Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
"I have students still using sentence stems to write the most basic of paragraphs."
I'm 35 and would have been marked down in any class that i didnt write using boring as fuck sentence stems. it made me the shitty writer i am today
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I feel like my early English education missed a shitload of these things because I just moved around a bunch and different schools taught at different times just in a way that I missed some foundational aspects, but like just the terminologies. Ended up just kinda learning English based on a "gut feeling" as to whether or not it sounded correct based on how much I read as a child.
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Yeah, most of the guidelines and formulas for "writing" papers make the process much harder and less natural
I had something like that but more complicated sentences and I fucking hated it, they presented it as a type of journal and said to actually give our real answers, but it would assume all kinds of shit about you like I dunno "I love eating broccoli because______________________________" and it took me a long time to just say fuck it and constantly lie in there