It’s fucking terrifying. Imagine high schoolers struggling with writing their own name. The schools I worked with had very few “book kids” - maybe some read manga (any reading is great!)
School districts have cracked down on teacher autonomy and often force them to use poorly supported curriculum and instructional strategies. With reading, it’s been a movement away from phonics towards guess what words mean based on context clues. Teaching effectively takes time and small class sizes, which there is no money for, so the solution is buying a $500k+ program of scripted curriculum for teacher to read in front of their class of 35. Students aren’t allowed to be held back or failed, so they’ll keep getting promoted whether they can add single digit numbers or not - and there’s no indication to anyone that anything is wrong. When standardized test scores come back and it didn’t work, it’s because the teachers didn’t implement it with fidelity, and in a couple years there’ll be a new program that promises to fix everything.
And if you think illiteracy and innumeracy are scary, wait till you hear them talk about history and science…
When I went into college I though everyone had just finished precalc and was going into Calc 1. Nope. Literally half the freshman went into algebra as their first college math class. I know it’s only gotten worse. A huge portion of high-school graduates not going to college can’t do trig, they can’t do long division, they can’t even multiply two 2 digit numbers. I just saw a tik tok about people trying to do 51*51 and the majority couldn’t.
I’ll admit I only graduated high school back in June and I already forgot how to do long division. I do know trig and the unit circle and whatnot pretty well though, and could do 51*51 in my head in about a minute.
That said, I don’t remember much from precalc, and barely passed it. At my school we had to write a full academic paper in our senior year and that took a lot of my energy. I also wasn’t allowed to drop any of the electives I took even though I didn’t need the credits, which meant I struggled a lot towards the end of senior year and many of my classes suffered. Somehow I still got a good GPA.
It’s fucking terrifying. Imagine high schoolers struggling with writing their own name.
This made me skip everything that came after. Even illiterate kids can probably memorize their names, even if they can’t sound out words. Back up your claim and I’ll reconsider.
Elsewhere, in this thread, you’ll see me champion reading and learning. I’m horribly saddened that kids don’t learn to read well. But this statement seems hyperbolic.
If you don’t believe me, please volunteer in your nearest inner city school. There are lots of children who cannot form the shapes of letters. Fourteen, fifteen year olds writing backwards “R”’s and the like. I’m not going to share screenshots of students names with you, but I saw what I saw over multiple years of teaching. It predates COVID, but COVID has accelerated it.
I’m curious, I often see it discussed now that slang and alternative interpretation must be accepted. In general, this is true, as languages change over time naturally.
But based on what you say, it seems like all pretense of language “standards” are deprioritized or discarded…
Imagine it is Friday night, and you are sitting down to grade a class of high school freshman’s essays. About half of them are less than two paragraphs long. Maybe a quarter of them are consistently capitalizing the first letter of a sentence. When you do see what resembles a normal English sentence, it is clearly AI generated or copied straight from the first google search result for the assigned essay topic. Lots of Wikipedia, with obvious artifacts [3]. Also, you have 100 of them to grade.
Seeing correctly spelled slang is a breath of fresh air.
Not just slang, but chosing to ignore (or not being aware of) grammar rules. Is it possible some are being discarded due to more purposeful disregard? Like, “no one cares to write that way any more”
It’s fucking terrifying. Imagine high schoolers struggling with writing their own name. The schools I worked with had very few “book kids” - maybe some read manga (any reading is great!)
School districts have cracked down on teacher autonomy and often force them to use poorly supported curriculum and instructional strategies. With reading, it’s been a movement away from phonics towards guess what words mean based on context clues. Teaching effectively takes time and small class sizes, which there is no money for, so the solution is buying a $500k+ program of scripted curriculum for teacher to read in front of their class of 35. Students aren’t allowed to be held back or failed, so they’ll keep getting promoted whether they can add single digit numbers or not - and there’s no indication to anyone that anything is wrong. When standardized test scores come back and it didn’t work, it’s because the teachers didn’t implement it with fidelity, and in a couple years there’ll be a new program that promises to fix everything.
And if you think illiteracy and innumeracy are scary, wait till you hear them talk about history and science…
When I went into college I though everyone had just finished precalc and was going into Calc 1. Nope. Literally half the freshman went into algebra as their first college math class. I know it’s only gotten worse. A huge portion of high-school graduates not going to college can’t do trig, they can’t do long division, they can’t even multiply two 2 digit numbers. I just saw a tik tok about people trying to do 51*51 and the majority couldn’t.
I’ll admit I only graduated high school back in June and I already forgot how to do long division. I do know trig and the unit circle and whatnot pretty well though, and could do 51*51 in my head in about a minute.
That said, I don’t remember much from precalc, and barely passed it. At my school we had to write a full academic paper in our senior year and that took a lot of my energy. I also wasn’t allowed to drop any of the electives I took even though I didn’t need the credits, which meant I struggled a lot towards the end of senior year and many of my classes suffered. Somehow I still got a good GPA.
This made me skip everything that came after. Even illiterate kids can probably memorize their names, even if they can’t sound out words. Back up your claim and I’ll reconsider.
Elsewhere, in this thread, you’ll see me champion reading and learning. I’m horribly saddened that kids don’t learn to read well. But this statement seems hyperbolic.
If you don’t believe me, please volunteer in your nearest inner city school. There are lots of children who cannot form the shapes of letters. Fourteen, fifteen year olds writing backwards “R”’s and the like. I’m not going to share screenshots of students names with you, but I saw what I saw over multiple years of teaching. It predates COVID, but COVID has accelerated it.
Ok 😅
I’m curious, I often see it discussed now that slang and alternative interpretation must be accepted. In general, this is true, as languages change over time naturally.
But based on what you say, it seems like all pretense of language “standards” are deprioritized or discarded…
Am I off base?
Imagine it is Friday night, and you are sitting down to grade a class of high school freshman’s essays. About half of them are less than two paragraphs long. Maybe a quarter of them are consistently capitalizing the first letter of a sentence. When you do see what resembles a normal English sentence, it is clearly AI generated or copied straight from the first google search result for the assigned essay topic. Lots of Wikipedia, with obvious artifacts [3]. Also, you have 100 of them to grade.
Seeing correctly spelled slang is a breath of fresh air.
To expand what I mean:
Not just slang, but chosing to ignore (or not being aware of) grammar rules. Is it possible some are being discarded due to more purposeful disregard? Like, “no one cares to write that way any more”