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:
- 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.
- 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?
You must log in or register to comment.
Teaching is a difficult job but realistically most teachers are also not that educated in the sense of having a broad grasp of the facts of the world. Recently I was at a local basketball game and during halftime they got some local teachers & students to come on for a fun teachers vs. students quiz. The idea was that they would let the teachers pull ahead with basic science questions but then the students would win by being asked about Tik Tok trends. Except the teachers absolutely ate shit on the basic science questions, it was a bit embarrassing.
Piggybacking off of this, as an elementary school art teacher I’m kind of baffled by my coworkers’ lack of vocabulary and inferential logic. I’m perturbed by it. Flummoxed even. For real though, I’m a bit of word-nerd. I think since I didn’t learn how to read until I was a teenager, I make a point to not dumb-down my language with kids as much as possible. Nothing is “that’s just what this thing is called” in my class. Oil pastels are called that for a reason, and you’ll understand what oils and waxes are by the time we’re done with this cool ass lava lamp project. I know I don’t have to go that deep in my instruction. I could be a Pinterest board teacher and get by very easily. But kids like knowing content on a deeper level. They eat up words like “tertiary” and “crystalline” and “zygomatic arch” when you give their brains a chance to expand. But I’m also not under any assumption that their homeroom teachers are going to know my content area like I do.
Though there’s something to be said for not understanding more common parlance. A homeroom teacher was picking up their class the other day, and we were making small talk as the students were exiting. I made a comment about a young boy in class who has somewhat of a Bart Simpson disposition. I said something like, “I’m not really a believer in nominative determinism, but with a name like his he’s bound to be a Supreme Court Justice or something.”
We teach children how to use context clues to make inferences. We teach that concept to children. It’s a big deal. Nominative determinism isn’t an everyday term, but even if you’ve never heard of it you can figure it from the context. So there I was after a couple minutes explaining that I don’t actually believe this child is destined to be a Supreme Court justice when the teacher hits me with, “How did you even come up with that?”
Some questions will just kind of grind your brain to halt, like when my mom asked me if net neutrality means they will tax the internet or like my two-year-old asking me if the sky is a type of motor. Maybe I’m not conveying the absurdity here clearly enough. Imagine someone implying that you came up with the phrase “life finds a way” while you’re talking about dinosaurs. I realize they’ve never seen Jurassic Park, so you tell them about it, but they think you’re talking about a real event where scientists actually created dinosaurs that got lose and ate people. That sort of the vibe here with me and that teacher. We’re ostensibly sharing the same reality, but it doesn’t feel like it.
my two-year-old asking me if the sky is a type of motor
let this kid cook
Removed by mod
Unhelpful and uncharitable. Why would you Think that someone posting one comment about word choice and usage is their entire personality. Please rethink making comments like these
No.
Also materially this is due to, at least in the US, to austerity and the infamous no child left behind act by bush junior which cut funding for “underperforming” schools. This gutted school curriculums to basically become test mills since the penalty for a “underperforming” cohort was potentially millions of dollars in cut funding. Some of these measures were walked back by progressives, but the neoliberals already got what they wanted and the trump era cuts are about building a parallel school system entirely controlled by private capital.
This is very much not “the youth can’t read” and more that the US, with its contradictions mounting, will gut the federal education system. Miseducation is the goal and the system is succeeding. The successful students are not the most accomplished or achieve the most growth but the most obedient and privileged.
These patterns aren’t new, minority groups have been feeling this since the beginning but now its universal and so its bubbling up more to the surface.
no child left behind act by bush junior which cut funding for “underperforming” schools
no child left behind act
explicitly leaves behind already struggling children
There’s no hate like conservative love.
To sort of echo what was being said, I hate to break it to you, but the teachers are already mostly illiterate. Ironically enough, the most literate teachers I have ever met were almost universally kindergarten/early elementary, special education, and university professors. Basically people who have to go through additional/specialty education to actually teach and not just have a random bachelors. The only other exceptions were a math teacher I had who had a change of consciousness after his second divorce, stopped designing rocket guidance systems (read missiles), and decided to instead teach high school math and coach the baseball team, and a high school history teacher who somehow was teaching high school despite having a Master’s in European History from Harvard, never got the full story there.
I say this having multiple friends and family who are middle school and high school teachers, many of whom I pity their students because despite spending so much time with children they have barely any sense of humor, understanding of childish logic or a general philosophy of teaching. Without these things, it is basically impossible to be truly literate. Genuinely, these people could use a dose of Marx’s maxim, ‘Nothing which is human is alien to me.’ They are so worried about being a figure of authority that they have alienated themselves from their students and therefore can never earn any natural respect as a mentor, and paradoxically, the harder they try enforce it, the more difficult it will become to enforce. And it is difficult enough to be a mentor when you are constantly derided by society as ‘those who can’t do, teach’, when teaching itself, especially in a classroom, is a ‘do’ that most people readily struggle with.
It reminds me of a science teacher I had in middle school who expected sixth graders to keep neat and accurate hand-written science notes (something I have never had to do even in professional academia) for a full experiment, and then, after basically alienating the entire class by not giving out a single ‘A’ in a class that really should have primarily been about learning the scientific method, not her particular journaling style, did one of those ‘read all the instructions, and then just sign your name at the top’ gotcha’s, and then gave a whole thirty minute lecture on the importance of reading directions fully after no one in the class got it. Again, for a bunch of coming into their bodies, angst and hormonal sixth graders. The only thing I really learned from that class is that you shouldn’t inherently trust that the teacher knows what they are talking about, but god forbid you correct them.
That said, even shit teachers still deserve a living wage and union benefits. Shit’s incredibly difficult.
However, yeah people definitely feel more technically bordering on functionally illiterate to the written word than they were in the past, but like, most of the 40-50 year old factory workers I work with are absolutely technically illiterate, but get by fine because society caters to their illiteracy, so idk when things actually ‘stopped getting better’. It feels like the trend towards functional illiteracy predates social media.
Oh hey, lab notebooks. We did those all through high school. I was surprised that other people didn’t. It was tedious, but I appreciated how neat and orderly it was. My handwriting still sucks tho.
I would have been fine with it if I was allowed to transcribe it onto a computer. I’ve just never been an ordered note taking person outside of a computer, but even my file storage was immaculate as a kid. And we never did them ever again to that degree of anal-retentive behavior in school again, so idk what she was on about.
I was talking to a fourth grade teacher a few years ago, right as her students were coming back in person from Covid. She expressed some very alarming things to me (e.g., several students appeared to literally not learn to read or write during the COVID years. One student who was adamant that he would be “a firetruck” when he grew up, and when asked “oh you mean a fireman” he insisted, no, the truck).
One student who was adamant that he would be “a firetruck” when he grew up, and when asked “oh you mean a fireman” he insisted, no, the truck).
He will become American financial superhero Optimus Subprime.
I still maintain that school-on-the-computer doesn’t actually work.
It can, but it requires a specific skill set and special methods. Lots of school districts were just throwing a few worksheets at the kids and calling it a day during the lockdowns, and even teachers who wanted to do better weren’t given the training and resources they would have needed to be successful.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn stuff on the computer. I love learning stuff on the computer.
I’m saying that school, where we try to teach a whole bunch of people the same set of information and skills in a structured way, doesn’t work when the people are all alone in their rooms. And further, that the commonly attempted fixes for this such as forcing them to be on camera the whole time or making their computers worse at being computers just make the whole process worse for everyone.
This. When my kid was in school during lockdown, they were already above grade level and their teacher just told us not to worry about doing the work
He’s gonna be a blitzball when he grows up
Bleetzboll
deleted by creator
I currently teach at the college level, and my students that are in prison and have been for years, decades maybe, are still typically more literate than the youngsters coming in to my campus classes. Its not good.
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.
Teaching at a prison is wonderful because they WANT to be in that class,
oh yeah, my students regularly have to fight or outsmart the cops to get to my classroom. they’re fuckin troopers and i love em
braver than the troops
Solidarity
The state funds us because recidivism rates for students with an education plummet to near zero, but I’m just happy to teach classes full of good students.
Its not just amerika, its all western countries. 89% of western adults are not considered Literate. “Functional literacy” is where the majority fall, and the rest are even lower.
89% of western adults can’t score 65% or higher on a literacy test.
89% of western adults cannot read books written for adults, literature, scientific literature, philosophy, political economy etc etc.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/dq241210a-eng.htm
Imagine scoring below 65% (not even a passing grade in trade schools or most university programs) and thinking that you are literate.
Hey, don’t lump in the rest of the west with Canada’s 89% illiteracy rates!
Here in Aus I believe it is closer to 95% (though that may just be some states)
Did you click the link cause 89% is the OECD countries, (comprising most western countries) averaged together. I dont think Aus is an OECD country so i don’t know your actual data. But if its like the rest of the west, it cant be good.
And canada is 86% at level 3 or lower. Which is considered “good” for western countries.
Get his ass!
I swear we had a version of an even bigger fire for Australia. Anyone remember what that one is called?
guessing it was :australia-cool: since that is the convention most of the burning flag emoji use
I feel like I have good diversity of people in my social circle, though leaning towards more educated. I do not know anyone else IRL who regularly reads even one book per year that isn’t the Bible or some Prayer of Jabez type book their church group is reading together.
I often wonder how much of it is apathy and being a rebellious teen? I would often have teachers be audibly surprised to see my test results because i never completed a single assignment and would play gameboy/DS in class instead of doing work.
Not to defend the US system of education to be clear
Real shit. My highschool calculus teacher just stopped caring about my missing assignments and let me play pokemon when all of my tests came back as high As. He was a real one for that
Only class I could get away with that was chem but yeah pretty much the same thing
Yeah I feel like this “the kids these days don’t know their reading ‘riting and ‘rithmetics” kvetching has been going on for decades. Like you said, there’s definite problems with the US education system, but this particular facet feels more like adults looking at their generation with rose-tinted glasses.
We test for literacy. We do adult competency testing every handful of years. Western adults cant read. Its a fact.
I think the kvetching you are talking about was right decades ago too. We can identify teaching trends that blatantly miseducate students on how to read that have been popular in various forms for decades (since like the 1980s), and as those waned in popularity we then got the internet more widely available. The kvetchers were right before that literacy got worse, and the new kvetchers are right now about it continuing to get worse.
The sense I get us, absolute literacy is in an okay place, relative to historical literacy rates in the US. I think the problem, and it’s not just the young’ns, is a lack of functional literacy, being able to take a written piece and understand not just the individual words and sentences, but the overall meaning, implications, and biases.
Personally, I blame the rise of standardized tests. It moves education away from exploratory, growth teaching that gets people to grapple with the subject matter and instead teaches to the test and to juice the metrics.
I would hazard a guess and say that a lot of these sorts of complaining teachers haven’t differentiated between a student who “can’t” do an assignment, vs those who don’t see the point and are just not bothering. And in turn, if they’re the sort of teacher to complain online about how horrible all their students are, they probably aren’t a very popular teacher, and their students probably aren’t particularly motivated.
I’m not saying things aren’t bad and getting worse, but I think it is also a case of the kids recognising that the entire school system over there is pointless and a waste of time, the kids are smarter than they are given credit for, they can recognise a broken, useless system that isn’t going to properly prepare them for the adult world, and don’t see the point in putting in effort.
I work in college. People can read and most can read well enough. But a significant percent have trouble parsing sentences with more than one clause. It’s bad.
Maybe I’m not following. How is it they can read well enough but they can’t parse multi-clause sentences?
Those are two different groups. The first is the majority, “read well enough” folks. The second is a significant percent of total students have literacy issues
Yeah they have been gutting schools and education in my country also.
Now they’re talking about disastrous literacy levels, while deporting 80 yo people for not being able to “integrate”.
But Neolibs can’t address the issue, the only thing they can do is change the curriculum (lower the standards of passing) or become reactionaries and blame DEI etc.
Be looking to the far time from the now where we be speakin’ the true true way of tellin’ our yarns.
What better way to aid this than removing teaching from professional list, gutting public education, making TPUSA chapters in texas campuses. Surely this will help
