Its a good thing heās there, looking out for everybody. Who the hell knows what would happen to everybody under a different political system.
Apparently there are apps that claim to be able to take a picture of your food and provide an accurate calorie count.
Something the article didnāt mention, is that many high school English teachers, I think they call it language arts these days, donāt like English literature. They donāt want to teach Shakespeare, for example, because they personally struggled with it. Add in that most of the Western canon was written by old, dead white men, so the green haired 22 year old teacher gets triggered just by hearing the authorās name, and you can see why kids donāt know anything.
This does not match my personal experience as an English Teacher.
What do you see from your students?
My grandma taught for 12 years in a public school district, 14 years for the DoD on a base in Germany, and 7 years of adult education - mostly GED, some ESL. English, psych, AP, math (for the adults). Sheās got a lot of experience and knows what sheās doing.
She came out of retirement this year to teach 10-12 grade English for a small private school that struggles to find/keep teachers. It was a last minute thing, as she heard about the opening a few weeks before the year started and felt bad for the school so she wasnāt very prepared. Sheās mostly having her students read short stories while she arranges lessons plans for more traditional readings later in the year.
She can barely get the kids to read a 5 page story, let alone tell her what the theme was or discuss the ideas. And these are small town āgoodā kids from āgoodā families. Their parents are farmers, pastors, business owners, etc.
Because you are what? A Gen Xer? Your education as a student, including college, was very different from what it is now. I doubt when you were learning to become a teacher if SEL and Culturally Responsive Teaching were a thing. Wokeism didnāt exist and not everyone got an A. In many schools, the lowest grade a student can receive is a 50. They can do literally nothing, including not show up to class, and they will get a 50. Now you have mastery based grading which makes homework, participation and even attendance optional. The schools in my town are spending a million dollars to implement it over the next three years. And they arenāt called English teachers anymore, itās Language Arts.
I would ask my daughter what she was reading in ālanguage artsā and it was nowhere as challenging or as intensive as what I was doing in English class at the same age. You have American college graduates who have not only not read anything by Melville, they donāt even know who he is. Some have never read anything by Twain. The best part was when a teacher was teaching Amanda Gormanās Inauguration poem. She didnāt like it when I mentioned that it read like something a high school student would have written.
I took over a class from a sub who had been retired from teaching, and took the position because it was temporary and the school was desperate. She told me something that is a common theme from veteran teachers: the rigor just isnāt there. Very little is asked and even still, it is too much for students.
Itās a function of the constant bombardment of short information and how the algorithms that run are lives are literally reprogramming human brains. Unless these kids actively read longer books as a younger child they will not understand how to deeply think past a 500 character short.
See the updated version of The Shallows by Timothy Carr
This is crazy to me as someone who wants to read more books to this day.
People think they can learn everything about a topic by watching 2 or 3 short tik tok videos on the subject. Their minds would be blown by what a 300 page non-fiction discourse on the same subject could teach them.
Also, the article mentions kids are hesitant to discuss books that present ideas/themes/etc that conflict with their or the generally accepted cultural view of the day. No one wants to say the wrong thing. Isnāt that the whole point of fiction? To challenge oneās thoughts and ideas and examine oneās own biases?
As I Lay Dying is a challenging book, but between that and The Things They Carried (both read my sophomore year of high school), my view of the world changed a lot.
Frankly, Iām usually disappointed with non-fiction books marketed to the masses. They often have 1-2 interesting ideas and concepts that they present in the first chapter and then proceed to rephrase for 10 more chapters without really adding new depth. Of course, there are often new examples and applications that manage to keep it interesting to read, but I donāt think that they are covering new ground through most of the book.
Welcome to the result of my truth.
Not to be like, āback in my day!ā but I went to this same high school less than 10 years ago. Iād get up for a paper route at 4am, go to school, go to practice, come home to eat dinner at a table with my family, do my chores, then sit down to do homework. Sometimes I wouldnāt get to bed until midnight
Now my high school brothersā classmates ask for assignments due on Monday to be moved to Tuesday because they have a football game Friday night. If they canāt do their homework during a study hall during the school day, it just does not happen. Evenings and weekends are their time. And sports matter more than school to them, which most of the parents seem fine with. (This is not a school that regularly produces stellar athletes.)
This was not my experience. Language Arts was the term for grades K-6, grades 7-12 took English. I was an English Teacher.
The colleagues I worked with, and myself, were all big fans of canonical literature, as well as more contemporary literature. Shakespeare was a favorite of ours, along with all of the other DOWGS (Dead Old White Guys). Iago and Lady MacBeth are two of the greatest characters ever written.
We also taught contemporary multi-cultural authors.
I had kids for 41 minutes a day. When they came to school hungry, cold, in fear, and were not read to at home, they had difficulty learning. I think the blame for declining literacy lies firmly in the lap of the parents and the institutionally racist āsystemā rather than with the teachers.
This question defies answering. The Hmong refugees in Sacramento were different than the Black and Hispanic kids in Brooklyn, who were different than the Jewish and Korean kids on Long Island. Universally, the kids in poverty (Sacramento and Brooklyn) fared much worse than the affluent kids from Long Island.
I blame cell phones and video games for the lack of attention span.
Just for context, I am Jones Generation (tail end Boomer) but my teacher preparation was in 98-99. I earned a CLAD Certificate in California as a teaching credential. CLAD stands for Cross-Cultural Language Academic Development. I retired from teaching in 2021, so not that far removed. As you can tell from the name of the credential, the preparation was culturally sensitive, and I was required to have a year of foreign language (for me, it was Spanish). Wokeism was certainly present in my training, as was the discussion of social promotion.
On a side note, I feel āWokeismā has become a slur for anyone that is even a little left of center. Being woke, to me, just means that a person is aware that in the big picture, we are ignorant. We know that we donāt know everything. We have become aware of the inequities in the world and would like to make it a better place.
Actually, I think it was a 55 in the districts where I worked - but that was a final class grade. I am not sure if there is a difference between a 40 and a 55, they both signify failure. My colleagues and I, for the most part, werenāt happy with this policy either.
I believe attendance is compulsory, which contributes to the problem - forcing a blue collar kid that wants to be a plumber to explicate a sonnet is challenging.
I agree. But how do you fix it? Free breakfast, lunch, healthcare, parenting classes? It is a complex problem for sure.
My local school budget and poor performance makes a lot more sense when you realize that the purpose of public schools is to fund public schools. Academic rigor and behavior standards are way at the back of the priority line, as is the general wellbeing of public school students. Many priorities centered around the wellbeing of adults involved with public schools supersede the development of children.
If a few of the kids pick up some useful skills on their way to being awarded a diploma, thatās just great.
A huge problem is that admin and teachers have different to the point of being opposing agendas. Teachers want to teach, admin wants to keep their jobs. And donāt get me started on parents who think the school needs to revolve around their kidās feelings. Whenever a parent, or even a student, says they pay the teacherās salary, they reveal that belief. I remember telling a parent how her daughterās behavior impacted the ability of other kids to learn. Her response was she didnāt care about the other kids.
Thatās not what āwOkeā has become
Manmade global warming