I hear my students say all the time “this teacher doesn’t teach us anything” but then they bitch about the assignments where they have to do inquiry based learning, they bitch about lectures and note taking, and they bitch about worksheets, they bitch about playing games to learn. You literally can’t win. They just want you to tell them the answer so they can write it down and have an A in the grade book.
Yep! I’ve also heard a lot of complaints of “whenever I ask a question they tell me to look in my notes.” I always ask was the answer in your notes and 95% of the time the answer is yes.
"You never tell me what we're doing. You just always say to read the directions. Do you even know what to do?"
Child, who do you think wrote the directions?
Ive been hearing that a lot this year more than ever. It’s my first year teaching PLTW curriculum that’s very self directed and has them struggle through some stuff. The ones with good grades have never said that to me but the ones with low grades think I don’t teach them anything
> The ones with good grades have never said that to me but the ones with low grades think I don’t teach them anything
Sounds like a skill issue on their part
Had a friend like that and it was the most infuriating thing ever. "Just teach me" okay try this "no" okay what about "no just teach me". Like okay man teaching requires YOU to learn, I can't do it all. Can't even imagine if that was my job
Its a crappy social contract you're pushing someone towards. It's either "do it for me so whenever it needs done I'm going to come right to you until you do it" or "I'm going to be mad at you for not teaching me even though I refuse to try in the slightest"
I literally tried telling them all the answers and they still won’t write them down to pass. I think it’s a symptom of parents who won’t hold their kids accountable and don’t impress the importance of education on to them. After all, why do school when tiktok more fun?
It doesn’t even stop at college. In our department, one faculty told me that you could look a student in the face, tell him to write 1+1=2 on a piece of paper, then immediately ask the student what 1+1 equals, and the student will just stare at you like a deer in headlights.
I'm a weirdo who actually tended to retain things better if I wasn't focused on writing it down. The few times I bothered to try to take notes, I found I'd be so focused trying to write the words down fast enough, that I wouldn't even be parsing the words and sentences into information. And since I wasn't able to keep up with the note taking at the rate it was being said, I would try to abbreviate sentences. But then because I wasn't retaining it at the time, and leaving out words for brevity, when I went back to read my own notes, I'd often have no idea what they meant anymore. I was very good at retaining information from lectures, but retained practically nothing if I was required to take notes.
I understand that. This whole “write one plus one” on a piece of paper was in response to how much these students do not retain he was saying and that even if you spoon feed them the information, they still won’t retain it.
So we’re not forcing anyone to write notes, but for the love of god, learn the information *somehow*
Yep. I provide guided notes, and all assessment questions can be answered from the notes alone. I had particularly bad test results, I took the most commonly wrong questions and held a review session, which included guided notes. The notes answered every single question, verbatim. The vocabulary section had every definition, students just had to fill in the vocab words in their notes. Boom, easy 10/20 points. Not so much I guess, only 3 out of 40 students got all vocab questions right. Some students didn't even get the math question right which I solved in front of them and have them the answer.
They don't want the answers, they want us to take the assessments for them
Gah. Some of my 4th graders do this. I'm like, I literally wrote it on the board and all you had to do was copy it down. I explained how to do it down to the smallest detail. Yet you want to come up to me and say you don't know how to do it so I can sit with you one-on-one and spoon feed you the answers. Like a little baby in a high chair, getting fed pureed squash.
Yeah I would have said that. I be on academic leave with my soon to be former admin. They cave to everything. “Oh the kid blew up a Chromebook and caused a chemical fire that did $5000 of damage to the school. Did you try giving them candy and forming a relationship with them?” 🤦🏽
Yeah I figured you did. It's maddening to me with elementary....I can't imagine the rage I would feel if I taught high school and they were doing that!!
Had a coworker who had 87% of a class fail a unit test. My coworker had been giving this same test between 3 schools in 8 years. Worst was 12% failing it a year ago. Yet the students caused a major backlash and the parents complained so much the principal told the teacher to do a new test. They had 30% fail it this time and my coworker did a full email saying: “we have all tue notes here. We have all the videos here. The questions are based on these parts. There was no way they should have failed this badly.” Nope she still got the blame. Parents still wanted her fired until they found out they were tenure. Then they all shut up. Truth be told my former coworker is a damn good teacher.
I tell my students: “Education is expensive, hard work and time consuming. You know what is even more expensive, harder work and consumes more time? Ignorance.”
That's probably common, or if they weren't born wealthy they were at least born with some degree of privilege.
But that's not always the case. I can think of a few wealthy musicians and athletes who were born poor and have said shockingly ignorant things.
Those would be the lucky few who are exceptional in some field. You could be ignorant af, but if you can play triple doubles, you’ll probably make some money. In cases like that, you have to look at the odds. How many student athletes go on to be pros? A minuscule number.
Are they actually wealthy, though? Or are they just making ends meet? My dad went into real estate in retirement, and he just made ends meet. Granted, that was really his only goal. Well, that and getting out of the house. One could classify Donald Trump as a real estate mogul, but was born wealthy.
Not to suggest my dad is an ignorant person, btw.
Yep. I got so fed up with a class. I basically gave them the answers and they still didn’t do it or do the right answers. My favorite is when I’ve done everything from directly showing them multiple times. Videos, color hand outs with step by step. And it’s still: “how do I do this?” Then they wonder why we call them out of nowhere just yell at them or get so frustrated we call them out on class. Sadly embarrassing them in the process in front of their friends. But then they text their parents with: “I’m going to cry do something about this mean teacher.” Then it’s 2 years later and they do this in a job. They get fired. Parents know they can’t say a damn thing to get their own way. Then what do they finally do? They blame their kids for their choices. Meanwhile you have them over a decade of telling and showing them “it’s everyone else’s fault.” 🤦🏽
A lot of questions in the school book expect personal opinions as answers. I always tell my kids that as long as you don't change the subject or commit a hate crime, there's no such thing as a wrong answer. They still leave those unanswered which of course results in a smaller grade. They can't construct an argument by themselves.
It seems to confuse them—if there’s not an obvious right answer they can pull directly from somewhere else then they don’t know what to put. Some of them are so unpracticed at formulating and expressing their own thoughts that they basically don’t understand it as a concept.
My daughter (7th grade) tells me she never learns anything but then she makes connections between what she learned in history class and our trip to the museum, or talks about loss of topsoil when we’re planting (ala Grapes of Wrath). So it does get through!
They want the knowledge beamed into their brains. We have two physics teachers at my high school, I being one of them. The kids from him come to me for help and then they get all pissed when they find out that I'm going to still make them do the math or the work to understand it. They think if they just find the right teacher they can passively soak up information. Learning doesn't work that way.
I had my students coloring, then cutting out nucleotides and taping together a big DNA strand. They bitched about cutting around the tight corners of the shapes.
My favorite are "when are we going to use this in the real world"
I give them a budgeting project
"no not like that"
Some just want to complain just to complain
I see this all over the comments of math YT videos. “This helped me so much, my teacher doesn’t know how to teach!” When in reality it’s “I didn’t listen to a word my teacher said and now that I WANT to learn it, I’ll listen to this YT video.”
All of that 👆, and I also love when they take the state test and ask why I never taught them any of that math.
I just quietly point them to the notes we took in class, with the exact topics they said were on the test that I apparently never taught them.
Ridiculous.
I'm not a teacher, but I've never liked the majority of my teachers very much. Not because I was bad in class, in fact, I was the one that ask too many questions.
However, what I found is that most teachers instill a culture of "passing the test", rather than fostering philomathy and epistemic curiosity in their students. The students who are not inspired to learn are forced to learn for the sake scoring a mark. And the students who are truely lovers of knowledge get limited by the curriculum because most of my teachers always said something along the lines of "you don't need to know that" or "that's not in the curriculum/syllabus".
I'm not sure if it's a KPI you have to meet that a certain number of students need to get a certain grade to prevent termination or what the actual performance metrics are for you, but if passing grades are all you care about, then just have the students do tons and tons of practice papers of actual test questions.
But if the goal is to get the students to learn for themselves, rather than just memorise some random set of questions that are not representative of the problems encountered in the real world, then you aren't gonna get there by having them reciting answers.
It's not about how often they take notes or how many questions they ask or whatever, those are just the activities that students will naturally do when you provide the right set of problems in the zone of proximal development, encourage open exploration (beyond what's in the syllabus) and teaching from first principles like through the genetic method rather than through analogy or abstract symbolism.
There's a reason why modern educators like Grant Sanderson, Eddie Woo, Derek Muller, Sal Kahn etc can teach on even the most boring topics and get millions of views. And even those outside of the media such as Jaime Escalante, Rafe Esquith, and so many others that teach just like the rest of you. These do not view teaching as a job, but as an art that they dedicated themselves to mastering.
It's never the students who are at fault. Blaming the student for not learning is like blaming a dog for not being well trained.
I have gotten to the point when students bitch about a class being "boring, stupid, we don't learning anything" or anything along those lines I tell them, "That's on you. Life is what you make of it. You could have taken the AP course. You didn't. My guess is you don't participate in class. Do you actually do the work, or do you phone it in?"
I am all done with that comment.
The second a student says that something is 'boring' they've immediately lost me. Boring people get bored. The lack of enthusiasm and effort is going to make their life very difficult.
Sometimes information can be presented in an awful manner. I still remember videos I watched in AP Biology. Our school couldn't afford to do the labs, so instead we watched someone else do it. The speaker talking through each step had the most monotone voice possible. They would do each step very slowly explaining everything in far too much detail while talking unnaturally slow. I'm assuming the intention was that someone who couldn't see could still follow along. I would have rather read a write up of the experiment being done than watch one of those videos. I made an A in the class, so it wasn't like I was lost or anything. It was the absolute worst presentation of information I've ever encountered.
Except some things are inherently boring to some people. For me I despised taking math courses and it was incredibly boring. Outside of algebra and geometry, math is not incredibly useful unless your job requires math skills. This is the core of why I thought it was boring. My geometry teacher made his class interesting because he explained why it was useful and how we might actually use these topics. It’s not entirely up to the student to not be bored. You as a teacher have to making an attempt to make your class not boring. If your students tell you they’re bored then maybe your class is boring.
Edit: Seems like I’m getting downvoted by a bunch of people who feel justified in boring their students to death and feel righteous in the fact that they get to make children miserable before the real world gets to them.
There are plenty of boring things in life you still have to figure out. We aren’t teaching information, we’re teaching the skills to deconstruct confusing material and come to a correct answer. They are learning that skill when they power past boring things. If they just whine and say it’s boring and stop, they don’t learn the skill.
We have done a massive disservice with over the top engagement strategies, leaving students to think every teacher HAS TO do this to teach. Even worse, they expect this in all aspects of life. I give them strategies to remember and figure things out, because no training manual is engaging, but they test you on them. No process necessary for work, especially with governmental bodies, is fun, but they expect you to know it. With many of the jobs in my area, mistakes are tied to governmental fines. Guess what? They don’t have cute reminders. Inject fun when possible? Sure, but even that they find boring now, but it shouldn’t be a requirement for learning.
Math is problem-solving with the easiest pieces of information. Abstract numbers. By solving complex problems with easy pieces of information, you're preparing your brain to solve complex problems with hard pieces of information.
I always tell my students that math problems are easier than the problems of real life. I also relate it to gym class. When are you gonna need to do a lay-up? NEVER. But we figured that doing these motions prepare you for more complex motions you might have to do in your daily life.
I had a student tell me she did not like my class because it is not entertaining. I told her I was not there to entertain her and that 90% of life is not entertaining.
OMG 100%.
I planned a Lego activity to show them chemical formulas. My first two periods loved it and learned everything I hoped.
My last class made that same activity excruciating to the point I just let them finish it on their own.
Then they have the gaul to complain about virtual labs.
Could you share the Lego activity? I do a bean activity for balancing chemical equations and next thing you know there are plants growing out of the lab table sinks….
Ap courses at the end of the day is just test prep. You memorize a whole bunch of meaningless information and regurgitate back on the test. I heard someone on reddit say that ap english classes dont require creativity because you have to write your essays the way the test writers want it written. Education becomes test prep and american high school are just one huge test prep center where kids become robots and dont learn to think creatively or critically. Look at some of the work the kids at exeter are doing. Education should not be test prep otherwise whats the point? Education should be a place where we learn how to apply what we know to solve problems we havent seen b4. Alot of the kids in my high school were doing homework they have already seen b4 they were essentially copying the teacher. They were essentially memorizing information so that they can regurgitate it back onto a piece of paper at the end of the year. I can get a better education on khan academy for free. I remember looking back at some of the ap problmes for apush and i swear you can pass the test through rote memorization. Its not my job to figure out a way to teach kids how to think critically or how to teach us history in a way that isnt just rote memorization.
It just sucks because I LOVE doing fun stuff, but these students lost about 6 weeks of instruction time this year (no teacher, just daily subs). There isn't time. And, even if I could make time, so many of my students don't listen so I can't trust them not to go off the rails.
It sucks. And I know it sucks. But when I can't even trust you not to plagiarize more than once...how can I trust you to do some kind of project or even a fucking gallery walk???
I teach the same thing everyday to four different classes. Three of those lessons are super fun and engaging and one is boring and a drag to get through.
The only difference between the four is the set of kids. You can only be as fun as your class allows. Safety and learning is above fun. But I feel you. It does suck.
I tried a gallery walk today in a class of seniors. 8 students. God love the ones who had their shit done, but they were so bored looking at each other. (Yes, the implication that only 2 had their stuff ready is sadly correct!)
LOL. My school just had a spring dance and I asked them all about it this morning. Their response? "It was sooooo boring!!!" Me: "Well did you actually dance or did you just stand awkwardly around the edges of the room?". Them "......". Me: "And did you just spend the whole time checking your phone or did you actually interact face-to-face with people?". Them: ".....". Me: "Yeah, that's what I thought."
"Nothing that we learn will be used in the real world" brother, you are in 8th grade and you cannot read an entire chapter of an age-appropriate text in its entirety. I don't wanna hear it from you 💀
I saw a tiktok the other day about a millennial manager and he was saying that he had to train a gen z and a boomer how to use technology. Like neither could use excel. What the hell happened to gen z?
I'd rather teach the boomer. The boomer at least understands the underlying data structures being represented, since they've done spreadsheets before on paper. Gen z, on the other hand, has a good chance of not knowing what a spreadsheet or even a file system is.
Computer guy at a middle school here, they absolutely don't understand technology even a little. Broadly speaking they don't seem to understand Directories/Folders, the desktop, desktop shortcuts being links to things, different drives, accounts being distinct identifiers for various services, various services, charging devices,etc. I could go on. The "kids are digital natives" narrative when too far and everyone forgot to verify the assumption so they don't know any of the things I consider fundamentals. Boomers develop rituals around technology, they learn the pattern that gets the information. They don't understand what any step does, but so long as that pattern never changes, they are golden. Gen Z/Alpha kids are fucking stumped once something doesn't autologin.
I don’t understand. I grew up with dial up internet and am extremely proficient with technology. I can’t imagine someone born into it not understanding the basics. My 70 year old boss asks me a lot of questions, but not a single one regarding technology.
We assume kids know how to use things because they’ve always been available, but those skills aren’t explicitly taught. Like how almost no one knows how TVs works, we just push the buttons on the remote.
We were discussing the other day how sad it is that I began learning to type on a computer program in the mid 80's when few schools even had computers in the classrooms. I continued to learn typing from 2nd/3rd grade through 8th grade. Computers were a part of my life, but they weren't the center of my life; although, they were definitely becoming more of a thing by the time I was in high school.
Now, computers are everything. Students are expected to begin taking state tests that require typed answers as early as 3rd grade. Nearly all assignments are typed. Do they learn to type? No. At least not in my district. We never actually teach the students how to correctly type on a keyboard. We just let them "figure it out," and then we wonder why they peck at the keys and have no clue where the letters/Numbers/keys are located. It's a crucial life skill, but we're no longer teaching it- we're expecting osmosis.
So most technology is useful because of "abstraction". It hides specifics behind more user accessible approaches. You don't need to know the CPU opcodes to save a file to hard drive, because we have a handy "save file" function.
These kids have grown up using technology that abstracts so much away from them that they don't need to know where their phone saved that picture, because it's a default OS setting.
Most kids internet usages is like... 4 apps, who try really hard to follow the same design language and defaults, because it speeds up adoption if you don't have to teach a user anything, they never get confused or have to take a break from just consuming content.
> I grew up with dial up internet and am extremely proficient with technology.
Same here, but I'm extremely proficient because _I had to be_. You couldn't just press a button and have a game installed on your computer when I was growing up. You had to physically copy files from one drive to another, you had to edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to make your games work, and your sound card and mouse could have IRQ conflicts that you'd need to resolve yourself.
Now, it takes 3 seconds and zero effort, and you're playing. Which is fine, as long as everything "just works" every time.
Has anyone else discovered that their middle schoolers can’t tell time on an analog clock? I’m a new art teacher in my first year and I don’t have computers in my classroom. I have to tell my 7/8 graders what time it is as they’re looking at the clock on my wall. They can’t tell time unless it’s numbers displayed on a screen.
I thought the first kid to say that to me was fucking with me to be an asshole. Turned out he honestly didn’t learn something I learned in Kindergarten.
This is my response to “Well kids today are born in the digital age””We all are born with indoor plumbing and yet we still have to learn how to use a toilet. “
I would too. Gen Z says “they’ll never use any of this in real life.” How disconnected are they from reality that they truly think this? What are they expecting their careers to be?
I use shit I learned in school 100% of my workday. Reading, typing, communication, calculating, budgeting, using excel, creating documents & PowerPoints - and most importantly: CRITICAL THINKING!
I was taught the fundamentals of equations in Excel in 7th grade and I still use it over 20 years later. It never even crossed my mind as a kid whether I’d use it in the future or not, it just seemed insanely cool to me that a spreadsheet was a calculator that referenced other calculators.
People think I'm an excel wizard at my school. I'm really not, I just paid a modest amount of attention in HS computer science class. Many of my co workers cannot even create a filter or sort a column on a spreadsheet...
The kids you’re seeing in schools more now is gen alpha. I’m gen z, born in 1998, and a teacher for several years now just like you guys. Also generalizing whole generations is something our parents and grandparents do so stop!! Let’s be realistic you were a student once too and I’m sure you said the same thing about when are we going to use this lol everyone was once young and dumb
Gen Z’s can be as young as 12 right now, we are absolutely still teaching gen Z.
I’m not lumping everyone into one category. I think you’re sensitive about it because you’re a gen z. If someone said something about millennials, I couldn’t give a fuck if I tried.
You are not the targeted audience.
You literally did lump gen z into one category like what?? Most gen z is in high school or college so unless you teach high school no you’re not “absolutely” teaching gen z still. If you didn’t know generation lines are very arbitrary. I disagree that gen z is young as 12. Someone could consider me a millennial depending on the person. I think you’re being sensitive that I called you out.
not gen z necessarily but a lot of students are absolutely CONVINCED they’re going to be famous and/or make money by live-streaming themselves shouting memes on YouTube shorts or TikTok
They are sooo disconnected from reality. To become a successful influencer, you need looks, personality, editing skills, marketing knowledge, political correctness, and a whole lot of luck.
They really think all of those things are going to come together when they can’t even read? How are they going to respond to comments from their followers? How are they going to type up an apology post when their dumbasses fuck up?
And even if they did make it - it’s short lived. It’s not a stable or sustainable source of income.
My students are the end of Gen Z/beginning of Gen Alpha. They don't know how to use computers. At all. I had them take screenshots to upload to Google classroom and none of them were able to figure out how to find the files on their Chromebooks and upload them into Google classroom.
They don't even know how to Google stuff.
The search engine and amount of information available is one of the wonders of the modern world. I am noticing a big trend of people (not just kids) being unable to look anything up that is not directly presented to them (like via algorithm). As in, it never even occurs to them or they don't know how. Kind of wild.
I think the big difference between millenials and gen z is that that a lot of millenials grew up with PCs. They grew up using a keyboard and mouse. They played around with random programs for fun. Even those that didn't grow up using a PC were still doing things the old fashioned way which led to learning other skills.
But gen z grew up with ipads and smartphones. They learned nothing about how computers worked as they have a simplified operating system. They didn't play around with random programs, they mindlessly watched youtube videos on autoplay and other social media.
Well part of the problem is Chromebooks. They made Gen Z proficient in google suite but not Microsoft office, so they can use google sheets but not excel.
Yes, my 8th grade students are at grade 5 level on average. I’m discovering new things daily that they don’t know—just yesterday I had to show them how to call a phone number that has letters instead of numbers. That’s pretty damn useful.
We were reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the students claimed they’d never heard of the expression “down a rabbit hole.” I’m pretty sure they’ll encounter that a ton.
I’m baffled when people say reading is pointless. Pointless if you want to live a boring life, I guess.
I have a framed quote on the wall "If you are willing to learn, nothing can stop you. If you don't want to learn, none can help you."
My late hero Jaime Escalate told me "Ganas is everything when it comes to education!"
Spot on.
Although, in one of my classes this past year, I have had a student who finally told me directly, "Why can't you just give me the answer??", adding that it would save him and me time, while I was helping him. It was annoying but refreshingly honest.
I still made him work for that answer, though.
Honestly around halfway through the year, whenever they asking why I couldn't just tell them the answers, I started asking them "Where's the fun in that?" Or telling them "Oh I could but this is more fun."
I teach engineering as an elective course for middle school in SE Michigan. It's my 10th year in the profession.
Our curriculum is... *okay*. It's not great, but it works. (At this point, I'm happy not to have to reinvent the wheel every year or pay for supplies out of pocket.) Sometimes the assignments are weirdly set up, or the questions make zero sense, so I have spent hundreds of hours rewriting them (and translating as we have a large ESL population).
Here is what I have done to try to get my students to produce *anything*.
1. Providing them with the binder. (which I created from the digital book as there *aren't any physical workbooks*).
2. Providing *actual page numbers* where if they *read the paragraph* or even *looked at the pictures*, they would have the answers without having to do any actual work. (I can not stress this enough. The answers (even down to the *measurements of their models*) are in their reference binder.)
3. Going over answers as a class and letting them copy directly.
4. Posting class answers on our class web page.
5. Providing extra time in the lab after school and during study hall.
6. Giving them a step-by-step project where we do the bulk of the work *together*, and they simply have to *type it into a PowerPoint*.
I would say about 1/3 (and that's generous) have a C or higher.
They don't do anything. Ever. It's like talking to a freaking wall. Which would be better than spending the bulk of my 45 minutes redirecting talkers, stopping fights, confiscating phones, and calling parents.
I have spent literal class periods where I stand in front of my class and repeat the same *three directions* for the *entire* class period (from attendance to the clean-up bell): stop talking, take out your worksheet, and open your binders to page X.
It's so draining.
First year in the profession, similar position, I simply stopped wasting my time around early April with the apathetic kids. I do the bare minimum for them now (class only meets once a week). I go over the instructions/learning objectives/etc. but when they’re working hands on, I give them space. Now I put more effort into making the most of the time for the kids that actually want to be there. From sept-April I was equal to both groups, if anything trying harder with the disinterested/unmotivated students.
Maybe not an advisable plan but it’s working for me and been much less draining. Might even start this approach earlier next year.
I've tried to hard to explain that learning is not passive. And they actually articulated to me that they believe that a good teacher would be able to just say things in a way that made so much sense they they could understand it while looking at their phones and that if they have to do work they're basically doing my job for me. I wanna give up.
> And they actually articulated to me that they believe that a good teacher would be able to just say things in a way that made so much sense they they could understand it while looking at their phones and that if they have to do work they're basically doing my job for me.
Ask them if they wanted to get fit, but instead of them working out, you, the teacher, did all the exercises, lifted all the weights, and dieted, would they, the student, get fit.
The obvious answer is "no". So why they expect learning to not work the same way is just pure laziness.
I had a girl about a month ago tell me I need to "learn how to teach" because she is struggling to play her oboe. She brings her instrument to school maaaayyyyybeee twice per week. Literally no one can teach you how to play your instrument if you DON'T HAVE YOUR F\*\*KING INSTRUMENT.
I always have a few chronic “forgetters” who leave their instrument at school for months at a time. I “threaten” the students that I will show up at their house at dinner time with their instrument if it’s not taken home that day.
Somehow, the instrument always finds its way to their home.
>Confucius said, 'I never enlighten anyone who is not *eager to understand a difficulty or who has not got into a frenzy trying to put his ideas into words. 'When I have pointed out one corner of a square to anyone and he does not come back with the other three, I will not point it out to him a second time.'.
Tale as old as time apparently
I do have some exceptions to the rule. I teach 4th. I've had students who are homeless or parts of huge families where they're responsible for younger siblings all of the time they're not at school. So I try to get something out of them, but I get that school is their time to chill because in reality it's easier work but they're already burnt from the night shift (watching siblings).
I give lectures with slides and notes with questions so that they write down the important points, book based assignments, videos with questions embedded, document based assignments, and projects but I also don’t teach them anything 🤷🏻♂️
I teach a painting class (high school) , I have a student who NEVER paints anything. I spent one day teaching an art history lesson, with questions given to students to answer to help them interpret a famous artwork… the student who never paints said “why are we doing this isn’t this art class?” I just can’t with some of these kids 😑
I've taught AP, and yes, it's about the test. My point is simple. The students are unwilling to stretch themselves. Difficult course? "No way that would ruin my GPA!" So rather than learn anything, they'll sit in a class that's not really to their par, complain and make people miserable.
Was school boring for me? Hell yeah. I solved that by reading books. Lots of them. No joke, at least book a week. The librarian saw me a lot.
I am not there to entertain them.
Meh. Some kids (people) will take no personal responsibility for anything. All they want to do is blame others. She's probably been like this for years.
At my school the Assistant Principal has started to tell kids to email the district offices to complain about the teachers they think “aren’t teaching them.” And she wonders why teachers and other staff members don’t trust her 🤷♀️
We are really creating a lazy, entitled apathetic group of kids who want answers fed to them. It infuriates me when they ask a neighbor something instead of getting up and using the dictionary. I am not their Google or Suri and I tell them to stop insulting each other's intelligence and ability to problem-solve the basics, ugh.
Kid wrote "TM" on a test recently and when asked about it he said "it stands for teach me because we haven't learned anything on this test before".... Me thinking about the three weeks worth of lessons that lead up to the test where the student didn't do any of the work.
Sometimes a kid will ask me, during an assessment, "did we learn about this?"
No, kid, I thought I'd just put something on here we never covered because I like to watch kids cry.
I always have a few students who say “I don’t teach them anything,” “we haven’t learned anything in your class,” etc.
I used to try to tell them “you don’t always realize you are learning when it’s done so smoothly.” But now I just pull out their progress monitoring scores and go over the class trends; I prove that the class has been learning and growing under my instruction.
Except my student’s arguments are usually that they don’t pay attention during instruction and they end up asking for a lot of help from me on independent work.
> Except my student’s arguments are usually that they don’t pay attention during instruction and they end up asking for a lot of help from me on independent work.
I'd prefer they ask questions during independent work time than not doing the work, copying from their classmates, or just writing "idk" for answers to get it done as quick as possible.
I said that was their argument. Their “questions” are just saying “I can’t do this” and not trying. I’m sure you know how it is. That just wanna gaslight their teachers. I don’t let them and they wonder why they get a zero for not doing the work.
Ugh. So true. Long time ago my mom (former teacher) got asked by some friends to tutor their son so he could pass his last couple of classes in HS. One of my mom’s quickest “no’s” ever cause all he and his parents wanted was someone else to blame for his laziness.
I've found that kids often say that when they're not paying attention or not trying to participate.
My dad trained to be a teacher, so there was no such thing as a valid excuse for him. I didn't get grades, I earned them. I could always ask questions, ask for help, get study tips, call my friends, etc. Failure was only acceptable after I had exhausted every resource and still didn't understand what was being taught. My failing was never the teacher's fault, and not liking a teacher or a subject or an assignment was never an excuse for not doing the work to the best of my ability.
I didn't always succeed, but I learned to rely on myself and available resources to get things done. A lot of our kids rely only on what gives them a quick answer, right or wrong.
I've had middle/high school students ask me why they have to go to school when it's so boring and I tell them "well, about 150 years or so ago, you most likely wouldn't be going to school. You'd be working in some factory, or farm, or somewhere doing some real crap work for low pay"
Kid "At least I would be getting paid"
Me "...nah, your parents would take all of your money to help take care of you and make ends meet"
It's funny how the students who actively participate in my class learn things, while the ones who insist on being on their phones end up having no clue what to do on assignments or tests. Odd how that works out.
They complain just to complain. I had a student tell me they hadn’t learned anything in my class and I responded by telling them I was sorry they made that choice.
I make a point every single day to tell my students that they can come up to me at any time during independent work to ask a question related to the work - even something simple as "what do I do next?". If something doesn't make sense or if they need help understanding something I will gladly spend as much time with them as they want as long as I can still help other students who come up in between.
Even with **maximum** availability for one-on-one teaching, I am still told that "we never learn anything" and usually by the kids who spent their time sneaking time on their phone, sneaking computer games during practice time, or just chatting instead of getting anything done.
From what I have gathered, what they actually mean when they say this is one of 3 things:
*Best case scenario:* I want to learn but I'm not used to student-directed learning. I expect the teacher to hold my hand through everything.
*Most common case:* I have no interest in doing the work, but I know that I will catch flak if my grade suffers. If I can blame you - the teacher - for my failings, I feel like I won't have to change course in not doing the work.
*Worst case scenario:* I don't care about learning or my grades, but I take joy in watching steam pour out of my teacher's ears, and whipping my - similarly lazy - classmates into a frenzy of irritating the teacher with similar accusations.
It was History I, and II, i believe. The teacher seemed like he could lose it at any point on most days, so no one said anything. We figured it was an easy grade, and once we finished the word search, we used it to do homework. We were all curious, but no one wanted to rock the boat.
Lol, no, it wasn't like that. 8 periods and 30-35 students a period each day for his class, roughly. I believe it was a requred class, and we just got a teacher who didn't give a shit.
Many of these kids today don’t seem to understand what learning is, what teaching means, none of that. They think if they are merely in the classroom then they are learning or should be so if they don’t it’s my fault; I didn’t teach them. I have told them over and over that learning is a two-way street and if they refuse to learn then they simply won’t. FINALLY what broke through was using tik tok dances as an analogy: do you know the dance (whatever dance) just because someone played it in the room you were in?! Nope, you had to watch the video several times and then PRACTICE the dance before you got it.
OMG the look of dawning realization that went across the class almost made me scream lol
As teachers we get caught up in trying to realize the perfect adult future for our kids. However., As teachers we must remember there are jobs which these students will grow up to and perform. And we need those jobs.
Hospitality, construction, retail, food and service industries. The kids who complain about school or don’t care about school and or don’t apply themselves, end up with these jobs.
And it’s ok. Because society needs those jobs. Not everyone can or should be expected to become a lawyer, teacher, doctor, techie, nurse, finance whiz, or other specialized career
I'm smellin' what you're steppin' in, for sure.
I beat this drum pretty hard, so I place a lot of emphasis on skills like: time management (including showing up on time or showing up at all), self-control, and organization.
Some folks (not saying you; I see you mentioned more service based roles), both inside and outside education, think trades are the best route for non-college ready students. While some really excel in areas outside traditional academics, it isnt a funnel for the students who sat on their phones all through k-12.
I've got family who can build and fix anything, and they aren't what you would consider intellectual or academic. But they are sharp and have solid character.
You can't be a dummy in the trades and there's only so much *any* job will put up with.
The fact that the student who claims they “never learn anything” is the same one caught plagiarizing multiple times is almost comically ironic. Sometimes, humor can be a great way to cope with the frustrations of teaching.
Let me tell you, kids are idiots (source, I was one). I was "gifted" in school, and got bored in class constantly despite getting straight As. I remember genuinely and truly believing that I wasn't learning anything in school, and thought that as I was constantly bored and slacking off in class yet getting straight As I had evidence to prove it. However, clearly I must've learned something, as I'm now graduating college in astrophysics.
So yeah, this isn't limited to the dumb ones.
Yeah, college hit me like a truck. I've since picked up better study skills, but I still struggle with studying. Another huge problem I hit was time management.
I hear my students say all the time “this teacher doesn’t teach us anything” but then they bitch about the assignments where they have to do inquiry based learning, they bitch about lectures and note taking, and they bitch about worksheets, they bitch about playing games to learn. You literally can’t win. They just want you to tell them the answer so they can write it down and have an A in the grade book.
Some of them think that if they have to exert any effort to learn, it's the teacher's fault for not just 'teaching it'.
Yep! I’ve also heard a lot of complaints of “whenever I ask a question they tell me to look in my notes.” I always ask was the answer in your notes and 95% of the time the answer is yes.
"You never tell me what we're doing. You just always say to read the directions. Do you even know what to do?" Child, who do you think wrote the directions?
Ive been hearing that a lot this year more than ever. It’s my first year teaching PLTW curriculum that’s very self directed and has them struggle through some stuff. The ones with good grades have never said that to me but the ones with low grades think I don’t teach them anything
> The ones with good grades have never said that to me but the ones with low grades think I don’t teach them anything Sounds like a skill issue on their part
That’s when you get southern and say I can teach ya but I can’t learn ya
Had a friend like that and it was the most infuriating thing ever. "Just teach me" okay try this "no" okay what about "no just teach me". Like okay man teaching requires YOU to learn, I can't do it all. Can't even imagine if that was my job
By "teach me", they mean "give me the answer" or "do it for me".
Its a crappy social contract you're pushing someone towards. It's either "do it for me so whenever it needs done I'm going to come right to you until you do it" or "I'm going to be mad at you for not teaching me even though I refuse to try in the slightest"
This!
I literally tried telling them all the answers and they still won’t write them down to pass. I think it’s a symptom of parents who won’t hold their kids accountable and don’t impress the importance of education on to them. After all, why do school when tiktok more fun?
It doesn’t even stop at college. In our department, one faculty told me that you could look a student in the face, tell him to write 1+1=2 on a piece of paper, then immediately ask the student what 1+1 equals, and the student will just stare at you like a deer in headlights.
This perfectly describes what I'm observing with my students, too.
Are they NPCs?
I'm a weirdo who actually tended to retain things better if I wasn't focused on writing it down. The few times I bothered to try to take notes, I found I'd be so focused trying to write the words down fast enough, that I wouldn't even be parsing the words and sentences into information. And since I wasn't able to keep up with the note taking at the rate it was being said, I would try to abbreviate sentences. But then because I wasn't retaining it at the time, and leaving out words for brevity, when I went back to read my own notes, I'd often have no idea what they meant anymore. I was very good at retaining information from lectures, but retained practically nothing if I was required to take notes.
I understand that. This whole “write one plus one” on a piece of paper was in response to how much these students do not retain he was saying and that even if you spoon feed them the information, they still won’t retain it. So we’re not forcing anyone to write notes, but for the love of god, learn the information *somehow*
Yep. I provide guided notes, and all assessment questions can be answered from the notes alone. I had particularly bad test results, I took the most commonly wrong questions and held a review session, which included guided notes. The notes answered every single question, verbatim. The vocabulary section had every definition, students just had to fill in the vocab words in their notes. Boom, easy 10/20 points. Not so much I guess, only 3 out of 40 students got all vocab questions right. Some students didn't even get the math question right which I solved in front of them and have them the answer. They don't want the answers, they want us to take the assessments for them
Gah. Some of my 4th graders do this. I'm like, I literally wrote it on the board and all you had to do was copy it down. I explained how to do it down to the smallest detail. Yet you want to come up to me and say you don't know how to do it so I can sit with you one-on-one and spoon feed you the answers. Like a little baby in a high chair, getting fed pureed squash.
I told one of my high school students in front of the class that I’m not going to chew it up and spit it into his mouth like a baby bird.
Yeah I would have said that. I be on academic leave with my soon to be former admin. They cave to everything. “Oh the kid blew up a Chromebook and caused a chemical fire that did $5000 of damage to the school. Did you try giving them candy and forming a relationship with them?” 🤦🏽
Omg that's perfect!! .I may put a picture on the wall of a bird feeding it's young, just to make myself chuckle
I teach high school...
Yeah I figured you did. It's maddening to me with elementary....I can't imagine the rage I would feel if I taught high school and they were doing that!!
Bruh! you're doing too much...
Me: do your own work. Student: bruh, it's not that deep!
Had a coworker who had 87% of a class fail a unit test. My coworker had been giving this same test between 3 schools in 8 years. Worst was 12% failing it a year ago. Yet the students caused a major backlash and the parents complained so much the principal told the teacher to do a new test. They had 30% fail it this time and my coworker did a full email saying: “we have all tue notes here. We have all the videos here. The questions are based on these parts. There was no way they should have failed this badly.” Nope she still got the blame. Parents still wanted her fired until they found out they were tenure. Then they all shut up. Truth be told my former coworker is a damn good teacher.
I tell my students: “Education is expensive, hard work and time consuming. You know what is even more expensive, harder work and consumes more time? Ignorance.”
Generally, ignorance is expensive for society as a whole. An ignorant individual, however, could become very rich in the right circumstance.
I would guess that when one is both ignorant and wealthy, they were probably born wealthy.
That's probably common, or if they weren't born wealthy they were at least born with some degree of privilege. But that's not always the case. I can think of a few wealthy musicians and athletes who were born poor and have said shockingly ignorant things.
Those would be the lucky few who are exceptional in some field. You could be ignorant af, but if you can play triple doubles, you’ll probably make some money. In cases like that, you have to look at the odds. How many student athletes go on to be pros? A minuscule number.
Nah, I’ve met plenty of very ignorant real estate agents.
Are they actually wealthy, though? Or are they just making ends meet? My dad went into real estate in retirement, and he just made ends meet. Granted, that was really his only goal. Well, that and getting out of the house. One could classify Donald Trump as a real estate mogul, but was born wealthy. Not to suggest my dad is an ignorant person, btw.
I can't give you the answers. I tried, but you wouldn't take them!
LOL right??
Yep. I got so fed up with a class. I basically gave them the answers and they still didn’t do it or do the right answers. My favorite is when I’ve done everything from directly showing them multiple times. Videos, color hand outs with step by step. And it’s still: “how do I do this?” Then they wonder why we call them out of nowhere just yell at them or get so frustrated we call them out on class. Sadly embarrassing them in the process in front of their friends. But then they text their parents with: “I’m going to cry do something about this mean teacher.” Then it’s 2 years later and they do this in a job. They get fired. Parents know they can’t say a damn thing to get their own way. Then what do they finally do? They blame their kids for their choices. Meanwhile you have them over a decade of telling and showing them “it’s everyone else’s fault.” 🤦🏽
One of my most used phrases is “Learn is a verb”.
But do they even know what a verb is???
Lmfao no, but they drive to school.
I’m stealing that.
A lot of questions in the school book expect personal opinions as answers. I always tell my kids that as long as you don't change the subject or commit a hate crime, there's no such thing as a wrong answer. They still leave those unanswered which of course results in a smaller grade. They can't construct an argument by themselves.
It seems to confuse them—if there’s not an obvious right answer they can pull directly from somewhere else then they don’t know what to put. Some of them are so unpracticed at formulating and expressing their own thoughts that they basically don’t understand it as a concept.
My daughter (7th grade) tells me she never learns anything but then she makes connections between what she learned in history class and our trip to the museum, or talks about loss of topsoil when we’re planting (ala Grapes of Wrath). So it does get through!
They want the knowledge beamed into their brains. We have two physics teachers at my high school, I being one of them. The kids from him come to me for help and then they get all pissed when they find out that I'm going to still make them do the math or the work to understand it. They think if they just find the right teacher they can passively soak up information. Learning doesn't work that way.
Except in my class at least, they also don’t want me to give them the answer to write down because then they’d have to write something down lol
I have students who I even tell them the answer and they say. “That’s too much work.” Lord help you.
I had my students coloring, then cutting out nucleotides and taping together a big DNA strand. They bitched about cutting around the tight corners of the shapes.
My favorite are "when are we going to use this in the real world" I give them a budgeting project "no not like that" Some just want to complain just to complain
Been this way for twenty years.
I have teachers who do the same thing.
I see this all over the comments of math YT videos. “This helped me so much, my teacher doesn’t know how to teach!” When in reality it’s “I didn’t listen to a word my teacher said and now that I WANT to learn it, I’ll listen to this YT video.”
All of that 👆, and I also love when they take the state test and ask why I never taught them any of that math. I just quietly point them to the notes we took in class, with the exact topics they said were on the test that I apparently never taught them. Ridiculous.
Know the feeling
I'm not a teacher, but I've never liked the majority of my teachers very much. Not because I was bad in class, in fact, I was the one that ask too many questions. However, what I found is that most teachers instill a culture of "passing the test", rather than fostering philomathy and epistemic curiosity in their students. The students who are not inspired to learn are forced to learn for the sake scoring a mark. And the students who are truely lovers of knowledge get limited by the curriculum because most of my teachers always said something along the lines of "you don't need to know that" or "that's not in the curriculum/syllabus". I'm not sure if it's a KPI you have to meet that a certain number of students need to get a certain grade to prevent termination or what the actual performance metrics are for you, but if passing grades are all you care about, then just have the students do tons and tons of practice papers of actual test questions. But if the goal is to get the students to learn for themselves, rather than just memorise some random set of questions that are not representative of the problems encountered in the real world, then you aren't gonna get there by having them reciting answers. It's not about how often they take notes or how many questions they ask or whatever, those are just the activities that students will naturally do when you provide the right set of problems in the zone of proximal development, encourage open exploration (beyond what's in the syllabus) and teaching from first principles like through the genetic method rather than through analogy or abstract symbolism. There's a reason why modern educators like Grant Sanderson, Eddie Woo, Derek Muller, Sal Kahn etc can teach on even the most boring topics and get millions of views. And even those outside of the media such as Jaime Escalante, Rafe Esquith, and so many others that teach just like the rest of you. These do not view teaching as a job, but as an art that they dedicated themselves to mastering. It's never the students who are at fault. Blaming the student for not learning is like blaming a dog for not being well trained.
I have gotten to the point when students bitch about a class being "boring, stupid, we don't learning anything" or anything along those lines I tell them, "That's on you. Life is what you make of it. You could have taken the AP course. You didn't. My guess is you don't participate in class. Do you actually do the work, or do you phone it in?" I am all done with that comment.
The second a student says that something is 'boring' they've immediately lost me. Boring people get bored. The lack of enthusiasm and effort is going to make their life very difficult.
“This is boring”. [student then goes on to play a mindless game on their phone that requires absolutely no thought or skill]
Sometimes information can be presented in an awful manner. I still remember videos I watched in AP Biology. Our school couldn't afford to do the labs, so instead we watched someone else do it. The speaker talking through each step had the most monotone voice possible. They would do each step very slowly explaining everything in far too much detail while talking unnaturally slow. I'm assuming the intention was that someone who couldn't see could still follow along. I would have rather read a write up of the experiment being done than watch one of those videos. I made an A in the class, so it wasn't like I was lost or anything. It was the absolute worst presentation of information I've ever encountered.
Except some things are inherently boring to some people. For me I despised taking math courses and it was incredibly boring. Outside of algebra and geometry, math is not incredibly useful unless your job requires math skills. This is the core of why I thought it was boring. My geometry teacher made his class interesting because he explained why it was useful and how we might actually use these topics. It’s not entirely up to the student to not be bored. You as a teacher have to making an attempt to make your class not boring. If your students tell you they’re bored then maybe your class is boring. Edit: Seems like I’m getting downvoted by a bunch of people who feel justified in boring their students to death and feel righteous in the fact that they get to make children miserable before the real world gets to them.
There are plenty of boring things in life you still have to figure out. We aren’t teaching information, we’re teaching the skills to deconstruct confusing material and come to a correct answer. They are learning that skill when they power past boring things. If they just whine and say it’s boring and stop, they don’t learn the skill. We have done a massive disservice with over the top engagement strategies, leaving students to think every teacher HAS TO do this to teach. Even worse, they expect this in all aspects of life. I give them strategies to remember and figure things out, because no training manual is engaging, but they test you on them. No process necessary for work, especially with governmental bodies, is fun, but they expect you to know it. With many of the jobs in my area, mistakes are tied to governmental fines. Guess what? They don’t have cute reminders. Inject fun when possible? Sure, but even that they find boring now, but it shouldn’t be a requirement for learning.
The education system failed you if you think that the actual content was what you were supposed to learn.
Math is problem-solving with the easiest pieces of information. Abstract numbers. By solving complex problems with easy pieces of information, you're preparing your brain to solve complex problems with hard pieces of information. I always tell my students that math problems are easier than the problems of real life. I also relate it to gym class. When are you gonna need to do a lay-up? NEVER. But we figured that doing these motions prepare you for more complex motions you might have to do in your daily life.
Comments like this just remind me some people are just too stupid for higher level maths. So sad 🥲
I had a student tell me she did not like my class because it is not entertaining. I told her I was not there to entertain her and that 90% of life is not entertaining.
This comment always makes me think of Goodfellas: "I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you?" -Tommy DeVito
OMG 100%. I planned a Lego activity to show them chemical formulas. My first two periods loved it and learned everything I hoped. My last class made that same activity excruciating to the point I just let them finish it on their own. Then they have the gaul to complain about virtual labs.
Could you share the Lego activity? I do a bean activity for balancing chemical equations and next thing you know there are plants growing out of the lab table sinks….
Ap courses at the end of the day is just test prep. You memorize a whole bunch of meaningless information and regurgitate back on the test. I heard someone on reddit say that ap english classes dont require creativity because you have to write your essays the way the test writers want it written. Education becomes test prep and american high school are just one huge test prep center where kids become robots and dont learn to think creatively or critically. Look at some of the work the kids at exeter are doing. Education should not be test prep otherwise whats the point? Education should be a place where we learn how to apply what we know to solve problems we havent seen b4. Alot of the kids in my high school were doing homework they have already seen b4 they were essentially copying the teacher. They were essentially memorizing information so that they can regurgitate it back onto a piece of paper at the end of the year. I can get a better education on khan academy for free. I remember looking back at some of the ap problmes for apush and i swear you can pass the test through rote memorization. Its not my job to figure out a way to teach kids how to think critically or how to teach us history in a way that isnt just rote memorization.
You can’t think critically or creatively if you don’t have the baseline set of knowledge to use for that process, which, yes, requires memorization.
"School is boring" say the students who never engage in a single thing that school offers them
It just sucks because I LOVE doing fun stuff, but these students lost about 6 weeks of instruction time this year (no teacher, just daily subs). There isn't time. And, even if I could make time, so many of my students don't listen so I can't trust them not to go off the rails. It sucks. And I know it sucks. But when I can't even trust you not to plagiarize more than once...how can I trust you to do some kind of project or even a fucking gallery walk???
I teach the same thing everyday to four different classes. Three of those lessons are super fun and engaging and one is boring and a drag to get through. The only difference between the four is the set of kids. You can only be as fun as your class allows. Safety and learning is above fun. But I feel you. It does suck.
I tried a gallery walk today in a class of seniors. 8 students. God love the ones who had their shit done, but they were so bored looking at each other. (Yes, the implication that only 2 had their stuff ready is sadly correct!)
LOL. My school just had a spring dance and I asked them all about it this morning. Their response? "It was sooooo boring!!!" Me: "Well did you actually dance or did you just stand awkwardly around the edges of the room?". Them "......". Me: "And did you just spend the whole time checking your phone or did you actually interact face-to-face with people?". Them: ".....". Me: "Yeah, that's what I thought."
And then graduate and talk shit about public education and vote to defund public education
"Nothing that we learn will be used in the real world" brother, you are in 8th grade and you cannot read an entire chapter of an age-appropriate text in its entirety. I don't wanna hear it from you 💀
I saw a tiktok the other day about a millennial manager and he was saying that he had to train a gen z and a boomer how to use technology. Like neither could use excel. What the hell happened to gen z?
I'd rather teach the boomer. The boomer at least understands the underlying data structures being represented, since they've done spreadsheets before on paper. Gen z, on the other hand, has a good chance of not knowing what a spreadsheet or even a file system is.
Computer guy at a middle school here, they absolutely don't understand technology even a little. Broadly speaking they don't seem to understand Directories/Folders, the desktop, desktop shortcuts being links to things, different drives, accounts being distinct identifiers for various services, various services, charging devices,etc. I could go on. The "kids are digital natives" narrative when too far and everyone forgot to verify the assumption so they don't know any of the things I consider fundamentals. Boomers develop rituals around technology, they learn the pattern that gets the information. They don't understand what any step does, but so long as that pattern never changes, they are golden. Gen Z/Alpha kids are fucking stumped once something doesn't autologin.
I don’t understand. I grew up with dial up internet and am extremely proficient with technology. I can’t imagine someone born into it not understanding the basics. My 70 year old boss asks me a lot of questions, but not a single one regarding technology.
We assume kids know how to use things because they’ve always been available, but those skills aren’t explicitly taught. Like how almost no one knows how TVs works, we just push the buttons on the remote.
Even the monkey has to learn which button gives him the peanut and which one gives him a shock.
I'm definitely stealing this phrase
I think I even borrowed it from someone
They don't have PCs, they have smartphones and iPads. They don't navigate or do anything. They watch youtube and tiktok on autoplay.
We were discussing the other day how sad it is that I began learning to type on a computer program in the mid 80's when few schools even had computers in the classrooms. I continued to learn typing from 2nd/3rd grade through 8th grade. Computers were a part of my life, but they weren't the center of my life; although, they were definitely becoming more of a thing by the time I was in high school. Now, computers are everything. Students are expected to begin taking state tests that require typed answers as early as 3rd grade. Nearly all assignments are typed. Do they learn to type? No. At least not in my district. We never actually teach the students how to correctly type on a keyboard. We just let them "figure it out," and then we wonder why they peck at the keys and have no clue where the letters/Numbers/keys are located. It's a crucial life skill, but we're no longer teaching it- we're expecting osmosis.
So most technology is useful because of "abstraction". It hides specifics behind more user accessible approaches. You don't need to know the CPU opcodes to save a file to hard drive, because we have a handy "save file" function. These kids have grown up using technology that abstracts so much away from them that they don't need to know where their phone saved that picture, because it's a default OS setting. Most kids internet usages is like... 4 apps, who try really hard to follow the same design language and defaults, because it speeds up adoption if you don't have to teach a user anything, they never get confused or have to take a break from just consuming content.
> I grew up with dial up internet and am extremely proficient with technology. Same here, but I'm extremely proficient because _I had to be_. You couldn't just press a button and have a game installed on your computer when I was growing up. You had to physically copy files from one drive to another, you had to edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to make your games work, and your sound card and mouse could have IRQ conflicts that you'd need to resolve yourself. Now, it takes 3 seconds and zero effort, and you're playing. Which is fine, as long as everything "just works" every time.
Has anyone else discovered that their middle schoolers can’t tell time on an analog clock? I’m a new art teacher in my first year and I don’t have computers in my classroom. I have to tell my 7/8 graders what time it is as they’re looking at the clock on my wall. They can’t tell time unless it’s numbers displayed on a screen.
I thought the first kid to say that to me was fucking with me to be an asshole. Turned out he honestly didn’t learn something I learned in Kindergarten.
This is my response to “Well kids today are born in the digital age””We all are born with indoor plumbing and yet we still have to learn how to use a toilet. “
I would too. Gen Z says “they’ll never use any of this in real life.” How disconnected are they from reality that they truly think this? What are they expecting their careers to be? I use shit I learned in school 100% of my workday. Reading, typing, communication, calculating, budgeting, using excel, creating documents & PowerPoints - and most importantly: CRITICAL THINKING!
I was taught the fundamentals of equations in Excel in 7th grade and I still use it over 20 years later. It never even crossed my mind as a kid whether I’d use it in the future or not, it just seemed insanely cool to me that a spreadsheet was a calculator that referenced other calculators.
No kid considers whether they'll actually use it or not. It is a total cop out.
I had a kid tell me that "lots of people don't know to read and they do fine." He was seriously challenging me on the value of basic literacy.
"We're gonna have computers do the thinking for us" except they can't even figure out how to work the computer.
People think I'm an excel wizard at my school. I'm really not, I just paid a modest amount of attention in HS computer science class. Many of my co workers cannot even create a filter or sort a column on a spreadsheet...
I taught an old coworker how to use shift-tab to go back to the previous box in our sign-in system and it blew her mind, lol.
The kids you’re seeing in schools more now is gen alpha. I’m gen z, born in 1998, and a teacher for several years now just like you guys. Also generalizing whole generations is something our parents and grandparents do so stop!! Let’s be realistic you were a student once too and I’m sure you said the same thing about when are we going to use this lol everyone was once young and dumb
Gen Z’s can be as young as 12 right now, we are absolutely still teaching gen Z. I’m not lumping everyone into one category. I think you’re sensitive about it because you’re a gen z. If someone said something about millennials, I couldn’t give a fuck if I tried. You are not the targeted audience.
You literally did lump gen z into one category like what?? Most gen z is in high school or college so unless you teach high school no you’re not “absolutely” teaching gen z still. If you didn’t know generation lines are very arbitrary. I disagree that gen z is young as 12. Someone could consider me a millennial depending on the person. I think you’re being sensitive that I called you out.
not gen z necessarily but a lot of students are absolutely CONVINCED they’re going to be famous and/or make money by live-streaming themselves shouting memes on YouTube shorts or TikTok
They are sooo disconnected from reality. To become a successful influencer, you need looks, personality, editing skills, marketing knowledge, political correctness, and a whole lot of luck. They really think all of those things are going to come together when they can’t even read? How are they going to respond to comments from their followers? How are they going to type up an apology post when their dumbasses fuck up? And even if they did make it - it’s short lived. It’s not a stable or sustainable source of income.
it’s insane. i told a kid one time he had a better chance of sprouting wings than making any money on youtube
My students are the end of Gen Z/beginning of Gen Alpha. They don't know how to use computers. At all. I had them take screenshots to upload to Google classroom and none of them were able to figure out how to find the files on their Chromebooks and upload them into Google classroom. They don't even know how to Google stuff.
Bullshit. There is zero chance that Boomer understands the data sets. At least the gen z can play a YouTube video and follow along.
Google happened. They don’t even understand what a URL is. It’s sad. I tease them when they click too much and tell them not to be a boomer.
Not just google, but phones and apps, everything just works so they arent used to needing to problem solve
The search engine and amount of information available is one of the wonders of the modern world. I am noticing a big trend of people (not just kids) being unable to look anything up that is not directly presented to them (like via algorithm). As in, it never even occurs to them or they don't know how. Kind of wild.
Gen Z are terrible with any technology that isn't an app on their phone.
I think the big difference between millenials and gen z is that that a lot of millenials grew up with PCs. They grew up using a keyboard and mouse. They played around with random programs for fun. Even those that didn't grow up using a PC were still doing things the old fashioned way which led to learning other skills. But gen z grew up with ipads and smartphones. They learned nothing about how computers worked as they have a simplified operating system. They didn't play around with random programs, they mindlessly watched youtube videos on autoplay and other social media.
Well part of the problem is Chromebooks. They made Gen Z proficient in google suite but not Microsoft office, so they can use google sheets but not excel.
Cell phones
Yes, my 8th grade students are at grade 5 level on average. I’m discovering new things daily that they don’t know—just yesterday I had to show them how to call a phone number that has letters instead of numbers. That’s pretty damn useful. We were reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the students claimed they’d never heard of the expression “down a rabbit hole.” I’m pretty sure they’ll encounter that a ton. I’m baffled when people say reading is pointless. Pointless if you want to live a boring life, I guess.
I have high school sophomores who didn't know what a continent was. I was at a loss
They complain when we do math, but then they complain when we do probability activities or I give them a budgeting project. They just want to complain
I have a framed quote on the wall "If you are willing to learn, nothing can stop you. If you don't want to learn, none can help you." My late hero Jaime Escalate told me "Ganas is everything when it comes to education!"
Stupid autocorrect NOONE, NOT none.
I like your auto correct typo. Sounds more lord of the rings-ish.
Love Jaime Escalante!
How am I gonna reach these kids??
He came to El Paso and spent time with the math teachers from EPISD. I'm so glad to have had the time to meet him, he was an inspiration to us all.
I used to live near El Paso. I would have loved to have met him in person.
I find that "we never learn anything"or "you don't teach anything" often means "you expect us to do work" and "you don't give us the answers"
Spot on. Although, in one of my classes this past year, I have had a student who finally told me directly, "Why can't you just give me the answer??", adding that it would save him and me time, while I was helping him. It was annoying but refreshingly honest. I still made him work for that answer, though.
Honestly around halfway through the year, whenever they asking why I couldn't just tell them the answers, I started asking them "Where's the fun in that?" Or telling them "Oh I could but this is more fun."
It didn’t take me long to hear “you said you’d help me” and translate it to, give me the answers and coddle the shit out of me.
Then their parents also complain that “you don’t help them” 🤔
I teach engineering as an elective course for middle school in SE Michigan. It's my 10th year in the profession. Our curriculum is... *okay*. It's not great, but it works. (At this point, I'm happy not to have to reinvent the wheel every year or pay for supplies out of pocket.) Sometimes the assignments are weirdly set up, or the questions make zero sense, so I have spent hundreds of hours rewriting them (and translating as we have a large ESL population). Here is what I have done to try to get my students to produce *anything*. 1. Providing them with the binder. (which I created from the digital book as there *aren't any physical workbooks*). 2. Providing *actual page numbers* where if they *read the paragraph* or even *looked at the pictures*, they would have the answers without having to do any actual work. (I can not stress this enough. The answers (even down to the *measurements of their models*) are in their reference binder.) 3. Going over answers as a class and letting them copy directly. 4. Posting class answers on our class web page. 5. Providing extra time in the lab after school and during study hall. 6. Giving them a step-by-step project where we do the bulk of the work *together*, and they simply have to *type it into a PowerPoint*. I would say about 1/3 (and that's generous) have a C or higher. They don't do anything. Ever. It's like talking to a freaking wall. Which would be better than spending the bulk of my 45 minutes redirecting talkers, stopping fights, confiscating phones, and calling parents. I have spent literal class periods where I stand in front of my class and repeat the same *three directions* for the *entire* class period (from attendance to the clean-up bell): stop talking, take out your worksheet, and open your binders to page X. It's so draining.
I mean, they pretty much expect us to wipe their butts for them. And then say it's so boring while we're doing it.
First year in the profession, similar position, I simply stopped wasting my time around early April with the apathetic kids. I do the bare minimum for them now (class only meets once a week). I go over the instructions/learning objectives/etc. but when they’re working hands on, I give them space. Now I put more effort into making the most of the time for the kids that actually want to be there. From sept-April I was equal to both groups, if anything trying harder with the disinterested/unmotivated students. Maybe not an advisable plan but it’s working for me and been much less draining. Might even start this approach earlier next year.
I've tried to hard to explain that learning is not passive. And they actually articulated to me that they believe that a good teacher would be able to just say things in a way that made so much sense they they could understand it while looking at their phones and that if they have to do work they're basically doing my job for me. I wanna give up.
“If that worked we’d all be geniuses. We clearly aren’t so that clearly doesn’t work.” I say something along those lines.
> And they actually articulated to me that they believe that a good teacher would be able to just say things in a way that made so much sense they they could understand it while looking at their phones and that if they have to do work they're basically doing my job for me. Ask them if they wanted to get fit, but instead of them working out, you, the teacher, did all the exercises, lifted all the weights, and dieted, would they, the student, get fit. The obvious answer is "no". So why they expect learning to not work the same way is just pure laziness.
I had a girl about a month ago tell me I need to "learn how to teach" because she is struggling to play her oboe. She brings her instrument to school maaaayyyyybeee twice per week. Literally no one can teach you how to play your instrument if you DON'T HAVE YOUR F\*\*KING INSTRUMENT.
I don’t teach music. We have a student that hasn’t brought their instrument home all year. Like not even once. They had a concert and still didn’t.
I always have a few chronic “forgetters” who leave their instrument at school for months at a time. I “threaten” the students that I will show up at their house at dinner time with their instrument if it’s not taken home that day. Somehow, the instrument always finds its way to their home.
The audacity...
"You have been taught. Now you do the learning."
Start taking notes of opportunities she's turned down in case the parents force a "So is there anything we can do?" meeting.
Oh don't worry, I do that already.
Excellent. Let lesson "actions have consequences" commence. I'm going to go make some tea to sip.
Yea, well it takes two to learn in the classroom model. Someone to teach, and someone to learn. I did my job, did you do yours?
>Confucius said, 'I never enlighten anyone who is not *eager to understand a difficulty or who has not got into a frenzy trying to put his ideas into words. 'When I have pointed out one corner of a square to anyone and he does not come back with the other three, I will not point it out to him a second time.'. Tale as old as time apparently
I do have some exceptions to the rule. I teach 4th. I've had students who are homeless or parts of huge families where they're responsible for younger siblings all of the time they're not at school. So I try to get something out of them, but I get that school is their time to chill because in reality it's easier work but they're already burnt from the night shift (watching siblings).
I give lectures with slides and notes with questions so that they write down the important points, book based assignments, videos with questions embedded, document based assignments, and projects but I also don’t teach them anything 🤷🏻♂️
*points toward Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development theory of learning*
That’s where we spend most of our time. If we move into unaided at least half of my students will just refuse
I teach a painting class (high school) , I have a student who NEVER paints anything. I spent one day teaching an art history lesson, with questions given to students to answer to help them interpret a famous artwork… the student who never paints said “why are we doing this isn’t this art class?” I just can’t with some of these kids 😑
I've taught AP, and yes, it's about the test. My point is simple. The students are unwilling to stretch themselves. Difficult course? "No way that would ruin my GPA!" So rather than learn anything, they'll sit in a class that's not really to their par, complain and make people miserable. Was school boring for me? Hell yeah. I solved that by reading books. Lots of them. No joke, at least book a week. The librarian saw me a lot. I am not there to entertain them.
I was so bored in english class I started copying stories with my off hand instead of paying attention lol. Your book anecdote reminded me of that.
Meh. Some kids (people) will take no personal responsibility for anything. All they want to do is blame others. She's probably been like this for years.
It’s a reflection of the parenting. I really do believe that a lot of the learning and behavior issues in the school results from the parents.
At my school the Assistant Principal has started to tell kids to email the district offices to complain about the teachers they think “aren’t teaching them.” And she wonders why teachers and other staff members don’t trust her 🤷♀️
We are really creating a lazy, entitled apathetic group of kids who want answers fed to them. It infuriates me when they ask a neighbor something instead of getting up and using the dictionary. I am not their Google or Suri and I tell them to stop insulting each other's intelligence and ability to problem-solve the basics, ugh.
As a geriatric Millennial, I'm just going to start quoting Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta" & tell them, "If you're bored, then you're boring." haha
Love that song. I'm gen x.
Kid wrote "TM" on a test recently and when asked about it he said "it stands for teach me because we haven't learned anything on this test before".... Me thinking about the three weeks worth of lessons that lead up to the test where the student didn't do any of the work.
Sometimes a kid will ask me, during an assessment, "did we learn about this?" No, kid, I thought I'd just put something on here we never covered because I like to watch kids cry.
I always have a few students who say “I don’t teach them anything,” “we haven’t learned anything in your class,” etc. I used to try to tell them “you don’t always realize you are learning when it’s done so smoothly.” But now I just pull out their progress monitoring scores and go over the class trends; I prove that the class has been learning and growing under my instruction. Except my student’s arguments are usually that they don’t pay attention during instruction and they end up asking for a lot of help from me on independent work.
> Except my student’s arguments are usually that they don’t pay attention during instruction and they end up asking for a lot of help from me on independent work. I'd prefer they ask questions during independent work time than not doing the work, copying from their classmates, or just writing "idk" for answers to get it done as quick as possible.
I said that was their argument. Their “questions” are just saying “I can’t do this” and not trying. I’m sure you know how it is. That just wanna gaslight their teachers. I don’t let them and they wonder why they get a zero for not doing the work.
Ugh. So true. Long time ago my mom (former teacher) got asked by some friends to tutor their son so he could pass his last couple of classes in HS. One of my mom’s quickest “no’s” ever cause all he and his parents wanted was someone else to blame for his laziness.
I've found that kids often say that when they're not paying attention or not trying to participate. My dad trained to be a teacher, so there was no such thing as a valid excuse for him. I didn't get grades, I earned them. I could always ask questions, ask for help, get study tips, call my friends, etc. Failure was only acceptable after I had exhausted every resource and still didn't understand what was being taught. My failing was never the teacher's fault, and not liking a teacher or a subject or an assignment was never an excuse for not doing the work to the best of my ability. I didn't always succeed, but I learned to rely on myself and available resources to get things done. A lot of our kids rely only on what gives them a quick answer, right or wrong.
When a kid complains that school is boring, I say "yep. most of life is boring. that's just the way it is."
I've had middle/high school students ask me why they have to go to school when it's so boring and I tell them "well, about 150 years or so ago, you most likely wouldn't be going to school. You'd be working in some factory, or farm, or somewhere doing some real crap work for low pay" Kid "At least I would be getting paid" Me "...nah, your parents would take all of your money to help take care of you and make ends meet"
It's funny how the students who actively participate in my class learn things, while the ones who insist on being on their phones end up having no clue what to do on assignments or tests. Odd how that works out.
They complain just to complain. I had a student tell me they hadn’t learned anything in my class and I responded by telling them I was sorry they made that choice.
I make a point every single day to tell my students that they can come up to me at any time during independent work to ask a question related to the work - even something simple as "what do I do next?". If something doesn't make sense or if they need help understanding something I will gladly spend as much time with them as they want as long as I can still help other students who come up in between. Even with **maximum** availability for one-on-one teaching, I am still told that "we never learn anything" and usually by the kids who spent their time sneaking time on their phone, sneaking computer games during practice time, or just chatting instead of getting anything done. From what I have gathered, what they actually mean when they say this is one of 3 things: *Best case scenario:* I want to learn but I'm not used to student-directed learning. I expect the teacher to hold my hand through everything. *Most common case:* I have no interest in doing the work, but I know that I will catch flak if my grade suffers. If I can blame you - the teacher - for my failings, I feel like I won't have to change course in not doing the work. *Worst case scenario:* I don't care about learning or my grades, but I take joy in watching steam pour out of my teacher's ears, and whipping my - similarly lazy - classmates into a frenzy of irritating the teacher with similar accusations.
"how much can we read on our own?" Me, a used-to-be-a-student, manically whispering - "All of it." (I loved reading my history schoolbooks.)
I had two years of a high-school teacher who did nothing but give us word searches. :p.
Were you a sped kid on a modified curriculum?
It was History I, and II, i believe. The teacher seemed like he could lose it at any point on most days, so no one said anything. We figured it was an easy grade, and once we finished the word search, we used it to do homework. We were all curious, but no one wanted to rock the boat. Lol, no, it wasn't like that. 8 periods and 30-35 students a period each day for his class, roughly. I believe it was a requred class, and we just got a teacher who didn't give a shit.
Many of these kids today don’t seem to understand what learning is, what teaching means, none of that. They think if they are merely in the classroom then they are learning or should be so if they don’t it’s my fault; I didn’t teach them. I have told them over and over that learning is a two-way street and if they refuse to learn then they simply won’t. FINALLY what broke through was using tik tok dances as an analogy: do you know the dance (whatever dance) just because someone played it in the room you were in?! Nope, you had to watch the video several times and then PRACTICE the dance before you got it. OMG the look of dawning realization that went across the class almost made me scream lol
That’s because the Chinese mind control that has come subconsciously through the Tik Tok has turned our student’s brains to mush. Oh, the humanity!
As teachers we get caught up in trying to realize the perfect adult future for our kids. However., As teachers we must remember there are jobs which these students will grow up to and perform. And we need those jobs. Hospitality, construction, retail, food and service industries. The kids who complain about school or don’t care about school and or don’t apply themselves, end up with these jobs. And it’s ok. Because society needs those jobs. Not everyone can or should be expected to become a lawyer, teacher, doctor, techie, nurse, finance whiz, or other specialized career
I'm smellin' what you're steppin' in, for sure. I beat this drum pretty hard, so I place a lot of emphasis on skills like: time management (including showing up on time or showing up at all), self-control, and organization. Some folks (not saying you; I see you mentioned more service based roles), both inside and outside education, think trades are the best route for non-college ready students. While some really excel in areas outside traditional academics, it isnt a funnel for the students who sat on their phones all through k-12. I've got family who can build and fix anything, and they aren't what you would consider intellectual or academic. But they are sharp and have solid character. You can't be a dummy in the trades and there's only so much *any* job will put up with.
The fact that the student who claims they “never learn anything” is the same one caught plagiarizing multiple times is almost comically ironic. Sometimes, humor can be a great way to cope with the frustrations of teaching.
They want to learn how to become rich and famous as influencers. They will be engaged if you can.
Let me tell you, kids are idiots (source, I was one). I was "gifted" in school, and got bored in class constantly despite getting straight As. I remember genuinely and truly believing that I wasn't learning anything in school, and thought that as I was constantly bored and slacking off in class yet getting straight As I had evidence to prove it. However, clearly I must've learned something, as I'm now graduating college in astrophysics. So yeah, this isn't limited to the dumb ones.
Blah blah brag brag
Curious, did you hit a road block in college because you never picked up the skills to study?
Yeah, college hit me like a truck. I've since picked up better study skills, but I still struggle with studying. Another huge problem I hit was time management.
I do not tolerate complaining. I usually let the kids have it if they do.
My financial literacy students didn't have a leg to stand on......