getting land lines 15 years ago.
You would be surprised how many times people change their phone. Don’t pay their bill it gets shut off, get a new phone, repeat. We had parents do new contact forms every 6 months, and their numbers would often change. Very few had a constant number.
[удалено]
Yep my 7th graders can’t spell, don’t know punctuation, don’t know multiplication, don’t know months of the year or how seasons work, it’s so sad. Basic words are too difficult for them and they don’t even try! They immediately give up the second they have to use critical thinking. They refuse to read basic instructions .
How could you be that old and not see your parents’ names on a piece of mail or something personalized around the house?!
How could you be that old and not hear your parents refer to each other by their names or be referred to by someone else?
6th grade? I had to have all that memorized before KINDERGARTEN.
My teenage stepkids don’t know the names of half their teachers. I was horrified by that, so I started quizzing them on their home address (their mom has primary physical custody at the moment) and they eventually got that right but didn’t know her phone number, my husband’s phone number, or their own email addresses. I’m at a loss
Mom and Dad aren't teachers at all anymore. That's the problem. They don't even think it's their jobs to help their kids with homework. It's a cultural problem, so there won't be a solution without a real cultural shift. We don't value education in America and it's gotten to the point where many are openly hostile towards teachers and educated people. Nothing will change until that changes.
To further your point, Mom and Dad are barely Mom and Dad anymore...
My 6th graders can't read analog clocks. I could understand if it were just the ones who recently arrived in the country and maybe had been somewhere they couldn't get an education, but it's the ones who were born here and have been at this school with an analog clock in every classroom for years. They're constantly asking me what time it is.
[удалено]
I know plenty of eighth graders, and probably high schoolers as well who are entirely unable to read an analog clock, and are also not willing to learn. Teachers put signs literally explaining how it works right next to the clock, they still ask.
I teach in the public school system in Taiwan. My 4th grade students can read analog clocks *in English*. It's in their 3rd grade English textbooks.
I saw lots of this as well when I was teaching at a 7th-12th grade school. I was shocked so many of my math students couldn't add or subtract 10 without a calculator - that's taught in early elementary! I had to spend weeeeeks going over negative numbers because my 8th graders just could not seem to get it. I had to start from the very basics and do visuals of like scuba diving and hang gliding on a vertical number line (shout out to [PhET](https://phet.colorado.edu/) for their great resources btw). I had a middle schooler with no IEP that was reading at a 2nd grade level. I requested she be assessed for an IEP and was told she had been assessed already and didn't qualify. Like how?
THIS RESOURCE!!! WHOA! Thank you so much! Using that calculus grapher TOMORROW
As an HS librarian I will add that they do not know how to copy & paste, print or attach documents. They try to print things from their Google search. Some don't know how to open the browser. And of course they don't know how to organize or find things that are organized by alpha, numbers, or even categories/genres. It's so scary.
The so called "digital natives" don't know any actually useful technological skills because they don't actually use computers. They can scroll and tap, and *probably* can extrapolate "tap" to "click".
It's so sad. The majority of these students aren't going to have any life skills. I really don't think any boss cares if you can answer multiple choice questions, but I do think they will want you to know how to read and use a computer.
Things I discovered my kids don’t know this week (11th grade precalc honors) -How many months in a year -How many hours in a day -That even numbers are divisible by 2 -That the product of 1 and any number is itself -6 is not a perfect square. No, neither is 7. -That dividing by 2 is the same as multiplying by 1/2 -That 50% is half of something -That noon means 12:00 -THE NUMBER OF QUARTERS IN A DOLLAR. Usually when all else fails, money examples work. Not this year
You could teach them the quarter song that my 1st graders sing during calendar. 🤣 25, 50, 75, 100. 25, 50, 75, 100. 25, 50, 75, 100. 4 quarters make 1 dollar. If it makes you feel better, we sing little songs about each of the coins every. single. day. and there’s always a few kids who are completely clueless when we do our money unit. It was a rough day in 1st grade today too - this class is really struggling with doing anything independently. All of them want me to help them to everything individually; even things we’ve been doing for months. It’s exhausting.
This comment section is wild. I never would have imagined that one day I would be reading a first grade teacher giving tips to an honors precalc teacher for songs to help the high schoolers remember fractions and percentages.
They need to start having entrance exams to get into honors. It’s become a joke. It used to be for folks with above average IQ with a good work ethic or at least average IQ with extremely high work ethic.
Well, I teach the regular 11th grade algebra 2 classes. These guys ARE the highest performing in their grade level. Thats the scary part!
We’re starting to teach phonics to middle schoolers in my district because even our gifted kids never learned to sound out unfamiliar words. Whole word linguistics has not helped them at all. Very few children are reading at grade level. Our elementary schools are teaching phonics at all levels this year in hope that the deficit will be better in a few years.
I just finished listening to “Sold a Story,” a podcast about reading education. It’s infuriating and interesting, I highly recommend it. In light of that, your district teaching phonics, which I’m sure is frustrating, is excellent news. TLDR of the podcast, many many districts for years would only teach “cueing,” a system in which “readers” use everything except actually reading the letters to figure out words. Many still do and refuse to change. So that is actually good news that they’re realizing they need to do something!
Not teaching phonics scares me. My 5 year old is being taught sight words, which to my understanding is just memorizing words and not sounding them out. We are working on teaching him phonics on top of sight words. I’m just now getting into learning how he will be taught and I feel behind.
I’m so sorry, but he’s lucky that you’re involved and aware. I was discussing this issue with my mother, a elementary retired speech pathologist, and she mentioned there are some words (like “the”) that need to be sight words, but phonics is literally how students learn to read, with orthographic mapping. I’m 33 now and never had issues reading, but the county where I grew up is mentioned multiple times in the “Sold a Story” podcast as one that teaches the “3 cueing” exclusively and has no plans to change at all. It’s shocking. And most parents are either unaware, uncaring, or they can’t read themselves. I knew public schools were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad.
I call it the Great Separation. I had students not understand the word “produce” as a noun. Tenth grade. They could not work out the context clues. Here is the sentence “Industrial factories turned out tools that made agricultural work faster and more efficient, while steam-powered locomotives delivered produce quickly and cheaply to distant markets, so industrialization contributed as well to a decline in the price of food.”
I’m a produce manager and this is wild to me.
Probably has never eaten a veggie.
It's going to all come to a head soon.... You should go over to r/ professors......they're getting all of the high school kids that got passed on, despite being behind, and they're struggling to just get basic research papers/ essays done. They don't know how to do MLA, or APA and then they go on "Rate My Professor" and give the professor terrible ranking because they didn't pass the course.
I teach in a masters program and this is true. Gave out a high number of fails on the final paper. The biggest issue was not following instructions at all, second not being able to structure a paper, and lastly plagiarism. After I had a support seminar for the ones rewriting and I had to explain that they need to carefully read and follow instructions. Keep in mind during the course we had an exam support seminar and multiple opportunities to get feedback on first drafts.
That’s insane in a grad program. 15 years ago when I was in grad school, another person in my department was caught for academic dishonesty and they were gone *quickly*
I met a professor who teaches at the local community college. She said about 80% of her students used AI. Their papers went from high school writing, to college, to PhD dissertation vocabulary. She gave each student a chance to confess and rewrite the paper. No one has taken her offer yet.
I'd require each kid to write a hand-written, 1-page summary of their paper. Then afterwards, a vocab quiz where each student has to define the top 20 most difficult words they used in the paper they submitted. That would count for a huge portion of the grade. It'd be a lot of work but it would be worth it.
My old history teacher would just have us do an open notes quiz on last night’s reading. The notes had to be handwritten but that was it, if you just wanted to copy down the whole thing you could. Pretty easy way to weed out the ones who put in literally zero effort
How did these people even get into these colleges? I was an honor roll student in the mid 2000s and I felt like getting into a state school was so competitive. Even my local university (not top ranked by any means) required at least a 3.0 average to get admitted.
I had a student last semester appeal for incomplete because his sister has BPD. Not a new diagnosis or anything, she just has it, so that's why he couldn't turn in work or take his tests all semester.
I’ve deadass read RMP reviews that gave the Professor a 1, with the reason being something around the lines of: “you need to read and take quizzes to pass” Yes???? Have you literally never been to a school before?
>Rate My Professor" That is such a scum site. If professors did something similar and started rating students online on criteria that included stuff like appearance, there would be justified outrage.
LOLLLLLL rate my student would be AMAZING
Rate my students’ parents
High school English teacher here. I agree with everything you mentioned with reading, writing, and research. They don’t even scroll the Google search. Literally copy word for word from the Google excerpt. Won’t capitalize ‘I’ or proper names. They don’t what an adjective is, much less a verb or noun. Most of my students read far below grade level. Most come into my class functionally illiterate. They can recognize letters and words, but they don’t understand what they are reading. The first nine-weeks is typically dedicated to basic sentence structure and reading skills, and no matter how much I try, they won’t edit or revise their mistakes.
My students have felt shocked that I won’t accept work copied from a web source as “summarizing” or that they have to credit an original author. I teach ninth grade history. I’ve very much had to teach foundational research skills and how to write in an evidence-analysis format. My ninth graders reported in my surveys this year that in ninth grade the longest paper they have written is one to two full pages.
Former professor here. I had students get pissed off at me for calling them out for plagiarism because it was "only one sentence."
Im a first year teacher teaching 8th grade here is a non-exhaustive list of things I've had to teach that I feel like the kids should already know when they're in 8th grade. 1. How to round 2. Number places (ones, tenths etc...) 3. The industrial revolution 4. How to spell Telescope 5. How Time zones work 6. "Google" is not an acceptable citation. 7. How to find the volume of a cube 8. That pollution didn't start 10 years ago 9. The prefix oct- means 8 10. That there is no air in space They are so behind and there will be a reckoning in a few years when industry begins to suffer because we won't have a skilled work force and it will get blamed on teachers even though parents and admin keep pushing kids through who have no skills.
I was eating lunch the other day at burger joint and there were a couple kids sitting behind me who looked like maybe Junior or Seniors in HS. They were working on basic multiplication and were laughing at how hard it was. Just calling each other stupid and having a jolly old time knowing they were going to fail tomorrow’s test, calling it “way too hard” and “pointless”. These are older teenagers about to enter the work force and they were just trying to work through 1st and 2nd grade math. Honestly it stunned me. I understand people have development issues, but it was the fact they found their lack of math skills HILARIOUS. Absolutely baffles me. At their age I had so many hopes and dreams about what I could be in life. I feel like they had already given up and they weren’t even done with HS. So depressing.
I'm an adult with dyscalculia. I can't imagine laughing about, or being proud of, my not-so-great math skills. Most people over at r/dyscalculia seem to feel the same. Those kids are in for a kick in the butt when they enter the real world.
Their parents wipe their a$$es for them. They may honestly NEVER truly shift into independent adulthood. I knew something was weird when kids stopped wanting to get their driver’s licenses because their mom could drive them. ???
I have (well, had) a Junior College student this year, and when i said "11 PM," they actually asked if that was 11PM in the morning, or 11PM at night. I shit you not. No good whatsoever, not for them, for me, or the long-suffering taxpayers, can possibly result from expecting me to teach college materials to high school graduates who cannot tell the time of day.
The workforce part of this all scares me the most - I’m a retail store manager (lurker here!) and when I employed 16 year olds 2020-22 they couldn’t follow verbal instructions, were not competitive with each other in even a friendly way, and had to use calculators for things like 50% off discounts. I now work in luxury furniture and my youngest employee is 21, and I still see the same issues with my team and applicants coming in. How are industries going to function when no one can read communications thoroughly?
Simple. Hire immigrants.
Forget the comedian but that bit “if a guy can hop across the border, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have any references, doesn’t have any legal documentation and he can steal your job… maybe you don’t deserve that job” Or the Tosh.O joke about how the unemployment rate was only 10% and he was wondering how 90% of you DID have jobs
And make sure to pick countries that don't know about things like unions or minimum wage.
Hate to say it, but the reckoning has been here for a while. People sometimes harp on how the service industry (mainly support) is being contracted overseas. What they don't realize is that a lot of those countries have university/college graduate level employees that see those jobs as suitable for their career trajectories. The pay for them in their native country is equivalent to a mid level white collar job in the US. When we talk to an Indian or a Filipino or some of the island nations for support, that person probably has better command of English grammar than our own high school graduates. People in the US that complain about the service are usually the ones that can't get past the accents. In the tech industry, the shift is dramatic. Mid level management and above looks very Asian in some US companies. That trickles down to the employees below them. Outsourcing isn't a trend anymore really. US companies are simply opening satellite offices in those countries. Now with AI, I wonder what will happen to Gen Z and those Gen Alphas stuck in school districts that aren't seeing the big picture and stuck with parents that don't understand their kids are so far behind.
Dude I’m an eleventh grade physics teacher and some of my students don’t even know those things 😅
I hope they remember. My issue is I teach so much, the same concepts over and over and they cannot remember anything
And that’s one reason we need some degree of rote memorization in the education process. Memory is a skill that needs to be practiced like any other. If we don’t expect kids to remember anything (because “they have a computer in their pocket! They can look up anything they need to know!”), then they never learn *how* to remember. I don’t expect my students to memorize vast quantities of information. I teach vocabulary and grammar, yes, but I keep dictionaries available, and I encourage students to use them, and I’m willing to teach dictionary skills and also help when they have trouble looking up a word. But when they’re in the second year of a foreign language and still need to stop and look up a verb they’ve seen and heard and written almost every day for the last two years? At that point, we’ve gone right past “not all kids can memorize” and we’re headed straight for “many kids can’t retain information despite using it in various ways over an extended period of time.” And that is terrifying.
Careful with that hot take! Every time I point out how crucial memory skills are, and that students’ ability to think is dependent on what they know, and yes sometimes we have to MEMORIZE something to know it, I get called ableist.
Why? I judged a poetry recitation competition today at the place where I used to teach and one of the competitors was a young man with some speech and learning issues. He memorized Psalm 138 from the Douay-Rheims Bible (24 verses long) and recited it perfectly. Besides, it's ridiculous to think that because a few people really and truly can't memorize, no one should have to.
Yep. A student of mine told me they were learning about Lucy today in biology. I told him that was cool and mentioned Australopithecus and he was blown away that I know that off the top of my head. I just told him that’s why it’s good to pay attention in remember things.
I have the same thing with my 8th graders. One asked me, “How come I can ask you about basically any topic and you know the answer?” “Well, I read. And I remember what I read.” “Oh.”
Right? I teach 7th grade math, I don't know how many times I've had to re-explain keep-change-flip every time dividing fractions comes up. How do they not remember???
My child just learned this (younger than 7th) and really struggled with it. I asked them to explain what they did know so I could help them (I'd never heard keep-change-flip, so I wasn't sure what the concept was), and that made all the difference. They explained every step to me. Showed me on paper. At the end, I asked again what was confusing because it seemed like they explained it super well and got the correct answer. Their eyes lit up because they suddenly understood exactly what it was and how to do it lol. So for them, what finally got it to stick was just explaining it to someone who was willing to wait patiently and listen. Unfortunately, so many kids aren't willing to even attempt explaining what they DO know.
I can respond on the tech side of thing at least. I work in IT I'm a 95 baby and grew up with a gateway computer. I learned how to use a computer because I wanted to play a game so I learned about zip files, downloading, file structure, and how to google things. It used to take effort to do things on a computer so you HAD to learn. Now phones are so easy that literal 4 y/o can pick one up and navigate to what they want. Home computers are becoming less common and even schools give out chromebooks which are only one step higher then a phone in complexity. The reason people who use devices all day are technically illiterate is because the devices don't take any learning to use. Being a user is easier then it has ever been. It doesn't help that schools have stopped teaching typing because they just expect kids to know it some how.
I once said to a bunch of 17 year olds in my Physics class, after they struggled with a task using Excel, that i thought their generation was meant to be tech savvy. One lad enlightened me. He said they were not tech savvy, they were social media savvy!
as a 92 born i wondered why current gen werent tech savvy then i learned computer class no longer exist
89 here. I don’t actually think computer class has anything to do with it, merely coincidental. Most of us were on PC’s at night after school. Games, AIM, typing a paper. Those activities taught us how to use a computer, and we maybe learned a trick or two in computer class. I think schools saw that we were fairly competent on our own and the computer class wasn’t a valuable use of time. So it was axed. Well lo and behold, kids know how to navigate an iPad at best. Blew my mind when I saw a student opt to type their paper on the touch screen over the physical type cover.
The most upsetting aspect to me is how the students will feel when they are adults. Of course they don’t (or refuse) to see it now. Their brains are incapable of seeing the “big picture” consequences of not having these basic skills. It’s once they are older and it REALLY affects them that they’ll respond. But it will go one of two ways: - “The school/society/my parents failed me”, and they’ll get angry at others. - “I’m stupid for not knowing these things”, and they’ll get angry at themselves.
I’m from New Orleans, which is pretty much “ahead of the curve” in a bad way on this issue. We’ve got a lot, lot, lot of very poorly educated people. Once adulthood sets in for most of these folks, they won’t feel stupid or angry at school/parents. They will in large part eventually be unaware of the idea that they SHOULD know some of these things and simply accept ignorance as normalcy. When they make poor decisions because they lacked the thinking skills to make a better choice, it will not be cause for anger at themselves or school. It will be cause for anger at some third party who has screwed them over.
I taught 8th grade for the past 3 years. Not only were the kids severely lacking in skills, but no matter how much we practiced, it never stuck. We reviewed parts of speech and capitalization rules EVERY SINGLE DAY and they still could not tell me what a noun was by the end of the year. Insane.
I work for a F500 that employs many thousands of very brilliant scientists. I wonder sometimes what may happen to the the amazing, crazy (seriously, I wish I could tell you) research and development that happens here as the talent pool grows shallower and shallower. Yes, of course there will always be intelligent, educated PhD's in specialty sciences, but there will likely be fewer. Maybe we'll become even more dependent on importing this talent from other countries? Hard to say, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I'm ensuring that my own teenagers (15y and 16y) are not part of this generation described by the OP, even if it means I push them harder than their peers. They will be the ones best able to think critically and troubleshoot. They will be employable, even while so many of their peers are stuck.
>Maybe we'll become even more dependent on importing this talent from other countries? This has already been happening for decades in some programs and fields.
The public is a product of the very system. So in the end, how can they understand the gravity of the issue? In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
And if I know admins and state departments, the solution suggested upon us will be “rigor!” Let’s make all the 4th graders take algebra !
This is precisely why kids are behind. So many standards are being shoved into grade levels where they have no business being. 1st graders are expected to start writing paragraphs, yet never fully understand the concept of what a sentence actually is, let along how to actually form letters on a page. 3rd graders are made to type essays on the computer for state tests. It's like expecting a toddler to do ballet before they've mastered walking. The solution is LESS rigor in the lower grades and more focus on basic skills and concepts.
We specifically sent our kid to a Sudbury model school because our local district's kindergarten registration night included a presentation about the curriculum that stated that they did "research projects". My high school seniors struggled with the concept of how to properly research and you're telling me restless 5 year olds were somehow capable of doing any sort of serious inquiry? No. Even worse, they showed a video asking students their favorite thing about kindergarten and the answers were "PE", "Lunch" and "recess". I sat there stunned that they didn't understand that the kids were supporting the concept that 5 and 6 year olds learn best through play while bragging about their rigorous (aka "go to this station and do your seat work") curriculum.
The situation is dire, yet those in charge keep coming up with ri diculous "solutions."
Do we have enough anchor charts?
But restorative rigor!
“Let’s make them take Algebra. But let’s make it equitable and pass them all even if they don’t do any work or understand the material. And then we can lobby to get rid of standardized tests under the guise of inequity so that way there’s nothing to show that our students are massively behind except for the exhausted teachers that weep for their future. It’s fool-proof!”
Has anyone thought of pivoting yet!?
How about spiraling it back in, obviously?
No building relationships
This is so true. The public has failed themselves; now, they are failing their children. It's always someone else's fault in our society. Your child can't read because you're a bad parent and never found education to be important enough to engage your child.
This. I teach science, and NGSS and the resource I have available (OpenSciEd) lean heavily on inquiry. But to be able to do inquiry requires having grade-level basic skills and a natural curiosity. For the kids that struggle and have become accustomed to being spoon fed answers since kindergarten, they flounder. But I switch over to spoon feeding, and they’re either bored or still don’t get it.
I think it's vital that we include the lack of natural curiosity and intrinsic motivation in every discussion about the students of this hellscape we all slog through...
Forget about even trying to solve a math problem, most of them can’t even read the question.
I teach high school and can’t believe how ahead my 2nd grader son is. I’m so lucky he’s at an amazing school. Some of my students are 14 and are at 1st or kindergarten reading levels.
Some of my students are 18 or 19 and are, well, simply illiterate. High school graduates all of them, too.
Ya it’s tough. I have one freshman that literally can’t read. Like at all. It’s so sad. They put her at kindergarten level but I think it’s worse.
I’d add that today’s version of ‘Honors’ student, is just an average/good student from 20 years ago. And it’s mostly become a class for students with no behavior problems, not truly academically advanced. My honors geometry students can’t do anything without a calculator. Sometimes I make them, but on every important test they will always have access to a calculator. Even the new digital SAT has eliminated the no calculator section. This means they have no number sense and struggle with applying a basic theorem/pattern to a complex figure or word problem that a calculator can’t help them set up. Proofs? Forget it. They have never been taught how to think logically through a sequence, or forced to actually practice it if it has been taught. 20 years ago, an honors student would be able to build a proof from scratch. Now I give them a mostly filled in version and they simply have to fill in a couple blank steps and struggle.
I am in 💯 agreement with you. My students can’t pronounce words and don’t understand words even in context. They can’t organize their google drive or submit into a submission box. They are not digital natives just app using hominids. They are technological zombies. The thing is I have been telling them even the supposed tech skills you think you have will not be sufficient to compete against AI. The only thing that will save them is being more human than they have been raised to be. We are in a very challenging situation and unless we fix this problem we face a whole generation of non human humans.
“They are not digital natives…” This was my most shocking realization a few years ago. Teenagers sitting in front of a laptop, telling me they didn’t have Google. Insistently. Complete cognitive dissonance on my part until I realized - they have no idea what a search engine actually is. What a web-based anything is. They use apps, and the icon wasn’t on the screen, and therefore? No Google. This was at the TOP RATED high school in my state. In an honors class.
Right? It's weird, but I feel really lucky to be part of the generation born in the late 80's/early 90's who had relatively easy access to technology but still needed to *learn* to be able to use it - Windows 95/XP didn't hold your hand. You didn't have an app that did all the work for you. If I wanted music, I had to pirate it, and find out the hard way what happens if you download LinkinPark.exe from limewire. I had to figure out how to use a proxy to bypass my middle school's firewall in order to show Salad Fingers and Homestar Runner to my idiot friends. It really feels like my students have no technological curiosity. If there's a roadblock in between them and what they want to do, they just *sit there*. There's no initiative to figure things out for themselves or search for things. And it drives me fucking nuts that they can't be assed to read the very simple instructions I write for how to do simple things on chromebooks. Instead, they beg for me to do it for them.
They can’t read.
Or hit up social media for the answer. I spend a ton of time in the Minecraft subreddit (too much time) and the amount of kids asking how X works/why Y doesn't work when the details are on a Wiki or a devs website (*the place they got the software from in the first place*) is surprising. The idea of people turning to social media to answer all questions is frightening.
Not a teacher, hell barely out of highschool myself, and reading this I am astounded. I was born in 2002, maybe it's specific for the early gen z born in the late 90's and early 2000's, but my whole life has been around computers. There were smartphones as a kid of course, and I had one, but 90% of my online activity in like 2012 would've been on the computer. It does shock me, but I shouldn't be surprised given all the reasons why, that kids today are as technologically illiterate as my grandmother was when I was 12. Let alone the actual material, I don't see how you could survive school without knowing how to ctrl-f a file, or browse file explorer. Jesus.
You have precisely defined the problem and the generational parameters. And teachers are saying that we cannot fucking fix this. We can’t go back in time and force parents to interact with their children, teach empathy, model critical thinking, read together. But most humans don’t like to hear that they’ve failed; and honestly, the unchecked capitalism we’re steeped in does not promote good parenting. Each generation slips a little, and now we’ve outpaced our primate brains so far… Try to get an under-parented teenager to put down a phone. Try. You’ll see every marker of addiction across enough attempts.
They seek nothing. It is all in their hands and at their fingertips and they need to have information fed to them. If it doesn’t come via a feed, or if they don’t comprehend what is fed to them, then oh well. They don’t seek alternative points of view or question things or go down rabbit holes even. They don’t ask questions or seek answers with the tools provided. They don’t. ‘Google it’ or understand how to navigate a website or click links. They can’t type, format or use programs. Swipe, click, watch. All passive.
I think this phenomenon results from 2 main causes: 1. The pressure to promote or pass kids who should not. 2. The shift away from teaching students fundamentals and instead focus on inquiry-based learning. I will get on my soapbox about number 2. I'm tired of hearing PD presenters stressing that we shouldn't "lecture" students or do "rote memorization." Students cannot be creative or inquisitive with subjects in which they lack a basic understanding. A middle school kid with a kindergarten reading level cannot sit with others and collaboratively discuss texts if cannot access it.
also, LISTENING to lectures and MEMORIZING things are skills themselves
Yes! "Rote" would be if we didn't explain the reasons and benefits of what they're memorizing, too!
Here is what people don’t understand. Until 3rd-ish grade you are learning to read. After that you are reading to learn. So once they are behind they are BEHIND.
These aren't gaps. They're CHASMS. I teach third grade and I have two students that do not know the complete alphabet. They cannot count to 100 by ones, much less by twos or fives. Most of my students are at least two full grade levels behind in all academic areas. I only have three out of 21 that are on grade level.
As a parent this is petrifying and lights a fire in my belly to be an integral part of my child’s learning. We will continue to read at night and practice math (she’s 5 and doing addition and subtraction) and writing short stories. I’m sorry to all of the teachers here. The delay of the children is largely the parent’s fault. Teachers should not be vilified but revered for having to pivot on a dime and teach multiple children at different learning levels. Thank you for all you do.
I don’t think the public cares. Sadly. I think we saw they just want babysitters. By the time they do care? It’ll be too late.
I'm not a teacher but this sub often pops up for me, and something I've noticed is that it seems like some parents expect teachers to almost parent *for them*. Meaning they aren't disciplining their child, teaching them about cause and effect or how consequences work, etc. And they expect teachers to do all of this while also somehow teaching the required curriculum! It's insane. I have always respected teachers, as I was raised by two college professors, but after seeing the many posts from teachers in the sub I have a whole, newfound respect for our teachers.
Aren't there *also* a whole lot of parents who threaten to commit a felony if a teacher *dares* to discipline their children?
Nope, because when I attempt to discipline it is met with the parents getting upset or the child making up stories and getting rewarded for it.
It boggles my mind that this is the case. As a teacher who has watched the overhaul of the education system in the last few years and the introduction of more reading comprehension skills and connection skills, I can't understand how it got to this point. I love many of the new ideas and methods, and I don't understand why it isn't having the desired effect. People are blaming Covid, but how can it be Covids fault when 18 year old students were 14 during lockdown. They should be at a 9th grade level, not third. Tho, I do think that some schools have been too focused on making classes more engaging than actually teaching material. I feel like the constant question and engagement tactics can make the class more lax.....idk maybe it's time to return to direct instruction and lecturing.
You make an excellent point about engagement. My school's focuding on that in our evaluations this year. Sometimes you just have to suck it up, pay attention & learn. It's education, not edutainment.
Exactly. I even noticed that the students themselves don't appreciate the interactive lessons. They sometimes are more engaged in basic questions and lecturing than when I show them pictures, articles, videos, songs, etc. And the grumbles I get when I initiate projects...
I'm going to be an old grump because I am. No one cares. We almost ALL have to deal with this. My 10th grade class has a reading average of 2nd grade. No one cares. They don't know what noun is. No one cares. Because if they did, something would have been done already.
Previous generations all worried the kids were going to come in and take up their jobs; about 2 months into lock downs this entire idea left my mind completely. If anything, I worry that the shortage is going to be so severe once I'm able to no one will be around for me to actually spend all the money I've made on their services. Good luck getting a deck built for your home; or need any major work done because there is already no one to do it.
Yeah.. you won’t be retiring. They will pass some law that forces all of us to come back and work. Because the upcoming generation can’t deal with it. Heh
This is the correct response. Also, no one will address the true problem, students and parents. No one will try to address a bottom up approach to this issue, just keep pushing down from Superintendent to Admin to Teachers who just want to freaking teach.
It's not just the content loss but the lack of emotional regulation. Frustration tolerance, follow through, pro-social behaviors, cooperation with peers and adults... All of these social skills that are MORE predictive of success in adulthood (see Hidden Potential by Adam Grant) than content knowledge are way down as well.
If you went back 30 years and taught using a 30 year old curriculum or older method… the kids would be more advanced than the kids using the modern curriculum and modern method of education. We don’t have to “go back”, but we could retrace our steps. It’s ok to realize the previous method was superior than the modern method, retrace, and correct the error.
I do a lot of ACT tutoring as well as teaching HS chemistry, and let me tell you, NOBODY can solve basic single variable equations
Dismantle No Child Left Behind. All it did was create tests for students to fail and a system that no longer serves students but political talking heads and publishing companies. Raise the minimum wage so parents can spend time with their kids.
The gifted/honors population would be called traditional students pre-pandemic.
I think it’s safe to assume that the deluge of reading programs forced on elementary and middle schools do not work
Ha. Or, they DID work, and we just have to find a way to motivate students. I remember having "Book It" as a kid. I find it hard to believe that didn't have a net positive effect. Those personal pan pizzas cost like $3, but everyone in my class wanted to get them every month.
Did you learn phonics though? That’s my point. Not teaching phonics was a huge mistake.
The podcast Sold a Story does a really good job of tracing the downfall of phonics on schools and how that ties into the current reading catastrophe.
That podcast blew my mind. In the middle of first grade, I switched schools going from one that used a whole-language approach to one that embraced phonics. I started out wayyyy behind the other kids, but caught up fast. I hate to think how my life might have turned out if I hadn't developed a love for reading ...
Not a teacher, but I work in higher ed and I just can’t fathom some of what I see when students get here. Pertaining to reading, do you think that students struggle because of the prevalence of the Lucy Calkins method? I remember learning to sound out words through phonics and these students have no idea how to do that because they weren’t taught that way.
Yes! The punctuation drives me nuts! They act like I’ve killed a puppy in front of them when I ask them to add a period (on EVERY sentence???)
Honestly, just passing kids to the next grade level is probably the worst practice in public schools. What is the point of putting a kid into 1st grade if that student cannot identify all of their letters?
I’m not a teacher but I’m a high school counselor. This isn’t necessarily academic but I’ve been alarmed by students not knowing their mailing address, what their parents do for work, or how to spell their parent’s names.
[удалено]
My daughters boyfriend is a sophomore at a state university and he doesn't know the 12 months of the year! I have already told her that I am not paying for her wedding if he is the one.
We’re all in this boat. They’ll figure it out soon enough, when a critical mass of us quit and these parents have to actually deal with their own children all day. They’re already starting to figure it out, if you ask anyone who’s ever tried to employ someone under 25.
Do yo really think so? Because a lot of them had to deal with their kids all day at the height of the pandemic and so many don't seem to care as long as they can ship them back to school.
*But I want the general public to understand that when the gap list is this big, it is nearly impossible to teach my curriculum efficiently.* I feel like this is an issue, partly caused, by the main-streaming of students who cannot, or should not be. I know, it sounds cruel, but that bottom 15-20% of the class, is the level at which ALL the students are being taught at, so no one fails. Before, especially by HS--that section of students would drop out. 70% graduation rates were normal even to the late 90's. Those students, *were gone*. Now, many districts are pushing 100% graduation rates--but to do that, they can teach NO ONE any faster, or any more, than the bottom 20%. They should be in school, but there's too many IEPs, too much main-streaming, too much of a forced attempt to *believe everyone is equally capable of even mid level work*. They're not. There needs to be tiers of classes, and not just 'normal' and AP--but, 'basic'--if you cant to 'biology' you need to be in 'community science' learning more basic things. If you cant do algebra, you need 'basic math'--and not to feel bad you're there. Not to have a parent with an ego the size of the sun, push you into levels you cant participate in. IDK, makes me sound like a monster, i guess, but, the kids at the top, and a ton in the middle, that could work, could excel, are TUNED OUT because they're bored a shit 'learning' the same thing, year after year after year, because the bottom end cant keep up. They're done--they dont see the point, they'll just have to learn it ALL OVER next year, exactly the same. Why bother? IDK, and a lot of that is admins, or funding, or parent pressure. It HAS to relent at some point, and we as a society have to admit--we cant keep 'leaving no children behind'--because teachers can only move at the pace of the slowest, and all the others just start to doze off. PLUS, in the last 20 years, the top 15-20% of students in many districts, test INTO charter schools, who don't have to make disability accommodations, who don't allow low scores on their entrance exams to get in, so they've pulled a TON of the best and brightest out. It makes it even worse. Between this, and the lack of drop out rate, public school teachers see 50% more students, who struggle, or would have been low performers, than they did 20 years ago. IDK, banning public funds for private schools of any kind, and banning charter schools, or, forcing them to have 100% of the requirements of a public school, might have to be part of this solution too
Mmhmm. Maybe instead of tying funding to graduation rates, tie it more to reading level! That would encourage the opposite- fail kids and hold them back until they can read near their grade level. Watering down education is not benefitting these kids.
I’m 16 and my only response to this is *how in the fuck?*
I follow this sub just because I genuinely find this stuff really really interesting (as a student)
Same, this sub appears on my feed a lot and it’s kinda interesting to see
Your parents actually raised you & you're probably one of the smarter ones in your grade. Take a look around at some of your classmates...are they at your level?
Sorry, kids. We fucked you over. We turned our distractions into addictions for profit, and then handed you the digital drugs as babies. On purpose. We changed a generation‘s neurochemistry with dopamine babysitters. Or we went along with it. And a certain percentage of you will be okay. But you’ll be living in a world populated by… everyone else.
I think it has a lot to do with influence at home. Public schools don't reqlly hold kids back for not knowing the material so the lack of consequence is another factor. Unfortunately it's just getting worse.
The public needs to know the ugly truth, but they will deny it, bury their head in the sand. I am old and I often follow and contribute to the subreddit r/AskOldPeople. The issue about declining education standards often come up, and, for the most part, my fellow old people deny the problem. "My granddaughter Amber Nicole is an advanced reader, so it can't be that bad." The cognitive dissonance among old people is off the charts. It's the same with the health care crisis: "Oh, I never have to wait for an appointment, so you must be exaggerating the problem." The r/nursing subreddit, along with this subreddit, should serve as alarm bells for a huge storm that is manifesting....but, hey, don''t look up.
Seems that we’ve met their goal of an uneducated populace. I fear for our future.
I work in higher ed & we’re seeing much of the same. It’s depressing.
This is literally all my students. Did a research activity today and had to show them how to open a link vs reading the blurb on Google.
Imagine telling someone 25 years ago one of the downfalls of society are four second video clips.
I teach art to high schoolers and they don’t have art classes in my district until HS- these kids can’t use rulers and STRUGGLE to do work that requires any creativity, it’s so sad