My TikTok feed is full of American teachers complaining about how their kids can’t read or write. Like high schoolers who can’t write a short paragraph or can’t comprehend simple directions.

I was talking about this with a friend of mine who teaches at the literacy program for a local college and they had two comments:

  1. Those TikTok teachers almost universally blame the students for their deficits rather than seeing the trend and blaming the systems. Specifically, my friend blames the curriculum being written by textbook corporations and the decision to make the kids stop learning to read in 3rd grade.
  2. My friend is seeing similar, though less drastic similarities in their college students. Mind you, they mainly teach graduate courses, so they are teaching people who are usually already in the field teaching.

And I’m just left thinking… at what point do the illiterate students become illiterate teachers?

  • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    10 days ago

    It’s not illiteracy—it’s an exciting new frontier of digital expression. It’s not cheating—it’s the humming of mind and machine coming together to be more than either alone.

    I’ve taken to giving any essay I suspect of being AI a C, with the feedback being “come to office hours to discuss if you want me to raise your grade.” They never do, and I don’t care enough to police the matter. If they want to turn in AI slop and get C’s it’s someone else’s problem as far as I’m concerned. I absolutely am not paid enough to deal with academic discipline for the quantity of AI slop essays I receive. I want to teach people who want to learn, and it’s a punishment for both of us that they’re being forced into debt slavery for classes they don’t want to be in anyway just so they can get a piece of paper that let’s them go find an exploiter. It’s all so bleak.

    The ones who want to learn are great though. Teaching at a prison is wonderful because they WANT to be in that class, and they very much understand the value of education having so frequently been denied it by social circumstances before then. Love working with those students.