charlotte

I mean, I know several people who have taught special ed because they were working for the district and the district couldn’t find a credentialed teacher, so they put them into a classroom and paid for their intern credential until they cleared it.

The way there was a difference between teachers who taught pre and post-COVID lockdown, there will be a difference between who taught through Trump 2.0 and who did not.

I noticed just now that the point you made in your 300 character post wasn't inescapably all-encompassingly comprehensive in its totality, so I'm afraid it's pistols as dawn

Standardized testing is based around excerpts. So a lot of new curricula follows that pattern.

to the conversation. I talked about both policy and attention spans because the two are related: the policy focusing on short form writing and reading because of standardized tests is leading to a lack of attention and stamina in our students. It’s not their fault, this was created.

You certainly assumed a whole lot from a vent post about a moment of frustration that I expected two people to see. It wasn’t indicative of what is done throughout the day, how I talk to my students, or the entirety of my own background. When more people saw it, I clarified a few things relevant

14 years old, moving up into high school next year.

I worked in the writing center throughout college at a university that was known for engineering. Based on the attitudes my peer clientele had regarding writing back then, your experience surprises me exactly zero.

I understand what you’re saying, but it still made me laugh because I am 29.

Comments about what I SHOULD be doing or who is to blame, especially from people outside of education, are not needed. I also expected basically no one to see any of this, so I’m not going to respond to most people (especially to rude comments about being American).

To be clear, I’m not looking for any sort of suggestions. I am mid-career, department head, and very involved in making decisions for my students. I also have a master’s degree in English literature. I know what I’m doing, I was just venting.

I would ask that you not try and give solutions based on a character limit driven snapshot of the education system. The problem is that this has been the expectation for their entire school lives, and we are working on undoing it.

When I was in school, it was expected that we would learn and discuss material at school, then write essays or passage commentary at home. Writing generally has been practiced at home, since it takes a significant amount of time. We can no longer have students write outside of class.

They simply would rather be doing something else (right now it’s most often watching YouTube shorts). While grades motivate them, they have been given unlimited opportunities to get their grade up throughout their schooling, so they aren’t motivated to try the first time.

About 75%. Most of the kids are born here. Almost all of them read only in English. Their parents are primarily from a country where English is commonly spoken and they often raise their children with English as their primary language.

I also have students several grades below, without the stamina to keep improving. I hardly see the kids who are just. On grade level.
7. They just don’t see the point. The world is burning around them. And they don’t see the point.

Policy is failing our kids. And here is where we’ve landed.

5. We have discovered that if we send any work home that isn’t reading, it will be done by AI. Giving homework is a complete lost cause.
6. What’s missing is the middle students. I have students reading at a 12th grade level, completing everything on time, and able to discuss on a deep level.

4. Due to various district policies, students don’t have hard deadlines. They will always be given more time to complete things. I agree with this in theory, but it has compounded into a complete lack of urgency. Tasks that used to take half a period now take a period and a half.

2. Their third grade year was online.
3. The 8th grade team has been fighting for the past 3 years against a district imposed curriculum that focuses on short stories and excerpts with maybe 1 book a year. We’ve been refusing to comply, but we all have tenure.

A couple points of context:
1. I teach in an affluent district where most of my students are middle and upper middle class. They are often the children of recent immigrants in the tech and medical fields. They have been read to, been in tutoring since forever, and their parents support education.

I never said I thought it is limited to just 8th graders. I was explaining a frustration I had at work, where I work with 8th graders. I am well aware of the literacy crisis in adults, but I simply wasn’t talking about them.

They definitely are not as good as they could be. However, most kids are in school consistently. The problems I see are really mostly related to attention span and motivation.

The worst of the attendance was definitely the first year back from distance learning, when kids had to quarantine often.

To be fair to their third grade teachers, they were in distance learning that year.

Over the last six years, I’ve seen a marked difference in the reading levels of my students. I used to have at least half reading above grade level. Now it’s flipped. Not that it was ever great. But a lack of phonics instruction and a push for teaching to the test has changed things.

Thinking back to when I had the current 12th graders in 8th grade… They were miles ahead of this.

In case anyone didn’t believe in the literacy crisis among the kids, my eighth graders loudly complained about being given a six page story and it took many of them about an hour and a half to read it. And then lots of them said they didn’t get very basic things in the story. And I’m so tired.

It’s honestly shocking how often I am just casually reading and then people eating gluten free catches a stray with some snarky comment in the narrative.

If I wasn’t already invested, this celiac would dnf because WHY do we need to make fun of what people eat???

Three panel cartoon by Tina Menzel A cat sitting on a table next to a big sign that says 2025 Cat looks down at 2025 Cat pushes 2025 off the table

Welcome to my life. Gluten is not considered a common enough allergen to put in the allergen statement, only wheat is. But gluten can be in barley and rye too.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.