I think it's bad, but I also think there's a
impulse to prove that others are dumb, even if it's children who are undergoing a severe mental health crisis.Even if what the users say is 100% true, I didn't see any posts talking about the reality of being a student in a world where you were forced to go back to school when people were still dying of covid, there are mass shooters who will come in because they watched something on Fox News, or that they are seeing climate change ravage their world.
I struggled to pay attention in school because of abuse and my GPA went to 4.0 as soon as I left the house.
Material conditions are a thing we talk a lot about here, but I feel like even then, we can forget about material conditions for children in the US.
I dunno. It's bad to be in school and we're definitely going to feel the consequences for a while. I just hate that the blame is gonna fall on teachers and not the depravity of capitalism.
Society blames the teachers, the teachers blame the parents:
Parenting now seems like keeping them alive until it’s time to register for school.
but it is capitalism, of course. Who has time to work 40 hours a week, prepare 2+ meals a day for your whole family, keep yourself and your kids and your home clean, spend time with your kids teaching them things and playing with them, budget your money, plan for the future, exercise, have a hobby, blah blah blah.
It is Not Possible to do all that without help, it just fucking isn't. The only people I know who "have it all" have childcare assistance (family, nannies) and a housekeeper, and even they are having a hard time doing everything.
I wish everyone could stop pretending that anyone does it all successfully all by themselves, but it's not in capital's interest for us to be sympathetic or cooperative.
I would imagine a lot of these students fail to see the "point" of learning. The US education system is so detached from the reality of these kid's lives that they just find it hard to care about. Why should they?
My generation was sold the lie that if we did well in school we could go to a good university and get a degree and get a really nice job. But that's such an empty, hollow goal for a person's life, and it didn't even turn out to be true, nepotism was and is the way to get a decent job, and these kids probably know it, and they also know that they don't know anyone in high places to get that cushy job.
So I don't really blame them for their apathy in a cold indifferent capitalist society that will probably crumble before they hit 40. Why work hard to get further in such an obviously broken system?
I do think that this is a huge factor. There's somebody in that thread who claims to be a pre-k teacher, and mentions that things like days of the week, colors, shapes, etc. have been removed from the pre-k curriculum for being "developmentally inappropriate," but kids are expected to do complex phonics exercises. I teach (mostly) 11th/12th grade in a very weird public school that isn't subject to these trends, but I have friends who teach k-12 in more standard schools that complain a lot about contemporary curriculum design. Everything is decontextualized and disconnected from everything else. The standard English curriculum mostly reads short passages to prepare for standardized tests rather than books. Math is almost entirely problem sets to prepare for standardized tests. None of it is connected to anything else, and teachers really have to go the extra mile to provide any kind of context or explanation for why students are learning the things they are in the order they are (and doing so means less time to teach to the standardized tests, which negatively impacts funding and teacher performance metrics). The insane focus on standardized testing and "metrics" is a problem at almost all levels, and has been an unmitigated disaster for educational performance. The purpose of all of this, of course, is to mold kids into ideal wage slaves for our billionaire overlords, which is why contemporary curriculum focuses so heavily on drilling mechanical skills and test performance rather than a broad understanding of the natural world and our place in it. No Child Left Behind and its successors have been a catastrophe.
millennials with some spillover to gen x and gen z are the only people on earth who know how computers work, when they're gone it's going to be a bad time
I feel like I should get into a tech job. I know a lot about computers but never bothered to learn to code. I could absolutely do any IT work but would rather get that coding money. I have started learning a few times but couldn't keep up with it in my limited free time. I've got some more time now so maybe I should get back into before there's another hiring boom.
I would take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt. There's someone in there claiming their AP human geography class didn't know what even numbers were. You really get the sense that there's a real creep in a lot of these stories from "I had a kid who did X..." to "My students do X...", all without any requirement to justify how some bad outcome is worse that it was in the past.
teachers can be drama queens, and redditors can be idiots.I'm sure there are districts in the US with dramatically under-resourced classrooms, but this has always been true. Right now there is a real zeitgeist where I live as well to try to tell this story that the kids are categorically worse as well, but honestly most of that is complete hash, or at the very best complicated. Covid did cause some general developmental delay and that is a real concern, but generally kids aren't much different than they used to be and in a lot of ways that are really important they're the best generation that's ever existed.
Yeah, and a bit of me wonders just how many of these stories we'd be getting if teachers had reddit back in 2003. I'm seriously doubtful that something has so dramatically changed about public schooling in the last 10 years to go from "sort of okay" to "Idiocracy (2005)"
The anecdote about even and odd numbers strikes me as less of a story about them not knowing, and more about them being so completely disengaged from the class that they're just not really listening to the teacher.
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…
Tbf I know a ton of adults like this. Zoomers about to have the email communication skills of old racist boomers
Given that every email client is different and there's a generational thing of "kids just kNoW aBoUt CoMpUtErS", this isn't surprising. If nobody is teaching the kids they won't know.
I was talking to a younger coworker the other day and he said he has friends who can barely spell and sorta just sound it out and pick from the top 3 keyboard suggestions like they're typing Mandarin.
The loss of phonics in schools and the general teaching to the test is really hurting students.
My BiL is in high school. He's not a dumb kid but struggles in class. I found one of his essays laying around and the spelling and grammar were all over the place.
The loss of phonics in schools and the general teaching to the test is really hurting students.
What you described is your coworker's friends doing phonics. The problem is that English is only semi-phonetic. Ime, most people learn English spelling with lots of memorization and repeated exposure to the target words.
Yeah I was aware, they're ~25 so they still got the tail end of phonics. It seems the later stages of school sorta left them behind though.
A lot of this seems really overblown, and the whole viral trend of teachers complaining about student being behind feels off to me. I'm a teacher. Not for k-12, so maybe I just haven't run into it yet, but this doesn't match my experience.
i mean, where do you teach?
i met a young adult who cant read a few months back
edit: oh you dont teach k-12, that's prolly selection bias there
i had close friends that couldn't do basic math and knew plenty of people outside of my circle who had horrible reading/writing skills, didnt know shit about history, never got past basic algebra.
that's prolly selection bias there
Probably. I don't have experience teaching younger kids, and my kid is still too young for me to have any first hand experience with the school system, but I've not run into anyone with the problems a lot of these videos are talking about.
I'm certainly not saying they're made up, but the fact that so many of them are attributing these problems to covid "lockdowns" and not the state of education in the US that has existed for decades has me questioning how widespread the problem is beyond what would be considered "normal" levels of underdevelopment.
Whos the reddit op? Whats his background? The commentors could just be a bunch of crackers honestly, considering its reddit its probably accurate. Also most teachers burnout quickly due to the shitty system and the ones who stay are usually hooked up with a kush job, which could explain more of the commentors.
i edited my post, im saying that depending where you are what the reddit op is talking about is not an unreal trend and everyone in this post and there do leave the 'where the fuck are you at' portion.
my hoodrat shithole definitely had all these issues, maybe not cracker white land where the resources are more abundant. if thats your only experience with public education it may seem like right wing scaremongering
and also id like to add that that's the experience for outside kids who are LD or troubled
I raised my kids in Crackerland and they went to a charter school. (shared parenting and an angry ex meant they were stuck) And it was complete trash. Basically it was a crunchy granola ass white hippy school that was marketed as such so white hippy ass parents could brag about it and act all superior to public school parents. My kids have a problem with reading and handwriting that still persists.
That school would send my kids to farms to work. But my kids lived on a damn ranch, so I would just keep them home when that would happen. 'They made us weed the beds.' Like naw you can do that at home.
I do notice that rich people do also fuck up their kids with bullshit like that.
I knew a couple of montessori kids who were train wreck adults despite having money. I learned recently that the lady who came up with montessori apparently gave her kid up for adoption and then he later came back and started working for her or some shit lol
I dont think anyone was 'rich'. Except I did meet an actor from Seinfeld. Where I live is an interesting mix of a red county with alot of libertarian hippies types. So performative enviromental esthetic with zero class consciousness. Whatever gross narcissism that plagues weed growers. Eat organic, smoke cigarettes, dont vaccinate your kids. So paying to send your child to a underperforming school set up to weaken teachers unions is okay if they make your kid shovel organic chicken shit.
I use rich for anyone middle class tbh, probably shouldnt keep that habit. My bad
On the one hand it would greatly benefit capital if this is happening. On the other hand it would greatly benefit capital to convince you that this is happening.
On the one hand it would greatly benefit capital if this is happening.
Would it? The public education system was largely designed BY capitalists cuz they realized they needed more workers who were literate and knew basic mathematics. As long as you sprinkle in a heathy dose of anti-communist propaganda teaching kids ABCs and 123s isn't all that more likely to make them read Marx.
Keeping your workers undereducated is really only beneficial if you have a feudal/plantation agricultural economy, and outside some of the really psycho CHUDs idk how many American capitalists want the US regressing back into the late Holy Roman Empire.
The problem they found is that teaching people to read and do math is a gateway to understanding things like history, the economy, labor laws, etc. I think we've reached a stage where they would rather make the jobs easier to do for illiterate people than risk class consciousness growing any more than it has.
Couple that with the rollback of child labor laws and you can see the future we're heading toward.
Idk dude. Everyone here is constantly talking about how public schools are basically propaganda centers that also teach some basic job training skill, and how much as the right may claim otherwise most universities just pump out STEM fascists or social studies PMC Libs who go onto either be middle managers or NYT op Ed writers. I know plenty of well educated people and most of them aren't comrades, meanwhile socialist revolutions have taken off in places where most of the population was illiterate. Class consciousness is the west has always been fucking abysmal, even when the west had better educational standards.
I think a lot of this is just Christo-fash who want to regress back to a plantation economy so they can get away with molesting their own daughters more.
Keeping your workers undereducated is really only beneficial if you have a feudal/plantation agricultural economy, and outside some of the really psycho CHUDs idk how many American capitalists want the US regressing back into the late Holy Roman Empire.
The US was able to get away with this through brain drain. All the difficult technical and intellectual work was done by brain drained professionals from the Global South while the domestic population was barely educated enough to be a wage slave. But now that those professionals are less likely to travel to the US or are repatriating back (as we have seen with Chinese scientists due to Sinophobia), the chickens are coming home to roost.
Actual US domestic talent has been lacking for a very long time, and it's only going to get worse.
I teach early elementary and about 1 in 4 of my students don't know some or most of the letters in the alphabet.
It’s a bigger sign of a class divide. You find kids like this in public urban schools with a police presence within the school. You don’t see this as much at the better public suburban schools.
I don't know how true that is. I had a roommate that was a high school math teacher and the suburban kids seem just as checked out as anyone else from what he's said. There's a small cadre of "good students" but it sounds like the majority would rather start being a wage slave than be in school.
Tbf it is math. For all the years I’ve been alive, math has always been that one subject people couldn’t stand to be in.
No one has ever adequately explained how crucial math is to them and how fucked they are if they're innumerate. Allowing calculators is another huge issue. Once kids get calculators they're like, "Great! Now I never have to think about this shit ever again!" Just teach the same concepts with simpler numbers until you actually NEED a calculator in like geometry or trig.
You know how to [add/subtract/multiply/divide/exponent/root], but do you know how to do that to a number with THREE digits? Good, now do that 30 times tonight at home or we penalize you is the epitome of busy work - beyond walking students how to break down the problem into the manageable steps they already know how to do, all this serves is to pad out the semester and breed a resentment of math in young people.
You shouldnt need a calculator as long as you limit yorself to 30, 45, and 60 degree angles. There is a reason rulers used to come with 2 trianhles of 45 and a 30 degrees, and a compass.
imo this content feels a little bit like millenials making themselves feel better about those dumb gen z/alpha kids.
Reminds me a bit of Jaywalking: just kind of making fun of people, rather than a call to action.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I want to add that there are high-performing students out there. However, from my experience, the gap between the "gifted/honors" population and the "general" population has widened significantly. Either you have students that perform exceptionally well or you have students coming into class grade levels behind. There are rarely students who are in between.
There are nerds who will learn no matter what and there are students who need a push either from the parent or the teacher. With online classes, there isn't much the teacher can do to compel students to study and if parents don't do it either then they'll end up falling behind.
How could the parents do it when most of them were working at the time as well?
We're witnessing the knock-on effects of being completely unprepared for COVID in every way, and then our government scrambling to bail out the stock market and give away trillions of taxpayer dollars to corporations for free. This requires revolutionary change to fix.
Yea Im not blaming the parents either, >40hour work week can be brutal.
What I'm saying is it's not exclusive to the U.S. but present across all capitalist countries post-2020.
Atleast in most Western countries there were stimulus cheques, in much of the global south, IMF and World Bank forced the countries to limit deficit which was devastating and of course, whatever increase in deficit went to the big business.
Or the parents aren't better off education wise, i remember doing basic algebra and my mom screaming at me and calling me stupid etc. for not being able to get it but she couldn't even do it herself lmao
i turned in a homework assignment, where i felt atleast, that she done most of the work and it was a fucking F lol
my folks were not doing well mentally or financially so the idea of getting a tutor or staying after school never crossed my mind or felt possible, also fuck school i just got an F in math
I honestly believe i had it light compared to others because i was super fortunate to have two parents albeit both were dysfunctional, not just one hyper extended parent who may or may not be dysfunctional themselves.
"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."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1axhne2/the_public_needs_to_know_the_ugly_truth_students/krockyu/
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The inevitable results of capitalism intentionally knee-capping public education by underfunding education and underpaying school staff, to keep as dumb a populace as possible while also creating justification to further privatize schooling/restrict a good education to the rich.
Do you think there's anything more sinister at work here than just capital being bad ? Even if things are old half as bad as that sub makes them out to be it seems like just such a horrible thing.
Edit; and by capital being bad I mean profit seeking off of education and the desire for a limitless supply of uneducated consumers/workers.
the school I worked in during the pandemic was only fully remote for the first half of 2020 (after covid hit), so a little less than one semester. 2020-2021 remote was optional, and many kids, except for the winter delta wave, chose to be in person - I'd say there were at most 3 kids remote in a class of like 20, during delta it was more of a 50-50 split. By at least spring 2021, the vast majority of kids were in person - having even one kid remote in a class of 20 was rare. 2021-2022 there was no remote option. So, at most, there was 1 1/2 years of remote learning, but really most kids had much less remote learning than this. And this is, by the way, in an epicenter of "woke liberalism," an extremely blue area, so I assume most other schools and areas were doing less than this.
But also, as someone points out, the problems they are seeing stretch further back from the pandemic. If there really were 2 years of lost learning, an 11th grader, for example, would be at a 9th grade level. Or, if they fell behind during the pandemic and were unable to catch back up at all, a 7th grade level. But what people are seeing is these kids are at an elementary school level. Clearly the education system started failing them before the pandemic.
I'd also love to know what sort of schools these people were teaching at. I was at a very low-income school right before the pandemic hit, and this absolutely tracks with what I experienced. I'd be trying to help a fifth-grader with their homework, and they could not figure out how to sound out a word. You'd end up having to re-teach basic letter sounds, or basic math or something. The education system in the United States has been failing these kids for a while, all the pandemic did was to put those problems on full display for parents and the public.
The lack of reading and math skills in 15-18 year olds started over 10 years ago, though
There are a lot of lib, well-intentioned teachers falling for slick snake oil salesmen that have nice, hippie sounding education strategies that have no scientific backing. There are a lot of chud parents who harass teachers at every turn. There are Bush era policies that created horrible incentives to undermine quality education, but the funny thing there is I'm convinced that Bush actually thought he was improving public education. There are so many aspects of this that are perhaps consequences of living under capitalism for so long, but have unique manifestations
Can confirm as a substitute.
Personally, I blame chan culture becoming more and more mainstream, so it's "cool" to be stupid.
Thankfully, I've had some really sweet, hardworking kids but it sometimes takes me aback when I'm teaching a sixth grade class and they have no idea what a 'vertebrate' is. Like come on, I learned that from Spongebob.
Personally, I blame chan culture becoming more and more mainstream, so it's "cool" to be stupid.
It's absurd to act like channers are responsible for rather than another product of America's long-running anti-intellectual tradition, which you can pretty easily date back over a century with philistine panderers like Theodore Roosevelt through to Ronald Reagan and now Trump.
Theodore Roosevelt.
Man, liberal me was in for a rude awakening when I learned the truth about him.
: "Oh wow, an environmentalist who calls himself a progressive and is also both the nerd and the jock at the same time? Based!"One radicalization later
: "Oh..."Yeah, this is the result of decades of work by right-wing groups to destroy public education and sell the "cure" in charter/private schools. The countries with the best education systems, unsurprisingly, have extremely rigorous standards set by the government and in many cases the methods and materials are produced by the governments, as well. The US's public/private brainworms destroys everything it touches. Which, critical support and all for destroying America, but millions of kids are absolutely fucked by no fault of their own because capitalists wanted a dumb, complacent army of labor.
Which, critical support and all for destroying America, but millions of kids are absolutely fucked by no fault of their own
Personally speaking, I'll reserve my critical support for adventurists and religious zealots who happen to pick good targets, rather than the masters of the state fucking themselves over in a long-term fashion for medium-term profit.
Yeah, that's a bad take from me. It does seem like the capitalists are really trying to accelerate the decline of the US empire, though. Guess they feel like they looted all they could out of the global south and now it's time to go for the imperial core.
so it's "cool" to be stupid
Perhaps it's escalated, but that's definitely not new.
The sixth grade my partner teaches didn't know what language they spoke in France. None of them knew English-speaking countries besides England and the US.
Seriously, if I ever get my shit together. I hope I can become a content creator that can engage gen alpha in a way that both the enshittified internet and the modern public schooling system has failed them. Especially as someone who holds a teacher-adjacent role, I know they're not stupid. They have been collectively wronged.
I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor. The US has always had shitty educational outcomes (look at our literacy rates) compared to even much poorer countries. Biggest villain here is austerity, which has only worsened in recent years. I’ve seen several news stories about districts having to go down to 4 or even 3 days a week since they literally can’t keep the doors open, either due to lack of funds or lack of teachers (which is just a lack of funds by another name).
The teachers are doing the best they can but trying to pin it on the parents is wrong headed too. By the time a kid is in high school they’ve spent 8 hours a day at school for half the year for 8 years, like at that point if they haven’t been taught how to do simple math there’s something very wrong with the system itself, and it’ll never be fixed because rich people don’t give a shit since their schools are good (funded through property taxes) or they go to private schools
I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor.
This has been the huge majority of the viral videos I've seen, which is another reason it doesn't smell right to me.
yeah this, the gulf between my shithole public education and what i see interacting with upper middle class people as an adult is huge
