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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by take_five_seconds@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

yea

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[-] Magician@hexbear.net 71 points 8 months ago

I think it's bad, but I also think there's a reddit-logo impulse to prove that others are dumb, even if it's children who are undergoing a severe mental health crisis.

Even if what the users say is 100% true, I didn't see any posts talking about the reality of being a student in a world where you were forced to go back to school when people were still dying of covid, there are mass shooters who will come in because they watched something on Fox News, or that they are seeing climate change ravage their world.

I struggled to pay attention in school because of abuse and my GPA went to 4.0 as soon as I left the house.

Material conditions are a thing we talk a lot about here, but I feel like even then, we can forget about material conditions for children in the US.

I dunno. It's bad to be in school and we're definitely going to feel the consequences for a while. I just hate that the blame is gonna fall on teachers and not the depravity of capitalism.

[-] the_itsb@hexbear.net 40 points 8 months ago

Society blames the teachers, the teachers blame the parents:

Parenting now seems like keeping them alive until it’s time to register for school.

but it is capitalism, of course. Who has time to work 40 hours a week, prepare 2+ meals a day for your whole family, keep yourself and your kids and your home clean, spend time with your kids teaching them things and playing with them, budget your money, plan for the future, exercise, have a hobby, blah blah blah.

It is Not Possible to do all that without help, it just fucking isn't. The only people I know who "have it all" have childcare assistance (family, nannies) and a housekeeper, and even they are having a hard time doing everything.

I wish everyone could stop pretending that anyone does it all successfully all by themselves, but it's not in capital's interest for us to be sympathetic or cooperative.

[-] DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml 55 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I would imagine a lot of these students fail to see the "point" of learning. The US education system is so detached from the reality of these kid's lives that they just find it hard to care about. Why should they?

My generation was sold the lie that if we did well in school we could go to a good university and get a degree and get a really nice job. But that's such an empty, hollow goal for a person's life, and it didn't even turn out to be true, nepotism was and is the way to get a decent job, and these kids probably know it, and they also know that they don't know anyone in high places to get that cushy job.

So I don't really blame them for their apathy in a cold indifferent capitalist society that will probably crumble before they hit 40. Why work hard to get further in such an obviously broken system?

[-] Philosoraptor@hexbear.net 18 points 8 months ago

I do think that this is a huge factor. There's somebody in that thread who claims to be a pre-k teacher, and mentions that things like days of the week, colors, shapes, etc. have been removed from the pre-k curriculum for being "developmentally inappropriate," but kids are expected to do complex phonics exercises. I teach (mostly) 11th/12th grade in a very weird public school that isn't subject to these trends, but I have friends who teach k-12 in more standard schools that complain a lot about contemporary curriculum design. Everything is decontextualized and disconnected from everything else. The standard English curriculum mostly reads short passages to prepare for standardized tests rather than books. Math is almost entirely problem sets to prepare for standardized tests. None of it is connected to anything else, and teachers really have to go the extra mile to provide any kind of context or explanation for why students are learning the things they are in the order they are (and doing so means less time to teach to the standardized tests, which negatively impacts funding and teacher performance metrics). The insane focus on standardized testing and "metrics" is a problem at almost all levels, and has been an unmitigated disaster for educational performance. The purpose of all of this, of course, is to mold kids into ideal wage slaves for our billionaire overlords, which is why contemporary curriculum focuses so heavily on drilling mechanical skills and test performance rather than a broad understanding of the natural world and our place in it. No Child Left Behind and its successors have been a catastrophe.

[-] flan@hexbear.net 54 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

millennials with some spillover to gen x and gen z are the only people on earth who know how computers work, when they're gone it's going to be a bad time

[-] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago

I feel like I should get into a tech job. I know a lot about computers but never bothered to learn to code. I could absolutely do any IT work but would rather get that coding money. I have started learning a few times but couldn't keep up with it in my limited free time. I've got some more time now so maybe I should get back into before there's another hiring boom.

[-] MF_COOM@hexbear.net 45 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I would take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt. There's someone in there claiming their AP human geography class didn't know what even numbers were. You really get the sense that there's a real creep in a lot of these stories from "I had a kid who did X..." to "My students do X...", all without any requirement to justify how some bad outcome is worse that it was in the past. shrug-outta-hecks teachers can be drama queens, and redditors can be idiots.

I'm sure there are districts in the US with dramatically under-resourced classrooms, but this has always been true. Right now there is a real zeitgeist where I live as well to try to tell this story that the kids are categorically worse as well, but honestly most of that is complete hash, or at the very best complicated. Covid did cause some general developmental delay and that is a real concern, but generally kids aren't much different than they used to be and in a lot of ways that are really important they're the best generation that's ever existed.

[-] Ho_Chi_Chungus@hexbear.net 32 points 8 months ago

Yeah, and a bit of me wonders just how many of these stories we'd be getting if teachers had reddit back in 2003. I'm seriously doubtful that something has so dramatically changed about public schooling in the last 10 years to go from "sort of okay" to "Idiocracy (2005)"

[-] Beaver@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago

The anecdote about even and odd numbers strikes me as less of a story about them not knowing, and more about them being so completely disengaged from the class that they're just not really listening to the teacher.

[-] rootsbreadandmakka@hexbear.net 41 points 8 months ago

I have kids who don't know how to start a new email. They just go back and reply to the first email I ever sent them all year long and never change the subject line. Others know how to start a new email but they write the body of the email in the subject line and leave the body blank. One kid was properly blown away that I could attach documents to emails…

Tbf I know a ton of adults like this. Zoomers about to have the email communication skills of old racist boomers

[-] D61@hexbear.net 13 points 8 months ago

Given that every email client is different and there's a generational thing of "kids just kNoW aBoUt CoMpUtErS", this isn't surprising. If nobody is teaching the kids they won't know.

[-] Shinji_Ikari@hexbear.net 27 points 8 months ago

I was talking to a younger coworker the other day and he said he has friends who can barely spell and sorta just sound it out and pick from the top 3 keyboard suggestions like they're typing Mandarin.

The loss of phonics in schools and the general teaching to the test is really hurting students.

My BiL is in high school. He's not a dumb kid but struggles in class. I found one of his essays laying around and the spelling and grammar were all over the place.

[-] Chapo_is_Red@hexbear.net 22 points 8 months ago

The loss of phonics in schools and the general teaching to the test is really hurting students.

What you described is your coworker's friends doing phonics. The problem is that English is only semi-phonetic. Ime, most people learn English spelling with lots of memorization and repeated exposure to the target words.

[-] Shinji_Ikari@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago

Yeah I was aware, they're ~25 so they still got the tail end of phonics. It seems the later stages of school sorta left them behind though.

[-] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 26 points 8 months ago

A lot of this seems really overblown, and the whole viral trend of teachers complaining about student being behind feels off to me. I'm a teacher. Not for k-12, so maybe I just haven't run into it yet, but this doesn't match my experience.

[-] Mokey@hexbear.net 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

i mean, where do you teach?

i met a young adult who cant read a few months back

edit: oh you dont teach k-12, that's prolly selection bias there

i had close friends that couldn't do basic math and knew plenty of people outside of my circle who had horrible reading/writing skills, didnt know shit about history, never got past basic algebra.

[-] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 14 points 8 months ago

that's prolly selection bias there

Probably. I don't have experience teaching younger kids, and my kid is still too young for me to have any first hand experience with the school system, but I've not run into anyone with the problems a lot of these videos are talking about.

I'm certainly not saying they're made up, but the fact that so many of them are attributing these problems to covid "lockdowns" and not the state of education in the US that has existed for decades has me questioning how widespread the problem is beyond what would be considered "normal" levels of underdevelopment.

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[-] Elon_Musk@hexbear.net 10 points 8 months ago

On the one hand it would greatly benefit capital if this is happening. On the other hand it would greatly benefit capital to convince you that this is happening.

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[-] Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net 24 points 8 months ago

It’s a bigger sign of a class divide. You find kids like this in public urban schools with a police presence within the school. You don’t see this as much at the better public suburban schools.

[-] SuperZutsuki@hexbear.net 12 points 8 months ago

I don't know how true that is. I had a roommate that was a high school math teacher and the suburban kids seem just as checked out as anyone else from what he's said. There's a small cadre of "good students" but it sounds like the majority would rather start being a wage slave than be in school.

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[-] grey_wolf_whenever@hexbear.net 22 points 8 months ago

imo this content feels a little bit like millenials making themselves feel better about those dumb gen z/alpha kids.

[-] Beaver@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Reminds me a bit of Jaywalking: just kind of making fun of people, rather than a call to action.

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[-] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I want to add that there are high-performing students out there. However, from my experience, the gap between the "gifted/honors" population and the "general" population has widened significantly. Either you have students that perform exceptionally well or you have students coming into class grade levels behind. There are rarely students who are in between.

There are nerds who will learn no matter what and there are students who need a push either from the parent or the teacher. With online classes, there isn't much the teacher can do to compel students to study and if parents don't do it either then they'll end up falling behind.

[-] FourteenEyes@hexbear.net 37 points 8 months ago

How could the parents do it when most of them were working at the time as well?

We're witnessing the knock-on effects of being completely unprepared for COVID in every way, and then our government scrambling to bail out the stock market and give away trillions of taxpayer dollars to corporations for free. This requires revolutionary change to fix.

[-] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yea Im not blaming the parents either, >40hour work week can be brutal.

What I'm saying is it's not exclusive to the U.S. but present across all capitalist countries post-2020.

Atleast in most Western countries there were stimulus cheques, in much of the global south, IMF and World Bank forced the countries to limit deficit which was devastating and of course, whatever increase in deficit went to the big business.

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[-] KurtVonnegut@hexbear.net 20 points 8 months ago

"During their presentation I got the distinct impression they had no idea where pearl harbor actually was. So during the questions I asked, "Where is pearl harbor?" Without a moment's hesitation they replied, "My research did not reveal that information to me."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1axhne2/the_public_needs_to_know_the_ugly_truth_students/krockyu/

[-] bbnh69420@hexbear.net 17 points 8 months ago

The children are becoming chatGPT

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[-] FoolishFool@hexbear.net 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The inevitable results of capitalism intentionally knee-capping public education by underfunding education and underpaying school staff, to keep as dumb a populace as possible while also creating justification to further privatize schooling/restrict a good education to the rich.

[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 17 points 8 months ago

Can confirm as a substitute.

Personally, I blame chan culture becoming more and more mainstream, so it's "cool" to be stupid.

Thankfully, I've had some really sweet, hardworking kids but it sometimes takes me aback when I'm teaching a sixth grade class and they have no idea what a 'vertebrate' is. Like come on, I learned that from Spongebob.

[-] GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 35 points 8 months ago

Personally, I blame chan culture becoming more and more mainstream, so it's "cool" to be stupid.

It's absurd to act like channers are responsible for rather than another product of America's long-running anti-intellectual tradition, which you can pretty easily date back over a century with philistine panderers like Theodore Roosevelt through to Ronald Reagan and now Trump.

[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 21 points 8 months ago

Theodore Roosevelt.

Man, liberal me was in for a rude awakening when I learned the truth about him.

bloomer: "Oh wow, an environmentalist who calls himself a progressive and is also both the nerd and the jock at the same time? Based!"

One radicalization later

doomjak: "Oh..."

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[-] 0x0520@hexbear.net 15 points 8 months ago

so it's "cool" to be stupid

Perhaps it's escalated, but that's definitely not new.

[-] Elon_Musk@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago

Or even really a notable part of chan culture tbh

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[-] Elon_Musk@hexbear.net 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Do you think there's anything more sinister at work here than just capital being bad ? Even if things are old half as bad as that sub makes them out to be it seems like just such a horrible thing.

Edit; and by capital being bad I mean profit seeking off of education and the desire for a limitless supply of uneducated consumers/workers.

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[-] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 15 points 8 months ago

I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor. The US has always had shitty educational outcomes (look at our literacy rates) compared to even much poorer countries. Biggest villain here is austerity, which has only worsened in recent years. I’ve seen several news stories about districts having to go down to 4 or even 3 days a week since they literally can’t keep the doors open, either due to lack of funds or lack of teachers (which is just a lack of funds by another name).

The teachers are doing the best they can but trying to pin it on the parents is wrong headed too. By the time a kid is in high school they’ve spent 8 hours a day at school for half the year for 8 years, like at that point if they haven’t been taught how to do simple math there’s something very wrong with the system itself, and it’ll never be fixed because rich people don’t give a shit since their schools are good (funded through property taxes) or they go to private schools

[-] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago

I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor.

This has been the huge majority of the viral videos I've seen, which is another reason it doesn't smell right to me.

[-] Mokey@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

yeah this, the gulf between my shithole public education and what i see interacting with upper middle class people as an adult is huge

[-] johnmccainstumor@hexbear.net 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Fellas, I have a solution. We round up all the children and we force them to live on a farm and do communism together. Then every fall, we get the twitch streamers to come to the farm and select which children should be taken to another farm and taught to read, then we take half the children who can read as selected by the twitch streamers and take them to another farm where twitch streamers choose their jobs (the ones that stay on the farm exist purely to watch the twitch streamers), and when the children can read and have jobs on the third farm the twitch streamers select the best out of all of them to make the next generation of twitch streamers. Those that are selected to move to another farm and fail are not sent back to the first farm (or is kicked out of the first farm), is moved by high speed rail to the pits to mine valuable asbestos to make twitch steamer branded blankets. We cannot let those who those who know how to read or work possibly teach those who do not. This is how we build a perfect socialist society, we must follow the tenets of communism with grifter characteristics and create slave plantations.

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[-] bbnh69420@hexbear.net 14 points 8 months ago

Hope hexbear doesn’t overcorrect in the other direction on this one. Public (ie most publicly available) Education has been hamstrung for decades in service of private profit, and as a result, students have having a more difficult time learning and behaving in an academic setting. The fact that the issue is systemic doesn’t mean that anecdotes about individual experiences are inherently false or covering for capital

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[-] FodlegBob@hexbear.net 10 points 8 months ago

You really falling for this?

[-] FodlegBob@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago

do i need to say more about this community

[-] sevenapples@lemmygrad.ml 30 points 8 months ago

Yes you do, the screenshot you posted is correct. Depression is on the rise for every demographic including students. I assume it's the same with anxiety and other mental illnesses

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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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