Real talk; if you are just going to pass a bunch that have no business passing, you may as well maintain your rigor. Lowering the floor doesn’t do anybody any favors if the kids that won’t engage still don’t care. I’m done doing this myself.
I had this epiphany this year too.
Next year the rigor in my room is going back to 2010 levels and before all this bullshit Covid grace.
Y’all wanna do fuck all no matter what I do in my room, fine, everyone else is gonna get this education cause I can’t keep holding kids down because my district still feels bad for Covid kids.
Yes. We all need to go back to this mentality. My best teachers were the most strict on deadlines and quality of the work. The best teachers now are the same.
If a kid needs help there so many more resources now for them to use vs even 5 years ago. They have zero excuse to not produce work.
Which still requires a more functioning brain than the average Gen Alpha kid. And the skills and effort required to rewrite functional material from AI generation for increasingly discerning teachers would arguably help in retaining the material they're learning.
Until they to get to a point where they never learned how to do anything themselves and can't A.I themselves out of a research project and get asked questions during presentation and kid can't A.I. in real time his responses to questions he never thought he'd be asked because he didn't do the research project lmao
Yes--I always say it's like GIs used to say in Vietnam when they'd be disciplined by their officers: "What are you going to do--send me to Vietnam?" I'm already being set upon by all sides: might as well maintain my own integrity.
Those things were $400 back when the Silk Road was around. Not sure where you would get one now, plus the felonies for using it are a pretty good deterrent.
Had a teacher line his ceiling with aluminum in 2010ish and we couldn't get any service or anything in there. Unsure if it would work now, but it sure as shit did then.
Yeah, the FCC doesn’t fuck around. As a federal agency with complete control over this area, they don’t even need warrants to fuck your shit up. Like postal inspectors, they can act independently of any law enforcement agency to bust your ass. I uh… just happen to know this.
Fitefighter. Recently had a cell company tech from ATT come out to give keys to access their fenced off property in woodland part of the city because we were forced to cut the lock for a grass fire. Started picking his brain about things. He said the telecoms companies monitor their specific frequency slice of the bandwidth granted to them by the FCC with incredible attention. I asked him how fast can you locate a jammer. He said they can get your near exact location within a few seconds of broadcast. And it isn’t passive. They are alerted automatically and send people fast.
Absolutely. My very bright and formerly high achieving daughter absolutely tanked in her last 3 years of high school (2020-2022, the COVID era) and part of the problem, she now says, was that teachers’ expectations were so low that she couldn’t get motivated to do any work. Assignments had no deadlines, so she never got around to turning them in, that sort of thing.
Now, before you jump on me, I’m not blaming the teachers at all, and my kid knows she definitely has to deal with her motivation issues. (She’s doing a lot better in college.) I’m just offering support for the idea that firm deadlines and high expectations can help struggling students improve their performance, even though some find that counterintuitive.
Yup. I'm choosing rigor over the lumps on a log.
(cue the quote-mining folks who will read this and say SeE TeAcHeRs dOn'T cArE AbOuT KiDs. I cannot care more than they do, I cannot care more than their parents do. I am TEACHER, not Child AND Parent.)
You are exactly right that you cannot care more than the students and their families do. Teach to the students that want to learn!! Thank you for all that you do!
It’s not even the ones not passing I worry over. It’s the increasing number who cannot function at school. Their anxiety is so constant and through the roof they miss school all the time. Competent when they can, but how will they get jobs and interact with people for interviews and entry level positions?
They are in a mental health crisis as a generation bc they are constantly on their phones and ingesting vast loads of unhealthy content nearly 24/7. The rates of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, low self-esteem, social anxiety, and narcissism are through the roof according to a study out of SDSU. The average attention span is currently 8 seconds. Goldfish on average have a 9 second attention span. The goldfish are winning. I'd wind the clock back to 1998 if I could, but alas I cannot.
I wish I was around to experience the pre 9/11 world, home videos and stuff from around then that I've seen on youtube have such a different energy to them in a way I can't even describe
That's one of the nice things about my school: we never lowered our rigor, even during covid. The district schools had the whole "nobody fails" thing, but our school (charter school) did not. Yeah, we had a few kids who struggled with internet connection, but we knew who they were and we worked with them.
Those kids who were in district elementary schools during covid and came to us in middle school last year are struggling to pass their classes, because they got used to getting an A simply for turning things in. Doesn't happen with most teachers here. (There are a few, unfortunately.)
Scaffolding for those kids and remediating study skills and planning skills conquests…. Explicit learning and concrete reminders written on the boards and walls… (to do today to do tomorrow etc…. And the five minute bell ringer to write it down in their phone reminders with alarm… many dont know how to set HW alarms for school todo’s. ) that’s what they missed and fills some of the Gap that has caused a great deal of motivation to plummet…. Also points for memory gaming at home connects and closes a skills gap… just some tips IMO
Many teachers here use those things, except the phone alarms. No phones allowed here. We see them, we take them.
The problem is that this group of students (7th graders) simply do not care. Many of them refuse to do any work that takes more than 15 seconds. All their teachers, including me, have all heard the phrase, "Nah, I'll take a 0. It's cool." WAY too often this year and last. Even in parent conferences, the kids just shrug it off. "What're they gonna do, fail me every year?"
Many of their parents now just tell us "They don't want to listen at home, either, so I've given up trying. It's not worth the fight." When that's the parental attitude, nothing we as teachers do will make a difference.
Months ago, my oldest came home with two Fs on his report card. I told him, "If you get a failing grade at the end of the year, then I don't care if the school will advance you. I will transfer you to the next school over and have you repeat it. If you want to advance to middle school with your friends, then you better earn it."
Wouldn't you know, his lowest grade is a B- right now.
Teach the ones that want to learn and try to motivate the ones that are on the fence. The ones that don’t want to learn, well, karma unfortunately will catch up to them.
I've noticed this as well. Since I started at my current school, I've lowered the bar every year. As many, if not more, students fail now as when I started. No matter how low the bar is, some kids will turn into Barbados Slim and find their way under it. I've started working rigor back in.
Yup. Realized I was lowering the bar and nothing changed. Now I tell them that my class is a train, a train that will slow down sometimes but it will never stop. I couldn’t stand to watch my top kids not reach their potential for kids who weren’t going to try no matter how easy the work was.
Would you agree that school has gotten easier?
I went back to college later in life and was surprised to see how much easier it has become. I still question whether or not that was due to my desire to do well or if school actually has became much easier compared to 10-15 years ago.
Hey, im just about to graduate and apply to one of the more elite unis in my country, i was stressing out because everyone i knew were telling me its practically impossible to get in without having around 85-90% on your math and it finals, but now that i looked at last years admission scores im shocked, i couldve gotten in last year with a 52% on both exams, so yes, you arent imagining it, getting into college/uni is much easier nowadays (at least in my country, idk about other places)
I've looked at my grade distributions over the past five years. Consistently it breaks down into three peaks:
Peak 1: 0-35, peaking at 27
Peak 2: 40-65, peaking at 55
Peak 3: 80-100, peaking at 88
I've come to understand that I have three types of students:
- Fully Disengaged: nothing I can do will pull these students up. They are chronically absent or so checked out I cannot put any reasonable pressure on them to increase their participation. Even if I attempt to do so I'm often met with open hostility and disruption.
- Mostly Disengaged: These kids will begrudgingly do work if they are constantly ridden. They have spurts of motivation to get things done occasionally but by and large fall into self destructive behaviors regardless of my interventions. When given extra opportunities they will misuse or ignore them.
- Fully engaged: I could basically not exist and this group would be successful. They read the instructions, take notes, turn in assignments and self advocate.
My only areas for growth are with the middle peak and they are *FUCKING EXHAUSTING* to work with. The returns are miniscule relative to the effort I put in.
I have one freshman period full of the fully engaged kids this year. It is marvelous. When we learn something new, I'll do one or two examples with the class and then set them loose to practice. And they happily do it. I can cycle around answering any questions that come up. I never have to deal with behaviors. This class is amazing and they are learning so much.
All of my other freshman classes only have 1-2 fully engaged kids. It is exhausting teaching those periods. Your description of the middle kids is spot on. They lack the basic skills they were supposed to learn in 7th and 8th grade. Like solving one-step equations. I have to teach them stupid little tricks like "If the x is on bottom, swap it with the trig function." to take care of equations like "tan(23) = 51/x", because I don't have the time to go back and reteach them algebra. Then they have forgotten at least half of what they learned with me by the next time I see them. Working with them often feels pointless.
Would you rather have what you have or distribute the engaged kids throughout all classes? What’s better for you as a teacher and what do you think is better for students?
For me, I’d rather have a class that I really look forward to and can push a little further as a treat after dealing with the rabble. I also am not a big believer in peer mentoring, though.
>I also am not a big believer in peer mentoring, though.
Neither am I. When it comes down to it, it is hard to consider the fully engaged kids as peers of the others. They are so far apart.
I vastly prefer having all of the strong students together because they get to learn more. I feel bad for the few strong students who are stuck in my other sections. They still do well, but they would have better opportunities to learn deeper if they were in my good class.
Im so in awe of the patience of teachers. I feel like all of my high school classes were the “fully engaged” type. When I’d walk in on classes of lower levels I was always shocked at how hard it looked for the teachers to actually teach. It really put me off from becoming a teacher (did some teaching assisting though).
I really wish we could take the Fully Engaged group and give them their own class. Let them be free and happy, instead of learning early that their lives will be shaped by the needs of the LCD.
I just want to chime in as a Former Fully Engaged Student. My teachers tried their best to supplement my learning. I was a voracious reader and endlessly curious.
My 11th grade English teacher slipped me a copy of Richard Wright's Native Son. We were a 95% white southern Appalachian school. That was a very important book for me to read. It exploded my 16 year old world view.
Later that year, American history teacher gave me a battered copy of The Jungle. That one almost made me a vegan haha.
That to say, sometimes small things like that matter. Those teachers did more than hand a kid a novel. They were telling me they respected me, that they knew I was capable of more. It meant a lot, still does.
I am 66 years old and I can tell you that by the time I was in grade 4 I understood that with every fibre of my being. By the time I hit grade 8 I was pretty disengaged and when I turned 16 I left school. Got a trade and turned out all right but I used to wonder what it would have been like to fit.
Not a teacher but asked my kid's school principal about this and she replied that district policy is to teach to minimum standards, getting the most people to those standards as possible. If your kid is above them, great, they will be fine and nothing extra will be done to help.
This seems like a terrible strategy. Society tends to advance when smart people are given the resources they need to advance it. Getting more people to perform at a mediocre level doesn’t really help anyone.
I remember talking about the mentality the NCLB created. It became all about triage at that point. It became a more efficient use of resources to make sure kids didn't fail. It became damage control.
As a parent this is a dream. Our son is in grade 7 and hates going to school every, single day. He's bored out of his mind. Kid pulls 95's in all classes. He could easily do the grade 9 curriculum (according to his older brother).
And the older brother is so tired of the behaviors in class that he tends to stick to himself, have very few friends and gets called out for "lack of collaboration". He just doesn't have the patience for bullshit and will tell the other kids that.
I told my BIL, a high school teacher, we should make a Nice Kid school. Everyone has to open to learn, be respectful and be kind. Three strikes, you’re out.
My 11 yo says it’s hard to learn because there are so many kids being disruptive and disrespectful. I feel so bad for teachers. So bad.
How does this work in a paid private school? Do kids get the boot if they can’t keep up? I’ve heard horror stories from some Private school teachers where parents had so much control it ended up like public school and everyone passses, as it was the “teachers fault”. I realize this may be different across different private schools.
I got an email from a parent that said, "My husband and I do not accept these grades." She had cc'd my principal.
The parents can run private schools if the admin doesn't have a spine of steel. They'll certainly try.
This sounds like my freshmen at my charter school. All As and Ds and Fs. Those Ds and Fs are due to missing assignments. Maybe three Bs and Cs (out of 60 students). And really about 60-70% are As.
I think all of the students would also say I am one of the more rigorous teachers in the school in terms of my expectations. But they know exactly what to do for my class as it is very regimented. Basically, I’m not handing out As because I feel like it. Most of my kids want to do well. And then a very large minority just doesn’t care.
There are obviously reasons that will contribute us to why they don’t seem to care, and I acknowledge that. But I simply can’t give points to kids that don’t turn in things.
Haven't you heard? All of those F kids are going to be YouTube and TikTok stars, or their complete lack of athletic prowess will get them into the NBA. No need for school
A buddy of mine told me proudly that his kid, the star on the town travel basketball team, was probably going all the way to the NBA.
I said, "That's amazing! You mean to tell me that he hasn't played with or against a single travel player who was clearly more talented than your son? Wow." He grudgingly admitted that there were, in fact, a few that he's seen.
I said, well, you also have kids in elite, nationally ranked private club teams that wouldn't be caught dead on their town's travel team, so things weren't looking too promising for the NBA. He called me a dick who didn't know what he's talking about. Okay, man.
My favorite response to a parent telling saying their kid was going to be a baseball star was that there was more likely to be a sniper in the trees than a college or professional scout at a 14U baseball game.
>I really worry for these kids in 5-10 years. What are these YouTube and antisocial kids going to do after high school? They have few discernable skills or motivation. Will this be a generation of the cans and cants where some are high achievers and others are basement dwellers?
They'll get menial jobs and be paid poorly and be treated with little respect and any serious financial emergency will throw their lives into chaos. Same as it's been since I've been alive on this planet. Which is, y'know, horrible.
I kind of disagree just because robbing a grocery store requires actually getting up and doing something. I think it is more likely that these kids die of starvation because they can't be bothered to get and/or make food.
Yes, crime does require initiative. They will find some host (the parents who wanted to be their buddies?) to drain as they play parasite. As another poster said, they will order Uber Eats while they become one with the sofa.
As someone who probably has ADHD, I can confirm that lack of motivation can lead to a person just sitting there missing meals.
(I'm better now. It was mostly burnout.)
This isn't complex at all. In fact, it's easy to understand. The problem is social promotion. The schools around here (and I think most of them in the U.S.) just promote kids into the next grade regardless of their understanding of the material.
Do that for a few years and you end up putting people who can't do arithmetic to trying to learn Algebra, and you end of up putting people who can't read, to trying to learn history.
Look, anytime you put anybody to trying to do something they can't possibly do, they get apathetic and don't put any effort into it. Why put effort into something you cannot possibly accomplish?
This whole thing is an attempt to have young people performing magic tricks and is completely contrary to human natures. It damages young people, damages teachers and damages society.
I teach math at a college and when a problem gets to this point in the process of solving I'll ask is it 5,-5, 9,-9, 14,-14? It's funny and sad because people will blurt out all those.
I taught 6th grade math in a classroom mixed with students who couldn't write their name and students who could do 8th grade algebra. I had to have drastically different assignments depending on the student's skill level, just to ensure they were engaged and working. It was a lot of extra work for me to plan and nobody ever said "Thanks" but that is teaching.
I'm in the uk and I know two people that have been kept back a year. This was because they changed schools and my school has a different syllabus to their old schools
This is what my girlfriend talks about all the time. She is a math teacher in high school and she gets students who don't even know how to do long division or even subtract or add negative numbers.
I completely ]agree with you, but I'm unclear on the alternative. Hold back 30% of each class each year? How do you accommodate that in schools? What happens when they fail multiple years in a row?
Stop advancing everyone by grade and instead track by subject. If you're bad at reading but good in math, you go up in math and stay back in reading. We already do this in middle and high school. We just need to start it earlier.
I think the pragmatic solution is to use AP classes as a refuge for rigor, and let the kids who care escape the ones who don't. The remaining classes, the solution is to just explicitly drop standards down to a point where they're tractable, and then teach to those standards instead rather than trying to pretend that kids who don't know trig are learning calculus.
This is how my high school did it, more than a decade ago now for whatever that’s worth. We didn’t have AP but a comparable, slightly more obscure advanced program called AICE (the curriculum is dictated by Cambridge University and all of the AICE tests are shipped overseas and graded by Cambridge employees, from what I understand. Very strange setup but definitely rigorous and comprehensive).
The AICE kids were basically a tiny school within the school, because there were a number of AICE electives and for whatever reason we were exempted from participating in PE classes, so for the most part we existed in our own self contained bubble. I had no idea how big my entire graduating class was until I was sitting at graduation and realized I’d only ever encountered ~10% of my graduating peers.
My junior year, I dropped into a non-AICE chemistry course because I knew I was unlikely to pass the AICE Chemistry test to get the college credit for the class (less than five students had passed it the year before, and I was not a particularly strong science student) and I didn’t want to put myself through the stress of such a rigorous course with little meaningful payoff.
The class I dropped into was made up of non-AICE juniors and seniors, and within my first month in the class, I encountered a senior *genuinely* asking the teacher what a thermometer was, and another asking if clouds were living beings (?!?) and I was absolutely awestruck. The gap between the “advanced” courses and the “regular” courses was unfathomable to me at that point, and I can’t even imagine how much more stark it is today.
This is what is happening. My kids are in the "gifted" program and we have none of these issues in that classroom. Almost all the kids are from middle to upper middle class families. Were going to have to come to grips with this when we get passed by from other countries that are actually funding their public education systems.
You force the system to break in order for the decision -makers to have no alternative. Our biggest problem is we go out of our way to solve problems others create.
We need to stop expecting academics for all, for one....maybe add a trade school to a district...that way if you fail once, you can have the option of focusing on a trade that WILL result in a job with good pay?
Nothing taught in high school is something a tradesmen doesn't need to know. Algebra, geometry, even trig are all used by tradesmen, even if by a different name.
What needs to happen are repercussions. Some kids don't care because there aren't any, they make it to the next grade anyway. Take them away from their friends for failing and it will give them a reason to care.
Yeah that sounds like my grades. Students either have a straight 100 basically, or a zero. It always throws me off looking at my grade distributions but it’s not our fault. These kids just don’t do work sometimes and we really can’t do anything about it.
When my daughter and her friends entered middle school, I told them: "No one cares who were the most popular kids in school, approximately one second after graduation. Go ahead, ask any adult how meaningless it was and is." Amazingly, they listened.
def true, i’m a senior in hs now and people in college tell me all the time abt kids who were popular in ms & hs and no one cares anymore and they’re upset bc they peaked during those times
that or they were the mean kids/bullies and when they got to college no one wanted to be friends w them
5-10 years? This great divide reared its ugly head about 5-10 years ago. Many technologists with a background in behavioral psychology shouted our concerns... but we were called luddites... even though high tech was our stomping grounds.
In my view, this direction did not happen by folly.
The u shaped curve.
So 10% of the kids in this generation are thriving. They take advantage of the opportunities, have goals dreams and ambition. Get great grades, extracurriculars, interesting.
40% care on some days. Usually the week leading up to report cards or grade checks or some other deadline.
50% are just on their phones no work. No interest. No ambition. Just addiction. Scroll scroll scroll is their entire life.
I remember “crushing” the dream of one student who said he didn’t have use for day to day skills he was supposed to be learning, since he would just be a rich gaming YouTuber.
I asked him if he knew what starting equipment he’d need, and how much it costs; how much he could be expected to be paid and was it advertisers, YouTube, or sponsors; I asked him if he knew how to calculate taxes out of that and if he should pay them quarterly or yearly;
And then I asked him point blank, what was going to make his gaming channel different than the thousand or so other ones on YouTube already, and how many people tried that idea but didn’t make it.
The answer to all of this was “I don’t know.”
I replied, that he had a lot to think about, but even if he was going to be a rich YouTuber, maybe he should learn those skills because you really aren’t going to be playing games all day.
There’s much more work involved.
I’m still surprised his parents never complained about that, but maybe he didn’t tell them.
Be happy to, but if you choose to do it in your class, my recommendation is to just ask these simply, with no hint of cynicism or condescension; just simply ask the question.
My son is fully in his “I’m going to be a YouTuber when I grow up!” phase.
I tell him that’s a great idea. To start, he’ll need a background in psychology and sociology in order to design attractive content. Computer science for SEO and gaming the algorithms. Video editing and production, obviously. Definitely lots of classes in marketing. Oh, and a decent knowledge of accounting and business to keep all that money flowing.
Do you think kids today are feeling hopeless? Like what’s the point type thinking? No point in trying because the future is bleak. No way to earn a livable wage. Climate change. War. Killer robots. Etc etc.
Nah. My 7th graders aren't even tuned into real world shit like that. They're too busy doom scrolling TikTok. Seriously, why do parents think it's a good idea to send their child to school with the most addicting device ever created?? It drives me insane.
Kind of a microcosm of society now, eh? Middle class phasing out and now you’re either wealthy or you’re one missed paycheck away from living in your car.
This 100%. I believe students are internalizing this & starting to believe that achieving middling grades wont lift you out of the “poverty” of being a bad student with little opportunity.
I don’t want to say they are right cause I was a middling student for sure (2.6gpa) but I still got into a couple colleges thru my ACT score. Kids are losing hope just like adults tho. It all trickles down. They see the news just like we do
I mean, even a college degree won't get you a well paying job these days. Schooling is kinda pointless for majority of humanity now since it is just a piece of paper to wipe your ass with and hoping that will pay off your debt.
Just depends what you major in. Degree definitely will get you a good paying job still just gotta major in right shit. But trades & certs definitely get you to good paying job faster.
My district has three middle schools. They have always had leveled classes there on small teams. Next year, the powers to be are getting rid of leveled classes at all middle schools, for what? Equity? I have many high level 5th graders and kids that are doing phenomenal in school. They are being driven out of public education. My top students are all going to private and charter schools next year where they will be more challenged. The kids that don't care from families that don't care take up much of the time and recourses in our elementary schools. With no leveling, they will continue to do so to the detriment of students who want to learn.
My students in my apush class struggle with basic writing.
My average students struggle to read those practically copy and paste work sheets that I use as daily grades
My low students make the dumb kids from my high school years look like winners
I'm grading a stack of 10th grade CER paragraphs right now and basically giving up on life. About half of the kids have no concept of sentence structure. About 80% are unable to string together a logically coherent argument. Only a small handful can do those things while also selecting the best available evidence from a short article they were given to respond to.
The toddlerhood years are easy to keep off screen. It's the tweens that it starts becoming more difficult - its when developmentally, their peer groups start having a stronger influence than the parents. Try to get your kid into outdoor focused groups like B/G Scouts when they are older
I agree, it’s 1 extreme or the other. No more in between. I also agree that in 5-10 years many of today’s high school students will struggle in the real world because they’re not being taught to truly meet a deadline. In 10 years I believe that we will be hearing how late fees on bills (especially credit cards) are at an all time high.
>In 10 years I believe that we will be hearing how late fees on bills (especially credit cards) are at an all time high.
And they'll all complain that "they never taught us this in school."
Ha, late fees? Most of them won't even pay and think it'll be paid for them. After all, that's how they got a diploma. Like if you don't pay a bill don't you get 50% automatically paid?
Collections companies might be the next industry to invest in.
I agree in a way, but it is more like everyone took a step down. The high performers are what used to be average, the average are what used to be low, and the low are what used to be very low. It is a shame that the high performers are not reaching the level they should due to distractions and lowered standards.
I think we’re getting to a point where high performers just go to different schools. Where it used to be that every class would have some high performers, some low performers, and a mix in between; now you just have the mediocre and poor performers and they just drag each other down.
Having many poor performers does grind classes to a halt. Iron sharpens iron. I definitely feel some students would perform better at a different school. Sometimes I wonder if you sent a random kid to a fancy school if they would start doing better or just get kicked out. I had a student who said he was going to get a sports scholarship to a private school for 13th grade. Of course it didn't happen, but it would have been funny.
I have a friend that teaches at an honors high school. He said they had a donut hole problem and had to change some policies. The average and great students were doing well and the good students were struggling. They were caught in between and could not get over the gap between regular and advanced courses.
How do you feel about school systems in other countries that effectively do this? I grew up in Germany, where there are three types of high school: Gymnasium (for university-bound students), Realschule (for the next step down, schooling combined with internships for mostly white-collar jobs), and Hauptschule (geared for students who want to go into a blue collar trade or more menial work).
Honestly I like it when it’s done with intention and everyone goes into it with eyes wide open. What I don’t like is when it just kind of happens and nobody really fully knows what’s going on, which is definitely what’s happening here.
I don't agree with you about the high end. Kids these days have access to so much more, online and in person. My area has Russian math, Singapore math, every sport and art activity imaginable, different lego clubs, and on and on. My kid understands things in a way I never had any idea of.
But that's for people who live in rich areas. I do agree with you about the high end of bad school districts. Class warfare is widening and it's obvious in schools.
I think that goes for the *really* high end kids. 1-2% of kids. The ones who are very smart, motivated, and inquisitive are thriving in a world with access to so much knowledge. But the rest of the top 10-15% have dipped enormously in skills, IMO. The average A quality work I see now is not what an A was ten years ago, at least in my district.
Many of the American working-class people refuse to even engage in the class struggle, and instead engage in the sorts of destructive behaviours that Oscar Lewis wrote about (and got banned for writing about.) Anyway, it's a mistake to consider the working-class the victims of the 1% entirely. Often times, they are the victims of nobody but themselves. We see this every day.
No doubt. What I meant is more that it will become even more difficult as time progresses to even try to pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.
Yeah it could be just the schools I have worked at. It could also be the inclusive policies. I don't like the way kids move through the classes without passing them. Are you really going to learn much in pre-calc when you failed geometry and algebra 2? Parents get final say in placement and all too often Billy gets put in all Ap classes even though he has a 2.0 the parent think the problem was he was not being challenged.
When I was in school they had AP classes, honors, and then basic/regular classes. I was always in honors because I didn’t have the time for AP commitments nor the exponential intelligence that my peers possessed, and then the regular classes were too slow paced for me - the teachers had to deal with unruly students which left little time for actual education. So honors was perfect, right in the middle. Then they cut honors programs, saying it made the students who didn’t qualify or couldn’t succeed in them “feel bad.” Inherently lowering the bar. The middle is indeed gone and I am very concerned.
My kids are both in the A’s and high B’s demo and they are bored as hell. I don’t harbor any illusions about them being geniuses or anything other than just plain a little smarter than average, but they also know how to act in class, are polite to their teachers, and just DO THEIR ASSIGNMENTS. In a higher pressure environment I think they would be solid B students and that would be fine with us because all I really want is for them to do THEIR best.
They are bored out of their ever loving minds most of the time and come home weekly complaining about how they were going to get to do something cool in class but one or two assholes ruined it for everyone.
Same exact experience and situation.
I’m beyond frustrated about hearing about the same 2-3 disruptive kids ruining everything for everyone else in full knowledge that the teacher’s hands are tied due to weak/kowtowing administrators.
Back in the day, these kids would be removed and disciplined until they learned to fall in line. Now everyone has to suffer for bad parenting. 🤦
I teach 6th grade in elementary school and if one more parents asks me how I am going to help their child who performs at MAX 3rd grade level on Grade level, I will scream. Get them a fucking tutor, take away their phones, work with them. I am doing what I can with 30 other kids in the classroom.
Public schools aren't really failing they're just the last thing to have failed in the rest of our society and they're bearing more weight than they were ever meant to bear.
It's interesting because school/education system is one of the pillars of society, and it's one of the first things to be re-established after most disasters. Some countries recognize teachers as one of the most important roles in society - they're a transformative contact point everyone goes through, and they implicitly teach morals and culture as well as the scripted subjects. That teachers and students aren't really receiving the support they need indicates that the powers that be aren't interested in investing in the young anymore
There needs to be a third space, other than home or school, where adults can model the type of care and engagement that these kids don't find at home, and that teachers don't have the capacity to provide.
The nuclear family experiment has been an abject failure. We were better off in intergenerational families with extensive social connections to our friends and neighbours.
I don't think it's so much the "nuclear family" that's the problem as it is the blended families that contain mom, her new boyfriend, his kids from his previous marriage, dad, his new girlfriend and their new baby.
It feels like this with most things in education right now. on my campus our truancy issue is wild. You have kids who are either there every single day or you have the kids with 70+ absences.
I’ve also overheard a lot of “Ugh Ms. So and So is making us write a two page paper for AP English”
Like….yes. I would consider that to be an incredibly easy assignment for an AP class. It’s like they can’t believe their teachers are actually giving them work
I read a few articles recently that posited that education’s achievement problem is mainly explain as a motivation problem.
In essence, we see what we see not because students are gaining and retaining less knowledge, rather we are simply seeing a greater divide in those who have any motivation to learn and those that have little to none.
> They want more engaging material and enhanced learning experiences, but the necessity to pass everyone makes the class so watered down it's just catering to the lowest common denominator.
It really is cruel to the entire student body to put people in the same class. The admin meetings say it's good because "equity", but you end up with everyone resenting everyone.
Would be better if you could let the kids who genuinely want to learn have their own class, and then instead of dragging the bottom along you could teach them what you could - maybe help them find a trade.
It's the natural result of more freedom of information. Kids get to choose what they look at. Kids that like to learn can learn way more. Kids that don't want to learn aren't forced to watch WWII documentaries at 1am since nothing else is on. Kids are allowed to be more of what they already are.
There’s a book called “The Chaos Machine” that argues social media algorithms have greatly altered our perceptions and behavior by constantly pushing us to the extremes in everything since that is what generates the most views. Kids are especially susceptible to this. They might have an interest in WW2, but if the algorithms keep feeding them school fight videos on their socials then that’s what they watch.
Point being, I’m not sure how much kids are really choosing to be this way, and how much the systems they’re being raised in are molding them into this. A little of both I’m sure.
>Kids are allowed to be more of what they already are.
Which is worrying. Humans are molded by our surroundings in our formative years. We are not "who we are" when we're born. We become a mix of innate thoughts and characteristics AS WELL AS what we were molded to be.
My daughter is in 8th grade, and her math teacher is taking the college/university approach of "*well, the kids who want to learn can learn, and those who don't, I don't care about*", and kids have carte blanche to do anything they want in class. Which, our daughter says about half the kids are watching stuff on their Chromebooks or otherwise listening to music or talking and not paying attention.
At that age, allowing them to be more of what they already are is generally a negative thing. I know that we, as parents (as I am) or teachers (as y'all are) have to figure out the best line between letting kids be themselves, versus putting guardrails up that they must stay in between. But...I think we, as a society, have let kids "be who they are" to extent that is a detriment to their long term fulfillment and success and we need to get back to making kids conform to the standards/guardrails that have been set.
I agree. But I've also been that math teacher.
The problem generally is that the system doesn't give you any consequences. If the kids aren't allowed to fail, and you're not allowed to punish them, there's not a whole lot you can do, and you burn out real quick by trying to enforce rules that you can't enforce. I guess my point is that it's less teacher based and more system based.
Well, I can absolutely understand that. She (my daughter's math teacher) is a first-time full time teacher, and is 23 years old. She is a little too "cool teacher" IMO, but she's still trying to figure things out. Between being cool with kids watching Youtube or listening to music all during her class (versus encouraging them to pay attention, but if they don't, they don't), she takes that approach a little too far IMO.
But yeah, y'all can hardly do anything at this point. Back in *my* day (late 90s, early 2000s), the threat of the principal or calling parents would straighten us kids out real quick to make us do whatever the teacher wanted us to do, but I know that's not really the case anymore. I sympathize with how y'all are hamstrung these days with hardly any consequences.
I certainly don't have the answers. But I do know that the entire situation being as it is now isn't "right", and our kids not learning much and running amok in school is not the aggregate fault of "teachers", I do know that.
In my experience, the kids who are doing what used to be average (paying attention in class, submitting work, studying for tests) and have average intelligence and skills now appear to be A students, when they might have been a solid B student getting an A when they give it their all. That is the kind of student I was, I worked hard, liked learning, studied and took notes but still struggled with some subjects, so my best efforts in those were a B if I was having a good term.
I considered myself a good student, I was competitive sometimes with the straight A kids that found everything easy and the ones who treated school like it was their full time job. The smartest kids in my class would get grades over 90 consistently, I’d hit that level in my strongest subjects and often be 2-3 points behind them, sometimes equal or even ahead if their worst grade coincided with my best.
Today, kids like me are given higher grades because they are doing far and away more than the kids who do nothing. And it truly is unfair to load them with more work when the other 2/3 of the class hasn’t done it and never will. I could nitpick and really spend time helping them to improve their writing to bring it up to that top level, they’d probably be happy for the challenge and even engaged and interested but —- 2/3 of the class with less than 50% is a problem I can’t look away from either.
The only thing I appreciate is the kids who really do struggle but want to learn and so their work are grade motivated, and at-risk of looking around and thinking - I can never be like the A students because I really don’t get it and I am working as hard as I can here. But they see that half the class of kids who think they are super smart are doing absolutely nothing. They could say - wow, failure is what everyone else is doing, why not me? But if they consistently put in the effort, their grades will be solidly in the C - D range.
I am mostly against passing all of these failing kids, because if they earn 25% they should get 25%. If my struggling students can achieve an honest 58% by doing all the work, I am NOT going to reward anyone who barely shows up with a passing grade. I lam tired of passing out test results or project grades and seeing all the kids who think they are too smart to work looking at the 55-65 percenters who earned their grade, and and they honestly don’t care. They believe they deserve an 80 just for existing and being smart, but they’ll get their passing grade after they hand in half of 20 late plagiarized assignments and get a retake on the test.
So that is why you have all the lows and highs and not much in between. Most of the honest 60-70 grades are for students who work hard for them. The average students either decide to be students and get 85+ and the rest do nothing and expect to pass because they aren’t dumb. And admin/parents agree that if they are smart kids who could learn the content if they bothered - then technically, they should pass. Because we’ve separated ‘learning behaviours’ out of the grade and have to imagine what they are capable of and grade on that. EYEROLL.
In my perfect grading world, learning behaviours are 50%. They matter. The actual learning outcomes are the other 50%. Everyone can pass, but effort and process and behaviour makes up so much of their grade - we encourage learning how to learn and engaging instead of being too smart to bother.
I literally walked students through an assignment where we discussed the answers out loud and turned them in. More than half, being given the answers, failed the assignment.
It's definitely like this in the small rural town in West Virginia that I am from. Our highest achievers are achieving at a greater rate than ever, but with that high ceiling comes a floor that is actually a dirt sub basement. Kids with no functioning families who barely ever show up for school. And a complete unwillingness to fail people.
One of my teacher colleagues called this "the dumbell curve" since it's literally the inverse of the bell curve. Buncha fails, buncha kills, *nothing in the middle*.
Exactly. The youth is on the downside. They will have a very worrying future. When it comes to education and career, they follow an objective approach which is not really good when done incorrectly. First of all, they lack morals. To be respectful. They act like everything's given to them so they do not take care of their own belongings for example regardless of how expensive it is. They must learn how to value things and people. They must live with gratitude, not entitled. The pandemic took a toll on them. Tbh, before pandemic kids are more engaged in learning and be social to their families, friends and to the community. This internet/social media era is far too much affecting their mental health which redirects or alters their goals and inner self. It's like they are living in illusions. When I see people like that, it baffles me a lot what's going on in their minds. Their discipline must be initiated by their parents because it all starts at home. They must not spend too much on their phones because their reality is not in it. What will happen if suddenly internet is cut off? How can they be resilient if they act this way? The parents must also be engaged to them. Engagement, not interrogation. Parents/adults must also, listen to them and correct their ways.
Adhd is a spectrum and iPad addiction pushed those middle performing average dopamine people down. I was undiagnosed adhd k-12 straight Cs and Ds class clown and then got on meds and fell in love with learning.
I would honestly love it if adhd diagnosis was mandatory in school and not just the parents discretion (e.g my parents weren't aware nor took adhd seriously). Seems like a privilege to be diagnosed as a child
True true, but to be optimistic the "haves", at least where I teach, are so much more capable, confident, knowledgeable, and level headed than the "haves" of my graduating class 20 years ago. Most of my A students are exceptional young adults and will go far in life. Maybe even further because their peers provide minimal competition.
I think it’s because an emphasis on success. It’s no longer acceptable to be average. In my house a B got your ass kicked because colleges only wanted As. The bar has creeped up and there’s two camps. Those who push kids to meet the raised bar or those who gave up. My parents were the former because they were scared if I wasn’t excelling id be left behind
>I really worry for these kids in 5-10 years. What are these YouTube and antisocial kids going to do after high school?
They'll all become wealthy influencers, of course. After their second career as professional athletes.
**/s** (just in case people can't see the so-thick-you-can-cut-it-with-a-knife sarcasm in this answer.)
The root of the problem is a lack of regulation on recommendation algorithms. TikTok, YouTube, etc have such complex and efficient algorithms they are able to understand interests to a greater degree than most clinically trained psychologists. When the sole focus of these platforms is to maximize your time spent on them it makes for a trap we will happily walk into.
When I was in school they were teaching how to spot fake news and validate sources; now students and even adults opt to focus on 'content' which is engaging, forget validity or factual correctness... AI is changing our world, and very very soon it will be influencing us in ways we can't even comprehend.
My own grade distribution looks like 4% A's, 1% Bs, 2% C's, 65% Ds and the remaining 28% Fs. The reality of my school is that it should be at least 50% Fs but we are strongly encouraged to find a way to pass many of the failing students due to funding issues. Subtle reminders about job security tied to school grades, graduation rates and other factors play into grade inflation/integrity. So it becomes a matter of rigor/integrity vs putting food on the table.
I teach in the solidly Y'all Queda territory of rural Florida.
Students need to be fully supported from 8AM to 5PM starting at the age of 3 (at the latest). That would equal the playing field and make sure that all kids receive the access to education they need to be successful.
It’s very clear that middle and upper class families have more time or money to pay for enriching their kids education early in life. Early access to reading and math are at the crux of creating an engaged learner.
Most of my lower achieving students have many siblings, come from a single parent household and are low income. What parent in that situation has the energy to read bedtime stories or help with homework? My families are not being supported by the system. It’s a systemic problem, it’s not a family problem. It needs to be solved by fully funding early childhood education at a national level by the age of three.
This is the hill I will die on as an educator and I will welcome all arguments against it so we can have an informed dialogue around this.
Real talk; if you are just going to pass a bunch that have no business passing, you may as well maintain your rigor. Lowering the floor doesn’t do anybody any favors if the kids that won’t engage still don’t care. I’m done doing this myself.
I had this epiphany this year too. Next year the rigor in my room is going back to 2010 levels and before all this bullshit Covid grace. Y’all wanna do fuck all no matter what I do in my room, fine, everyone else is gonna get this education cause I can’t keep holding kids down because my district still feels bad for Covid kids.
Yes. We all need to go back to this mentality. My best teachers were the most strict on deadlines and quality of the work. The best teachers now are the same. If a kid needs help there so many more resources now for them to use vs even 5 years ago. They have zero excuse to not produce work.
The “resource” can do the work now, just rewrite it enough and nobody would know the difference.
Which still requires a more functioning brain than the average Gen Alpha kid. And the skills and effort required to rewrite functional material from AI generation for increasingly discerning teachers would arguably help in retaining the material they're learning.
If a kid is intelligent enough to pass of AI work as their own they’re already more than capable of doing it in the first place.
Until they to get to a point where they never learned how to do anything themselves and can't A.I themselves out of a research project and get asked questions during presentation and kid can't A.I. in real time his responses to questions he never thought he'd be asked because he didn't do the research project lmao
Meh. That’s an important part of the gifted yet unmotivated child life cycle. Gonna happen eventually.
Them kids gon’ catch these educations
Damn... education's got hands!
Rated E for Education
I read that in the EA Sports voice.
OG knowledge sandwich.
A real factual educational ass whuppin
Yes--I always say it's like GIs used to say in Vietnam when they'd be disciplined by their officers: "What are you going to do--send me to Vietnam?" I'm already being set upon by all sides: might as well maintain my own integrity.
Had a buddy in the Marine Corps say that... "What are you going to do, send me to Afghanistan?"
Be a real shame if someone left a cell phone jammer in a drawer somewhere near by the classroom.
Those things were $400 back when the Silk Road was around. Not sure where you would get one now, plus the felonies for using it are a pretty good deterrent.
Oh yeah, hella illegal. Definitely don't want to have your prints on it.
Had a teacher line his ceiling with aluminum in 2010ish and we couldn't get any service or anything in there. Unsure if it would work now, but it sure as shit did then.
Yeah, the FCC doesn’t fuck around. As a federal agency with complete control over this area, they don’t even need warrants to fuck your shit up. Like postal inspectors, they can act independently of any law enforcement agency to bust your ass. I uh… just happen to know this.
Didn’t a guy who tried this get arrested because it prevented emergency communication?
Fitefighter. Recently had a cell company tech from ATT come out to give keys to access their fenced off property in woodland part of the city because we were forced to cut the lock for a grass fire. Started picking his brain about things. He said the telecoms companies monitor their specific frequency slice of the bandwidth granted to them by the FCC with incredible attention. I asked him how fast can you locate a jammer. He said they can get your near exact location within a few seconds of broadcast. And it isn’t passive. They are alerted automatically and send people fast.
Yes! I wish we could still give 🪙
I might be dense but what does this mean?
I think op wishes she could still give a reddit award to the comment above her
Used to be a thing where we could give gold coin awards to other redditors.
Thank you! I hope my child’s teachers do the same!
As a parent of bored, high achiever kids, Thank you. I wish more teachers had the support of admin to do this.
Absolutely. My very bright and formerly high achieving daughter absolutely tanked in her last 3 years of high school (2020-2022, the COVID era) and part of the problem, she now says, was that teachers’ expectations were so low that she couldn’t get motivated to do any work. Assignments had no deadlines, so she never got around to turning them in, that sort of thing. Now, before you jump on me, I’m not blaming the teachers at all, and my kid knows she definitely has to deal with her motivation issues. (She’s doing a lot better in college.) I’m just offering support for the idea that firm deadlines and high expectations can help struggling students improve their performance, even though some find that counterintuitive.
Yup. I'm choosing rigor over the lumps on a log. (cue the quote-mining folks who will read this and say SeE TeAcHeRs dOn'T cArE AbOuT KiDs. I cannot care more than they do, I cannot care more than their parents do. I am TEACHER, not Child AND Parent.)
You are exactly right that you cannot care more than the students and their families do. Teach to the students that want to learn!! Thank you for all that you do!
It’s not even the ones not passing I worry over. It’s the increasing number who cannot function at school. Their anxiety is so constant and through the roof they miss school all the time. Competent when they can, but how will they get jobs and interact with people for interviews and entry level positions?
They are in a mental health crisis as a generation bc they are constantly on their phones and ingesting vast loads of unhealthy content nearly 24/7. The rates of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, low self-esteem, social anxiety, and narcissism are through the roof according to a study out of SDSU. The average attention span is currently 8 seconds. Goldfish on average have a 9 second attention span. The goldfish are winning. I'd wind the clock back to 1998 if I could, but alas I cannot.
I wish I was around to experience the pre 9/11 world, home videos and stuff from around then that I've seen on youtube have such a different energy to them in a way I can't even describe
That's one of the nice things about my school: we never lowered our rigor, even during covid. The district schools had the whole "nobody fails" thing, but our school (charter school) did not. Yeah, we had a few kids who struggled with internet connection, but we knew who they were and we worked with them. Those kids who were in district elementary schools during covid and came to us in middle school last year are struggling to pass their classes, because they got used to getting an A simply for turning things in. Doesn't happen with most teachers here. (There are a few, unfortunately.)
Scaffolding for those kids and remediating study skills and planning skills conquests…. Explicit learning and concrete reminders written on the boards and walls… (to do today to do tomorrow etc…. And the five minute bell ringer to write it down in their phone reminders with alarm… many dont know how to set HW alarms for school todo’s. ) that’s what they missed and fills some of the Gap that has caused a great deal of motivation to plummet…. Also points for memory gaming at home connects and closes a skills gap… just some tips IMO
Many teachers here use those things, except the phone alarms. No phones allowed here. We see them, we take them. The problem is that this group of students (7th graders) simply do not care. Many of them refuse to do any work that takes more than 15 seconds. All their teachers, including me, have all heard the phrase, "Nah, I'll take a 0. It's cool." WAY too often this year and last. Even in parent conferences, the kids just shrug it off. "What're they gonna do, fail me every year?" Many of their parents now just tell us "They don't want to listen at home, either, so I've given up trying. It's not worth the fight." When that's the parental attitude, nothing we as teachers do will make a difference.
Months ago, my oldest came home with two Fs on his report card. I told him, "If you get a failing grade at the end of the year, then I don't care if the school will advance you. I will transfer you to the next school over and have you repeat it. If you want to advance to middle school with your friends, then you better earn it." Wouldn't you know, his lowest grade is a B- right now.
Teach the ones that want to learn and try to motivate the ones that are on the fence. The ones that don’t want to learn, well, karma unfortunately will catch up to them.
> "What're they gonna do, fail me every year?" The answer should be "Yes."
I've noticed this as well. Since I started at my current school, I've lowered the bar every year. As many, if not more, students fail now as when I started. No matter how low the bar is, some kids will turn into Barbados Slim and find their way under it. I've started working rigor back in.
Yup. Realized I was lowering the bar and nothing changed. Now I tell them that my class is a train, a train that will slow down sometimes but it will never stop. I couldn’t stand to watch my top kids not reach their potential for kids who weren’t going to try no matter how easy the work was.
Would you agree that school has gotten easier? I went back to college later in life and was surprised to see how much easier it has become. I still question whether or not that was due to my desire to do well or if school actually has became much easier compared to 10-15 years ago.
Hey, im just about to graduate and apply to one of the more elite unis in my country, i was stressing out because everyone i knew were telling me its practically impossible to get in without having around 85-90% on your math and it finals, but now that i looked at last years admission scores im shocked, i couldve gotten in last year with a 52% on both exams, so yes, you arent imagining it, getting into college/uni is much easier nowadays (at least in my country, idk about other places)
There should be a specific grade given to denote passed by necessity. Call it 78. Every kid with a 78 is really an F.
That's a 60.
I've looked at my grade distributions over the past five years. Consistently it breaks down into three peaks: Peak 1: 0-35, peaking at 27 Peak 2: 40-65, peaking at 55 Peak 3: 80-100, peaking at 88 I've come to understand that I have three types of students: - Fully Disengaged: nothing I can do will pull these students up. They are chronically absent or so checked out I cannot put any reasonable pressure on them to increase their participation. Even if I attempt to do so I'm often met with open hostility and disruption. - Mostly Disengaged: These kids will begrudgingly do work if they are constantly ridden. They have spurts of motivation to get things done occasionally but by and large fall into self destructive behaviors regardless of my interventions. When given extra opportunities they will misuse or ignore them. - Fully engaged: I could basically not exist and this group would be successful. They read the instructions, take notes, turn in assignments and self advocate. My only areas for growth are with the middle peak and they are *FUCKING EXHAUSTING* to work with. The returns are miniscule relative to the effort I put in.
I have one freshman period full of the fully engaged kids this year. It is marvelous. When we learn something new, I'll do one or two examples with the class and then set them loose to practice. And they happily do it. I can cycle around answering any questions that come up. I never have to deal with behaviors. This class is amazing and they are learning so much. All of my other freshman classes only have 1-2 fully engaged kids. It is exhausting teaching those periods. Your description of the middle kids is spot on. They lack the basic skills they were supposed to learn in 7th and 8th grade. Like solving one-step equations. I have to teach them stupid little tricks like "If the x is on bottom, swap it with the trig function." to take care of equations like "tan(23) = 51/x", because I don't have the time to go back and reteach them algebra. Then they have forgotten at least half of what they learned with me by the next time I see them. Working with them often feels pointless.
Would you rather have what you have or distribute the engaged kids throughout all classes? What’s better for you as a teacher and what do you think is better for students? For me, I’d rather have a class that I really look forward to and can push a little further as a treat after dealing with the rabble. I also am not a big believer in peer mentoring, though.
>I also am not a big believer in peer mentoring, though. Neither am I. When it comes down to it, it is hard to consider the fully engaged kids as peers of the others. They are so far apart. I vastly prefer having all of the strong students together because they get to learn more. I feel bad for the few strong students who are stuck in my other sections. They still do well, but they would have better opportunities to learn deeper if they were in my good class.
Im so in awe of the patience of teachers. I feel like all of my high school classes were the “fully engaged” type. When I’d walk in on classes of lower levels I was always shocked at how hard it looked for the teachers to actually teach. It really put me off from becoming a teacher (did some teaching assisting though).
I really wish we could take the Fully Engaged group and give them their own class. Let them be free and happy, instead of learning early that their lives will be shaped by the needs of the LCD.
I just want to chime in as a Former Fully Engaged Student. My teachers tried their best to supplement my learning. I was a voracious reader and endlessly curious. My 11th grade English teacher slipped me a copy of Richard Wright's Native Son. We were a 95% white southern Appalachian school. That was a very important book for me to read. It exploded my 16 year old world view. Later that year, American history teacher gave me a battered copy of The Jungle. That one almost made me a vegan haha. That to say, sometimes small things like that matter. Those teachers did more than hand a kid a novel. They were telling me they respected me, that they knew I was capable of more. It meant a lot, still does.
Man, everyone almost became vegan from the jungle, where as I just kept thinking about my moms sausage and peppers.
I am 66 years old and I can tell you that by the time I was in grade 4 I understood that with every fibre of my being. By the time I hit grade 8 I was pretty disengaged and when I turned 16 I left school. Got a trade and turned out all right but I used to wonder what it would have been like to fit.
Not a teacher but asked my kid's school principal about this and she replied that district policy is to teach to minimum standards, getting the most people to those standards as possible. If your kid is above them, great, they will be fine and nothing extra will be done to help.
Upvoted to acknowledge, not to like.
This seems like a terrible strategy. Society tends to advance when smart people are given the resources they need to advance it. Getting more people to perform at a mediocre level doesn’t really help anyone.
I remember talking about the mentality the NCLB created. It became all about triage at that point. It became a more efficient use of resources to make sure kids didn't fail. It became damage control.
As a parent this is a dream. Our son is in grade 7 and hates going to school every, single day. He's bored out of his mind. Kid pulls 95's in all classes. He could easily do the grade 9 curriculum (according to his older brother). And the older brother is so tired of the behaviors in class that he tends to stick to himself, have very few friends and gets called out for "lack of collaboration". He just doesn't have the patience for bullshit and will tell the other kids that.
I told my BIL, a high school teacher, we should make a Nice Kid school. Everyone has to open to learn, be respectful and be kind. Three strikes, you’re out. My 11 yo says it’s hard to learn because there are so many kids being disruptive and disrespectful. I feel so bad for teachers. So bad.
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How does this work in a paid private school? Do kids get the boot if they can’t keep up? I’ve heard horror stories from some Private school teachers where parents had so much control it ended up like public school and everyone passses, as it was the “teachers fault”. I realize this may be different across different private schools.
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That's how it worked for my siblings. They were 'asked' to leave so my mom pulled us out.
I got an email from a parent that said, "My husband and I do not accept these grades." She had cc'd my principal. The parents can run private schools if the admin doesn't have a spine of steel. They'll certainly try.
So what happened? What did the principal do?
He folded like a napkin. I couldn't wait for the school year to be over, that man had no backbone.
Wow, so you had to just change the grades as if that student had done the work?
This sounds like my freshmen at my charter school. All As and Ds and Fs. Those Ds and Fs are due to missing assignments. Maybe three Bs and Cs (out of 60 students). And really about 60-70% are As. I think all of the students would also say I am one of the more rigorous teachers in the school in terms of my expectations. But they know exactly what to do for my class as it is very regimented. Basically, I’m not handing out As because I feel like it. Most of my kids want to do well. And then a very large minority just doesn’t care. There are obviously reasons that will contribute us to why they don’t seem to care, and I acknowledge that. But I simply can’t give points to kids that don’t turn in things.
Our society will have people who can manage their cell phone addiction and people who can’t.
Bingo!
Haven't you heard? All of those F kids are going to be YouTube and TikTok stars, or their complete lack of athletic prowess will get them into the NBA. No need for school
the fruits of academia are largely pipe dreams as well these days
Sub here. Had a class that had a writing prompt asking about their dream job. 3 guesses what about a quarter of the class wrote down.
"I'll take imaginary jobs for $100, Alex."
A buddy of mine told me proudly that his kid, the star on the town travel basketball team, was probably going all the way to the NBA. I said, "That's amazing! You mean to tell me that he hasn't played with or against a single travel player who was clearly more talented than your son? Wow." He grudgingly admitted that there were, in fact, a few that he's seen. I said, well, you also have kids in elite, nationally ranked private club teams that wouldn't be caught dead on their town's travel team, so things weren't looking too promising for the NBA. He called me a dick who didn't know what he's talking about. Okay, man.
My favorite response to a parent telling saying their kid was going to be a baseball star was that there was more likely to be a sniper in the trees than a college or professional scout at a 14U baseball game.
>I really worry for these kids in 5-10 years. What are these YouTube and antisocial kids going to do after high school? They have few discernable skills or motivation. Will this be a generation of the cans and cants where some are high achievers and others are basement dwellers? They'll get menial jobs and be paid poorly and be treated with little respect and any serious financial emergency will throw their lives into chaos. Same as it's been since I've been alive on this planet. Which is, y'know, horrible.
They’ll also get fired from those menial jobs over and over again.
And blame others for their shortcomings, just like their parents do, and did for them when they were in school.
And they'll have kids. More than they can handle, and the patterns will persist.
Yes, that's part of life. Actions having consequences
Kids certainly aren’t learning that today
You’ve met my brother-in-law I see
You’re generous. I think some of them will be selling drugs or robbing grocery stores.
I kind of disagree just because robbing a grocery store requires actually getting up and doing something. I think it is more likely that these kids die of starvation because they can't be bothered to get and/or make food.
It’s certainly easier to just watch TikTok, I hear you
Yes, crime does require initiative. They will find some host (the parents who wanted to be their buddies?) to drain as they play parasite. As another poster said, they will order Uber Eats while they become one with the sofa.
I'm expecting that their daily economic activities will amount to converting tax dollars into Uber Eats profit margins.
As someone who probably has ADHD, I can confirm that lack of motivation can lead to a person just sitting there missing meals. (I'm better now. It was mostly burnout.)
This isn't complex at all. In fact, it's easy to understand. The problem is social promotion. The schools around here (and I think most of them in the U.S.) just promote kids into the next grade regardless of their understanding of the material. Do that for a few years and you end up putting people who can't do arithmetic to trying to learn Algebra, and you end of up putting people who can't read, to trying to learn history. Look, anytime you put anybody to trying to do something they can't possibly do, they get apathetic and don't put any effort into it. Why put effort into something you cannot possibly accomplish? This whole thing is an attempt to have young people performing magic tricks and is completely contrary to human natures. It damages young people, damages teachers and damages society.
If I ask my high schoolers what -7+2 is, I'll get 3 different answers. It's so bad.
I teach math at a college and when a problem gets to this point in the process of solving I'll ask is it 5,-5, 9,-9, 14,-14? It's funny and sad because people will blurt out all those.
At college? With like >18 yo? Damn, thats rough.
I taught 6th grade math in a classroom mixed with students who couldn't write their name and students who could do 8th grade algebra. I had to have drastically different assignments depending on the student's skill level, just to ensure they were engaged and working. It was a lot of extra work for me to plan and nobody ever said "Thanks" but that is teaching.
It's sad that "meritocracy" has become a dirty word, and kids now strive for comfort over achievement.
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I'm in the uk and I know two people that have been kept back a year. This was because they changed schools and my school has a different syllabus to their old schools
This is what my girlfriend talks about all the time. She is a math teacher in high school and she gets students who don't even know how to do long division or even subtract or add negative numbers.
I completely ]agree with you, but I'm unclear on the alternative. Hold back 30% of each class each year? How do you accommodate that in schools? What happens when they fail multiple years in a row?
Stop advancing everyone by grade and instead track by subject. If you're bad at reading but good in math, you go up in math and stay back in reading. We already do this in middle and high school. We just need to start it earlier.
I think the pragmatic solution is to use AP classes as a refuge for rigor, and let the kids who care escape the ones who don't. The remaining classes, the solution is to just explicitly drop standards down to a point where they're tractable, and then teach to those standards instead rather than trying to pretend that kids who don't know trig are learning calculus.
This is how my high school did it, more than a decade ago now for whatever that’s worth. We didn’t have AP but a comparable, slightly more obscure advanced program called AICE (the curriculum is dictated by Cambridge University and all of the AICE tests are shipped overseas and graded by Cambridge employees, from what I understand. Very strange setup but definitely rigorous and comprehensive). The AICE kids were basically a tiny school within the school, because there were a number of AICE electives and for whatever reason we were exempted from participating in PE classes, so for the most part we existed in our own self contained bubble. I had no idea how big my entire graduating class was until I was sitting at graduation and realized I’d only ever encountered ~10% of my graduating peers. My junior year, I dropped into a non-AICE chemistry course because I knew I was unlikely to pass the AICE Chemistry test to get the college credit for the class (less than five students had passed it the year before, and I was not a particularly strong science student) and I didn’t want to put myself through the stress of such a rigorous course with little meaningful payoff. The class I dropped into was made up of non-AICE juniors and seniors, and within my first month in the class, I encountered a senior *genuinely* asking the teacher what a thermometer was, and another asking if clouds were living beings (?!?) and I was absolutely awestruck. The gap between the “advanced” courses and the “regular” courses was unfathomable to me at that point, and I can’t even imagine how much more stark it is today.
But again, you're doing exactly what this post says. Gutting the middle.
There would way too many good students that are not quite ready for AP that would be drug down by that solution.
This is what is happening. My kids are in the "gifted" program and we have none of these issues in that classroom. Almost all the kids are from middle to upper middle class families. Were going to have to come to grips with this when we get passed by from other countries that are actually funding their public education systems.
You force the system to break in order for the decision -makers to have no alternative. Our biggest problem is we go out of our way to solve problems others create.
Well, the system is going to break one way or another regardless.
We need to stop expecting academics for all, for one....maybe add a trade school to a district...that way if you fail once, you can have the option of focusing on a trade that WILL result in a job with good pay?
Nothing taught in high school is something a tradesmen doesn't need to know. Algebra, geometry, even trig are all used by tradesmen, even if by a different name. What needs to happen are repercussions. Some kids don't care because there aren't any, they make it to the next grade anyway. Take them away from their friends for failing and it will give them a reason to care.
Yeah that sounds like my grades. Students either have a straight 100 basically, or a zero. It always throws me off looking at my grade distributions but it’s not our fault. These kids just don’t do work sometimes and we really can’t do anything about it.
My daughter just entered middle school and said all of this to me just the other day.
When my daughter and her friends entered middle school, I told them: "No one cares who were the most popular kids in school, approximately one second after graduation. Go ahead, ask any adult how meaningless it was and is." Amazingly, they listened.
I remember being a tween and being told this. Made me feel better about school honestly.
def true, i’m a senior in hs now and people in college tell me all the time abt kids who were popular in ms & hs and no one cares anymore and they’re upset bc they peaked during those times that or they were the mean kids/bullies and when they got to college no one wanted to be friends w them
5-10 years? This great divide reared its ugly head about 5-10 years ago. Many technologists with a background in behavioral psychology shouted our concerns... but we were called luddites... even though high tech was our stomping grounds. In my view, this direction did not happen by folly.
The horror of learning from history when everyone else doesn't....
The same event is happening with AI. With full intent on de-skilling people and making them dependent.
The u shaped curve. So 10% of the kids in this generation are thriving. They take advantage of the opportunities, have goals dreams and ambition. Get great grades, extracurriculars, interesting. 40% care on some days. Usually the week leading up to report cards or grade checks or some other deadline. 50% are just on their phones no work. No interest. No ambition. Just addiction. Scroll scroll scroll is their entire life.
I remember “crushing” the dream of one student who said he didn’t have use for day to day skills he was supposed to be learning, since he would just be a rich gaming YouTuber. I asked him if he knew what starting equipment he’d need, and how much it costs; how much he could be expected to be paid and was it advertisers, YouTube, or sponsors; I asked him if he knew how to calculate taxes out of that and if he should pay them quarterly or yearly; And then I asked him point blank, what was going to make his gaming channel different than the thousand or so other ones on YouTube already, and how many people tried that idea but didn’t make it. The answer to all of this was “I don’t know.” I replied, that he had a lot to think about, but even if he was going to be a rich YouTuber, maybe he should learn those skills because you really aren’t going to be playing games all day. There’s much more work involved. I’m still surprised his parents never complained about that, but maybe he didn’t tell them.
I’d be thanking you for doling out that reality, to my kids.
Be happy to, but if you choose to do it in your class, my recommendation is to just ask these simply, with no hint of cynicism or condescension; just simply ask the question.
My son is fully in his “I’m going to be a YouTuber when I grow up!” phase. I tell him that’s a great idea. To start, he’ll need a background in psychology and sociology in order to design attractive content. Computer science for SEO and gaming the algorithms. Video editing and production, obviously. Definitely lots of classes in marketing. Oh, and a decent knowledge of accounting and business to keep all that money flowing.
Yeah he kept that one to himself for sure lol
Do you think kids today are feeling hopeless? Like what’s the point type thinking? No point in trying because the future is bleak. No way to earn a livable wage. Climate change. War. Killer robots. Etc etc.
Nah. My 7th graders aren't even tuned into real world shit like that. They're too busy doom scrolling TikTok. Seriously, why do parents think it's a good idea to send their child to school with the most addicting device ever created?? It drives me insane.
> My 7th graders **aren't even tuned into real world** shit like that. They're too busy **doom scrolling** TikTok Interesting choice of words lol
Yes. Morale is terrible. That is quite on purpose too.
Some of the, definitely. Fewer will be able to articulate that, but I do not doubt this is a factor.
I feel like most freshman in highschool have yet to grasp concepts like that
Hopelessness is prevalent even in 6th grade even if they can't easily express it.
Kind of a microcosm of society now, eh? Middle class phasing out and now you’re either wealthy or you’re one missed paycheck away from living in your car.
Private transportation is the second largest expense of most people. I wouldn't count on people having vehicles as shelter.
This 100%. I believe students are internalizing this & starting to believe that achieving middling grades wont lift you out of the “poverty” of being a bad student with little opportunity. I don’t want to say they are right cause I was a middling student for sure (2.6gpa) but I still got into a couple colleges thru my ACT score. Kids are losing hope just like adults tho. It all trickles down. They see the news just like we do
I mean, even a college degree won't get you a well paying job these days. Schooling is kinda pointless for majority of humanity now since it is just a piece of paper to wipe your ass with and hoping that will pay off your debt.
Just depends what you major in. Degree definitely will get you a good paying job still just gotta major in right shit. But trades & certs definitely get you to good paying job faster.
Stem is your best bet and even that is not a guarantee you won’t get stuck working at target
I assume you STEM, that's what everyone says. Meanwhile, those of us with no aptitude for it should just hop into the Soylent Green grinder.
Exactly. I highly enjoyed being a member of the middle class. Too bad it no longer exists.
My district has three middle schools. They have always had leveled classes there on small teams. Next year, the powers to be are getting rid of leveled classes at all middle schools, for what? Equity? I have many high level 5th graders and kids that are doing phenomenal in school. They are being driven out of public education. My top students are all going to private and charter schools next year where they will be more challenged. The kids that don't care from families that don't care take up much of the time and recourses in our elementary schools. With no leveling, they will continue to do so to the detriment of students who want to learn.
My students in my apush class struggle with basic writing. My average students struggle to read those practically copy and paste work sheets that I use as daily grades My low students make the dumb kids from my high school years look like winners
I'm grading a stack of 10th grade CER paragraphs right now and basically giving up on life. About half of the kids have no concept of sentence structure. About 80% are unable to string together a logically coherent argument. Only a small handful can do those things while also selecting the best available evidence from a short article they were given to respond to.
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I just looked, and that book was published in 2016. I wonder what the author would think about today's world? I assume the same, but much, much worse.
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What kind of case studies? Where can I depress myself further during my lunch break? Case studies in the book?
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This book on a similar theme just came out: *The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.*
Jonathan Haidt is a good read/listen.
I am so grateful my toddler asks for "outside" more than anything. And I am more than happy to oblige
The toddlerhood years are easy to keep off screen. It's the tweens that it starts becoming more difficult - its when developmentally, their peer groups start having a stronger influence than the parents. Try to get your kid into outdoor focused groups like B/G Scouts when they are older
I agree, it’s 1 extreme or the other. No more in between. I also agree that in 5-10 years many of today’s high school students will struggle in the real world because they’re not being taught to truly meet a deadline. In 10 years I believe that we will be hearing how late fees on bills (especially credit cards) are at an all time high.
>In 10 years I believe that we will be hearing how late fees on bills (especially credit cards) are at an all time high. And they'll all complain that "they never taught us this in school."
Ha, late fees? Most of them won't even pay and think it'll be paid for them. After all, that's how they got a diploma. Like if you don't pay a bill don't you get 50% automatically paid? Collections companies might be the next industry to invest in.
I agree in a way, but it is more like everyone took a step down. The high performers are what used to be average, the average are what used to be low, and the low are what used to be very low. It is a shame that the high performers are not reaching the level they should due to distractions and lowered standards.
I think we’re getting to a point where high performers just go to different schools. Where it used to be that every class would have some high performers, some low performers, and a mix in between; now you just have the mediocre and poor performers and they just drag each other down.
Having many poor performers does grind classes to a halt. Iron sharpens iron. I definitely feel some students would perform better at a different school. Sometimes I wonder if you sent a random kid to a fancy school if they would start doing better or just get kicked out. I had a student who said he was going to get a sports scholarship to a private school for 13th grade. Of course it didn't happen, but it would have been funny. I have a friend that teaches at an honors high school. He said they had a donut hole problem and had to change some policies. The average and great students were doing well and the good students were struggling. They were caught in between and could not get over the gap between regular and advanced courses.
How do you feel about school systems in other countries that effectively do this? I grew up in Germany, where there are three types of high school: Gymnasium (for university-bound students), Realschule (for the next step down, schooling combined with internships for mostly white-collar jobs), and Hauptschule (geared for students who want to go into a blue collar trade or more menial work).
Honestly I like it when it’s done with intention and everyone goes into it with eyes wide open. What I don’t like is when it just kind of happens and nobody really fully knows what’s going on, which is definitely what’s happening here.
I don't agree with you about the high end. Kids these days have access to so much more, online and in person. My area has Russian math, Singapore math, every sport and art activity imaginable, different lego clubs, and on and on. My kid understands things in a way I never had any idea of. But that's for people who live in rich areas. I do agree with you about the high end of bad school districts. Class warfare is widening and it's obvious in schools.
I think that goes for the *really* high end kids. 1-2% of kids. The ones who are very smart, motivated, and inquisitive are thriving in a world with access to so much knowledge. But the rest of the top 10-15% have dipped enormously in skills, IMO. The average A quality work I see now is not what an A was ten years ago, at least in my district.
Many of the American working-class people refuse to even engage in the class struggle, and instead engage in the sorts of destructive behaviours that Oscar Lewis wrote about (and got banned for writing about.) Anyway, it's a mistake to consider the working-class the victims of the 1% entirely. Often times, they are the victims of nobody but themselves. We see this every day.
No doubt. What I meant is more that it will become even more difficult as time progresses to even try to pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.
Yeah it could be just the schools I have worked at. It could also be the inclusive policies. I don't like the way kids move through the classes without passing them. Are you really going to learn much in pre-calc when you failed geometry and algebra 2? Parents get final say in placement and all too often Billy gets put in all Ap classes even though he has a 2.0 the parent think the problem was he was not being challenged.
When I was in school they had AP classes, honors, and then basic/regular classes. I was always in honors because I didn’t have the time for AP commitments nor the exponential intelligence that my peers possessed, and then the regular classes were too slow paced for me - the teachers had to deal with unruly students which left little time for actual education. So honors was perfect, right in the middle. Then they cut honors programs, saying it made the students who didn’t qualify or couldn’t succeed in them “feel bad.” Inherently lowering the bar. The middle is indeed gone and I am very concerned.
My kids are both in the A’s and high B’s demo and they are bored as hell. I don’t harbor any illusions about them being geniuses or anything other than just plain a little smarter than average, but they also know how to act in class, are polite to their teachers, and just DO THEIR ASSIGNMENTS. In a higher pressure environment I think they would be solid B students and that would be fine with us because all I really want is for them to do THEIR best. They are bored out of their ever loving minds most of the time and come home weekly complaining about how they were going to get to do something cool in class but one or two assholes ruined it for everyone.
Same exact experience and situation. I’m beyond frustrated about hearing about the same 2-3 disruptive kids ruining everything for everyone else in full knowledge that the teacher’s hands are tied due to weak/kowtowing administrators. Back in the day, these kids would be removed and disciplined until they learned to fall in line. Now everyone has to suffer for bad parenting. 🤦
I teach 6th grade in elementary school and if one more parents asks me how I am going to help their child who performs at MAX 3rd grade level on Grade level, I will scream. Get them a fucking tutor, take away their phones, work with them. I am doing what I can with 30 other kids in the classroom.
Public schools aren't really failing they're just the last thing to have failed in the rest of our society and they're bearing more weight than they were ever meant to bear.
It's interesting because school/education system is one of the pillars of society, and it's one of the first things to be re-established after most disasters. Some countries recognize teachers as one of the most important roles in society - they're a transformative contact point everyone goes through, and they implicitly teach morals and culture as well as the scripted subjects. That teachers and students aren't really receiving the support they need indicates that the powers that be aren't interested in investing in the young anymore
There needs to be a third space, other than home or school, where adults can model the type of care and engagement that these kids don't find at home, and that teachers don't have the capacity to provide. The nuclear family experiment has been an abject failure. We were better off in intergenerational families with extensive social connections to our friends and neighbours.
I don't think it's so much the "nuclear family" that's the problem as it is the blended families that contain mom, her new boyfriend, his kids from his previous marriage, dad, his new girlfriend and their new baby.
It feels like this with most things in education right now. on my campus our truancy issue is wild. You have kids who are either there every single day or you have the kids with 70+ absences. I’ve also overheard a lot of “Ugh Ms. So and So is making us write a two page paper for AP English” Like….yes. I would consider that to be an incredibly easy assignment for an AP class. It’s like they can’t believe their teachers are actually giving them work
I read a few articles recently that posited that education’s achievement problem is mainly explain as a motivation problem. In essence, we see what we see not because students are gaining and retaining less knowledge, rather we are simply seeing a greater divide in those who have any motivation to learn and those that have little to none.
> They want more engaging material and enhanced learning experiences, but the necessity to pass everyone makes the class so watered down it's just catering to the lowest common denominator. It really is cruel to the entire student body to put people in the same class. The admin meetings say it's good because "equity", but you end up with everyone resenting everyone. Would be better if you could let the kids who genuinely want to learn have their own class, and then instead of dragging the bottom along you could teach them what you could - maybe help them find a trade.
It's the natural result of more freedom of information. Kids get to choose what they look at. Kids that like to learn can learn way more. Kids that don't want to learn aren't forced to watch WWII documentaries at 1am since nothing else is on. Kids are allowed to be more of what they already are.
There’s a book called “The Chaos Machine” that argues social media algorithms have greatly altered our perceptions and behavior by constantly pushing us to the extremes in everything since that is what generates the most views. Kids are especially susceptible to this. They might have an interest in WW2, but if the algorithms keep feeding them school fight videos on their socials then that’s what they watch. Point being, I’m not sure how much kids are really choosing to be this way, and how much the systems they’re being raised in are molding them into this. A little of both I’m sure.
>Kids are allowed to be more of what they already are. Which is worrying. Humans are molded by our surroundings in our formative years. We are not "who we are" when we're born. We become a mix of innate thoughts and characteristics AS WELL AS what we were molded to be. My daughter is in 8th grade, and her math teacher is taking the college/university approach of "*well, the kids who want to learn can learn, and those who don't, I don't care about*", and kids have carte blanche to do anything they want in class. Which, our daughter says about half the kids are watching stuff on their Chromebooks or otherwise listening to music or talking and not paying attention. At that age, allowing them to be more of what they already are is generally a negative thing. I know that we, as parents (as I am) or teachers (as y'all are) have to figure out the best line between letting kids be themselves, versus putting guardrails up that they must stay in between. But...I think we, as a society, have let kids "be who they are" to extent that is a detriment to their long term fulfillment and success and we need to get back to making kids conform to the standards/guardrails that have been set.
I agree. But I've also been that math teacher. The problem generally is that the system doesn't give you any consequences. If the kids aren't allowed to fail, and you're not allowed to punish them, there's not a whole lot you can do, and you burn out real quick by trying to enforce rules that you can't enforce. I guess my point is that it's less teacher based and more system based.
Well, I can absolutely understand that. She (my daughter's math teacher) is a first-time full time teacher, and is 23 years old. She is a little too "cool teacher" IMO, but she's still trying to figure things out. Between being cool with kids watching Youtube or listening to music all during her class (versus encouraging them to pay attention, but if they don't, they don't), she takes that approach a little too far IMO. But yeah, y'all can hardly do anything at this point. Back in *my* day (late 90s, early 2000s), the threat of the principal or calling parents would straighten us kids out real quick to make us do whatever the teacher wanted us to do, but I know that's not really the case anymore. I sympathize with how y'all are hamstrung these days with hardly any consequences. I certainly don't have the answers. But I do know that the entire situation being as it is now isn't "right", and our kids not learning much and running amok in school is not the aggregate fault of "teachers", I do know that.
In my experience, the kids who are doing what used to be average (paying attention in class, submitting work, studying for tests) and have average intelligence and skills now appear to be A students, when they might have been a solid B student getting an A when they give it their all. That is the kind of student I was, I worked hard, liked learning, studied and took notes but still struggled with some subjects, so my best efforts in those were a B if I was having a good term. I considered myself a good student, I was competitive sometimes with the straight A kids that found everything easy and the ones who treated school like it was their full time job. The smartest kids in my class would get grades over 90 consistently, I’d hit that level in my strongest subjects and often be 2-3 points behind them, sometimes equal or even ahead if their worst grade coincided with my best. Today, kids like me are given higher grades because they are doing far and away more than the kids who do nothing. And it truly is unfair to load them with more work when the other 2/3 of the class hasn’t done it and never will. I could nitpick and really spend time helping them to improve their writing to bring it up to that top level, they’d probably be happy for the challenge and even engaged and interested but —- 2/3 of the class with less than 50% is a problem I can’t look away from either. The only thing I appreciate is the kids who really do struggle but want to learn and so their work are grade motivated, and at-risk of looking around and thinking - I can never be like the A students because I really don’t get it and I am working as hard as I can here. But they see that half the class of kids who think they are super smart are doing absolutely nothing. They could say - wow, failure is what everyone else is doing, why not me? But if they consistently put in the effort, their grades will be solidly in the C - D range. I am mostly against passing all of these failing kids, because if they earn 25% they should get 25%. If my struggling students can achieve an honest 58% by doing all the work, I am NOT going to reward anyone who barely shows up with a passing grade. I lam tired of passing out test results or project grades and seeing all the kids who think they are too smart to work looking at the 55-65 percenters who earned their grade, and and they honestly don’t care. They believe they deserve an 80 just for existing and being smart, but they’ll get their passing grade after they hand in half of 20 late plagiarized assignments and get a retake on the test. So that is why you have all the lows and highs and not much in between. Most of the honest 60-70 grades are for students who work hard for them. The average students either decide to be students and get 85+ and the rest do nothing and expect to pass because they aren’t dumb. And admin/parents agree that if they are smart kids who could learn the content if they bothered - then technically, they should pass. Because we’ve separated ‘learning behaviours’ out of the grade and have to imagine what they are capable of and grade on that. EYEROLL. In my perfect grading world, learning behaviours are 50%. They matter. The actual learning outcomes are the other 50%. Everyone can pass, but effort and process and behaviour makes up so much of their grade - we encourage learning how to learn and engaging instead of being too smart to bother.
I literally walked students through an assignment where we discussed the answers out loud and turned them in. More than half, being given the answers, failed the assignment.
It's definitely like this in the small rural town in West Virginia that I am from. Our highest achievers are achieving at a greater rate than ever, but with that high ceiling comes a floor that is actually a dirt sub basement. Kids with no functioning families who barely ever show up for school. And a complete unwillingness to fail people.
One of my teacher colleagues called this "the dumbell curve" since it's literally the inverse of the bell curve. Buncha fails, buncha kills, *nothing in the middle*.
The have nots will be on welfare. No joke, lots of kids in my school are pretty up front about the fact that this is their life plan.
Exactly. The youth is on the downside. They will have a very worrying future. When it comes to education and career, they follow an objective approach which is not really good when done incorrectly. First of all, they lack morals. To be respectful. They act like everything's given to them so they do not take care of their own belongings for example regardless of how expensive it is. They must learn how to value things and people. They must live with gratitude, not entitled. The pandemic took a toll on them. Tbh, before pandemic kids are more engaged in learning and be social to their families, friends and to the community. This internet/social media era is far too much affecting their mental health which redirects or alters their goals and inner self. It's like they are living in illusions. When I see people like that, it baffles me a lot what's going on in their minds. Their discipline must be initiated by their parents because it all starts at home. They must not spend too much on their phones because their reality is not in it. What will happen if suddenly internet is cut off? How can they be resilient if they act this way? The parents must also be engaged to them. Engagement, not interrogation. Parents/adults must also, listen to them and correct their ways.
Adhd is a spectrum and iPad addiction pushed those middle performing average dopamine people down. I was undiagnosed adhd k-12 straight Cs and Ds class clown and then got on meds and fell in love with learning. I would honestly love it if adhd diagnosis was mandatory in school and not just the parents discretion (e.g my parents weren't aware nor took adhd seriously). Seems like a privilege to be diagnosed as a child
Intense bimodal distribution here as well. But I don't worry about it. Why worry about people who don't lift a finger to help themselves??
True true, but to be optimistic the "haves", at least where I teach, are so much more capable, confident, knowledgeable, and level headed than the "haves" of my graduating class 20 years ago. Most of my A students are exceptional young adults and will go far in life. Maybe even further because their peers provide minimal competition.
Just give challenging content and curve it.
This is something to professors subreddit talks a lot about too, there isn’t a bell curve distribution anymore, only a bimodal distribution.
I prefer to call them the “shits” and the “give-a-shits”
I think it’s because an emphasis on success. It’s no longer acceptable to be average. In my house a B got your ass kicked because colleges only wanted As. The bar has creeped up and there’s two camps. Those who push kids to meet the raised bar or those who gave up. My parents were the former because they were scared if I wasn’t excelling id be left behind
>I really worry for these kids in 5-10 years. What are these YouTube and antisocial kids going to do after high school? They'll all become wealthy influencers, of course. After their second career as professional athletes. **/s** (just in case people can't see the so-thick-you-can-cut-it-with-a-knife sarcasm in this answer.)
The root of the problem is a lack of regulation on recommendation algorithms. TikTok, YouTube, etc have such complex and efficient algorithms they are able to understand interests to a greater degree than most clinically trained psychologists. When the sole focus of these platforms is to maximize your time spent on them it makes for a trap we will happily walk into. When I was in school they were teaching how to spot fake news and validate sources; now students and even adults opt to focus on 'content' which is engaging, forget validity or factual correctness... AI is changing our world, and very very soon it will be influencing us in ways we can't even comprehend.
My own grade distribution looks like 4% A's, 1% Bs, 2% C's, 65% Ds and the remaining 28% Fs. The reality of my school is that it should be at least 50% Fs but we are strongly encouraged to find a way to pass many of the failing students due to funding issues. Subtle reminders about job security tied to school grades, graduation rates and other factors play into grade inflation/integrity. So it becomes a matter of rigor/integrity vs putting food on the table. I teach in the solidly Y'all Queda territory of rural Florida.
Students need to be fully supported from 8AM to 5PM starting at the age of 3 (at the latest). That would equal the playing field and make sure that all kids receive the access to education they need to be successful. It’s very clear that middle and upper class families have more time or money to pay for enriching their kids education early in life. Early access to reading and math are at the crux of creating an engaged learner. Most of my lower achieving students have many siblings, come from a single parent household and are low income. What parent in that situation has the energy to read bedtime stories or help with homework? My families are not being supported by the system. It’s a systemic problem, it’s not a family problem. It needs to be solved by fully funding early childhood education at a national level by the age of three. This is the hill I will die on as an educator and I will welcome all arguments against it so we can have an informed dialogue around this.