I’m sorry but a child reaching freshmen year with their documentation that shows they are developmentally at a third grade level for reading and writing is unteachable. I know that may be a crazy opinion but I’ve never seen it this bad till this year.
Half a co-taught class developmentally 6 years behind where they should be. My co-teacher is losing their mind. I’m losing my mind. We’re doing stories that are 3 pages long and they forget what was 1 paragraph before. They don’t know how to operate a google document. Many have lost their homework sheets in their folder less book bags.
I don’t even really know the other half of my class since I have no time to talk to the students who are demonstrating the basic ability to follow a 2 step direction since I’m busy putting the fire extinguisher to other half who seemingly have never been told to do anything their entire life.
I cannot scaffold things any lower without it literally being a third grade level class. One child literally had documentation showing they don’t understand that stories begin and end.
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story. Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
I’m losing my brain
If the revolution ever happens in the US we will need Cuban style literacy programs in every corner of the country.
As the joke goes: before the re-education camps we need education camps
“We can’t teach communist theory to people who can’t even read a short pamphlet.”
“The Commies just want everyone to know how to read so that they can make you read communist propaganda! Reading is for flithy pinkos!” - Something I’d be unsurprised to hear an American media outlet say.
This is literally a copy pasta. Some dipshit brags about how his illiterate grandfather is the biggest anti communist he knows.
I’ve seen the copypasta. I’d be unsurprised to hear an American conservative unironically spout it, though.
Something I’d be unsurprised to hear an American media outlet say.
Not in those exact words, but Ive read articles claiming the high literacy rates are so people can be indoctrinated, and that’s why Cuba has such high voter turnouts
Well, when you have democracy that works and people who feel like voting does something, you get good voter turnout! (Or you can just do like Australia does and make it mandatory to show up. Which led to Democracy Sausages, which is neat, but people are still going to just turn in a spoiled ballot if they don’t think voting will do any good.)
If literacy rates are so linked to voter turnout, sounds like America needs some literacy programs. But no, they don’t decide to bemoan American illiteracy, they just start accusing Cuba of nonsensical bullshit recycled from Cold War accusations thrown at the Soviets, because the Red Scare never ended, baby!
Are communists, or anarchists for that matter, even capable of making their pamphlets short, though?
Yeah, sadly the PuagerU people have nothing to worry about :/
That’s a good point. Communists, in general, are not known for being short-spoken or to-the-point.
I’m gonna be real, the thing that actually scares me is how many teachers are redditers, if I had suspected any of my teachers were posting on reddit, I’d have pretended not to know how to read just to enjoy the aggravation
Our school got rid of reading intervention because is racist and inequitable, apparently. Since latino students were disproportionately in intervention I guess it means that wanting to give targeted supports to them is actually a racist plot or something.
See what I mean
People always shit on the Hispanic kids but those dudes knew like 3 languages where I was growing up. People thought they were stupid for not knowing all the English rules even though their speech was fluent. No, you just hate them for being better at language than you and cause you’re racist.
this was my experience in HS too, latino kids in french got shit on by our professor because they could already sus out the conjugation and gender of words before most people and when they’d maybe get it wrong instead of corrections like the valley girl chick would get they got scolded.
lmao, I’m pretty sure the ESL students were held to a higher standard. the difficulty had a noticeable dropoff after I got out of ESL—suddenly it didn’t matter so much if you knew how to spell “restaurant”.
My first question was why the kids weren’t getting reading intervention en masse. What is this bullshit about ELL students getting services being inequitable?
The school admin is trying to save money and the user prefers to blame “woke” or the user is lying
Yes exactly. People have been using “well meaning progressivism is actually racism” bad faith arguments forever
It’s more than people consider any program that disproportionately serves people of color as racist against white people, but they’ve learned to borrow DEI language to obfuscate.
isn’t it literally equitable if it’s targeted?
I’ll play devil’s advocate and say that there are plenty of teachers, especially white ones, who take one look at Latino ELL students and just throw up their hands and insist on services because they insist there’s a disability. “They can’t do anything” is a phrase I’ve heard many times. But the solution to that isn’t to discontinue the availability of services. It’s to insist on high quality data for referrals and educate teachers on how to provide that data. When done well, yes, this is equitable.
Education is bad, but r/teachers is not real
i used to take amazon returns at a retailer and iirc the official stats are an abysmal like 1/7 adults in my state being functionally illiterate but based on my time helping people through what’s a really brainlessly simple return process I would believe it’s closer to 1/5 or 1/4, like people staring at their phones like a westworld android just not seeing what’s in front of them. I understood having to deal with the elderly being overwhelmed by it but there were innumerable younger people too who I’d have to help to such a degree that “these people can’t read” is the likeliest explanation
and this is just like reading steps like “take this to a UPS and show them this QR code” not like parsing paragraphs of story
40·18 days ago1/5 adults in the US apparently cannot read and understand simple bullet list instructions, according to this post
89% of western adults cannot read books written for adults.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/dq241210a-eng.htm
Where are you getting that from this post? I’m seeing a lot of levels and scores but not what those scores mean in terms of ability. 89% seems high unless you mean like scientific journals or something
When compared with the 27 OECD countries participating in the 2022 PIAAC, Canada ranked in the top 10 for the proportion of adults with high literacy scores, or those at levels 4 and 5 (276 and over), with 14% of the population at these levels, compared with 11% among participating OECD countries. Individuals at the highest proficiency levels of literacy can integrate information across multiple dense texts and reason by inference.
The PIAAC levels can be found on this website (expand “Literacy Proficiency Levels”, see also the literacy samples that make it clearer what it actually means)
So looking at those levels and the examples they give, I wouldn’t say it measures literacy very well at all? They have three example texts and all of them are basically lists of facts. The longest of them is three paragraphs (and missing punctuation, always a good sign). The flaws of standardized tests like this are pretty well known by now, and the skills that are being tested here are only tangentially related to being able to read and understand a novel.
I would not be surprised if most adults struggle to understand, idk, Finnegan’s Wake or something, but that isn’t really something a standardized test can tell you.
Reading about the actual tiers that test grades participants into, I’m not sure if “can read books for adults” is an accurate description of what tier 4 (which starts at a score of 65%) and above is determining, nor where the sample questions (all of which were extremely simple, straightforwards texts and tasks) fall on it:
At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can infer what the task is asking based on complex or implicit statements. Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences. Texts and tasks at Level 4 may deal with abstract and unfamiliar situations. They often feature both lengthy contents and a large amount of distracting information, which is sometimes as prominent as the information required to complete the task. At this level, adults are able to reason based on intrinsically complex questions that share only indirect matches with the text contents, and/or require taking into consideration several pieces of information dispersed throughout the materials. Tasks may require evaluating subtle evidence-claims or persuasive discourse relationships. Conditional information is frequently present in tasks at this level and must be taken into consideration by the respondent. Response modes may involve assessing or sorting complex assertions.
It may be a little stricter of a requirement, since it sounds like at levels 4 and 5 the questions are frequently forcing guesses based on inferred information, and notably the highest tier only requires a score of 75% so even someone who is considered fully literate to as much as is feasible to test is still expected to/allowed to fail a bunch of the hardest questions.
I’m really not sure what the lower tiers look like in practical terms: “below level 1” is clearly like a grade school level or below, level 1 itself is maybe grade school level? Maybe 2 and 3 are more highschool level proficiencies? I really don’t know what’s expected of people or normal at a given level. It seems like the threshold for tier 4 is around the level of “graduated highschool with reasonably good language comprehension abilities” though.
There’s also this note alongside the scale, which confirms my assumption that even proficient people are expected to fail a lot:
NOTE: Every test item is located at a point on the proficiency scale based on its relative difficulty. The easiest items are those located at a point within the score range below level 1 (i.e., 175 or less); the most difficult items are those located at a point at or above the threshold for level 5 (i.e., 376 points). An individual with a proficiency score that matches a test item’s scale score value has a 67 percent chance of successfully completing that test item. This individual will also be able to complete more difficult items (those with higher values on the scale) with a lower probability of success and easier items (those with lower values on the scale) with a greater chance of success.
In general, this means that tasks located at a particular proficiency level can be successfully completed by the “average” person at that level approximately two-thirds of the time. However, individuals scoring at the bottom of the level would successfully complete tasks at that level only about half the time while individuals scoring at the top of the level would successfully complete tasks at the level about 80 percent of the time. Information about the procedures used to set the achievement levels is available in the OECD PIAAC Technical Report.
SOURCE: OECD 2023 Survey of Adult Skills International Report
What % of adults do you know that read a single book every year? Even multiple years. I’m willing to bet it’s a lot lower than you think.
Lol and i live in a particularly bad state, too, so hey, my vibe based estimate checked out
Every E-Mail Job I have the amount of people who can process any text longer than about 3 sentences is shockingly low. like 20% at the max.
Like some parts of it is “I don’t care”, sure, but the amount of meetings I’ve had where I basically just spent an hour explaining about one page of text to some people is shocking
This is the exact reason why so many meetings and phone calls have to happen even though it can be resolved through a short email chain. It’s because they literally can’t follow an email that’s more than 3 sentences.
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This is every poor district in the US. It’s something that gets easily swept under the rug
EVERYTHINGS COMPUTER!!
Beautiful
friendly reminder that everything on reddit is fake
Western illiteracy is well documented though.
Except for how much the teachers on that sub hate the children they teach, especially the ones that aren’t white. So much racism disguised as “ELL is a waste of resources” and the like.
America not being able to read isn’t fake
One child literally had documentation showing they don’t understand that stories begin and end.
i blame marvel movies, or is this an actual neurological condition people can have?
Long Covid?
If I were to guess, these kids aren’t trying because businessmen aren’t trying anymore. The whole point of education is for jobs, and employers have proudly announced time and time again just how satisfied they are with the workers they got, they don’t even need to make jobs anymore.
These younger students likely know many older siblings or cousins that did go through college and are now basement dwellers because no one’s hiring. Ergo, why would they take school seriously if even when you do well, you’ll be treated like you failed? Same logic why we have so little people actively trying to become actors in Hollywood, because only a tiny 0.000001% of the people that go for it will be successful. Now all industries have the Hollywood logic: if you’re not a nepo baby, forget it you’ll be lucky to even wash dishes no matter how well you do.
TL;DR: With business owners just kicking back and refusing to ever lift a finger to put people to work, even children understand that they’re doomed and react to this nihilistic culture.
Nah, I don’t think they’re that aware of the job market. I think everything these days is slop and kids are fed gallons of it from the day they’re born, and use AI instead of thinking critically. Their parents are probably in a similar boat.
I think the polycrisis, or whatever it’s best called, makes most issues have like a dozen interlocking and self reinforcing causes and effects. The nihilism in culture makes us hedonistic and slop oriented which makes us dumber which makes us unfulfilled which makes depressed which makes us hedonistic and so on with every issue. Kids can definitely see there being no good future for the Great Satan.
I know I am
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Yeah yeah, I get your point - people always complained about young people, and lowbrow culture was always the dominant form - but at the end of the day it’s an entirely different mode of entertainment now, driven by hypercapitalist algorithms specifically designed to biohack your attention span.
Sure, I used to sit and read the Beano or Far Side comics for hours rather than reading ‘proper’ books when I was a kid, but the mode of both consumption and production is worlds apart.
Obviously, there’s other factors of societal collapse at play too, but it’s hard to deny that having screens with an endless tap of brain melting entertainment in our pockets has fundamentally changed the way we live our lives - probably for the worst.
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Worse with AI they’re explicitly seeing a massive institutional push to eliminate 80% of office jobs
Who gives a shit about Canterbury tales learn to run wire is a completely understandable world view for the young
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story. Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
sounds like ai
Half a co-taught class developmentally 6 years behind where they should be. My co-teacher is losing their mind. I’m losing my mind. We’re doing stories that are 3 pages long and they forget what was 1 paragraph before. They don’t know how to operate a google document. Many have lost their homework sheets in their folder less book bags.
this one sounds like long covid, the kid that doesn’t know stories begin or end is either fake or sequel fatigue
It is not uncommon for me to have situations when talking to americans where it is obvious that their reading comprehension is very very bad. I’m not talking about political conversations, just general conversations I might have in gaming forums, movie forums, discords, etc.
I’ve long since gotten in the habit of trying to rephrase and restate the core point I’m trying to get across multiple times when talking in general and generally to avoid making any sentence hinge on a single word to be interpreted correctly since even people who are literate tend to skim text and miss key words. I don’t always remember or succeed though: even here I had one particular old power poster blow up on me on several occasions when we were actually in agreement, because he missed a key word and reversed the meaning of what I was saying.
Oh now that you mention it I have seen that situation occur here where people miss one word and don’t realise they actually agree with each other. I may even be guilty of that myself though tbh.
tbh the bad am*rican literacy rate could explain why so many arguments on hexbear get so out of hand
I have seen a few arguments here and there where people have just seemingly refused to analyse what the other person has said and has just gotten mad at something they assumed they said. That is much more common elsewhere on the internet though.
I haven’t experienced it here at all so I don’t know about that. I just think hexbears are spicy and extra catty when getting into disagreements.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Yeah I don’t think it’s just a bias because I am one, I think it’s safe to say that the average hexbear is significantly more well-read and educated than the average American. But that doesn’t mean miscommunication isn’t a common occurrence here too, even specifically miscommunication due to someone not taking the time to really read and parse a comment. It’s happened to me several times and I don’t even comment all that much, but I see it often enough when just lurking. Not always during disagreements either, though the anger that can flare when there are disagreements makes it much more likely to happen.
“Why are we having a meeting/talking on the phone when you could just send an email” takes on a whole new meaning when that is paired with the average Burgerlander being functionally illiterate.
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story.
I taught 11th grade students this 5 years before covid and it was nearly impossible then, too. I’m sure it’s more impossible now, but “the kids these days” have never liked doing school
can confirm; always hated school.
If 1/12th of what they say in that sub is true, it’s terrifying
I hate that sub. Half of it is this kind of doomposting, the other half is utter hatred for children and teenagers, it’s such an interesting example of “you start to hate the people directly under you in the class system once you get a tiny bit of power to oppress someone who has no recourse”.
It’s just the teacher version of retail workers venting about customers.
Teaching is a hard job with no pay that requires a uni degree to do. There’s a baseline assumption that everyone who’s in it is in it because they care deeply about educating children. And schools are usually set up in such a way that they’re not really able to do that properly. And they see that every day and it hurts. The teacher version of “the customer is always right” is Solely Positive Regard. No matter what a kid does in the classroom a teacher (should) be trying to make sure that the kid still thinks the teacher thinks the world of them, and their parents should think the same and teachers (should) keep their cool in the classroom at all times. And that’s just not sustainable 24/7. Like retail workers the repressed frustration from being patient and caring and giving 8 hours a day 5 days a week gets vented in situations where it’s safe to do so. Teachers generally live in the community they teach and parents in the community are as much (often more) a “customer” as the kids are, often more, so only their families and other teachers (usually) get to see this.
The vast majority of teachers don’t hate kids. If they did they wouldn’t stay teachers, f you read that thread closely the vast majority of these comments aren’t contemptous, they’re saying “I wish I had time/capacity/permission to teach this kid in the way I know they need to be taught. The way I have to teach them is an actively harmful waste of my, theirs and all my other students time”.
they’re usually mad at parents or admin. some kids are electively bad but usually there’s a home situation there.
I have noticed the “admin is worthless and the system forces wastes of time and resources and fails all the kids” posts. Those are good. I do understand the venting. It’s just that… I have seen some posts there where they seem mad at parents who stand up for their kids and lump truly right ones in with “My Little Johnny can do no wrong!” ones, and mad at admin who won’t let them mistreat a “problem child” in even more egregious ways than they’re already getting away with or remove that child from their classroom (they never care where that child would go, just “I need him Not Here”), and stuff where… they’re mad that they’re expected to have complete control over things they’re not given effective tools to affect in any way. Which is sometimes an obvious admin fail that they correctly blame admin or partially misblame parents for, and sometimes control freak behavior from admin that they’re angry at both the admin and the students for.
It’s very possible I’m seeing a lot of it come off a lot worse than it was intended, just because I was on the receiving end of in class explosions by fed up and just plain abusive teachers and support staff a lot as a kid.
I work with grad students and recently had some do an exercise where they had to do a short assessment with spell check turned off and no Internet connection. Only one performed at what I’d consider a reasonable undergraduate level. It’s not looking great out there.
maybe this is the dyslexia speaking, but i really think that spelling and being able to comprehend a text are two skills of massively different importance. relying on spell check and/or phonetic estimations can serve you perfectly fine in almost all situations and changes nothing, whereas being functionally illiterate makes your life more hollow
I was pretty forgiving of the typos, the thing that bothered me was the lack of structure and coherence in the responses.
Hey! I not…not coherence! I coherence yes!
What’s crazy to me about this thread (reddit), is the amount of posters that aren’t typing at a teachers writing level…
How you type isn’t necessarily a good reflection of your writing level, particularly in the case of touchscreen-based comments on forums.
the problem…
r/teachers is a place for people who hate children to make up stories about how the youth are completely stupid and irredeemable and it is all their fault for being lazy kids on their tiktoks and fortnites. I wouldn’t trust it to be any more based in reality than r/nosleep.
So basically like any subreddit?
If it ain’t a fed or a fash or an ad, it’s a creative writing exercise.
Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
Wtf are kids thinking like chatgpt now? This is so scary.
That also sounds like the sort of shit I would write as a kid just to fuck with a teacher I didn’t like, to see if they were even paying attention. And if they’re posting on reddit about how dumb and terrible their students are, they probably have a lot of students who don’t like them and just want to fuck with them.
Having used AI story bots, I’ve not had an issue of new characters that aren’t meant to exist. I’ve had a lot of issues of characters in theory leaving the scene and then hey right back in it. And forced appearances of other people who are in the story, but definitely shouldn’t be bursting in immediately.
Skill issue.
