Because it’s on purpose. Education has a profound effect on voting. Higher education has a massive effect on voting.
When sabotaging schools brings you votes…
I don’t disagree that red states cutting education funding is intended to do just that, but I think this trend is a reflection of the 2020 lockdowns stunting a year of development and kids getting hooked on social media in general since it’s all across the world. Scary stats regardless, though.
Anecdotal hope: All of my friends with kids read to them nightly, even when both parents are working. My three year old nephew’s obsessed with books.
As a teacher (not a reading teacher, not being defensive), I feel like this is the right track more than anything going on in education.
Not only is it a kids wanting their immediate gratification from social media, but parents are all addicted as well. And being stressed and all dystopiad-out. When I was a kid, I could go home and stop worrying about what was going on in the social spheres, but there is no escape anymore.
There seems to be a trend of parents spending way less time reading to their kids and needinh more alone time, and the kids aren’t demanding it as much because they are getting attention from devices.
The absolute best readers I get had parents reading to them, with them, and encouraging reading in early years to foster an interest for later.
You have every right to feel defensive, parents, school districts, and politicians will throw you under the bus with these issues at the drop of a test score. Otherwise, same book same page. It’ll be a huge win for society when these cortisol/dopamine shufflers in our pockets get restricted for young people.
Thanks for all the sacrifices you’ve made to be a teacher. You’re awesome, and hundreds of kids will remember your effort.
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s intentional,
What you said is true but what’s also true is that millennials are so crushed under grind culture and financial burdens that they don’t have the time to parent that used to be the norm, so where overworked boomers let the TV raise their kids, parents today are letting the iPad do it, which is turning out to be exponentially worse for development.
Because a kid will eventually get bored of the TV and want to hang out with a friend or play with their parents. But a tablet can provide all the stimulation and pseudo-social contact you could possibly want and you can sit there for days on one.
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 thought 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.
Not gonna lie, as someone in their 30’s that just returned to higher education this kicked me right in the dick. I was a great student, and loved school until I was enrolled in a Christian middle school where my education tanked (especially math & science). Then in ended up in a good quality high school where my first science teacher had no consideration for the missed concepts that I had no way of knowing about, and so I barely passed his class. The same thing happened to me in math where I ended up in Algebra II, but had missed many of the ways the curriculum was taught in their school system so I struggled. This, along with the fact that I had serious life turmoil from 11-21 caused me to give up on education. (everyone in my family died, including two suicides, except my mom who was checked out at the time dealing with estate shit)
Anyway, feels really bad to be so far behind the curve on mathematics especially, but I have been soaking up the course work through Khan Academy like a sponge. I feel like I have learned more concepts more thoroughly through that free resource in the last 6 months that I did in the entire 12 years of school. I started at Algebra I, and am now moving on to Geometry. My goal is to make it through at least pre-calculus as my desired career field is technology. If you have any insight or resources on math education I am all ears.
First, thanks for sharing. That’s a bummer you got behind, but you’ll be able to learn anything you put yourself to.
I think the most valuable thing is to use the resources that help you the most. If that’s online videos, do that, if that’s in person tutoring do that. Obviously they teach how to do math a certain way but the doesn’t mean it’s the best for everyone. I think it’s so awesome that places like YouTube and khan academy are there so people can get what they need.
Get as much as you can with online resources. Try and learn as much as you can. When you come across problems you can’t do, put them some where to come back to. Move on and keep learning. Then come back to those. You might have just figured it out without realizing. And if you still can’t figure it out then that’s a great thing to take to a tutor to ask questions about. You’ll get your money’s worth from a tutor if you already have questions and problems you need help with.
I am very sorry for your losses. Nothing can bring people back.
Math especially requires learning from the bottom up. Most concepts require an understanding of one or more basic concepts, and as you say, just keeps building.
Khan academy is probably the best and least monetized site I know of. MIT Open Course Ware is also good.
There are no rules, go find yourself.
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.
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”
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.
Ok 😅
Because the meme won’t load
And just how do you expect us to do so? Write about it? Read others written thoughts?
Even if you could write about it and your comrade could read it, it’s fake news. If you made a video about it, no you didn’t. It’s a deep fake.
Nothing is real, nothing believable. Thus, no reason to be engaged, enraged – whatever.
It’s not just America. I heard on Public Radio that practically every country in the world has scored worse on reading tests since 2020. I think Japan was the one excpetion.
Of fucking course the country with the most convoluted writing system ever devised by men is the one that’s able to maintain literacy scores lol
It’s not at all that complicated. I’ll take kanji strokes over spelling any day. (I passed ikyuu a decade ago.)
What’s that say?
I’d tell you, but you couldn’t read this anyway.
My auto correct wrote this
IT SAYS THAT AMERICAN KIDS CAN’T READ NOR WRITE
A large part of these developmental delays are due to the social isolation from the Covid shutdown. Many children missed out of vital childhood experiences. Literacy isn’t the only thing they’re behind in. Their social skills are emaciated. They don’t know how to interact with people because they were deprived of the opportunity.
There is an effect there but this has been a problem before COVID. Anecdotal but a teacher friend has been complaining about this for years. I know all parents don’t have the time but we read a ton to our kids and helped them learn to read when they were just getting started.
That’s some of it, but there are high school kids who come in to my office and literally write like 5 year olds. I mean holding the pen like little kids do, handwriting that’s a dead ringer for my kindergarten work books, all of it. Those kids were struggling way before COVID.
In their defense, in the modern workforce there is little need for handwriting so there’s little need to teach it. You need to sign your name occasionally but other than that, handwriting is rare due to prevalence of typing.
This is true in office work but less automated professions may be closer to 50/50 still. It is true though that non-office work environments are also less likely to care about writing than reading comprehension though.
My read on things is that a lot of kids are also lacking in basic computer skills like typing, since their main device is a smartphone.
Personally, I did a high school senior project on the absolute state of public education over 10 years ago. I don’t think my conservative, Ayn Rand-pushing English teacher even read my paper because she gave it a solid B.
(The same year I had forced an AP teacher to change his rubric because they wanted to flunk me and I met a condition that they thought we were too dumb to meet.)
It’s not just kids. I know lots of adults that when they read out loud it is like hearing a 3rd grader read out loud with all of the pauses and mispronunciations.
LOL, very fitting meme template
the US intentionally withdrew from the UN literacy standards agency years ago
Republicans: Let them fight.
Not talking about it because of racism.
Generally, states with progressive policies and higher immigration have higher literacy rates, some data: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/src/PDF/STATE.pdf,
Data on immigration: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/states-with-the-highest-shares-of-foreign-born-residents
Exceptions exist for all kinds of reasons.
