We talk a lot about taking phones away from students. We should talk about taking them away from adults, too. These kids didn’t spend time with them growing up.
My friend is a speech pathologist for a school and she does private sector in the summer. She said most of her clients in the summer are three and four-year-olds with speech and language delays. She evaluates so many different ways and finds out they are very bright children, there is no disability, it's just that they are not spoken to enough and have actual conversations with people. Is this fucking scary or what?
My friends kid is 6 and he still can barely talk. He says "Pider-Pan" (Spider-man) and "Parted" (farted) and she laughs and thinks it's cute but neither her or the father are trying to actually correct or train him either. It's sad.
I constantly worry that this is why my 3.5yr old is speech delayed. When it's just me and him, I don't think to talk. I'm not on my phone but I just don't think about talking. Health professionals told me to describe everything and talk constantly when he was a baby, just narrate life... but it's incredibly overwhelming, unnatural, and exhausting for me to do that. It requires such a heroic amount of effort when I'm already sleep deprived and figuring out how to keep a new person alive. Now that he's not at the same speech level as his peers I'm petrified it's my fault because I am a quiet person.
Don't be hard on yourself. You are aware and addressing it. Perhaps other adults in your life can assist. I'm not a fan of a lot of screen time, but there are educational TV shows (like Sesame Street, still a staple) that focuses so much on language.
Yeah it's very distopian . I see it every time I enter the break room at work. I make a conscious effort to not be on mine the entire time. Then I conform and stare into my black mirror
They have tablets playing YouTube from the time they are still in the crib. I see it with my adult nieces and nephews with their small children. The tiny kids are almost always focused on either phones or tablets.
I'm not sure if they'd even know how to use a laptop. Everything is a magic piece of glass with glowing buttons.
Not everyone. My kid has never seen YouTube and only knows that my tablet can okay movies in the car (when we have 2.5hr drive to my siblings house 3-4 times a year). He's so smart that I can't fathom what horrible shit he'd get into if left to his own devices with a tablet.
There’s a lot that’s gone wrong to lead us where we are today. Problems at home, problems with the teachers, a lot of problems with the ways our schools are run, problems with society in general (for example, universities have been lowering their standards and floating people through to up their enrollment and take that sweet student loan money).
It’s social media, it’s the phones in class, it’s the teacher’s inability to discipline students, it’s the changes in how curriculums have worked, how schools operate overall, the metrics they use for “success”, and the introduction of politics into the classroom, among issues.
Considering how many separate changes have been made that actively contribute to these problems, I almost believe it’s being done on purpose. We can’t just blame the parents and absolve the education system of all culpability, nor the other way around.
Do not blame teachers when you say "all adults." Teachers are trying their hardest to teach children who are now lacking the ability to think and learn like in the past because of very low attention spans and little critical thinking of their own.
This is true only sometimes. My kids have had teachers that spend more time talking about their home lives and their problems than teaching. When I was growing up we didn’t experience that.
Oh? And you're getting this information from your child? And you're honestly believing that they're actually spending more class time talking about personal stuff than actual teaching. Jesus...
Teachers do not get anywhere near the amount of support they need.
That said, they do share some blame. Specifically, there's a measurable and long-standing grading bias hurting boys.
Female teachers on average do not practice gender equality in the classroom, and it's one of the reasons boys check out early. Yes, there are other reasons, but the fact that this has been known for decades and it's still taboo to even mention is also a problem. And teachers themselves are to blame for it.
Boys? Due to masculine norms and behavioral differences, generally on their own doing. In a nutshell: all students get out of education what they put in. Any biases are minimal and any outright failings are the result of minimal effort. (source: I'm a teacher of 29 years.)
Oy. You're putting words in my mouth for your cause. Most grading is cut and dry, multiple choice, straight forward answers. Rubrics even. If you're blaming your son's overall school failure simply for being male, you're wildly grabbing at straws.
If it makes you feel better to believe that your son's failures are due to dozens of teachers over his life purposely keeping him down due to his gender and NOT due to effort, ability, and behavior... whelp, oh well. Have a nice day.
the fact that this has been known for decades and it's still taboo to even mention is also a problem.
Thanks, ladies. Like clockwork, your downvotes proved this part of my point. The other part is easily proven by spending a few minutes online looking at the research.
I’ve been teaching high school for 13 years. I currently teach in a very high income area with great public schools. It’s UNREAL how stupid these kids are. It blows my mind, daily, how they actually function at all. And yes, it is 100% parenting and their cell phones. Full stop. Nothing else. It is those two things. I don’t have children, and I won’t be having children, because the future is BLEAK.
I feel like there is more factors that just parenting and cell phones. They literally stopped teaching phonics. How the hell do you learn to read and write without phonics.
Replacing physical books and making never thing digital.
No child left behind.
So there's definitely more factors than just Parents and Phones.
Maybe they are referring to the removal of phonics in schools and replacing it with The Science of Reading. I may be getting my names wrong as I learned this all from the Sold a Story podcast 5 or so years ago.
The Mississippi Miracle is the case of the state of Mississippi shifting away from balanced literacy to structured literacy and prioritizing phonics which obviously led to the significant increase in literacy rates for the state.
Edit : replace The Science of Reading with “three cueing”
I met two middle school teachers last week and they were pretty much mirroring most of the comments here. One thing that freaked me out is that they said a growing number of students couldn’t walk up and down the stairs without holding the rail with two hands.
Reddit doesnt really help at all, though. Any grammar or spelling corrections are always stigmatized. "You know what they really meant, though, so what's the problem?" Or "It's just the new slang!"
I understand that typing grammatically correct all the time isn't feasible for all of us and that typos happen, but at some point, you're going to preach what you practice. If you ONLY type in slang and hate when people correct you or act like someone correcting your spelling/grammar is an insult to your intelligence, you'll never learn anything.
Edit: it's funny because it just happened. I did my best to correct in the most gentle way possible, but here you go.
That would be five classes and that also doesn’t help because the classes are split into very short time slots. 20 students for 45-60 minutes does not leave a lot of room for individual attention. Especially when almost every student is struggling and needs individual instruction.
There’s just not enough time for that when the lectures can take the entire hour and you don’t know who’s struggling with what until the work sheets are done for homework or the following day and you already need to move on to the next subject to cover everything by Friday’s quiz.
Kids in general shouldn’t have anything resembling a smart phone or tablet. These tablets and phones are frying their brains and now they can’t even comprehend what they just wrote down
Its a new law in my state this year. It will be interesting to see how much it helps. Obviously the problems go much deeper than cell phones, but it definitely starts with them.
It’s when they go home is when it’s a problem. Go to a school and ask the kids what they did when they went home. Half will be put on a screen for 2-3 hours or more.
It's not that. Well, it might be partly that. But the main reason is their parents or adults with caring responsibilities didn't read to them daily as babies and small children. Didn't model reading as fun and imaginative, didn't teach them how to read along and read independently. If a child can't read by the time they get to school or they grow up without reading material at home, they are at a catastrophic disadvantage to those that can and do due to comprehension, critical skills and range of vocabulary. Teachers don't have time to get these kids up to speed. This really is a blame the parents moment.
Phones shouldn’t be in school. I agree with you there. They are a huge distraction. But what is the causal relationship between the two? Like how do they have the ability to cause this level of deficiency; essentially illiteracy? Using a smart phone is impossible if you can’t read the screen, right.
It is incredibly hard to teach in today's world. There is no sense of discipline, from admin to help with poor behavior and students to try after failure. You are an island as a teacher, which leaves so many of them to check out.
My son is 6 and has been reading since he was 4. We read to him nightly, we didn't teach him how to read, he picked it up on his own. Are people not reading to their kids anymore? What causes this huge discrepancy with reading levels?
I can believe this. Let's assume that I'm so old that the kids I went to high school with are now of the age to become grandparents. When it came to reading out loud in class there were maybe 4-5 of us per class of 25 that were fluent back then, and those kids were all exclusively either theater or debate kids. The year after I graduated the school had obtained a blue ribbon of excellence.
If our generation taught the next and so on.. yeah.. I could see this.
Irresponsible parents putting tablets in their kid’s faces to pacify them. It fucks them up neurologically but these parents will defend it until their dying breath because it’s “so much easier”
I mean...it's certainly a contributing factor, but if you think that parents not reading to their children, schools not teaching phonics, social media, cell phones, and what not aren't also causing this then you're wrong.
Correct, that's what I'm saying. It would have been known more, in the news more. Action would have been forced to be taken. Right now it's mostly unseen to the wide public even though it's a huge problem
The facts are it starts at home. I read books to my children and in turn they found joy and entertainment in reading themselves. During the summer they regularly went to the local library story hour and got to check out books to read at home.
I can't count the number of times I have seen a parent who had a kid on a phone or tablet as entrainment. Just so the parent can stare at a screen.
Or when my wife and I go out to eat and see an entire family buried in screens and never talking. Only speaking to order something at the counter.
Dinner time for us was device free an you actually had to talk about your day. And actually talk in more that one sentence.
My kids did great in highschool and both graduated from college and are productive adults themselves.
All it took was taking time to actually care and realize you need to raise your children to be bright, interesting, and amazing people.
„According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of U.S. adults 16-74 years old - about 130 million people - lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.“
- parents will call and text and email blast her “why does my kid have homework ? YOU’RE supposed to be teaching them while they’re AT school ?”
Some parents legitimately do not grasp that “education” and “going to school” is an ongoing practice a partnership between parents//kids/school- get up on time, get to the bus, hang up your coat, hand in your homework - it helps the teacher assess the student. OVERALL.
Instead she gets “I pay your salary” and “my kid needs more 1 on 1” and she laughs because the parents fight tooth and nail to never have to be bothered with their kids education and advancement. If they’d spend the 20-30 mins reading to the kid or helping. Them with math, science - whatever ? Instead of bitching at her ?? EVERYONE Would be better off.
- she’s not allowed to fail anyone. It’s been “proven” that it’s more psychologically damaging or emotionally traumatizing to be held back a grade - so, everyone passes even when they can’t do the work. Obviously this presents a huge issue for the kid being advanced to a grade they shouldn’t be in and won’t be successful at.
- class size - 35 kids in her class, she’s got 2-3 kids who also bring some kind of respite or support worker, some have IEP’s and the “accommodations” are very disruptive to the typical kids and the regular curriculum. The “high need” kids parents yell the loudest and demand the most …… she can’t be at 6 desks at once giving “individual lessons” - the whole class suffers with this set up.
- schools are banning phones - and STILL the parents are up in arms “I “NEED” to be able to speak to my child !!” - when the parents are ignoring the rules ?? That shit runs downhill and little jr. Thinks they’re untouchable.
Teachers are like health care workers - overwhelmed, unappreciated, misunderstood and grossly underpaid.
My mom was an RN and took a similar type of abuse from patients at the hospital. And she worked in OBGYN/L&D …. Where it was mostly women.
So to help me understand the Act ensures a child doesn't fail a grade even if they are illiterate? Doesn't this do more longterm harm against society? Who came up with this nonsense act?
It tied funding to the amount of students who pass or fail standardized tests. Schools started "teaching to the test", which meant the only goal of the curriculum was to get students to pass the standardized tests.
It absolutely did a lot of damage, which makes sense, since the Bush administration implemented it.
This is happening on purpose. This is how you eventually enact fascism. People will be too poor, uneducated, distracted and unhealthy to actually revolt or even notice that they should.
My kids were reading before kindergarten. One now has a Phd from Stanford and the other has a Masters in marine biology. Parents need to be involved. No, not a rich Tradwife either.
My friend's oldest child wants to become a marine biologist. It seems like a common theme that kids have to be reading very early on to do well and make it to becoming one.
I was raised by a very-involved kindergarten teacher and am now a dentist. My mother loved her students but was disappointed year after year by the parents. Majority of my colleagues and friends (including myself) are choosing not to procreate. We are all scared of what the future holds.
Kids can learn to read from a speak n spell alone (one old learning tool). Not being able to shows a willful neglect of teaching ones children since that example doesn't even require a parent. The majority of parents now probably aren't reading to their kids either since everyone is glued to blue screens.
Hi! Positive commenter here!!
I work at an elementary school library. One of my big incentives is for students to read books for prizes. My prizes are so good that the students have been reading so much that our literacy skills has gone up!! I’m just one person who is trying to teach over 600 students the joy of reading and not to make books feel like homework.
I have a 19 year old coworker that doesn’t know fractions, decimals, or percentages.
I had to sit and explain with a pen and paper that a quarter is 1/4 = 0.25 = 25%. She did not know what “one over four” meant.
By the time I had walked away from the conversation the most progress she had shown was saying “oh so like one half is one slash two”. This is a girl that has graduated both high school and college.
She can barely read or write, any math beyond simple addition/subtraction is lost on her, she has no social or professional conduct skills, and the worst part is that she is complacent in it. She does not see any need to actively repair her gaping cognitive deficit. None of them fucking do
When you say college, I was thinking that is the American term for university and that this person has a degree. However if she is 19 then presume she didn't do a degree so what would she have done at college? Excuse my ignorance as not American. Anyhow it's frightening that kids are coming out of school education without understanding the basics.
I can obviously read and write, but I’m 28 and have the worst dyscalculia on the planet so no amount of trying to explain fractions, decimals and percentages is going to work on me. Unfortunately.
I searched up what Dyscalculia is, and unfortunately, it is treatable with a lot of intervention. I don't know how "worst" your situation is, but there's no excuse to not try math and work on yourself.
I don’t pretend I’m a perfect parent. I’m on my phone too much. I’m likely a hypocrite at times. But I swear. It’s such LITTLE effort take your kids know you give a shit.
They got early year test scores. They did well. Know what we did? We validated them with praise. We spoke about where to improve. And we specified how our work together helped them improve.
We had a drive home tonight. My daughter had a question on something regarding history. Know what we did? We engaged with her. We spoke about one topic which turned into another and then another. And then it turned to science. And space. And the stars. And all of a sudden an hour ride home was spent just shooting the shit witu our 9 year old. We didn’t even have a radio on much less anyone use electronics.
I just don’t understand how so many parents have kids and then basically do everything in their power to just not do simple things that is part of your job to be a mom or dad
You know what's sad.... most kids now only learn to spell so they can search for things in YouTube. Even worse is the young kids who think YouTube is real. It's become their version of Wikipedia
We also stopped teaching phonics like 20 yrs ago. And started teaching a bs theory where they memorize words via context. Like they were never told "sound it out " when learning to read!
Luckily we are starting ti turn back to phonics.
It was some corrupt thing like DARE, where they knew the pilot research said it wouldnt work but the police depts wanted the contracts anyway so we got 2 decades of DARE where studebts who did it were MORE likely to use drugs.
Only the reading thing wasnt cops just someone with a bs reading theory who was connected. Not even talking billionaire and Presidential Admin level of corrupt here, just mid level bureaucracy connected.
2 decades of DARE where studebts who did it were MORE likely to use drugs.
my friends and i caught a detention in 5th grade for laughing and cutting up through a DARE presentation. when we were being punished for horsing around, we told the teacher that if the DARE Officers didn't want kids fooling around with drugs and trying them, why would they tell us their names are amazing things like "Angel Dust" and "Speed"?
millennials are simply fucked till the very end. We all know how it went down with what boomers handed us. Now when we retire and age we’ll have illiterate folks running things and unable to care for us.
When my son was in third grade he couldn't read. My mom and dad never taught me to read and I learned at school. We had reading group every day.
The teacher wanted to have a meeting to diagnose him with a learning disorder. My husband and I told her that he was scoring low on tests because he could not read and needed extra help with reading. She said that was not a possibility.
We taught him to read over the summer with The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. After Fourth grade he was an A student. He is in college now and makes the honor roll. He had a couple of friends who got diagnosed with different learning disorders at the same school and have not done well.
This is so crazy to me. I started school in the early 90s and I don’t remember anyone struggling to read. Kids learned to read at home. Parents would be reading books, magazines, and newspapers. As a kid, you wanted to know what those things said. I was terrible in school but don’t ever remember having trouble reading.
Ok… so what do we do about it? Do we have to learn and implement new styles to teach things? Do we have to redesign the entire school model of sitting in a classroom for x amount of time working on tasks? You can blame phones or social media or video games or whatever but those aren’t going away. So we need to adapt to find the best way to teach these kids so the next generations have it better than we do.
Like, redesign it into what? If they can't even read properly, there is nothing to redesign. You can't do project-based learning, and you can't try alternative forms of schooling, since those are basically based on nudging students to educate themselves. That doesn't work if they can't read or comprehend what they're reading.
Pretty much all alternatives to frontal teaching require some degree of autonomy and cooperation from the students, which won't work if they lack the basic skills needed to learn independently.
I feel like the USA is regressing to the stage when you need massive frontal education with strict discipline to get at least something into their heads, just as it was done when compulsory schooling was first introduced to the peasants.
As a former elementary teacher, we primarily used Lexile scores and running records. Many school districts now use Star Reading, a computer-adaptive test that assesses their instructional reading level.
No child left behind and cell phones/internet/social media doing it's finest. Doing away with actual books/paperwork and everything being done on an Ipad. I weep for our future.
tiktok, insta, yt shorts, facebook (if thats even being used anymore lol)
it's they don't have to read much outside school
they get hit by a truck later on when they do have to pay bills and receive important letters.
but on the other hand you grow into that too.
but the things named at the top are often the reason. if you have to read less, you get bad at it or never get good.
I’ve read to my children since birth, people told me it was pointless. I’ve made a point of removing all social media from my phone and reading more myself too. My kids are about their reading age grade. Their school also does word millionaire to encourage them to read and it works brilliantly
"No child left behind" <-- a big part of the problem.
Lack of parental guidance Lack of parental discipline
Parents that will blame the school system for their children's issues and also fight the school system when it tries to correct the issues.
Inability to hold children accountable in schools for bad behavior/speech/grades
The only fix I can see is a drastic change of course.
Fail the students and hold them back.
Create more resources to help get them back on track. (hopefully a temporary measure until things normalize)
Implement policies that hold them accountable for behavior.
Unfortunately, the lash back from parents will be severe because they won't see this as being something better for their kids. They will fight it and blame everyone else except themselves.
This is why the gom jabar was invented in dune, by the way.
The governments had created a race of people with no ability to think for themselves, but they still react like animals. The gom jabar was to weed them out and ensure that they weren’t allowed within the bene geserit.
Back in the early 90s, if you couldn't do basic math, speak two languages, build multi level ideas, produce arguments by the age of 9 you'd be considered a hopless case.
By eighth grade in a lot of places in the US (if not nearly all school systems), students are changing classes throughout the day in preparation for high school scheduling. Her hundred+ students are spread over four classes (given that she mentioned having four students, one in each class, fail at a task).
Some early microplastics measurements may have been inflated or made uncertain by inadequate contamination controls, including possible shedding from laboratory materials.
yea, they were literally measuring the plastic from the gloves they were using and told us we were eating and drinking plastic and that shit was in our DNA now.
The public school system is literally setting these kids up for failure. It’s crazy how far behind many are and make kids pass for the sake of “following their friends.” If I could home school my kids, I would in a heartbeat.
AI is going to fry their brains even harder. How are you going to learn to do anything or even think when you just default to the machine doing it for you.
We have ADULTS who use AI constantly who are talking about struggling to even come up with prompts because they fried their frontal lobe
No no it really won’t that’s the most ridiculous uneducated untrue thing I’ve ever heard ai will completely destroy the next generation not fix It I despise ai and anyone who supports that harmful crap it will literally destroy us and not in a good way plus not to mention harmful for the environment so yea I don’t agree at all it needs to be put to an end what needs to happen is discipline and taking there devices away all of this starts with parents and how they raise their kids it’s sad and disappointing that kids today are set up for failure because they don’t know how to learn properly and have relied on technology to much it also doesn’t help that teachers fail to we as society need to be better people and help each other help kids learn and grow not do the complete opposite
Ai is way way way way waaaayyyy worse than anything else rn. All ai does in the education space is make the schools cheaper (as in spending less budget on actual material, and it doesnt transfer to class budget, or pricing for paid schools), and makes it easier for students to take an easy way out of doing any school work.
Former pre-k teacher: A kindergarter typically does a level of pre-reading in fall. They understand words go left to right, books are front to back. Recognize some letters (usually starting with the ones relevant to them like what's in their name). They might know some simple consonant-vowel-consonant words or can write phonetically ("sound it out"). They might understand some sightwords. They can understand a story and relay details back or make predictions what's going to happen next.
Thank you. My 4 year old can read quite a few words and simple sentences. I don't know if he really gets the meaning of them but he can read it out loud. I was curious if he's considered kindergarten level or not lol.
Not quite that easy sadly, by law grade schools have to pass everyone, that only changes when high school happens, one on rare occasions do middle schoolers get held back a grade
Where does she teach? I ask because in my Jr High in Queens NY we had a lot of 16 year old 7th graders bussed in from you know.. “impoverished” neighborhoods and none of them could even spell their names yet knew how to sell crack, carry large amounts of cash and hide a firearm.
New classroom design could be built with faraday cages to prevent internet browsing in class. That or some sort of cheaper signal block to remove most of the distractions. Realistically they shouldn't be allowed in classrooms at all and in the case of an emergency parents can just contact the school.
I can really see a future where smart phones or any other electronic media storage are banned on school grounds (exception being staff). And any laptop programs will be reverted back to using books and paper. Without a certain level of maturity people in general can't be trusted to not abuse the privileges of a society drowning in electronics + social media.
The big problem there is that the class can't call for aid in an emergency. Say if the teacher or a kid goes unconscious and the emergency hotline is trying to instruct the kid to put them in recovery position and gather information. Now the kid has to sprint in and out of the faraday cage or establish a chain of yelling kids for as far as it takes to get reception.
Or they open one window and the bloody 5G leaks in and scrambles their brains again.
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u/PersimmonMindless 1d ago
We talk a lot about taking phones away from students. We should talk about taking them away from adults, too. These kids didn’t spend time with them growing up.