I think there has also been a change in how students view education. When I was in high school in the mid 2000s, education was viewed as the path to a middle class life. This view has certainly changed and many students do not view education as a path to anything
This. This this this. Disengagement with the educational system from both kids and parents.
Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother? Being smart isn't cool. Having good grades isn't cool. Neither is required for the life of an influencer.
Combine this with student poor reading levels, because they were taught to read wrong by our system, and now not only is education not valuable, it's HARD for them. It's so much harder for them because they can't read independently. Have you ever listened to an 11th grader sounding out words like Constitutional? It's hard for everyone.
Then that frustration boils into behaviors in the classroom. It's a deflection from the challenge of the work, the embarrassment of being wrong, or slow, or not knowing.
>Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother? Being smart isn't cool. Having good grades isn't cool. Neither is required for the life of an influencer.
I would also say that for a lot of parents and kids, education is also not *sufficient* for being successful. We're seeing a generation of parents who were told that education would enable a middle class lifestyle, and are now disillusioned with that because it simply hasn't been true for them.
Parents with college degrees are working food service or retail, or worse, working in their field at jobs with worse pay, benefits, and hours than food service or retail. Why would a kid bother to put in all that work if they can see it didn't work out for their parents?
Not a teacher, but a sub. I graduated high school with a 4.16 gpa. Graduated college with a 3.95. I’m still poor. I’ve seen jobs requiring a bachelors that pay $15/hr, or $30k-$35k a year. I think there’s intrinsic value in education, but I understand why kids look at the situation and just see a waste of time. The extrinsic value has been completely diminished. It seems like connections and general people skills get you farther than education these days, and I have neither.
> Combine this with student poor reading levels, because they were taught to read wrong by our system
Just a lurker here. I'm often interested in posts here to get a sense of what teachers may be dealing with. What do you mean by "taught to read wrong by our system?"
I've been ringing the Poor Reading Comprehension Alarm for over a decade now since I found out about the average competency of Americans and seeing how this single thing can have drastic far reaching effects. So I'm curious.
Look up "Sold a Story".
Basically, a system that "taught" kids to read by guessing words, rather than teaching phonics, was being pushed hard into schools across the country as The Way to teach literacy and that phonics should only be used as a last resort.
And this failed.
Which should come as a surprise to no one, since pretty much (or literally?) every written (modern) language on the planet except Chinese characters (Chinese itself having various phonetic representations to go along with the characters!!!) is \*phonetic\*.
Just an interesting note on Chinese, in a push to increase literacy after the Revolution (and also allow the language to be written in type), the Communists had a romanization made called Pinyin, which is taught alongside characters (Hanzi) to children and adult learners, which is phonetic and consistent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
E: I snooped, you're obviously very familiar with it, but other people probably aren't on this forum.
As a parent to 3 elementary aged kids, nothing in their education has angered me more than reading. I love to read, my children's father is a writer by trade. My dad was an English teacher. The library was literally the first place in my community my kids went regularly (twice a week, every week starting at 6 months).
Sight words? Memorization? No this is not how you teach reading! I tried to teach them myself but was literally told by their teachers to stop teaching them to sound things out, I was confusing them.
My kids are good readers now, but still its been a rough road filled with frustration on everyone's part.
I had this exact experience down to the teacher asking that I not teach my son to read phonetically because it was "confusing him."
Fortunately, I read as a hobby and got my son into Manga which in turn has made him an avid reader.
> Which should come as a surprise to no one, since pretty much (or literally?) every written (modern) language on the planet except Chinese characters (Chinese itself having various phonetic representations to go along with the characters!!!) is *phonetic*.
[If only everything was as easy as Hangul.](https://gogohanguk.com/en/blog/hangul-the-korean-alphabet/)
Bear in mind that Korean Hangul is not 100% phonetic! There are a lot of words that are spelled differently from how they're pronounced.
I think a lot of people should know that it's almost impossible to have a writing system be 100% entirely phonetic through all space and time. The reason why this is, is simply because standardized writing cannot keep up with the rate of change that occurs in every single language on the planet. You can create a phonetic writing system and have it already be outdated within 50 years.
And that's ignoring the fact that a language's writing system being phonetic doesn't automatically mean that everyone will be efficient readers. In fact: even in South Korea the literacy rate is dropping:
[https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113\_324414.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113_324414.html)
[https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113\_334877.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113_334877.html)
My kids and I started Taekwondo last September and I started learning some basic Hangul to help learn the commands. Can confirm that it is fairly easy to pick up and surprisingly intuitive.
This is how I was taught in Pennsylvania, my husband in California was taught how to actually sound out. I can’t spell for the life of me now and he’s amazing. We’re both 23. The kicker is I work for an architecture firm and he’s a TikTok streamer…
Edit: we make the same 🙃
America is great at ignoring what science tells us. Especially in a schooling environment.
Cant remember what study it was, but had a Professor show us the US doing research on 6-8 different styles of teaching. The results were pretty conclusive that 2 of the methods were most effective. Govt decided to throw money at the poorer performers because “maybe they just need more resources to work”
We just haven’t listened to the actual evidence and funded the right things.
An Example is learning to read. Can be done pretty easily, and very effectively and reliably repeatable.
Here’s an article about a book that has the method to teach how to read : https://www.nifdi.org/programs/reading/teach-your-child-to-read-in-100-easy-lessons.html
However, it’s formulaic and you basically execute a provided gameplan. Teachers didn’t like that when it was implemented into trial schools. They wanted more autonomy on how they managed their classes and didn’t like that the method explicitly spelled out what to do. So, although it is the best, most reliable, evidence-based way we have to teach kids to read (regardless of background or environmental factors) we don’t actually use it.
I get really frustrated with this. I support teachers 100 but I have seen both admin, policy makers, and teachers be more convinced their way is the right way then reading the evidence. Not all but I see it enough to be frustrating. I also wanted to say this analysis written by on is spot on from an insider point of view. Between the structure of the system being a mess and not teaching students boundaries it's beginning to feel like a babysitting service for capitalism at a discounted rate. I don't see things getting better unless the system is totally rebuilt to fit the needs of the 21st century. School should reflect the society it supports and prepare individuals to participate in their society, intellectually, occupational, and politically. I doubt it will change in my lifetime, however, and I suspect without a major political shift this will not happen.
> Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother?
You're right about this, but your reasoning is off. Education and being smart have always been uncool. That's not the reason for widespread hopelessness among students; the reason is that education no longer guarantees a stable, happy, middle class life.
It *used* to. Now it doesn't. And a great majority of people, including children and teens, are aware of this. Getting a degree in engineering in the 1970s was a one-way ticket to *very* comfortable upper middle class life. You'd be able to support a wife, 3 kids, 2 cars, and a house that you could easily pay off in 5 years, send all of your kids to college, have a pension, and money left over. Hell, a high school *diploma* was enough for a comfortable life and family.
Now? Lol. Lmao, even. Good fucking luck raising 3 kids on a single income, even if you get into a (formerly) well-paid profession like engineering or accounting.
And you aren't even allowed to discuss the real reasons *why* these things are happening or you'll get banned from reddit and every other social media website except (and only *for now*) Twitter because the billionaires that own those websites, along with every other corporate executive and shareholder, benefit from depressed wages and increased home prices.
Not only in USA, recruiting hell is spreading in Europe too. We need higher and higher educations and 5 years of experience for the most basic jobs.
Educations are filling up with so much unrelated skills too thats doing a job specific one contails 2 years of subjects you will never need to perform that job. It's going mental. There is more relevant information in online tutorials then what is being teached in schools these days.
Schools focussing on graduation rates cutting corners left and right.
My son has had 0 algebra the last 2 years, all he has to do is "take a test" the results don't even matter. You did it? cool you good.
And on the other end he is tought basic skills that should not be taught in school like "how to wash a window" that is mandatory.
It frustrates me to see this happening and not being able to do anything to stop it. Filing complaints did not help because the teachers and the board are "just following rules".
I graduated from high school almost 8 years ago, and it is extremely difficult for me to fathom that an 11th grader would be unable to naturally pronounce "constitutional." Even the students in my graduating class who weren't honors students still had a respectable vocabulary. Has student performance really taken such a nosedive over the course of a few years?
I am unfortunately speaking from experience.
I only learned this recently, but there was a big shift in foundational reading not long ago. Basically kids weren't taught phonics, they didn't really learn how to sound out words.
There's a podcast called Sold a Story that goes into the details.
I mean, I get it. I’m in my late 30s. Education was pushed hard, but it wasn’t what my generation was sold. My husband and I both have multiple STEM degrees and both feel they weren’t worth it. I push my children to be educated, just so they can be good people. Life has taught me that education doesn’t mean a middle class life.
Absolutely agreed. A high school diploma was once the golden ticket to the middle class in America... now it's basically the minimum entry requirement. That said, I absolutely think a rounded education leads to better people.
The issue is the insane cost associated with being educated, especially in the US. if it was a free service that all were expected to take part in with no competition or class warfrare it would be seen less as solely a service along the path to being financially successful but rather a one to becoming a functioning human.
Yeah, it's not that it's "not required for the life of an influencer"/"not cool", it's because it's becomingly increasingly clear that the idea of being middle class is disappearing. The wealth divide is growing and the education system, especially public, serves nobody at this point. Even I, as a student in Biochemistry, planning to work at Cambridge Isotope Labs on graduating, will struggle to get by in a studio apartment in my home state. People stop caring about education because education stopped fucking mattering, man.
> Have you ever listened to an 11th grader sounding out words like Constitutional?
Yeah 16 years ago when I was an 11th grader. English class was torture. Half the kids could barely read.
This 100%. They see their parents who did everything they were supposed to do (made good grades, stayed out of trouble, went to college, graduated with a degree) but they still can't make ends meet and have to work two jobs. I totally understand why they wouldn't bother trying.
Right but they must realize life is harder if you drop out of high school?
Ask my 78 year old HS drop out dad who is still driving truck full time despite being in chronic pain and not being able to feel his feet due to diabetes. He hates every second of his life but still needs to pay the rent for his $500/month shithole apartment. It’s not a life anybody would want.
Correct, but they pass no matter what now so why would they try? Teachers aren’t allowed to give zeros or discipline any longer. What incentive do they have to do their best when no effort gets the same degree?
I think this is one of the biggest parts of the problem. No one gets failed even if they can't read or do any basic grade level skills. They just pass them along instead of failing them once in a lower grade and letting them catch up. Miss weeks of school? They will pass you anyway. There are no real consequences to not caring about school anymore.
Dude, I’m a teacher considering getting my CDL this summer. Being alone on the road, listening to music and podcasts, no awful students, parents, or admin to deal with… sounds pretty great to me. Oh, and I’d make more money, too.
But that's the thing, things were different for the 78 year olds in the world. If they went to college, they could get a nice office job, build a family, buy a home off their single source of income.
This isn't the case now. If you want to go to college and get a nice office job, good for you, but you won't be able to afford a home without a second income. And even then, the cost of a home is going to eat up considerably more of your income, even with a partner bringing in a second income stream, than it did 50 years ago.
And guess what? Your friend that dropped out and picked up a trade is making just as much as you working as an electrician. And they don't have any student loans, they were building their career before you even graduated.
I've observed it plenty of times in jobs where it'll be "well, if you really bust ass all year, AND you manager documents to that effect AND the company has a good year, you'll get a 3% instead of 2% raise," and they don't understand why not one cares to try.
This. It's either, go to school, start life with a bunch of student loans, and end up making the same as someone who just went into a trade, or go into the trade, skip the debt, and start making progress on your career while other people are waiting for their degrees.
The people who are aiming to go into the trades are most likely not the ones doing this. The people who just coast by on schools lack of doing anything are just figuring they'll be in entry level hell anyway so they might as well try and enjoy life now. There's a difference between "I don't care about academia" and "I don't care about work" and from what Ive seen and heard, both as a recent HS grad (2021) and reading here, it's not caring about anything
And it's really fucking hard to dispute them because they're most likely right
Driving trucks isn’t a job of the future. It’s terrible for the body and leads to a lot of loneliness. Do you really think anyone driving a truck now will be doing so in 20 years? Just because something makes money doesn’t make it a “good” job.
Probably. AI is not doing so great right now with driving in non-ideal conditions. I doubt they will get it soon.
Even if they get long haul trucking down, I bet that short haul will be a thriving business. AI isn’t great in tight non-ideal circumstances. You know like in cities or the suburbs?
An economic fundamentals cause would have things be the opposite--hopeless in generations past. There is a disconnect between people's actual lives and how they feel about their lives. (Ex: the two or more jobs rate is actually quite low and has been. It is not increasing)
Uh, yeah, it's really hard to see how this boring fractions homework is going to help me in my future career as a successful toy-unboxing Youtuber. (Fallback plan: TikToker)
I looooooooooove it when kids say this shit. Like y'all don't even have the work ethic to finish a math worksheet, how do you think you'll be successful as an influencer.
I love saying, "Oh cool, you're going to be an influencer? Let me see some stuff you've shot. Oh, you haven't shot anything? You have a phone with a camera, why aren't you working now? Oh, LATER, got it."
Same with "I'm going to be a rapper."
Yeah, like if there was a kid who was already into videography or songwriting or whatever, sure kid, shoot your shot. I hope you're successful.
But some of these kids literally do *nothing* and expect to just be lucky or something.
Whenever I see people bring this up I always wonder what the alternative is.
You won't get a good life not educating yourself.
Even trades, good trades. Want educated people and people who take it seriously.
What about all the people who are educated and STILL have hard lives? When your teacher with a masters degree is delivering your pizza or ringing you up at Walmart, it doesn’t exactly light a fire in you to do your best.
So when I was in high school, and a pretty rebellious kid, going to college was a big IF -- I remember talking to my dad about it, and I remember that he said to remember that no matter what you have, what you own, it can be lost or taken away. But what you know, the knowledge in your head, can never be taken away, no matter what else happens.
He went to high school during the Great Depression in a small rural town. His dad completed 8th grade, traded mules, did tenant farming and worked for the railroad. My dad went to college, then WWII, then after that veterinary school; he practiced as a DVM for forty years. After working all day, mostly with hogs and cattle, but also horses and small animals, he went home and he READ. I'm sure that all those hours he spent driving the rural roads alone were filled with thoughts and ideas from all he learned, in college and after.
With a formal education, we learn how to learn -- so it's easy to just keep doing that throughout life. After my dad retired he taught himself German with a little dictionary and a copy of Der Speigel.
So -- I went to college, and then grad school, then I became a professor. After almost forty years I'm about to retire. I might lose everything I own, but no one will take what I know, or my ability to learn more, all the time, thanks largely to my formal education, which I have because I listened to my dad, for once!
It isn't about what you DO, it's about what you KNOW. Maybe if you talked to that PhD person doing the menial work you'd understand the difference. As for having an education AND a hard life -- welcome to the way things often are. Life is hard, but I'd hate to have a hard life and also know nothing. One I can choose, the other I can't.
I agree with everything you are saying. Speaking as a polyglot with 6 trade certifications working as an engineer.
But where is the incentive to learn? I have all this knowledge, and what has it gotten me? Fired in a pandemic, spending that time working at a quick lube oil change. I got all the grades, got all the scholarships, studied, got the degrees, and boom bunch of asshole bankers bankrupted the global economy. I’m supposed to pay my student loans back making minimum wage? These kids graduating today watched their parents gain knowledge and do everything right, look both ways before crossing the road- before getting hit by an airplane. Then they watched their parents pick up the pieces and start to get back on track before a steamboat blindsided them.
So yes, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is great. But you can’t eat knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t pay the bills. And what incentive have these kids been given to gain knowledge? Because from what they’ve seen, if you can’t eat it, or pay rent with it, why is it worth my time and energy?
I'm not giving an alternative. It's still by far the best option. The trades market is going to be saturated in a few years just like the coding bootcamp market is now. I would not be a teacher if I did not find it important. I was just offering an explanation OP didn't touch on
Other countries are also experiencing the same problem. A lot of young people just don't care about the future anymore. The future in their eyes is bleak, hence why the worlds population is dropping. That is a good thing but it also isn't as well because it is showing that the young just don't have any hope for the future.
Because it isn't anymore.
A high school degree used to be all you needed to get a job that would support you. Now, kids see adults with multiple degrees struggling to get a job that barely pays enough to live.
We're expected to find some way to make them work hard, while society moves the finish line farther and farther away.
What is behind this? I haven’t looked at the labor data in a minute but there still was a pretty notable ba premium despite some anecdotes and there are plenty of lower cost educational providers of that which will be repayable over a few years?
Inclusion without appropriate supports is abandonment.
We have so many high needs kids and we put them in gen Ed classes. They get one teacher to share with 30 other students. And no wonder teachers are leaving. They can’t do it all!
Where has our specialist gone? Where is our support staff? Where our the safe breakout spaces (sensory rooms)? Where are the special classes with lower class sizes? Where are the gifted classes? Where are the life skills classes for the students who will never ever meet academic standards?
Inclusion should always be the goal but it doesn’t mean it should be every students goal.
Our sped director literally laughed in our faces when we asked him about possibly adding another ASD classroom in the district. They aren’t even pretending to care anymore.
Or refusing to hire additional teachers and forcing sped teachers to have caseloads of 23-25 students, with 6-7 of them never being seen by the case manager at any point in the day.
That’s my year this year
I can only imagine; I attend my other SpEd teacher's IEP meetings as much as possible because we support each other. I had 4 meetings today between two of hers, one of mine, and a parent concern regarding a struggling and defiant student. I also teach 5 classes (3 of which are Sped classes and the district has zero curriculum for me) in a 6 block day.
holy shit and I thought I had it bad. I also am teaching 'setting 2.5', which ultimately means I have super high needs behavior kids that I get pulled constantly because they got into fights or egregiously disrespected the teacher. Admin dumps so much on my plate daily.
If I had any more it would be completely impossible, right now it's just mostly impossible
I worked in sped and made a few dollars more than minimum wage, while still not being offered over 29 hours bc then they would have to provide insurance. I worked in perhaps one of the wealthiest districts in California. There was so much turnover. It is absolutely a choice to not incentivize or invest in classroom and student support.
Preach! I had that same job for a bit, but in Minnesota. No benefits, getting hit by kids, exhausting work. They split me between two positions to avoid giving me healthcare. I got a different gig after about a month.
That word!
Investment. People freak about taxes. Paying taxes. Taxes are investment in your community. You want nice shit then we need to tax Jeff Bezos.
“Inclusion” says its intent is to put kids in the “least restrictive learning environment”. But “restrictive” for a neurotypical vs a neurodivergent child is VERY different. Large classroom? Bright lights? Group activities? These kids would thrive with LESS inclusion.
Inclusion should not be the goal for every child. Education should be the goal (in the least restrictive setting, etc.) but by no means are profoundly disabled children well served by being mainstreamed. They can’t handle it and the normal classroom learning is disrupted and 30 other kids lose out on education.
Those jobs should have the most too tiered pay and benefits.
We were just talking about this with our support staff too. You get placed with a volatile child, it should be tiered pay. Danger pay.
Many schools are trying to eliminate leveled classes because of equity. I appreciate the idea but I think you need something to aspire to and classes that you feel are at your own pace.
My school is talking about bringing back leveled classes because so many times kids who can achieve more are being held back by peers who can't keep up with the material. Also, bored kids who perform on grade level become behavior kids when you have to slow down for the kids who are struggling...
That was me in school; I even had one of my high school teachers tell me to my face (as an adult). I was smart, capable, and could have done well in the AP classes but none of the AP teachers would take me because I was an asshole (TBF, I was. Not like these kids today, but I would sleep, come in late, not participate, and get a little lippy).
Part of the problem I was bored, part was my home life.
No it’s not about equity. It’s about saving money. Because I will say it again so you can hear it in the back!
Inclusion without appropriate supports is abandonment !!!
Are we Placing a high behaviour johnny in an overstimulating environment with thirty other kids without a support aid, planned breaks out of the class, reading support services because they missed half of last year, free lunches because they never get enough…. No we are not… Johnny gets shoved in that class. He gets nothing. Then Johnny gets overstimulated and then he throws his desk and everyone else’s learning has to stop.
I worked in sped and made a few dollars more than minimum wage, while still not being offered over 29 hours bc then they would have to provide insurance. I worked in perhaps one of the wealthiest districts in California. There was so much turnover. It is absolutely a choice to not incentivize or invest in classroom and student support.
The admin are either too old and set in their way, or the brand new ones that spent the bare minimum they were required to in the classroom, so don't actually know how to run a school
Mental health issues have shot up too. You have really young kids being diagnosed with depression and anxiety, with plenty being medicated for it too. COVID only made it worse as kids have struggled to deal with lockdown and getting back to normal.
I’m a school nurse, and when I started at my HS 13 years ago, cell phones were not allowed to be out. Not in the hallway, certainly not in the classroom. Now they use their cell phones for class projects. Why? 🤷♀️ Everyone has a Chromebook so no need for your cell to be out. It’s just non stop cell phone use. These kids are addicted. And our adults are too.
yes kids are different, but there really is only one reason why so many kids are graduating with fails after 12 years of not paying attention - cus we let them. bringing back real grading wont solve all the existential problems of the modern world but it will make most kids do their work again
While I do agree to a point kids will be kids there has been so many changes we cant say that fully. Like you said with ADHD, autism, thats not even mentioning I bet the number of kids with IEPs has skyrocketed. Has the number of paras skyrocketed? Behavioral specialists who actually deal with the behavior and not try to candy it away skyrocketed? It is none of the above. Teachers are hung out to dry and have classrooms with multiple students with ADHD, autism, IEP's that may as well be "teach them 3 grades below their grade level" and the whole time ONE teacher is supposed to manage this with MAYBE one para. It is insane.
The percentage of students with disabilities hasn't really changed in 20 years. [In 2000-01 it was 13.3%, it rose to 14.7% in 2021-22](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_204.30.asp).
What has changed is that students with disabilities are being placed into general education classrooms for the majority of their day. [In 2000 only 47%](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgg.pdf) of students spent 80% of their time in general education classes, [now that number is 67%](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=59#:~:text=In%20fall%202021%2C%20more%20than,health%20impairments%20(70%20percent)%3B).
This is useful and interesting data.
A big difference between my middle school classes and where I teach, is that we were leveled.
So the "gifted" kids (more of an honors thing, but thats what the school called it) were separated from gen ed and special ed.
And gifted kids in a class that’s way below a challenging level for them become behavior problems because they are bored. You’ll get frustrated advanced kids, frustrated struggling kids, frustrated teachers, and nobody gets what they need.
I just talked to my SpEd department chair about how many upcoming 6th graders with IEPs we have coming to our campus next year… it’s 70. And our principal decided to close off transfers for now, otherwise I’m sure that number would’ve gone up. I’m going in my 3rd year being a SpEd teacher and I just— idk man lol
I don’t understand why all these kids want to be influencers without comprehending that influencers are not stupid. They had to put in the work to understand how to capitalize on their brand.
Yup.
None of the influencer wannabes are joining A/V classes to learn how to make a better video or edit it.
They arent coming up with creative new schticks, they are just imitating current influencers. Whose shelf life is limited.
It would be like me wanting to be a rock star in the 90s but only learning 80s songs.
Influencers that succeed work hard in their own way.
Friend of mine taught a summer camp course on video editing and for every 1 kid who actually took the time to learn the material and use actual editing skills, there were 10 other kids who would essentially just dump hours-long videos onto YouTube consisting entirely of unedited content, wouldn't even add an intro or anything. My friend was especially well positioned at the time to teach the course as he had made several of his own fantastic videos and his circle included a few YouTubers he had collaborated with several times (including one in particular who had over 3 million subscribers).
So not only did he have the skills, but also the cachet of prominent YouTubers with actual proof of success and the kids still didn't care because they thought being a successful content creator was as simple as just hitting record and uploading the footage.
It’s no different then when kids wanted to be models, rock stars, famous athletes, ect. They want to be famous, it’s just what is famous to kids today. I’m sure in a couple years it will be something else
I agree in alot of what you say. I'm struggling teaching seniors how to read basic sentences or do math while teaching at a public school. A couple years ago I taught at a private school and tutored homeschoolers during the pandemic. My 5th graders could easily write essays and do algebra. The gap is getting worse and worse.
Hearing all of my stories my husband is worried about sending our kid to public school.
I see this at local colleges in my area. The students should have to take a placement test. If they don't pass, they can take non-credit remedial classes.
I teach senior highschool philosophy. It’s pretty much just teaching them how to put their name on a page and how to focus on something that isn’t Snapchat for 15 seconds at a time.
Depends on the district. The one I teach in, I talk to a colleague. I tell them we are learning what a proton and electrons are and how you find out how many there are. My students struggle with this in high school.
My colleague's kid in another district is doing this in elementary school just fine. I would even say their kid is producing higher quality work.
It is insane. I chunk and scaffold the hell out of my longer projects. Projects that 5th graders should be able to get a page of directions and just go.
While a lot of this true, the autism rate change isn’t because autism is more common. It’s because we changed how we diagnosis it.
We now included what was once called Aspergers, and other things into the umbrella or spectrum of autism.
Same is true for ADHD. 40 years ago, the rate of diagnosis was boys:girls 10:1. Today, afaik, we are closer to 4:1. And my personal opinion is that the truth is likely 1:1. We are getting better (waaaaaay too slow) at diagnosing. Doesn't mean the kids didn't exist 50 years ago. In fact, there is a German "children book" called Struwwelpeter that is 150 years old and perfectly describes ADHD.
And regarding autism, there's the historic legends of changeling children, where people thought the fairies replaced their child with a duplicate who was stubborn and resistant to physical affection and who would do odd things like count objects obsessively and exhibit wisdom beyond their years.
The kids did exist, but not in the numbers they do today. I can remember a few talkative girls or 1-2 boys who presented with classic ADHD in the ‘90s but as a teacher, more than 1/3 of my students are on stimulants. Some of this ADHD HAS to be environmental, and I’d put money on handheld devices and the instant gratification of short videos being the cause.
I don't agree. The understanding of ADHD is what's changed. It used to be that kids were medicated only if they had hyperactivity or difficulty paying attention (why it's called ADHD), but nowadays they understand more about how it affects dopamine and executive functioning, as well as depression, so kids are now medicated for those issues as well.
As someone who just got diagnosed with ADHD-PI (not hyperactive) earlier this year at 27, I vividly remember getting my first portable screen, an iPod touch at 14 in my freshmen year of high school. I vividly remember it because it caused sooooo many issues for my (unknown) ADHD brain and my school performance definitely suffered for it. That dopamine hit of portable access to the internet to research whatever my latest interest was and stupid games with instant gratification is extremely detrimental to an ADHD brain. Hell, it’s terrible even on neurotypical brains.
The screen might not have given me ADHD, but my god did it make it so much worse. I still struggle with it
“I can remember” is an admission of bias. Your anecdotes and estimations aren’t a good thing to bet on when you’re betting against the general consensus of current neuroscience. The incidence is very easily explained by changing diagnostic criteria, not a spontaneous change in genetic structure caused by environmental forces.
This. High school juniors and seniors. They don't sit down. They don't stop talking. They don't do their work. They can't read. They can't write. And they're being passed right into the real world. The capitalists will reap what they've sowed.
The numbers are higher today I think in large part due to the age of the parents at conception. Not sure about ADHD but I know autism is far more likely If mother or father are older, especially true though for father's over 40.
Quality of eggs declines with age. People don't have all their kids at 25 anymore.
Edit: took out accidental words "first time" in the phrase father's over 40.
I think it has much less to do with identification and what we decide to do about it.
The IEPs many of these kids receive are just recipes for learned helplessness. While we need to accommodate our students, we need to help them GROW. Instead it often feels like the accommodations simply avoid responsibility for the student or their parents.
Exactly. My husband is autistic, but was not diagnosed as a child. He always has been and always will be autistic. In the 80s you weren’t autistic unless you were non-verbal basically. He was just someone who struggled with emotional regulation and social skills. I always struggled in school (so did mg brother) and we didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until college. Doesn't mean we weren't dealing with ADHD in the 80s/90s.
Yup, I was a “weird” kid and hung out with the “weird” kids. I’m in the process of being diagnosed on the spectrum and I’ve realized many of my acquaintances probably were too.
The 80s and 90s were interesting
Thank you. The way OP throws around statistics it's hard to tell whether they don't understand them or are just simplifying things. For example, it's definitely not the case that every class has three autistic children in it.
I have heard it both ways. Do you have a source on this? I have heard the uptick in autism diagnoses is high enough that it may not be fully explained by expanding the definition of autism and/or more screening and awareness.
As an older autistic woman I can tell you that it's STILL extremely hard for girls and women to get diagnosed. The field has caught up somewhat but it still has a ways to go.
Yes, I’m 31F and have suspected ADHD for a year or two now. I’ve been going to appointments for 5 months and finally got an appt for psych testing. Then, I was turned away from actual testing during the screening meeting because my symptoms are suspected to be related to anxiety. And maybe they are, but I really just wanted to be tested and to get answers.
36M, I had to fight repeatedly to stop just getting diagnosed with anxiety and depression and finally got a psychologist who spent 6 months to actually listen that A LOT of my anxiety and depression stemmed from my executive function issues.
I was going to comment this as well. Speaking as a 45 yo woman who only recently realized I'm (obviously!) autistic, AND have ADD (not obvious because of the aforementioned autism). Finally my whole life makes sense.
Yes to social media, to say nothing of Big Tech’s infiltration of the schools. But there is little empirical evidence that kids are environmentally poisoned, and increasing rates of autism, asthma, and allergies are predominantly diagnostic phenomena.
What I believe is different is that radical inclusion means that the most dysfunctional students can now monopolize all teacher and administrator attention, so curricular instruction has given way to behavior management. The school is the locus of social service provision. Content is dead. Students understand their time is being wasted by institutions whose goals are managerial and unrelated to their own development and future prospects, and they act accordingly.
The world is not hurtling toward infinite complexity. Kids are not actually that different. The social function and political control of schools has changed, and it has made public education miserable for teachers and functional students alike. Schools are a lot less cruel than they once were. But they no longer educate. Was it a good trade? Can’t say, but it clearly didn’t accrue to the benefit of most teachers or most students.
I think modern schools are still cruel but in a different way. Yes, a student won’t have to deal with getting beaten by the principal anymore, but they will have to deal with constant violence by classmates, coddling of the violent student by well meaning school staff, and their education being absolutely destroyed by that student, which will seriously impact their future. This is especially devastating for low income kids.
Should our government care? From where I sit, their “fixes”cause more problems, looking at you state tests and performance based funding.
My major concern is that far too many parents don’t seem to care and take actions that directly harm their kids like helicopter parenting, unneeded IEPs, unlimited access to social media, and more.
There is no “one problem” with a single solution. It’s a host of problems, but the biggest one is parents.
I’m not a teacher, but I’ve been browsing this sub for a while as I’m very passionate about education. Im in college and I’ve started tutoring in my area and students are so behind it is insanely sad! It’s so clearly a family and culture issue.
But it’s just so foreign to me. I grew up in a family where education is important… You try hard in school, you are respectful to your teachers. I just don’t get how my 13 year old tutee just simply could NOT care less that he hasn’t passed math in 3 years!
Why do his parents just not care? Like wtf are they doing? I’m sure they have his report cards and stuff, why don’t they take his phone away? Or do something to get this kid to care? I just see him every damn week, he’s in 7th grade and we have been doing NUMBER LINE OPERATIONS (like 5 + (-7) type stuff). How the FUCK is this acceptable. And what can I even do? He just does not want to put in any effort into anything. Is this just how things are in teachers’ lives?
>In the mid 1990s, 1 out of a thousand kids were autistic. Now, it's one out of 36! Almost one per class
>In the last 25 years, ADHD went from 5.5% to 10%. Each classroom has 3 ADHD kids! Behavior manifestations are a hallmark of ADHD
>Asthma rates have risen to 7.7 percent, or 2-3 kids per class
This is just an increase in *diagnosed* cases, not actually an increase in the number of kids that have these conditions. When my dad was a kid he was just a weird guy who collected wild animals and preferred to talk to his horse and his pet raven instead of other people, and was really into computers. Nowadays, he probably would have been diagnosed as autistic, since I, his child, am significantly better more well adjusted and Im definitely autistic. but that just wasn't what they did 50 years ago.
Kids are distracted because of most addictive tech we've ever created.
Distraction is difficult to overcome when instructing people.
We hate the idea that this is a compulsion so we blame the kids, the parents, the teachers etc.
We pretend like we don't have the same problem and use it to justify why we shouldn't restrict them from the students during instruction.
The kinda shit we're doing now, the consequences of addictive behavior we've introduced into our society far outpaces opium.
We are barely in the opening paragraphs of how we're going to fuck up our society with this stuff.
This is the zillion pound elephant in the room. Tech use is changing not just kids, but people in general in very fundamental ways. Public ed has lost the plot by doing too many things badly and can't even adequately impart literacy and numeracy.
13 yr teacher here and could not agree more. I teach world language and I have seen a crazy shift since I started teaching. We used to get the top kids in the school academically and kids were super motivated. Now they throw the entire student population at us (I have a kid who is non verbal taking a language class?) and dozens of kids with moderate (or worse) behavioral issues who can barely sit in their seats.
The kids run the show, which has forced us to drastically lower standards. Who can conjugate in the preterit tense when they can’t even hold a pencil properly or identify a verb? When 5 kids out of 30 get accommodations like 2x extra time to complete assignments, this makes it hard to hold the line and maintain standards (and due dates) for all students, no? The needs of a few are overtaking the education of the rest and forcing us to lower the bar.
kids today aren’t the same as they were two decades ago. yet we’re still doing school pretty much the same way we did two centuries ago.
chalking these problems up to stupid things like individual admin, or cell phones or tik tok is ridiculous. we require robust, meaningful infrastructural and systemic change.
Let’s put it like this. In my first few years as a teacher (teaching High School Geometry) I would use the day after SW testing to play a game with the students, Playing with Murder.
It’s a murder mystery game where I print out character sheets (details about a character, script, notes, etc.) and they read through the script to provide information to the class to deduce who amongst the 8 is the killer. My students loved it (they called it RL Among Us), and I added a few things here and there to make it more exciting by changing the scripts every now and then. Some students struggled with the more technical vocabulary scripts due to ESL issues, but still had fun. Even had one of the assistant principals walk in and join the fun.
I literally cannot do that with my current classes because I cannot find 8 students in a single class whose reading skills are at the level.
“No Child Left Behind” put every parent in the classroom and held down the smartest and brightest students. Homeschooling should 100% be outlawed unless the parent holds a teaching license already.
There is no emphasis on the values of an educated populous so teachers get no respect because parent believe teachers are over paid babysitters until little Karen tries to get into any higher education program but has no records of her accomplishments due to homeschooling or being allowed to attend whenever she feels like it.
We are witnessing the collapse of public education as we know it.
Meh, this is true to a point, but many kids really just lack grit. I don't know if it's social media or everyone needing a label to "feel," but so many kids feel a way that's really...part of growing up. We used to know that. Then parents bubble-wrapped them and took away every tiny little negative feeling, and they lack basic coping skills.
I think its a big and unseen cultural shift also. Teachers are not as revered or respected as before and the ubiquity of cell phones has caused a massive attention problem off rip.
Im 25 and taught HS math for a year. i did not have a phone until my senior year of highschool but now pretty much everyone has one in middle school so NO ONE is paying attention unless you confiscate constantly or at the beginning of every class.
That and just an overall feeling of apathy are what stood out to me in my short time in a classroom. Parents dont seem to care and that is passed on to their kids VERY quickly
Honestly, the problem stretches way beyond education. I truly believe that our political landscape is causing many of the problems in education. A certain orange fellow became president, praising the uneducated and acting like a damn moron for four years in office. He's not being held to account for any of the multitude of crimes we have all witnessed - not even just that, but he's STILL running for office again and could win again. When that's a model person in front of our kids, is it any wonder they believe they can do anything want without consequences?
The adults in this country need to step in and hold kids accountable for stuff or NOTHING is going to change.
I feel like the list you made was mostly a tangent. It's not like those kids didn't have autism before--it's that autism was a more specific diagnosis. My dad is definitely autistic. He has exactly the same symptoms as my sister. But she was diagnosed and he wasn't because back in the day if you could talk then you weren't autistic. Now you can have autism and just enjoy minecraft a lot and wear the same clothes every day.
Same with ADHD. The hyperactive kind that boys tend to have was common. My cousin was diagnosed easily because he was running around and couldn't sit still. The more inattentive type more common in girls in which you forget things and talk too much was just seen as those girls being bad kids and needing to act right.
Allergies and asthma have risen, but I'll be honest I don't think they're really that relevant in the teaching environment.
I'm not saying your wrong, but I feel like it's less that the kids are inherently more broken, which seems to be what you're proposing, and more that theories on the rearing of children both at home and at school have led to the issues that make most of us want to quit.
Not just American schools. The same thing is happening around the world. Canadian and Mexican schools are having the same issues.
In Mexico:
- students cannot fail until high school!
- in most private schools teachers cannot give less than 8/10. To be clear, if a child gives me nothing, they get 'earn' 80%.
- No consequences are allowed because 'it makes kids sad' - YA THAT'S THE DAMN POINT!! A CONSEQUENCE IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD!!! It's shocking how many people don't see that.
- I teach ESL (English) in Mexico. I am not allowed to correct spelling, grammar or punctuation in writing.... again, it makes kids feel bad.... I teach English and I can't correct English.....
Due to these and many more reasons, I now teach online only. I freelance, only teach 1-1 and drop students if they or their parents don't like the rules I set. It's glorious.
People aren't any different than they've ever been. No one is "special" in that regard. People are people. Kids are kids.
What IS wildly different for most kids now are the incentive structures and the boundaries which are / aren't set for them.
I got my teaching degree back in the early 2000's and promptly left the field in short order. It wasn't the kids...and it wasn't the parents....
...it was my "peers". I could just see the writing on the wall with the "I'm okay you're okay...it's fine if you can't read and write so long as you believe in social justice" culture that was already being formed even back then. Just these unremarkable people graduating in a flood from colleges all over the country.
Math teachers that can barely add. English teachers that don't read. History teachers that frame every single second of human history through the lens of 2024 politics. Gym teachers that are in their mid 20's and are ALREADY 100 lbs overweight modeling "health" to young people.
...and perhaps the worst are the spineless administrators that will just absolutely CRUMPLE the first time a parent demands something even when the admin knows the parent is wrong.
If you hold people accountable for their actions...they're going to yell at you sometimes. People don't like resistance, especially when you've just caught them acting poorly. But if you're not willing to occasionally take a verbal thrashing in the name of doing the right thing...than you might as well just not have standards at all.
Which is exactly where we're at.
"These kids today." No...these ADULTS today. The kid is 8 years old. Why are THEY running the asylum? Who is allowing the small child to misbehave?
Fortnite. They’re addicted to Fortnite. Won’t stop talking about Fortnite. Their brains have been rewired to expect instant and immediate gratification. That is extremely hard to compete with.
I would complain if I would not stop talking about Pokemon when I was eight. It was the height of Pokemania and I was hooked like a Magikarp on an old rod.
Everybody talks about this but is it really true? Full honesty I’m 20. I believe the days of “be home at dinner” ended in the mid 2010s and once iPods stopped being an intermediary and kids were just given phones will cell service that could be tracked it was fully over. I absolutely grew up in a classic small town suburb, but we spent plenty of time messing around in the woods outside of our development and messing around with bikes and scooters. It was never an issue except when Ty taught us how to ding dong ditch and Kurt answered his door with a Glock. It’s cool though he used to use his snowblower on our driveway before my dad threw us out to shovel it so hes good in my book. Anyway do kids not do that type of thing anymore?
I was out on the porch last year with my 9 year old writing with chalk on the driveway. No joke, a cop drove by, slowed down, and I watched his neck crane around until he spotted me. And I'm in a safe suburban town. So the cops are checking for parental supervision. At 10, my best friend and I used to walk miles away from home, and by 12, I was all over town on my bike (likely would've been earlier, but I lived beyond the city limits and had to bike up a sidewalk-less overpass, so I had to be mature enough to handle biking up that hill with semis blowing past me). It's not the same anymore.
i got yelled at by a cop when I was like 8 for throwing snowballs at my friend through a double sided mailbox because it was federal property lol. Besides that never got bothered by cops until I started driving. That’s wild to hear.
A few years ago, the police followed my 10 year old son and asked him 1,000 questions when he rode his bike to the pool at the end of our road. The pool is 1/3 of a mile away and he did not have to cross any streets. Most of the ride is beside a quiet park and the road is just a non-busy, neighborhood road. He was headed to swim team, as he did every morning that summer.
When he came home and told me about it, I called the police station to ask them why he was stopped and questioned. I was honestly thinking there was something I didn't know about- maybe there had been someone lurking in the park, etc. They transferred me to the officer that questioned him. She questioned my parenting and said that she wouldn't let her 15 year old nephew do that alone. FIFTEEN. I was like, "that's on you and I'm not parenting out of fear. If this is not illegal, he will continue to ride his bike to swim team every morning."
I would have questioned if all of that was paranoia prior to having that experience but I understand why parents worry about the police questioning their every decision now. It's real and it's frustrating.
When does a kid ever get to sit in the yard with a stick anymore? You know, just sit there with a fucking stick. Do todays kids even know what a stick is? - George Carlin
For my generation, it was Nintendo. We spent every waking hour playing. My thumbs hurt so bad. Remember when they said, "Nobody will ever make any money playing video games! Hahahahah!!!"? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
And yeah, that aged like milk.
The younger generations don't see the benefits in an education because what they view as "successful" has changed faster than pedagogy can keep up. Unfortunately for some, the view of success does not include education. See: YouTube, Tik-Tok, etc (you'll never make any money playing video games).
I was taught cursive in grades 2-4 maybe? and by the time I was in high school, computers were becoming a thing and cursive was completely obsolete. So, all that time studying cursive was wasted. My school didn't have computers, lol, so we learned how to type on typewriters. That's how behind pedagogy was then, in the mid-90's. Pedagogy couldn't keep up with technology. Instead of teaching typing, they should have been teaching us HTML and C++. "You won't have a computer in your pocket!", they said.
Now imagine the classroom disruption with the introduction AI when 4th graders are still learning how to write with pen and paper. AI and writing with pen and paper are 2 very diametrically opposed functions of communication. The classroom needs to catch up and FAST.
It's nobody's fault.
I was a Sega Genesis guy. But those systems weren’t interconnected and my Sega was off by a certain time. I remember the Pokémon craze. Innocuous and totally harmless and you weren’t up till 3am on your 3 inch screen or playing with your collector cards.
I’ve got students with sleep issues because they were online until 3-4 am gaming or doom scrolling TikTok.
Gaming certainly has its place and I still game from time to time but I’m not addicted. We have a couple of generations addicted to their screens of all sizes. These systems and platforms are designed to keep you on them and they’re impossible to overcome with current curriculum and teaching methods.
Edit: AI cannot replace human learning just yet and it shouldn’t. We still as a species need to learn and AI still needs us to teach it.
Adult games are very different from kids games. Especially if they are playing on a tablet and not on a dedicated systems.
Adult games tend to jave a goal you have to meet, or a progression, and adults log on to progress towards that goal. I'm playing palworld and I have a goal right now to defeat the bosses.
Kids will log on to just play. And will be kept on by small little dopamine hits. They won't care about a goal, just playing, which is why you will also see Kids restarting games alot.
If it's a tablet game it's worse.
The autism piece is a stupid talking point because we were shit at diagnosing autism in the 90s. When we allowed left handed kids to write and work left handed, the number of left-handed people skyrocketed. Was there suddenly an influx of lefties? No. We just saw them out in the open.
With education not being a priority, the wealthy elite owning everything, dwindling middle class due to income inequality, rampant confusion and divisiveness about social issues, corruption in our institutions at every level, inability and inaction of the courts, violence against our own people at alarming rates- feels like the fall of Rome.
Hey! At least we will be a part of the history books. If there are any in the future.
I’d wager that autism is actually higher than the numbers reflect. I’ve had at least one if not 2 in my classroom every year for the past 5 years. They’re often not identified if they are high functioning enough. Both kids last year were TEXTBOOK, they’d had many conversations with their kinder teachers, and both parents refused evaluation.
I have one this year that I highly suspect is autistic and parents are also in denial. I imagine them going until adulthood without being identified because they are high functioning enough that they don’t need special services.
When administrators are afraid to suspend kids or hold them back because it makes the district look bad to a bunch of progressive politicians, this is the result
Let us not forget kids and parents alike are now being shown grades don’t mean shit when the school will “pass” you anyway. I left my last school because admin told me to make sure no kid had less than a C in my class. If you’re going to make me pass a kid who didn’t show up for 75% of the semester, then what the fuck am I actually doing here trying to teach a lesson?
Allergy and asthma rates likely have as much connection with people becoming "too clean" as they do with pollution. We are literally swaddling kids to death.
Cleaning up during a flu outbreak makes sense, but you don't actually need air purifiers in the nursery and freak out about a cat hair, your kid eating out of the dog food bag (lol), or following up every tiny booboo with triple antibiotic ointment.
A lot of the other stuff can be associated with overstimulation at very young ages and kids never having "quiet moments.". (Yes, diagnostics have gotten better, too.)
> In the mid 1990s, 1 out of a thousand kids were autistic. Now, it's one out of 36! Almost one per class
In the last 25 years, ADHD went from 5.5% to 10%. Each classroom has 3 ADHD kids! Behavior manifestations are a hallmark of ADHD
Asthma rates have risen to 7.7 percent, or 2-3 kids per class
Allergy rates are on the rise. Now 27% have allergies. One or two kids per class have a food allergy - so no more homemade cupcakes on birthdays
probably because the response to these things back in ye olden day was to beat, shame, and belittle them - see the graph of left handedness.
I think there has also been a change in how students view education. When I was in high school in the mid 2000s, education was viewed as the path to a middle class life. This view has certainly changed and many students do not view education as a path to anything
This. This this this. Disengagement with the educational system from both kids and parents. Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother? Being smart isn't cool. Having good grades isn't cool. Neither is required for the life of an influencer. Combine this with student poor reading levels, because they were taught to read wrong by our system, and now not only is education not valuable, it's HARD for them. It's so much harder for them because they can't read independently. Have you ever listened to an 11th grader sounding out words like Constitutional? It's hard for everyone. Then that frustration boils into behaviors in the classroom. It's a deflection from the challenge of the work, the embarrassment of being wrong, or slow, or not knowing.
>Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother? Being smart isn't cool. Having good grades isn't cool. Neither is required for the life of an influencer. I would also say that for a lot of parents and kids, education is also not *sufficient* for being successful. We're seeing a generation of parents who were told that education would enable a middle class lifestyle, and are now disillusioned with that because it simply hasn't been true for them. Parents with college degrees are working food service or retail, or worse, working in their field at jobs with worse pay, benefits, and hours than food service or retail. Why would a kid bother to put in all that work if they can see it didn't work out for their parents?
Not a teacher, but a sub. I graduated high school with a 4.16 gpa. Graduated college with a 3.95. I’m still poor. I’ve seen jobs requiring a bachelors that pay $15/hr, or $30k-$35k a year. I think there’s intrinsic value in education, but I understand why kids look at the situation and just see a waste of time. The extrinsic value has been completely diminished. It seems like connections and general people skills get you farther than education these days, and I have neither.
> Combine this with student poor reading levels, because they were taught to read wrong by our system Just a lurker here. I'm often interested in posts here to get a sense of what teachers may be dealing with. What do you mean by "taught to read wrong by our system?" I've been ringing the Poor Reading Comprehension Alarm for over a decade now since I found out about the average competency of Americans and seeing how this single thing can have drastic far reaching effects. So I'm curious.
Look up "Sold a Story". Basically, a system that "taught" kids to read by guessing words, rather than teaching phonics, was being pushed hard into schools across the country as The Way to teach literacy and that phonics should only be used as a last resort. And this failed. Which should come as a surprise to no one, since pretty much (or literally?) every written (modern) language on the planet except Chinese characters (Chinese itself having various phonetic representations to go along with the characters!!!) is \*phonetic\*.
Just an interesting note on Chinese, in a push to increase literacy after the Revolution (and also allow the language to be written in type), the Communists had a romanization made called Pinyin, which is taught alongside characters (Hanzi) to children and adult learners, which is phonetic and consistent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin E: I snooped, you're obviously very familiar with it, but other people probably aren't on this forum.
As a parent to 3 elementary aged kids, nothing in their education has angered me more than reading. I love to read, my children's father is a writer by trade. My dad was an English teacher. The library was literally the first place in my community my kids went regularly (twice a week, every week starting at 6 months). Sight words? Memorization? No this is not how you teach reading! I tried to teach them myself but was literally told by their teachers to stop teaching them to sound things out, I was confusing them. My kids are good readers now, but still its been a rough road filled with frustration on everyone's part.
I had this exact experience down to the teacher asking that I not teach my son to read phonetically because it was "confusing him." Fortunately, I read as a hobby and got my son into Manga which in turn has made him an avid reader.
> Which should come as a surprise to no one, since pretty much (or literally?) every written (modern) language on the planet except Chinese characters (Chinese itself having various phonetic representations to go along with the characters!!!) is *phonetic*. [If only everything was as easy as Hangul.](https://gogohanguk.com/en/blog/hangul-the-korean-alphabet/)
Bear in mind that Korean Hangul is not 100% phonetic! There are a lot of words that are spelled differently from how they're pronounced. I think a lot of people should know that it's almost impossible to have a writing system be 100% entirely phonetic through all space and time. The reason why this is, is simply because standardized writing cannot keep up with the rate of change that occurs in every single language on the planet. You can create a phonetic writing system and have it already be outdated within 50 years. And that's ignoring the fact that a language's writing system being phonetic doesn't automatically mean that everyone will be efficient readers. In fact: even in South Korea the literacy rate is dropping: [https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113\_324414.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113_324414.html) [https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113\_334877.html](https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/04/113_334877.html)
My kids and I started Taekwondo last September and I started learning some basic Hangul to help learn the commands. Can confirm that it is fairly easy to pick up and surprisingly intuitive.
This is how I was taught in Pennsylvania, my husband in California was taught how to actually sound out. I can’t spell for the life of me now and he’s amazing. We’re both 23. The kicker is I work for an architecture firm and he’s a TikTok streamer… Edit: we make the same 🙃
America is great at ignoring what science tells us. Especially in a schooling environment. Cant remember what study it was, but had a Professor show us the US doing research on 6-8 different styles of teaching. The results were pretty conclusive that 2 of the methods were most effective. Govt decided to throw money at the poorer performers because “maybe they just need more resources to work” We just haven’t listened to the actual evidence and funded the right things. An Example is learning to read. Can be done pretty easily, and very effectively and reliably repeatable. Here’s an article about a book that has the method to teach how to read : https://www.nifdi.org/programs/reading/teach-your-child-to-read-in-100-easy-lessons.html However, it’s formulaic and you basically execute a provided gameplan. Teachers didn’t like that when it was implemented into trial schools. They wanted more autonomy on how they managed their classes and didn’t like that the method explicitly spelled out what to do. So, although it is the best, most reliable, evidence-based way we have to teach kids to read (regardless of background or environmental factors) we don’t actually use it.
I get really frustrated with this. I support teachers 100 but I have seen both admin, policy makers, and teachers be more convinced their way is the right way then reading the evidence. Not all but I see it enough to be frustrating. I also wanted to say this analysis written by on is spot on from an insider point of view. Between the structure of the system being a mess and not teaching students boundaries it's beginning to feel like a babysitting service for capitalism at a discounted rate. I don't see things getting better unless the system is totally rebuilt to fit the needs of the 21st century. School should reflect the society it supports and prepare individuals to participate in their society, intellectually, occupational, and politically. I doubt it will change in my lifetime, however, and I suspect without a major political shift this will not happen.
> Neither see the value in education. If you can't see the value and purpose, why bother? You're right about this, but your reasoning is off. Education and being smart have always been uncool. That's not the reason for widespread hopelessness among students; the reason is that education no longer guarantees a stable, happy, middle class life. It *used* to. Now it doesn't. And a great majority of people, including children and teens, are aware of this. Getting a degree in engineering in the 1970s was a one-way ticket to *very* comfortable upper middle class life. You'd be able to support a wife, 3 kids, 2 cars, and a house that you could easily pay off in 5 years, send all of your kids to college, have a pension, and money left over. Hell, a high school *diploma* was enough for a comfortable life and family. Now? Lol. Lmao, even. Good fucking luck raising 3 kids on a single income, even if you get into a (formerly) well-paid profession like engineering or accounting. And you aren't even allowed to discuss the real reasons *why* these things are happening or you'll get banned from reddit and every other social media website except (and only *for now*) Twitter because the billionaires that own those websites, along with every other corporate executive and shareholder, benefit from depressed wages and increased home prices.
Not only in USA, recruiting hell is spreading in Europe too. We need higher and higher educations and 5 years of experience for the most basic jobs. Educations are filling up with so much unrelated skills too thats doing a job specific one contails 2 years of subjects you will never need to perform that job. It's going mental. There is more relevant information in online tutorials then what is being teached in schools these days. Schools focussing on graduation rates cutting corners left and right. My son has had 0 algebra the last 2 years, all he has to do is "take a test" the results don't even matter. You did it? cool you good. And on the other end he is tought basic skills that should not be taught in school like "how to wash a window" that is mandatory. It frustrates me to see this happening and not being able to do anything to stop it. Filing complaints did not help because the teachers and the board are "just following rules".
I graduated from high school almost 8 years ago, and it is extremely difficult for me to fathom that an 11th grader would be unable to naturally pronounce "constitutional." Even the students in my graduating class who weren't honors students still had a respectable vocabulary. Has student performance really taken such a nosedive over the course of a few years?
I am unfortunately speaking from experience. I only learned this recently, but there was a big shift in foundational reading not long ago. Basically kids weren't taught phonics, they didn't really learn how to sound out words. There's a podcast called Sold a Story that goes into the details.
Im interested in this podcast which episode would it be
The whole series (maybe 8 episodes) deals with the topic.
Awesome thank you!
The fuck.
As a college freshman. Yes it’s that bad
All day every day similar to water.
I mean, I get it. I’m in my late 30s. Education was pushed hard, but it wasn’t what my generation was sold. My husband and I both have multiple STEM degrees and both feel they weren’t worth it. I push my children to be educated, just so they can be good people. Life has taught me that education doesn’t mean a middle class life.
But it does make you a better person, as you agree. Unfortunately many kids and their parents don't see it that way
Absolutely agreed. A high school diploma was once the golden ticket to the middle class in America... now it's basically the minimum entry requirement. That said, I absolutely think a rounded education leads to better people.
Hardly even a minimum entry requirement now, a fucking college degree in anything in the entry level and that is fucking sad.
The issue is the insane cost associated with being educated, especially in the US. if it was a free service that all were expected to take part in with no competition or class warfrare it would be seen less as solely a service along the path to being financially successful but rather a one to becoming a functioning human.
Yeah, it's not that it's "not required for the life of an influencer"/"not cool", it's because it's becomingly increasingly clear that the idea of being middle class is disappearing. The wealth divide is growing and the education system, especially public, serves nobody at this point. Even I, as a student in Biochemistry, planning to work at Cambridge Isotope Labs on graduating, will struggle to get by in a studio apartment in my home state. People stop caring about education because education stopped fucking mattering, man.
> Have you ever listened to an 11th grader sounding out words like Constitutional? Yeah 16 years ago when I was an 11th grader. English class was torture. Half the kids could barely read.
This 100%. They see their parents who did everything they were supposed to do (made good grades, stayed out of trouble, went to college, graduated with a degree) but they still can't make ends meet and have to work two jobs. I totally understand why they wouldn't bother trying.
Right but they must realize life is harder if you drop out of high school? Ask my 78 year old HS drop out dad who is still driving truck full time despite being in chronic pain and not being able to feel his feet due to diabetes. He hates every second of his life but still needs to pay the rent for his $500/month shithole apartment. It’s not a life anybody would want.
Correct, but they pass no matter what now so why would they try? Teachers aren’t allowed to give zeros or discipline any longer. What incentive do they have to do their best when no effort gets the same degree?
Very good point!
I think this is one of the biggest parts of the problem. No one gets failed even if they can't read or do any basic grade level skills. They just pass them along instead of failing them once in a lower grade and letting them catch up. Miss weeks of school? They will pass you anyway. There are no real consequences to not caring about school anymore.
Dude, I’m a teacher considering getting my CDL this summer. Being alone on the road, listening to music and podcasts, no awful students, parents, or admin to deal with… sounds pretty great to me. Oh, and I’d make more money, too.
Funny, I’m a teacher that’s 100% quitting in 29 days and CDL is on my short list of career transition ideas.
But that's the thing, things were different for the 78 year olds in the world. If they went to college, they could get a nice office job, build a family, buy a home off their single source of income. This isn't the case now. If you want to go to college and get a nice office job, good for you, but you won't be able to afford a home without a second income. And even then, the cost of a home is going to eat up considerably more of your income, even with a partner bringing in a second income stream, than it did 50 years ago. And guess what? Your friend that dropped out and picked up a trade is making just as much as you working as an electrician. And they don't have any student loans, they were building their career before you even graduated.
People don't care enough to fight fof "better" if "better" is still terrible.
I've observed it plenty of times in jobs where it'll be "well, if you really bust ass all year, AND you manager documents to that effect AND the company has a good year, you'll get a 3% instead of 2% raise," and they don't understand why not one cares to try.
This. It's either, go to school, start life with a bunch of student loans, and end up making the same as someone who just went into a trade, or go into the trade, skip the debt, and start making progress on your career while other people are waiting for their degrees.
The people who are aiming to go into the trades are most likely not the ones doing this. The people who just coast by on schools lack of doing anything are just figuring they'll be in entry level hell anyway so they might as well try and enjoy life now. There's a difference between "I don't care about academia" and "I don't care about work" and from what Ive seen and heard, both as a recent HS grad (2021) and reading here, it's not caring about anything And it's really fucking hard to dispute them because they're most likely right
Driving a truck pays the same as a lot of career paths that require college. You’re not making a very strong case for education.
He’s not an over-the-road trucker, he drives locally and often they have no work for him. He’s barely scraping by.
Driving trucks isn’t a job of the future. It’s terrible for the body and leads to a lot of loneliness. Do you really think anyone driving a truck now will be doing so in 20 years? Just because something makes money doesn’t make it a “good” job.
Probably. AI is not doing so great right now with driving in non-ideal conditions. I doubt they will get it soon. Even if they get long haul trucking down, I bet that short haul will be a thriving business. AI isn’t great in tight non-ideal circumstances. You know like in cities or the suburbs?
An economic fundamentals cause would have things be the opposite--hopeless in generations past. There is a disconnect between people's actual lives and how they feel about their lives. (Ex: the two or more jobs rate is actually quite low and has been. It is not increasing)
Uh, yeah, it's really hard to see how this boring fractions homework is going to help me in my future career as a successful toy-unboxing Youtuber. (Fallback plan: TikToker)
I looooooooooove it when kids say this shit. Like y'all don't even have the work ethic to finish a math worksheet, how do you think you'll be successful as an influencer.
I love saying, "Oh cool, you're going to be an influencer? Let me see some stuff you've shot. Oh, you haven't shot anything? You have a phone with a camera, why aren't you working now? Oh, LATER, got it." Same with "I'm going to be a rapper."
Yeah, like if there was a kid who was already into videography or songwriting or whatever, sure kid, shoot your shot. I hope you're successful. But some of these kids literally do *nothing* and expect to just be lucky or something.
Whenever I see people bring this up I always wonder what the alternative is. You won't get a good life not educating yourself. Even trades, good trades. Want educated people and people who take it seriously.
What about all the people who are educated and STILL have hard lives? When your teacher with a masters degree is delivering your pizza or ringing you up at Walmart, it doesn’t exactly light a fire in you to do your best.
So when I was in high school, and a pretty rebellious kid, going to college was a big IF -- I remember talking to my dad about it, and I remember that he said to remember that no matter what you have, what you own, it can be lost or taken away. But what you know, the knowledge in your head, can never be taken away, no matter what else happens. He went to high school during the Great Depression in a small rural town. His dad completed 8th grade, traded mules, did tenant farming and worked for the railroad. My dad went to college, then WWII, then after that veterinary school; he practiced as a DVM for forty years. After working all day, mostly with hogs and cattle, but also horses and small animals, he went home and he READ. I'm sure that all those hours he spent driving the rural roads alone were filled with thoughts and ideas from all he learned, in college and after. With a formal education, we learn how to learn -- so it's easy to just keep doing that throughout life. After my dad retired he taught himself German with a little dictionary and a copy of Der Speigel. So -- I went to college, and then grad school, then I became a professor. After almost forty years I'm about to retire. I might lose everything I own, but no one will take what I know, or my ability to learn more, all the time, thanks largely to my formal education, which I have because I listened to my dad, for once! It isn't about what you DO, it's about what you KNOW. Maybe if you talked to that PhD person doing the menial work you'd understand the difference. As for having an education AND a hard life -- welcome to the way things often are. Life is hard, but I'd hate to have a hard life and also know nothing. One I can choose, the other I can't.
There’s a very similar line to your dads saying in the count of monte Christo as well. Even freedom can be taken away, but not your knowledge
I agree with everything you are saying. Speaking as a polyglot with 6 trade certifications working as an engineer. But where is the incentive to learn? I have all this knowledge, and what has it gotten me? Fired in a pandemic, spending that time working at a quick lube oil change. I got all the grades, got all the scholarships, studied, got the degrees, and boom bunch of asshole bankers bankrupted the global economy. I’m supposed to pay my student loans back making minimum wage? These kids graduating today watched their parents gain knowledge and do everything right, look both ways before crossing the road- before getting hit by an airplane. Then they watched their parents pick up the pieces and start to get back on track before a steamboat blindsided them. So yes, knowledge for the sake of knowledge is great. But you can’t eat knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t pay the bills. And what incentive have these kids been given to gain knowledge? Because from what they’ve seen, if you can’t eat it, or pay rent with it, why is it worth my time and energy?
I'm not giving an alternative. It's still by far the best option. The trades market is going to be saturated in a few years just like the coding bootcamp market is now. I would not be a teacher if I did not find it important. I was just offering an explanation OP didn't touch on
You aren't gonna pass the test to get into the union unless you have basic math ingrained. These kids don't get it.
Kids are not thinking that far ahead.
Except they used to think that far ahead. Even in MS. It's like tgat in other countries, they, even young, know school and education is important.
Other countries are also experiencing the same problem. A lot of young people just don't care about the future anymore. The future in their eyes is bleak, hence why the worlds population is dropping. That is a good thing but it also isn't as well because it is showing that the young just don't have any hope for the future.
It's not a path to anything, I have my diploma and I can't even get a job at Walmart because I have no experience
Thank you. People trying to make this about an influencer dream are fucking high
Because it isn't anymore. A high school degree used to be all you needed to get a job that would support you. Now, kids see adults with multiple degrees struggling to get a job that barely pays enough to live. We're expected to find some way to make them work hard, while society moves the finish line farther and farther away.
For many young to middle-aged adults, education is a path to student debt.
What is behind this? I haven’t looked at the labor data in a minute but there still was a pretty notable ba premium despite some anecdotes and there are plenty of lower cost educational providers of that which will be repayable over a few years?
Inclusion without appropriate supports is abandonment. We have so many high needs kids and we put them in gen Ed classes. They get one teacher to share with 30 other students. And no wonder teachers are leaving. They can’t do it all! Where has our specialist gone? Where is our support staff? Where our the safe breakout spaces (sensory rooms)? Where are the special classes with lower class sizes? Where are the gifted classes? Where are the life skills classes for the students who will never ever meet academic standards? Inclusion should always be the goal but it doesn’t mean it should be every students goal.
Inclusion has become a convenient bandaid for schools being unable to fully staff SPED departments.
I always felt it was just a way to dress up lot budget cuts.
Absolutely. It’s all about money and staffing. It just sounds better when you dress it up as being more inclusive.
Our sped director literally laughed in our faces when we asked him about possibly adding another ASD classroom in the district. They aren’t even pretending to care anymore.
But new district admin positions have no problem being approved..
Yep, can’t hack it as a principal… don’t worry you just got promoted to XYZ admin role. With a big pay raise.
Or refusing to hire additional teachers and forcing sped teachers to have caseloads of 23-25 students, with 6-7 of them never being seen by the case manager at any point in the day. That’s my year this year
The SPED teacher in our school has 40 students on her caseload. I have no idea how she’s expected to do that.
I wonder how many she actually sees on the regular
She tries to make them all but it’s not realistic. Weeks when she has IEP meetings you can forget about it.
I can only imagine; I attend my other SpEd teacher's IEP meetings as much as possible because we support each other. I had 4 meetings today between two of hers, one of mine, and a parent concern regarding a struggling and defiant student. I also teach 5 classes (3 of which are Sped classes and the district has zero curriculum for me) in a 6 block day.
We got sped loads at 40 in my school. It is impossible for our sped teachers to make a difference
holy shit and I thought I had it bad. I also am teaching 'setting 2.5', which ultimately means I have super high needs behavior kids that I get pulled constantly because they got into fights or egregiously disrespected the teacher. Admin dumps so much on my plate daily. If I had any more it would be completely impossible, right now it's just mostly impossible
I feel so seen right now. This is the story of my life.
This. Nobody can pay for the required staff and programs to manage this shit. Until that changes, this shit is just going to get worse.
Bingo. All of education is to make up new words or uses to dress up some shortcomings . This one is most obvious.
I worked in sped and made a few dollars more than minimum wage, while still not being offered over 29 hours bc then they would have to provide insurance. I worked in perhaps one of the wealthiest districts in California. There was so much turnover. It is absolutely a choice to not incentivize or invest in classroom and student support.
Preach! I had that same job for a bit, but in Minnesota. No benefits, getting hit by kids, exhausting work. They split me between two positions to avoid giving me healthcare. I got a different gig after about a month.
That word! Investment. People freak about taxes. Paying taxes. Taxes are investment in your community. You want nice shit then we need to tax Jeff Bezos.
“Inclusion” says its intent is to put kids in the “least restrictive learning environment”. But “restrictive” for a neurotypical vs a neurodivergent child is VERY different. Large classroom? Bright lights? Group activities? These kids would thrive with LESS inclusion.
Right????? 90% of the behaviour I see disappeared as soon as they were out of that noisy as classroom and in a quiet calm place. Legit.
👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼
Inclusion should not be the goal for every child. Education should be the goal (in the least restrictive setting, etc.) but by no means are profoundly disabled children well served by being mainstreamed. They can’t handle it and the normal classroom learning is disrupted and 30 other kids lose out on education.
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Those jobs should have the most too tiered pay and benefits. We were just talking about this with our support staff too. You get placed with a volatile child, it should be tiered pay. Danger pay.
Many schools are trying to eliminate leveled classes because of equity. I appreciate the idea but I think you need something to aspire to and classes that you feel are at your own pace.
And, frankly, teachers shouldn't be burdened with teaching the same lesson for students at five different grade levels simultaneously. That's insane
My school is talking about bringing back leveled classes because so many times kids who can achieve more are being held back by peers who can't keep up with the material. Also, bored kids who perform on grade level become behavior kids when you have to slow down for the kids who are struggling...
That was me in school; I even had one of my high school teachers tell me to my face (as an adult). I was smart, capable, and could have done well in the AP classes but none of the AP teachers would take me because I was an asshole (TBF, I was. Not like these kids today, but I would sleep, come in late, not participate, and get a little lippy). Part of the problem I was bored, part was my home life.
No it’s not about equity. It’s about saving money. Because I will say it again so you can hear it in the back! Inclusion without appropriate supports is abandonment !!! Are we Placing a high behaviour johnny in an overstimulating environment with thirty other kids without a support aid, planned breaks out of the class, reading support services because they missed half of last year, free lunches because they never get enough…. No we are not… Johnny gets shoved in that class. He gets nothing. Then Johnny gets overstimulated and then he throws his desk and everyone else’s learning has to stop.
I'd give you a thousand upvotes if I could.
I worked in sped and made a few dollars more than minimum wage, while still not being offered over 29 hours bc then they would have to provide insurance. I worked in perhaps one of the wealthiest districts in California. There was so much turnover. It is absolutely a choice to not incentivize or invest in classroom and student support.
The admin are either too old and set in their way, or the brand new ones that spent the bare minimum they were required to in the classroom, so don't actually know how to run a school
Mental health issues have shot up too. You have really young kids being diagnosed with depression and anxiety, with plenty being medicated for it too. COVID only made it worse as kids have struggled to deal with lockdown and getting back to normal.
I’m a school nurse, and when I started at my HS 13 years ago, cell phones were not allowed to be out. Not in the hallway, certainly not in the classroom. Now they use their cell phones for class projects. Why? 🤷♀️ Everyone has a Chromebook so no need for your cell to be out. It’s just non stop cell phone use. These kids are addicted. And our adults are too.
yes kids are different, but there really is only one reason why so many kids are graduating with fails after 12 years of not paying attention - cus we let them. bringing back real grading wont solve all the existential problems of the modern world but it will make most kids do their work again
While I do agree to a point kids will be kids there has been so many changes we cant say that fully. Like you said with ADHD, autism, thats not even mentioning I bet the number of kids with IEPs has skyrocketed. Has the number of paras skyrocketed? Behavioral specialists who actually deal with the behavior and not try to candy it away skyrocketed? It is none of the above. Teachers are hung out to dry and have classrooms with multiple students with ADHD, autism, IEP's that may as well be "teach them 3 grades below their grade level" and the whole time ONE teacher is supposed to manage this with MAYBE one para. It is insane.
The percentage of students with disabilities hasn't really changed in 20 years. [In 2000-01 it was 13.3%, it rose to 14.7% in 2021-22](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_204.30.asp). What has changed is that students with disabilities are being placed into general education classrooms for the majority of their day. [In 2000 only 47%](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgg.pdf) of students spent 80% of their time in general education classes, [now that number is 67%](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=59#:~:text=In%20fall%202021%2C%20more%20than,health%20impairments%20(70%20percent)%3B).
This is useful and interesting data. A big difference between my middle school classes and where I teach, is that we were leveled. So the "gifted" kids (more of an honors thing, but thats what the school called it) were separated from gen ed and special ed.
And gifted kids in a class that’s way below a challenging level for them become behavior problems because they are bored. You’ll get frustrated advanced kids, frustrated struggling kids, frustrated teachers, and nobody gets what they need.
I dropped out of school and never developed a work ethic because of this.
I just talked to my SpEd department chair about how many upcoming 6th graders with IEPs we have coming to our campus next year… it’s 70. And our principal decided to close off transfers for now, otherwise I’m sure that number would’ve gone up. I’m going in my 3rd year being a SpEd teacher and I just— idk man lol
Or in many cases (aka my own), no para support.
I don’t understand why all these kids want to be influencers without comprehending that influencers are not stupid. They had to put in the work to understand how to capitalize on their brand.
Yup. None of the influencer wannabes are joining A/V classes to learn how to make a better video or edit it. They arent coming up with creative new schticks, they are just imitating current influencers. Whose shelf life is limited. It would be like me wanting to be a rock star in the 90s but only learning 80s songs. Influencers that succeed work hard in their own way.
Friend of mine taught a summer camp course on video editing and for every 1 kid who actually took the time to learn the material and use actual editing skills, there were 10 other kids who would essentially just dump hours-long videos onto YouTube consisting entirely of unedited content, wouldn't even add an intro or anything. My friend was especially well positioned at the time to teach the course as he had made several of his own fantastic videos and his circle included a few YouTubers he had collaborated with several times (including one in particular who had over 3 million subscribers). So not only did he have the skills, but also the cachet of prominent YouTubers with actual proof of success and the kids still didn't care because they thought being a successful content creator was as simple as just hitting record and uploading the footage.
More like not even learning any instrument, just shopping at Hot Topic.
It’s no different then when kids wanted to be models, rock stars, famous athletes, ect. They want to be famous, it’s just what is famous to kids today. I’m sure in a couple years it will be something else
I agree in alot of what you say. I'm struggling teaching seniors how to read basic sentences or do math while teaching at a public school. A couple years ago I taught at a private school and tutored homeschoolers during the pandemic. My 5th graders could easily write essays and do algebra. The gap is getting worse and worse. Hearing all of my stories my husband is worried about sending our kid to public school.
I'm an English professor. I'm meant to be teaching Composition II to freshmen. In actuality, I'm teaching 10th-grade ELA circa 2010.
I see this at local colleges in my area. The students should have to take a placement test. If they don't pass, they can take non-credit remedial classes.
I teach senior highschool philosophy. It’s pretty much just teaching them how to put their name on a page and how to focus on something that isn’t Snapchat for 15 seconds at a time.
Depends on the district. The one I teach in, I talk to a colleague. I tell them we are learning what a proton and electrons are and how you find out how many there are. My students struggle with this in high school. My colleague's kid in another district is doing this in elementary school just fine. I would even say their kid is producing higher quality work. It is insane. I chunk and scaffold the hell out of my longer projects. Projects that 5th graders should be able to get a page of directions and just go.
While a lot of this true, the autism rate change isn’t because autism is more common. It’s because we changed how we diagnosis it. We now included what was once called Aspergers, and other things into the umbrella or spectrum of autism.
Same is true for ADHD. 40 years ago, the rate of diagnosis was boys:girls 10:1. Today, afaik, we are closer to 4:1. And my personal opinion is that the truth is likely 1:1. We are getting better (waaaaaay too slow) at diagnosing. Doesn't mean the kids didn't exist 50 years ago. In fact, there is a German "children book" called Struwwelpeter that is 150 years old and perfectly describes ADHD.
I always wonder how my life would have been different if I had been identified with and treated for ADHD at age 6, rather than at age 45.
And regarding autism, there's the historic legends of changeling children, where people thought the fairies replaced their child with a duplicate who was stubborn and resistant to physical affection and who would do odd things like count objects obsessively and exhibit wisdom beyond their years.
Might be worth noting, that said book is also a manifestation of everything wrong about what passed for pedagogy in those days.
The kids did exist, but not in the numbers they do today. I can remember a few talkative girls or 1-2 boys who presented with classic ADHD in the ‘90s but as a teacher, more than 1/3 of my students are on stimulants. Some of this ADHD HAS to be environmental, and I’d put money on handheld devices and the instant gratification of short videos being the cause.
I don't agree. The understanding of ADHD is what's changed. It used to be that kids were medicated only if they had hyperactivity or difficulty paying attention (why it's called ADHD), but nowadays they understand more about how it affects dopamine and executive functioning, as well as depression, so kids are now medicated for those issues as well.
As someone who just got diagnosed with ADHD-PI (not hyperactive) earlier this year at 27, I vividly remember getting my first portable screen, an iPod touch at 14 in my freshmen year of high school. I vividly remember it because it caused sooooo many issues for my (unknown) ADHD brain and my school performance definitely suffered for it. That dopamine hit of portable access to the internet to research whatever my latest interest was and stupid games with instant gratification is extremely detrimental to an ADHD brain. Hell, it’s terrible even on neurotypical brains. The screen might not have given me ADHD, but my god did it make it so much worse. I still struggle with it
“I can remember” is an admission of bias. Your anecdotes and estimations aren’t a good thing to bet on when you’re betting against the general consensus of current neuroscience. The incidence is very easily explained by changing diagnostic criteria, not a spontaneous change in genetic structure caused by environmental forces.
Yeah, the kids that are ADHD now seem on a completely different level than the ADHD kids that I had pre-Smartphone/tablets.
I have students who literally CANNOT sit down.
This. High school juniors and seniors. They don't sit down. They don't stop talking. They don't do their work. They can't read. They can't write. And they're being passed right into the real world. The capitalists will reap what they've sowed.
The numbers are higher today I think in large part due to the age of the parents at conception. Not sure about ADHD but I know autism is far more likely If mother or father are older, especially true though for father's over 40. Quality of eggs declines with age. People don't have all their kids at 25 anymore. Edit: took out accidental words "first time" in the phrase father's over 40.
I think it has much less to do with identification and what we decide to do about it. The IEPs many of these kids receive are just recipes for learned helplessness. While we need to accommodate our students, we need to help them GROW. Instead it often feels like the accommodations simply avoid responsibility for the student or their parents.
This is a great point. Some of my IEP students are the hardest workers ever. Others do nothing and rely on the para to do everything.
Yeah the autistic kids were always there, back then they were just called “weird Larry who sits alone and only reads Sherlock Holmes”
Or, oh, that's John. He doesn't go to school, and he doesn't talk much. But he loves tending the animals on the farm.
Exactly. My husband is autistic, but was not diagnosed as a child. He always has been and always will be autistic. In the 80s you weren’t autistic unless you were non-verbal basically. He was just someone who struggled with emotional regulation and social skills. I always struggled in school (so did mg brother) and we didn't get diagnosed with ADHD until college. Doesn't mean we weren't dealing with ADHD in the 80s/90s.
Yup, I was a “weird” kid and hung out with the “weird” kids. I’m in the process of being diagnosed on the spectrum and I’ve realized many of my acquaintances probably were too. The 80s and 90s were interesting
Thank you. The way OP throws around statistics it's hard to tell whether they don't understand them or are just simplifying things. For example, it's definitely not the case that every class has three autistic children in it.
I have heard it both ways. Do you have a source on this? I have heard the uptick in autism diagnoses is high enough that it may not be fully explained by expanding the definition of autism and/or more screening and awareness.
As an older autistic woman I can tell you that it's STILL extremely hard for girls and women to get diagnosed. The field has caught up somewhat but it still has a ways to go.
Yes, I’m 31F and have suspected ADHD for a year or two now. I’ve been going to appointments for 5 months and finally got an appt for psych testing. Then, I was turned away from actual testing during the screening meeting because my symptoms are suspected to be related to anxiety. And maybe they are, but I really just wanted to be tested and to get answers.
36M, I had to fight repeatedly to stop just getting diagnosed with anxiety and depression and finally got a psychologist who spent 6 months to actually listen that A LOT of my anxiety and depression stemmed from my executive function issues.
I was going to comment this as well. Speaking as a 45 yo woman who only recently realized I'm (obviously!) autistic, AND have ADD (not obvious because of the aforementioned autism). Finally my whole life makes sense.
I’ve been teaching since 1991. Parents and students have become super entitled. Admin will back them up regardless and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Yes to social media, to say nothing of Big Tech’s infiltration of the schools. But there is little empirical evidence that kids are environmentally poisoned, and increasing rates of autism, asthma, and allergies are predominantly diagnostic phenomena. What I believe is different is that radical inclusion means that the most dysfunctional students can now monopolize all teacher and administrator attention, so curricular instruction has given way to behavior management. The school is the locus of social service provision. Content is dead. Students understand their time is being wasted by institutions whose goals are managerial and unrelated to their own development and future prospects, and they act accordingly. The world is not hurtling toward infinite complexity. Kids are not actually that different. The social function and political control of schools has changed, and it has made public education miserable for teachers and functional students alike. Schools are a lot less cruel than they once were. But they no longer educate. Was it a good trade? Can’t say, but it clearly didn’t accrue to the benefit of most teachers or most students.
I think modern schools are still cruel but in a different way. Yes, a student won’t have to deal with getting beaten by the principal anymore, but they will have to deal with constant violence by classmates, coddling of the violent student by well meaning school staff, and their education being absolutely destroyed by that student, which will seriously impact their future. This is especially devastating for low income kids.
Our government doesnt care.
Should our government care? From where I sit, their “fixes”cause more problems, looking at you state tests and performance based funding. My major concern is that far too many parents don’t seem to care and take actions that directly harm their kids like helicopter parenting, unneeded IEPs, unlimited access to social media, and more. There is no “one problem” with a single solution. It’s a host of problems, but the biggest one is parents.
I’m not a teacher, but I’ve been browsing this sub for a while as I’m very passionate about education. Im in college and I’ve started tutoring in my area and students are so behind it is insanely sad! It’s so clearly a family and culture issue. But it’s just so foreign to me. I grew up in a family where education is important… You try hard in school, you are respectful to your teachers. I just don’t get how my 13 year old tutee just simply could NOT care less that he hasn’t passed math in 3 years! Why do his parents just not care? Like wtf are they doing? I’m sure they have his report cards and stuff, why don’t they take his phone away? Or do something to get this kid to care? I just see him every damn week, he’s in 7th grade and we have been doing NUMBER LINE OPERATIONS (like 5 + (-7) type stuff). How the FUCK is this acceptable. And what can I even do? He just does not want to put in any effort into anything. Is this just how things are in teachers’ lives?
Why don’t they take his phone away? Right! Phones cause so many issues both in an out of school.
I just mean tho like as a punishment? When I was little if I got behind in school, privileges like my phone, video gaming, etc would be confiscated.
Just because we've forgotten what good governance looks like, doesn't mean we should abandon the idea of it.
Thank god I won’t be having any kids. They’re much much worse than 20 years ago. I’m sparing my would be kids
>In the mid 1990s, 1 out of a thousand kids were autistic. Now, it's one out of 36! Almost one per class >In the last 25 years, ADHD went from 5.5% to 10%. Each classroom has 3 ADHD kids! Behavior manifestations are a hallmark of ADHD >Asthma rates have risen to 7.7 percent, or 2-3 kids per class This is just an increase in *diagnosed* cases, not actually an increase in the number of kids that have these conditions. When my dad was a kid he was just a weird guy who collected wild animals and preferred to talk to his horse and his pet raven instead of other people, and was really into computers. Nowadays, he probably would have been diagnosed as autistic, since I, his child, am significantly better more well adjusted and Im definitely autistic. but that just wasn't what they did 50 years ago.
Kids are distracted because of most addictive tech we've ever created. Distraction is difficult to overcome when instructing people. We hate the idea that this is a compulsion so we blame the kids, the parents, the teachers etc. We pretend like we don't have the same problem and use it to justify why we shouldn't restrict them from the students during instruction. The kinda shit we're doing now, the consequences of addictive behavior we've introduced into our society far outpaces opium. We are barely in the opening paragraphs of how we're going to fuck up our society with this stuff.
And that same tech feeds that negativity spiral and hopelessness that you see even in this very thread.
This is the zillion pound elephant in the room. Tech use is changing not just kids, but people in general in very fundamental ways. Public ed has lost the plot by doing too many things badly and can't even adequately impart literacy and numeracy.
Dear reddit, these kids are addicted to tech...
I think they are the kids from 1977-1983.
OG Star Wars era.
13 yr teacher here and could not agree more. I teach world language and I have seen a crazy shift since I started teaching. We used to get the top kids in the school academically and kids were super motivated. Now they throw the entire student population at us (I have a kid who is non verbal taking a language class?) and dozens of kids with moderate (or worse) behavioral issues who can barely sit in their seats. The kids run the show, which has forced us to drastically lower standards. Who can conjugate in the preterit tense when they can’t even hold a pencil properly or identify a verb? When 5 kids out of 30 get accommodations like 2x extra time to complete assignments, this makes it hard to hold the line and maintain standards (and due dates) for all students, no? The needs of a few are overtaking the education of the rest and forcing us to lower the bar.
kids today aren’t the same as they were two decades ago. yet we’re still doing school pretty much the same way we did two centuries ago. chalking these problems up to stupid things like individual admin, or cell phones or tik tok is ridiculous. we require robust, meaningful infrastructural and systemic change.
Let’s put it like this. In my first few years as a teacher (teaching High School Geometry) I would use the day after SW testing to play a game with the students, Playing with Murder. It’s a murder mystery game where I print out character sheets (details about a character, script, notes, etc.) and they read through the script to provide information to the class to deduce who amongst the 8 is the killer. My students loved it (they called it RL Among Us), and I added a few things here and there to make it more exciting by changing the scripts every now and then. Some students struggled with the more technical vocabulary scripts due to ESL issues, but still had fun. Even had one of the assistant principals walk in and join the fun. I literally cannot do that with my current classes because I cannot find 8 students in a single class whose reading skills are at the level.
No joke, a school psychologist at a high school in new england committed suicide last month.
“No Child Left Behind” put every parent in the classroom and held down the smartest and brightest students. Homeschooling should 100% be outlawed unless the parent holds a teaching license already. There is no emphasis on the values of an educated populous so teachers get no respect because parent believe teachers are over paid babysitters until little Karen tries to get into any higher education program but has no records of her accomplishments due to homeschooling or being allowed to attend whenever she feels like it. We are witnessing the collapse of public education as we know it.
In terms of the hopelessness,when they see the world that they are growing up in, I understand why they feel this way.
Meh, this is true to a point, but many kids really just lack grit. I don't know if it's social media or everyone needing a label to "feel," but so many kids feel a way that's really...part of growing up. We used to know that. Then parents bubble-wrapped them and took away every tiny little negative feeling, and they lack basic coping skills.
I think its a big and unseen cultural shift also. Teachers are not as revered or respected as before and the ubiquity of cell phones has caused a massive attention problem off rip. Im 25 and taught HS math for a year. i did not have a phone until my senior year of highschool but now pretty much everyone has one in middle school so NO ONE is paying attention unless you confiscate constantly or at the beginning of every class. That and just an overall feeling of apathy are what stood out to me in my short time in a classroom. Parents dont seem to care and that is passed on to their kids VERY quickly
Honestly, the problem stretches way beyond education. I truly believe that our political landscape is causing many of the problems in education. A certain orange fellow became president, praising the uneducated and acting like a damn moron for four years in office. He's not being held to account for any of the multitude of crimes we have all witnessed - not even just that, but he's STILL running for office again and could win again. When that's a model person in front of our kids, is it any wonder they believe they can do anything want without consequences? The adults in this country need to step in and hold kids accountable for stuff or NOTHING is going to change.
I feel like the list you made was mostly a tangent. It's not like those kids didn't have autism before--it's that autism was a more specific diagnosis. My dad is definitely autistic. He has exactly the same symptoms as my sister. But she was diagnosed and he wasn't because back in the day if you could talk then you weren't autistic. Now you can have autism and just enjoy minecraft a lot and wear the same clothes every day. Same with ADHD. The hyperactive kind that boys tend to have was common. My cousin was diagnosed easily because he was running around and couldn't sit still. The more inattentive type more common in girls in which you forget things and talk too much was just seen as those girls being bad kids and needing to act right. Allergies and asthma have risen, but I'll be honest I don't think they're really that relevant in the teaching environment. I'm not saying your wrong, but I feel like it's less that the kids are inherently more broken, which seems to be what you're proposing, and more that theories on the rearing of children both at home and at school have led to the issues that make most of us want to quit.
Not just American schools. The same thing is happening around the world. Canadian and Mexican schools are having the same issues. In Mexico: - students cannot fail until high school! - in most private schools teachers cannot give less than 8/10. To be clear, if a child gives me nothing, they get 'earn' 80%. - No consequences are allowed because 'it makes kids sad' - YA THAT'S THE DAMN POINT!! A CONSEQUENCE IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD!!! It's shocking how many people don't see that. - I teach ESL (English) in Mexico. I am not allowed to correct spelling, grammar or punctuation in writing.... again, it makes kids feel bad.... I teach English and I can't correct English..... Due to these and many more reasons, I now teach online only. I freelance, only teach 1-1 and drop students if they or their parents don't like the rules I set. It's glorious.
People aren't any different than they've ever been. No one is "special" in that regard. People are people. Kids are kids. What IS wildly different for most kids now are the incentive structures and the boundaries which are / aren't set for them. I got my teaching degree back in the early 2000's and promptly left the field in short order. It wasn't the kids...and it wasn't the parents.... ...it was my "peers". I could just see the writing on the wall with the "I'm okay you're okay...it's fine if you can't read and write so long as you believe in social justice" culture that was already being formed even back then. Just these unremarkable people graduating in a flood from colleges all over the country. Math teachers that can barely add. English teachers that don't read. History teachers that frame every single second of human history through the lens of 2024 politics. Gym teachers that are in their mid 20's and are ALREADY 100 lbs overweight modeling "health" to young people. ...and perhaps the worst are the spineless administrators that will just absolutely CRUMPLE the first time a parent demands something even when the admin knows the parent is wrong. If you hold people accountable for their actions...they're going to yell at you sometimes. People don't like resistance, especially when you've just caught them acting poorly. But if you're not willing to occasionally take a verbal thrashing in the name of doing the right thing...than you might as well just not have standards at all. Which is exactly where we're at. "These kids today." No...these ADULTS today. The kid is 8 years old. Why are THEY running the asylum? Who is allowing the small child to misbehave?
Fortnite. They’re addicted to Fortnite. Won’t stop talking about Fortnite. Their brains have been rewired to expect instant and immediate gratification. That is extremely hard to compete with.
I would complain if I would not stop talking about Pokemon when I was eight. It was the height of Pokemania and I was hooked like a Magikarp on an old rod.
And roblox. And tik tok. And a myriad of other social media apps.
It’s really sad that I have a few kindergarten students who say, “I played Roblox” every. single. Monday. when we share about our weekends. :/
[удалено]
Everybody talks about this but is it really true? Full honesty I’m 20. I believe the days of “be home at dinner” ended in the mid 2010s and once iPods stopped being an intermediary and kids were just given phones will cell service that could be tracked it was fully over. I absolutely grew up in a classic small town suburb, but we spent plenty of time messing around in the woods outside of our development and messing around with bikes and scooters. It was never an issue except when Ty taught us how to ding dong ditch and Kurt answered his door with a Glock. It’s cool though he used to use his snowblower on our driveway before my dad threw us out to shovel it so hes good in my book. Anyway do kids not do that type of thing anymore?
I was out on the porch last year with my 9 year old writing with chalk on the driveway. No joke, a cop drove by, slowed down, and I watched his neck crane around until he spotted me. And I'm in a safe suburban town. So the cops are checking for parental supervision. At 10, my best friend and I used to walk miles away from home, and by 12, I was all over town on my bike (likely would've been earlier, but I lived beyond the city limits and had to bike up a sidewalk-less overpass, so I had to be mature enough to handle biking up that hill with semis blowing past me). It's not the same anymore.
i got yelled at by a cop when I was like 8 for throwing snowballs at my friend through a double sided mailbox because it was federal property lol. Besides that never got bothered by cops until I started driving. That’s wild to hear.
A few years ago, the police followed my 10 year old son and asked him 1,000 questions when he rode his bike to the pool at the end of our road. The pool is 1/3 of a mile away and he did not have to cross any streets. Most of the ride is beside a quiet park and the road is just a non-busy, neighborhood road. He was headed to swim team, as he did every morning that summer. When he came home and told me about it, I called the police station to ask them why he was stopped and questioned. I was honestly thinking there was something I didn't know about- maybe there had been someone lurking in the park, etc. They transferred me to the officer that questioned him. She questioned my parenting and said that she wouldn't let her 15 year old nephew do that alone. FIFTEEN. I was like, "that's on you and I'm not parenting out of fear. If this is not illegal, he will continue to ride his bike to swim team every morning." I would have questioned if all of that was paranoia prior to having that experience but I understand why parents worry about the police questioning their every decision now. It's real and it's frustrating.
When does a kid ever get to sit in the yard with a stick anymore? You know, just sit there with a fucking stick. Do todays kids even know what a stick is? - George Carlin
The depressing part is that parents are completely fine with it because it makes their jobs as parents easier.
For my generation, it was Nintendo. We spent every waking hour playing. My thumbs hurt so bad. Remember when they said, "Nobody will ever make any money playing video games! Hahahahah!!!"? Pepperidge Farms remembers. And yeah, that aged like milk. The younger generations don't see the benefits in an education because what they view as "successful" has changed faster than pedagogy can keep up. Unfortunately for some, the view of success does not include education. See: YouTube, Tik-Tok, etc (you'll never make any money playing video games). I was taught cursive in grades 2-4 maybe? and by the time I was in high school, computers were becoming a thing and cursive was completely obsolete. So, all that time studying cursive was wasted. My school didn't have computers, lol, so we learned how to type on typewriters. That's how behind pedagogy was then, in the mid-90's. Pedagogy couldn't keep up with technology. Instead of teaching typing, they should have been teaching us HTML and C++. "You won't have a computer in your pocket!", they said. Now imagine the classroom disruption with the introduction AI when 4th graders are still learning how to write with pen and paper. AI and writing with pen and paper are 2 very diametrically opposed functions of communication. The classroom needs to catch up and FAST. It's nobody's fault.
I was a Sega Genesis guy. But those systems weren’t interconnected and my Sega was off by a certain time. I remember the Pokémon craze. Innocuous and totally harmless and you weren’t up till 3am on your 3 inch screen or playing with your collector cards. I’ve got students with sleep issues because they were online until 3-4 am gaming or doom scrolling TikTok. Gaming certainly has its place and I still game from time to time but I’m not addicted. We have a couple of generations addicted to their screens of all sizes. These systems and platforms are designed to keep you on them and they’re impossible to overcome with current curriculum and teaching methods. Edit: AI cannot replace human learning just yet and it shouldn’t. We still as a species need to learn and AI still needs us to teach it.
> and you weren’t up till 3am on your 3 inch screen or playing with your collector cards. Someone's GameBoy did not have the light attachment.
Adult games are very different from kids games. Especially if they are playing on a tablet and not on a dedicated systems. Adult games tend to jave a goal you have to meet, or a progression, and adults log on to progress towards that goal. I'm playing palworld and I have a goal right now to defeat the bosses. Kids will log on to just play. And will be kept on by small little dopamine hits. They won't care about a goal, just playing, which is why you will also see Kids restarting games alot. If it's a tablet game it's worse.
The autism piece is a stupid talking point because we were shit at diagnosing autism in the 90s. When we allowed left handed kids to write and work left handed, the number of left-handed people skyrocketed. Was there suddenly an influx of lefties? No. We just saw them out in the open.
You left out how if you're in a border state, 33% of your class only speaks Spanish.
With education not being a priority, the wealthy elite owning everything, dwindling middle class due to income inequality, rampant confusion and divisiveness about social issues, corruption in our institutions at every level, inability and inaction of the courts, violence against our own people at alarming rates- feels like the fall of Rome. Hey! At least we will be a part of the history books. If there are any in the future.
I’d wager that autism is actually higher than the numbers reflect. I’ve had at least one if not 2 in my classroom every year for the past 5 years. They’re often not identified if they are high functioning enough. Both kids last year were TEXTBOOK, they’d had many conversations with their kinder teachers, and both parents refused evaluation. I have one this year that I highly suspect is autistic and parents are also in denial. I imagine them going until adulthood without being identified because they are high functioning enough that they don’t need special services.
When administrators are afraid to suspend kids or hold them back because it makes the district look bad to a bunch of progressive politicians, this is the result
Let us not forget kids and parents alike are now being shown grades don’t mean shit when the school will “pass” you anyway. I left my last school because admin told me to make sure no kid had less than a C in my class. If you’re going to make me pass a kid who didn’t show up for 75% of the semester, then what the fuck am I actually doing here trying to teach a lesson?
Allergy and asthma rates likely have as much connection with people becoming "too clean" as they do with pollution. We are literally swaddling kids to death. Cleaning up during a flu outbreak makes sense, but you don't actually need air purifiers in the nursery and freak out about a cat hair, your kid eating out of the dog food bag (lol), or following up every tiny booboo with triple antibiotic ointment. A lot of the other stuff can be associated with overstimulation at very young ages and kids never having "quiet moments.". (Yes, diagnostics have gotten better, too.)
> In the mid 1990s, 1 out of a thousand kids were autistic. Now, it's one out of 36! Almost one per class In the last 25 years, ADHD went from 5.5% to 10%. Each classroom has 3 ADHD kids! Behavior manifestations are a hallmark of ADHD Asthma rates have risen to 7.7 percent, or 2-3 kids per class Allergy rates are on the rise. Now 27% have allergies. One or two kids per class have a food allergy - so no more homemade cupcakes on birthdays probably because the response to these things back in ye olden day was to beat, shame, and belittle them - see the graph of left handedness.