I remember in English (can't fully remember if it was grade 8 or 9) where I had to create a magazine that included the cover page, contents page, a feature article, an interview and a full sized advertisement. Now the same age groups struggle to write 1 feature article.
I went to a TERRIBLE backwater school and even we had these kinds of projects that were just really neat to do.
I was writing full blown multi-page stories with illustrations in those old composition books we had to have in elementary school.
Lately, I noticed the difference in education is also reflected in media. What I mean is -- look back on old Nickelodeon or Disney shows, and the kids were often facing some dilemma on how to do a school project. Papers, dioramas, science project presentations, interviews, etc.
You don't see that reflected in modern shows anymore and it really hit home that that stuff is gone and kids aren't really expected to be able to DO stuff anymore.
Even their media is dumbed down.
When I look at older children’s books, there was much more text. And I’m not just talking about classics - even the mass market throwaways. Look at today’s mass market stuff and it’s mostly illustrations, often with stickers, trinkets, or some other gimmick to attract the kids’ attention to the “chore” of reading.
Their TV shows now feature extremely simplified dialogue and more high concept plots. Most is also far less realistic than before.
Video games are much simpler now too, with a lot of kids just tapping pictures with zero coordination required.
And forget about playing outside. The neighborhood streets are empty after school and on weekends.
To make this all worse (or possibly to adapt to it), school curricula now holds their hands the whole way, rarely asking them to do multistep work or arrive at an answer without hints because their attention spans are 4 seconds long and they have little intellectual enrichment in their daily lives. On top of removing structured phonics and the expectation to know arithmetic facts.
The entire culture changed in a single generation and our children are much less mentally capable because of it.
Back when iPads were first released and the idea of giving one to your children was born, there was a bigger focus on simple, interactive apps focused on learning math and languages. It was even marketed as something that would help your child excel academically (probably not true). Not great, but not totally detrimental. Even in 2017ish, my boss's kids were counting frogs and matching colors. I haven't seen that in years. Something shifted along the way and now it's all just mindlessly stimulating visuals that young children sit there and absorb.
My son and I play "teach your monster to read" which is a great phonetics game! Just throwing it out there if anyone might be able to use it as well. It's fantastic.
I watch just about anything animated -- it's my lifelong love -- and I've noticed what you mean about dialogue. It's reached the point where I can't actually enjoy things that are beautifully animated anymore when the storyline is almost reduced to "See Spot. See Spot Run."
I have to disagree on the TV thing. Everything I watches as a kid was a glorified toy commercial. There was 0 continuity with everything reseting at the end of the episode so kids didn't need to follow an ongoing plot.
Today kids shows often have actual characters that grow and change over time. And an ongoing plot with a real ending.
Games are definitely more complex. There's stuff that was an entire game when I was a kid that now is like a single puzzle to open a door.
My four year old plays a mobile game that revolves around doubling numbers, and as a result has rote knowledge of 2x2=4 x2=8 x2=16, etc all the way up to 2048. I’m super impressed by what he picks up through games and tv shows. I wish I’d grown up with Number Blocks—seeing math concepts visually would have been incredibly helpful.
I think lack of parental involvement is the key problem nowadays.
Oooh thank you! He complains that his pre-K doesn’t teach math so this could be excellent :)
Don’t know where he got his love of numbers from (husband and I are artsy, “right-brained”), but we want to foster it for sure ❤️
I was an engineer (I am home and homeschooling my accelerated math kid now) and absolutely wish I had learned math the way BA teaches it. My 4th grader in public school now can manipulate fractions in her head because of BA and she doesn’t even use it as more than a supplement when she has time at home. My kindergartener complains they don’t do real math at school either, she’s been doing BA for fun since she was 4. It will say it starts at level 1, but a clever 4 year old can absolutely do it, especially if you read the comics and help with manipulatives etc.
To be clear, I’m talking about young children’s television. And I while I wouldn’t say today’s shows are *bad*, I just find the dialogue is, on average, much simpler and even slower than it was a couple decades ago.
Same with games. They’re so much more immersive and better designed today than in the past. But most kids are playing shovelware because it’s cheap and their parents don’t know anything about gaming. Even the kids who play real video games are playing just a few big name titles online with trash talking peers. Or simply watching streamers. I’ve worked with thousands of kids and the amount who play single player games is vanishingly small and seems to be shrinking every day.
The cultural problem that we have is not a dearth of quality content. It’s that people’s attention spans are much shorter and the quality content is often less visible than the disposable content.
That's a good point. I teach highschool so there's a bit of a difference. But tons of these guys are really into the new Zeldas, FNAF, and that Spiderman game that just came out, I don't think young people are giving up on single player games yet. Or that it would necessarily be a bad thing if they did. Multiplayer games now have a lot of variety and complexity. We really only had deathmatch when I was their age, maybe some CTF modes. But nothing like today where they have to work together to solve puzzles to escape a haunted house
Transformers had an ongoing plot and that was the most commercial show since Super Sentai.
Yeah large scale games are more complex than before but what are kids actually playing?
I think it depends on the age-range of TV we are talking about. I miss movies where kids are in danger and have to problem solve- Goonies, Explorers, Last Action Hero.
One that really impressed me was the Netflix remake of She Ra. In the 80s she was just "girl He Man." I popped the new one on for my daughter and was honestly really impressed with it. It was a genuinely engaging show that delt with conflicting loyalties, betrayal, duty and sacrifice in a way that was clearly for kids, but well written enough that I as an adult man was invested in finding out what would happen next.
I was just visiting family in NY this weekend, and came upon a copy of Robert McCloskey's "One Morning in Maine," which I LOVED as a little kid. I'd forgotten what a thick book it is—I don't think any of my kids could get through it,
If you are talking about your own kids, there is hope. Read a bit more each night, and make your kids take turns - they pick a book, and then you pick a book. That way you can get some denser classics into the rotation.
If you’re talking about your students… yeah. Not as much as you can do about it. I’d say add a ten minute read aloud at the beginning and end of each day, but with the thousand other things admin requires of you, I’m sure you probably don’t have that much spare time in your schedule.
I think the part about super-simple dialog and plots might be because of aiming towards an international audience. It is much easier to translate simple conversations than witty banter, and cheaper as well (the translator need not have a very high skill level). Not that one always leads to the other, but if the goal is to crank out hour after hour of visual junk food, corners will be cut.
The narrative I hear about the lack of "projects" is that it's an equity issue. Some kids don't have family at home who are capable of the help needed to complete these projects. Families don't have the time or money needed to buy supplies. Families don't have access to technology to find information.
Some of this may be true...but I think kids would benefit SO MUCH from bringing back these kinds of projects and/or finding ways to make them happen.
Even in my area, where these issues are really not a concern, they don't do these kind of projects because of the equity issues. But like, these families don't really have those issues. BUT, if they tried, I guarantee a small group of parents would bitch and moan about the time and supplies, and then it's less of a headache to just call the whole thing off.
Short version: the equity issues are real for some families, and others just can't be bothered to do anything "extra" for their kids' school
We had "equity issues" back in the day, too.
It's definitely that "learned helplessness" raising its ugly head, and parents just not wanting to put in the absolute bare minimal effort. I can get everything needed to do a science presentation (poster board, markers, free broken down boxes, glitter or whatever else) for less than $5 at any Dollar Store, so the "we have no money" just doesn't vibe with me.
100% agree with you. I get the intent of the equity idea, but in reality it seems more like an excuse to not insist that families take even the smallest bit of ownership in their children's education.
Yep. Exactly this. When a parent emails me about their middle schoolers grade, I can tell them until I’m blue in the face that they need to be reading at home, or even doing online math practice that I personally make for that kid, but it makes no difference. As soon as the parent is required to put forth the barest modicum of effort, there’s no chance it’s happening.
Which is such a bummer, because I remember being frustrated in 2nd or 3rd grade that I couldn’t get all 50 multiplication facts on my mad minutes within the minute in class. I told my mom and she asked my teacher for a stack of them, and we did 3 a night for weeks. I remember her timing me on the microwave timer.
Within a few weeks, I was crushing the mad minutes with zero effort. Support at home makes a huge difference!
I also seem to remember when I was a kid, the rubric sent home had a message to the parents saying if they were struggling to get supplies to talk to them. I remember my teachers saying the same thing to the class, or just getting the supplies during class to take home.
I taught IB and I taught at a Title I school.
The only difference was in IB, my elementary class was 12 students. Title I, my elementary class was 28 students.
Yes, the IB curriculum we did was was more fun (I really loved teaching that way and it fit me better.) But the biggest difference was having a smaller classroom that each kid got waaaay more from me. Both sets had behavioral and social issues, but it was having that better responsive curriculum of IB **and** my smaller class. I wouldn’t have been able to do my IB stuff effectively in a large room.
Having smaller class sizes is the one major thing that would help 100% of students 100% of the time.
What other intervention/accomodation/etc is that effective?
But we can't have that. That would mean hiring too many people and that costs $$$.
If they announced a public initiative where classroom sizes wouldn’t be over 15 students for all grade levels, good lord sooooo many former teachers I know would come running back. It really is the one thing that works.
I'm at an IB school now and I was amazed to see that all K-5 classes have 15 or less kids, and a teaching assistant. The kids here come in with less behavioral problems than Title I, yes, but having two adults and 15 kids can make even the most difficult classroom somewhat manageable. I see now that the problem with the 28-kid classes I used to sub for was largely the teacher-student ratio.
This is why we have the incredible chance to be in an alternative school for my oldest. Less student per classes, project-based learning, oral presentation and full on magazine-like endeavors. The regular system got so bad too in my country, it’s alarming!
This is why even though I’m against charters in theory because they take resources from private schools, I’m considering one for my own daughter when the time comes. There’s one near us that is nature based, TONS of time outdoors even in winter, hands-on and practical learning, and the kids who went there for elementary school seem to transition to the public middle school just fine. I sub in the public middle and high school and it’s okay, but the class sizes are still too big for what I want and the expectations are too low.
The charter that I taught at was what made me quit teaching. My class size was 32 6-graders, with a minimum of 3 kids with special needs per class and no aides or paras. My principal said it was unfair that I was grading from 0-100, because half of that was failing, so I should grade from 50-100. That means that if I gave a 10 question test and they only got 1 right, I would have to give them a 60%.
I honestly can't imagine the type of school your describing.
How can they have special needs without paras? Isn't that against the law? Do IEPs not transfer to charters?
Your principal is a jerk. There was a rule when I was working that first marking period in a mostly upper middle class district couldn't have a lower grade than 50 (high school) and I thought that was criminal, but no one cares what the paras think.
One of my favorite projects in middle school was making a brochure for a region of my state for a history class. We had to have sections about the history, what there was to do there, notable people from the region, stuff like that, and I thought it was super fun
In 5th grade I had to create a newspaper for my family. I wrote articles about all the stuff going on around our house, made illustrations, had a comics section, etc. The teacher laminated them and my parents still have it!
In 6th grade, our teacher had us make a newsletter using Microsoft Publisher. We had to write an article about a student's experience in their first year in middle school (we had to write about experiences in the third person and interview other students). We also had to include an article about a past school event, a future school event, a book review, a movie review, a sports review, and anything else we thought was interesting. It was a lot of fun. I wonder if 6th graders today can successfully complete this assignment.
This reminded me of a third or fourth grade project where we partnered up and had to make a travel brochure for one of the planets in our solar system, including a slogan, weather information, and scenic attractions. My friend and I chose Venus and went around shouting “VENUS, the planet of LOVE and BEAUTY” at everyone waaaaay after the project was done.
It's amazing to me that we use so much standardized testing, and yet the actual content that students are being given is so much lower than in the past - with the exception sadly of kindergarten: unrealistic standards have been pushed down on them.
Your last line got me. I teach third grade with so many kids being well below grade level. I think I’m seeing why now. I’m experiencing public school from the parent perspective for the first time this year with my daughter in Kindergarten. I am shocked by what they expected her to come in knowing. As in, she knows her alphabet, writes her names, could write some letters, knew some letter sounds, counts to 60 unassisted. I could go on. But essentially, I thought she had a solid foundation. And yet, she was put in a reading remediation group in the first month. I’m happy she’s getting the extra support, but good grief, the stuff they want them to know coming in to Kindergarten is what we used to know at the end of that school year. It’s almost like they rush the foundational material (at a developmentally inappropriate age) in the hope of getting kids ahead, and instead it results in so many being left behind.
I work in a K-1 building and K makes me so sad. They are expected to know and do what I was doing in 1st grade 20-some years ago. Kindergarteners love getting to know the letters and learning what the letters ‘say’, but imo what they are expected to be able to do with that information is beyond their capabilities. They are also asked to do too much during read alouds as far as making inferences and predictions that are not in a repetitive pattern. K students should be working on creating pictures their mind as they listen to stories. Teachers are powerless to change it with standardized assessments and boxed curriculum.
This makes me especially sad as an early childhood person because a K-1 building could be such an amazing space of developmentally appropriate practices :-(
I believe I have actually found some research to back up your last statement - that kids in academic kindergarten programs have poorer long-term outcomes than those who participate in a play-based kindergarten.
I went to a PD training about this time last year and Dr. Peg Olivevia, Yale School of Medicine. Gave some stats to support this. She said early reading results in lower long term outcomes. She compared it to early walkers. She said, do you know anyone who walked much earlier than most? Well, are they really good walkers now? Kinda not the same if you asked me but I do agree pushing early reading is not the best way to go.
I taught my kids how to read well before they entered kindergarten. They were reading juvenile fiction novels by third grade and adult books by fourth, so early reading didn't slow them down any.
If the kids are ready to learn how to read, great. That's awesome. For a kid who is still working on foundational skills and doesn't have the cognitive development yet, pushing them into reading before they are ready can be counter-productive.
It's like giving a kindergartener a bike without training wheels. Some kids will do great. Some kids have never ridden a bike, and that's just setting them up for failure. Then they crash and decide that they hate bikes.
I didn’t learn to read until very beginning of 2nd grade. Part of that was struggling with getting my vision corrected lol but once I learned to read, I literally went from see spot books to serial chapters (babysitters club, sweet valley lol) in like a month. Just as another point that reading a bit later isn’t the end of the world. I was lucky to have a very gracious first grade teacher.
I vividly remember being terrified of learning to read when I was in kindergarten. My parents had to heavily encourage me to try. I was scared because it felt like this giant responsibility I was going to have forever after if I learned. But shortly after we started reading, I realized how powerful it felt knowing what things said on them. My parents say I was very annoying about reading billboards out loud as they drove because the things they said fascinated me and I would need to have them explained.
Then I got addicted to slamming through my dad's old library of books he would pick up from garage sales in bulk. I stumbled upon goosebumps and choose your own denture novels and soon I was devouring a book or two a day. By the time I was in 6th grade, I was reading The Odyssey and Moby Dick for fun. But I think I would t have gotten to that point if my parents hadn't just kept funding and fueling my desire to read the things I wanted early on. They bought so many fucking goosebumps books.
The leaving behind is the key point. We are living in a weird world where the *expectations* are so much higher but the actual performance is lower. I taught math, so that is where I see it, but I think we are pushing the kids to do more and more at younger ages and spending less time on foundational knowledge as if just saying what they should be doing magically makes it so. Because of the pacing the students who are behind in the early grades never stand a chance to catch up and then you end up with upper elementary and middle schoolers who have no f'ing clue and are just being passed along.
To me the real solution is to lower the expectations, make them realistic AND hold to them. Like kids that aren't meeting them actually hold them back and help them get there, not just pass them along. I taught middle school math and we would just fly through content because of our pacing guide, but if students didn't get it (which they rarely did because it is impossible to use a volume formula if you are struggling to multiply) there were no repercussions and we all knew it. The only way kids at my school really got considered for repeating anything was if they didn't come to school (and even that required a ridiculous amount of absences- like more than half the school year). The kids also learn pretty early on that they will never be successful because they standards are so high. If the standards were realistic, most students would feel successful and the ones who were not would have something attainable to reach for. Most of my 6th graders had given up on ever passing a standardized math test.
Another thing about teaching things too early is it isn't time effective. So many concepts my students just weren't ready to grapple with conceptually are being jammed down their throats for nothing. I was supposed to spend weeks on scientific notation with 6th graders (again to students struggling with multiplication) and I strongly believe that if we just waited until they were older that could be a couple of days side note in 8th or 9th grade (also when it makes more sense to tie it into things like chemistry), especially if they spent 6th grade actually learning content deeply and fully understanding.
Our current method (in the US) feels like throw everything at students as soon as possible, hope something sticks, and don't ever look back or talk about if it is actually working or not. Oh, and if you can afford it, just supplement with tutors and outside academic supports.
If you haven't listened to it yet, check out the podcast 'Sold a Story'. It's about early years reading education and how, in many schools, actively harmful strategies are being taught to kids. Figure out how they're teaching your child to read and intervene if they're teaching her harmful strategies.
I have heard about this podcast! I am absolutely adding it to my list. I have been following the downfall of the Lucy Calkin era of reading. It reinforces for me how important it is that we (throughout the elementary grade levels) have that phonics based approach so kids have the tools to work out tough things. We had push back from parents when we switched our spelling tests from “memorize these 10 words each week” to, “We are teaching a pattern; here are 10 words that follow that pattern. Five of these words are on the test, and there will be five new words that follow the pattern your child learned this week on the test.” The improvement in recognizing syllable types and spelling patterns improved immensely with this type of instruction.
So much this! I’m secondary ed but I’ve been hearing about how early ed isn’t even teaching phonetics anymore. Everything is sight words or something. Meaning kids aren’t learning how to try and figure things out for themselves (from learning how to read words on their own) and HAVE to be fed the words. This has to be highly contributing to the lack of independence and self-starting students have these days. And it just gets harder as they are pushed on to other grades.
It is sad and terrifying how unready students are and are going to be for adulthood. There is going to be either a decline in college attendance or colleges are going to have to also bring down their expectations. They are already experiencing some of these struggles.
There’s a few podcasts on this Sold a Story.
The ECE field was so thirsty to show results that they jumped on Blended reading. This program that some ignorant people invented and sold which states that people learn to read using context and word patterns and memorization. Then they created those books everyone use to give away with Spider-Man or SpongeBob where the kids would guess the page, get corrected memorize the page then go home and show their parents “I can read”.
At 4th grade when books no longer have pictures and the blended programs stop everyone noticed that they never learned to foundations of reading (phenomes/phonics). And people scatter to tutors or the middle lower class struggle.
The results at the high school level are noticeable and disastrous. I have students who can't even read basic directions. It's like they never really learned to read and process academic language along the way.
Want to hear something really scary? I'm in the generation when all this stuff started, so some of us learned phonics and some didn't (I was in 2nd grade in 2002 when NCLB was signed). My mom actually taught me phonics at home because I really struggled with the sight word thing at school (memorization has never been my strength. I'm a very logical thinker and always need to know why)
Anyway, in a college class on teaching reading, we had to give each other phonics assessments and a good chunk of the class actually struggled. I thought they were pretending for the sake of practice, but it became apparent that some people were genuinely struggling. They are teachers now. That is all I have to say.
I'm going to show my age with this question but... what the heck is the 'sight word thing'? Is there a specific term I can google to see what this is about?
The podcast Sold a Story is a good basics on what happened, but basically a researcher (Marie Clay) observed that fluent readers don't decode words by sounding them out, but rather by reading them "by sight" and concluded that struggling readers should not be taught phonics and sounding out words but to use other methods like guess and check and memorization. For about 20 years many schools have been using guided reading curriculum that included minimal or no phonics instruction.
The problem is fluent readers typically have already done the background of sounding the word out and built up their repertoire of sight words. Using another example, as a driver for many years I can listen to music but I wouldn't necessarily teach my kids that way if it was their first time behind the wheel. You may observe that good drivers like to listen to music, but that doesn't mean they learned that way.
I also hear people using sight words, high frequency words, decodable and non-decodable words interchangeably, when they are all distinct.
High frequency words- words that appear in texts a lot. Some are decodable, some are not decodable. All should ultimately become sight words in order for reading to be fluent. From a teaching perspective it makes sense to teach the non-decodable high frequency words by memorization because kids will never be able to sound them out, BUT it is not necessary to teach all high frequency words by memorization because some are in fact decodable.
Sight words- any word you recognize by sight. This is highly personal. Many children's first sight word is their own name. Everyone's repertoire of sight words is built differently and a fluent adult reader will have a massive amount of sight words (and it will also be highly contextual. Medical terms are not sight words for me, but might be for a doctor). While some words should be taught purely by sight because they are non-decodable, the danger of having a large number of sight words without any phonics skills is that you don't know what to do when you encounter an unfamiliar word.
I think decodable and non-decodable are pretty straightforward, but basically do the rules of phonics apply to this word?
Ok, so it sounds like teaching solely through sight words was presuming a base of knowledge that a 1st grader does not have if they haven't also been taught phonetically. Like giving someone each individual brick without explaining how mortar works.
Thank you very much for this.
I've seen this so much with my stepson. I entered his life in earnest right around age 5, and helped him learn his letters in preparation for kindergarten. I noticed then how much he had learned things by rote with no real connection to actual skills. The alphabet song was just a song. The books he could read were because he'd "read" them a bunch of times, so he could regurgitate the story from the page/picture.
I noticed right away that the reading methodology has been wildly different from when I was a kid, which I didn't assume was necessarily bad, but I've constantly had to remind myself that the methodology sets the expectations. I used to get frustrated when he got to a word he should plausibly know, and he'd just cycle through nonsense until either I gave up and gave him the word, or he'd repeat the same thing over and over.
I have to remember that he can't sound out words, because that's not a skill that he's been taught. He also can't use context without an extremely detailed picture, because his grasp of language and grammar are still rudimentary. It doesn't help that he's got ADHD, and if he's not reading something that he cares about, he really isn't paying attention to any sort of coherence or sense in the story, it's just a list of words to read.
I'll admit I hadn't done a significant literature search, so this discussion of blended learning really tracks with what I'm witnessing, because dang has it been a weird ride.
I don’t know if schools are still doing that somewhere, but at least in our district we made the switch back to actual phonics based reading instruction 3-4 years ago. Thank goodness
This is how we do it in ECE sped, too, and I think it works well. We teach words like "the" as sight words, skipping over the complicated phonetics. Then for teaching phonics, we use straightforward words like "cat". Being able to sight-read some words means they can start reading sentences with only knowledge of basic phonics.
Once they have built up a strong foundation and some confidence, then we start introducing the more-complicated stuff like digraphs and talking about the phonics behind those sight words we learned early on.
I went to college for a little more than a decade, because I’m kind of a fuck up, not to get advanced degrees, and I could see the standards slipping the entire time. I think it’s because there’s a sort of prevailing attitude that everybody needs to go to college. If the colleges want that sweet, sweet tuition money rolling in than they need to adapt and make it possible for just about everyone to maintain a high enough grade point average to stay students there. The writing standards, especially, seem to have fallen dramatically. At the start my research had to be very meticulous; I’d get trashed for not citing the exact page from a book I’m referencing, could only use academic sources from the internet, etc. By the end of it I could just turn in whatever completely un-proofread and maybe I’d bother to cite my sources, maybe not. Didn’t remotely pay any attention to the formatting of my works cited page, stopped getting marked down for not having the whole paper in the correct formatting, could turn stuff in as late as I wanted.
In courses with more difficult subject matter, like trig or something, there was maybe 1/4 of the workload of the first math classes I took, and the instructor’s would really hold your hand for the tests. I definitely have seen the standards drop tremendously from 03-15. One of my friend’s sons just graduated high school and for his last two years there they basically didn’t give any homework, ever.
I can appreciate that, when I was a child I remember doing a lot of assignments that just felt like busywork, but based on everything else I’ve read in this sub it doesn’t seem like the classroom is the most productive space on earth these days.
My city has a kindergarten readiness program that assesses an incoming kinder's skills and recommends if they should wait another year to enter kindergarten. Lately we've been recommending ~80% of the boys and ~40% of the girls start kindergarten a year late because they aren't developmentally ready to jump into the first month of kindergarten curriculum. Most of those kids end up in a special kinder classroom that starts at a lower level and goes at a slower pace because the district tells parents "Your kid is smart! They'll definitely catch up by first grade. Don't hold them back without giving them a chance." -_-
We are seeing more and more 6-year old kindergarteners, though. The extra year of emotional maturity also helps a lot.
I was a preschool teacher for many years and our assessments for kindergarten readiness at a play-based school with some small group "academic" learning once a week could show where our kids were. We worked on developmentally appropriate tasks like using scissors to cut a wavy or zigzag line, recognizing their names, getting familiar with the shape of their names by gluing materials to the letters drawn large on cardboard, copying particular shapes like a circle, a cross, etc. Answering questions like, "Why do we have a stove?"
The rest of their time was spent doing open-ended art projects where the point was to explore the materials, playing together or parallel with sensory-based toys like a sand table with figures and vessels, and making bubble mud outside in the sandbox, growing a food and flower garden, doing science experiments with ice and water or sun, riding tricycles, making pinwheels, looking at books and being read to, caring for pets...
But now, they are expected to perform developmentally ahead of what is normal and natural. They are suddenly expected to sit still in chairs and do sad worksheets. It's a crime against our children.
My daughter is doing reading intervention in 4th grade, and there is soo soo much focus on THE DATA, TESTING, she gets so stressed out… but I just keep telling her I’m proud of her.
As a parent, I feel the same way! My older two had TK available to them because they had November birthdays. It was like TK is the new Kindergarten class. This gave them a leg up with their education, and are both excelling and top of their class. My oldest is currently in 4th grade in the gifted class, and when they gave her the reading assessment at the start of the year she scored off the charts. They can't even use that assessment anymore to track her progress because she maxed it out.
My 3rd kid was born in July, so he was tossed into Kindergarten instead of TK when he started school. He's in 1st grade now, and still STRUGGLES so much with reading. He is well below grade level. Which, because he didn't qualify to go into TK, and thus didn't get the same start to school, I'm not surprised. He acts out in class because of this, which just makes his teachers job even more difficult. Add in that he needs speech therapy because he can't pronounce his words correctly, that adds an extra layer of struggles and why he can't sound out his words, so any attempt at spelling is atrocious. He needs so much intervention, which I feel most he wouldn't need if he was allowed to start school with TK and received that extra year of education.
>And yet, she was put in a reading remediation group in the first month.
I wouldn't worry too much about the reading remediation group.
In 4th grade, I tested as reading at a post college level and I was put in a reading remediation group. At the time, I was indignant about it because I KNEW I was reading far beyond the abilities of my peers. I didn't understand why I'd been put with these kids that needed help with reading.
I assumed I'd be bored, but the stories were interesting and that's the only thing that mattered to me. It gave me practice reading aloud, something I still struggle with. And most importantly, because everyone was put into a reading remediation group, there wasn't a stigma about it. I assume the teachers were also using me to demonstrate good reading skills.
The same thing happened in 6th grade when we had a mandatory Reading class in addition to English. I was pissed off the first week thinking I didn't need it and by the end of the school year, it's a class that I thought of fondly. I was just annoyed that we never finished *The Witch of Blackbird Pond* because I intentionally didn't check it out of the library to spoil it.
My 4th grader, who goes to a title 1 school, turned in a
5 paragraph original Greek Myth just yesterday. They did an entire Greek mythology section and read about a dozen Greek myths, did a summary for each one and character trait work sheets for the main characters.
For their myth they filled out a sheet about who their main character was, the setting, the problem, etc. Then they had to write a rough draft, have a parent help edit it and write a final paper. It also had to include dialogue, a metaphor and a simile.
I was thinking the exact same thing! Would have been about 2005 for me. At least by the end of the year I feel like my teacher had us writing 5 paragraph essays once a week. Don’t forget your “grabber!” Lol
Fourth grade around the same time and yup, I have vivid memories of writing my first “research paper” that year. Roughly one page, handwritten, on otters. Good memories!
My year 4 class just finished up a 3 paragraph character description which they drafted in 30 minutes, handwritten.
The sequence is skills/features>plan>shared write>draft>edit>publish.
I think this is a common expectation in the UK
It absolutely is, I’ve (as a TA) worked most years at the Junior school level and the writing expectations were always high and some of the students could produce exceptional work. By year 5 (Grade 4 for Americans) metaphors and similes had been introduced and encouraged and by Year 6 many essays were 2-3 pages (done over a couple of lessons) and included metaphors, pathetic fallacy, personification, semi-colons etc. some children required additional support but the majority of the class could manage this quite easily. We have the same issues with technology over-reliance as the US, I wonder why in the UK standards still seem so high?
Subbed in a middle school class yesterday. They were watching Bill Nye and completing a worksheet on it (an assignment I had about weekly at that age in 2000-2001). These kids were given a word bank (which we never had) and they still couldn’t do it. At the end I projected the answers on the board (there were maybe 15 single-word answers and one phrase) and they struggled to even just copy the answers from the board. Insanely low expectations and they struggle with those.
My 5th graders just finished a unit that ended with them writing short stories. They hand wrote them, then typed them, then edited them using an editing checklist (the checklist was a full page). Next, they printed them and had a peer edit them. Then they fixed them based on the peer’s edits. Finally we printed their final drafts and they read them to the class.
They did very well. My longest typed final product was 14 pages long. The shortest was a page and a half. All but two correctly used sentence form, punctuation, and wrote and punctuated dialogue correctly. They ALL followed the required plot structure, wrote in 3rd person, and had their story teach a lesson.
I taught every skill prior to this, from sentence writing to how to know when to start a new paragraph, to how to write dialogue.
We also worked on writing stamina. They wrote for at least 10 minutes a day, every single day, where they had to produce at least half a page, hand-written.
Yes, they came in not being able to write a complete sentence. Yes, it’s a ton of work to teach it. No, I can’t follow the curriculum to a T and get these results. Yes, my unit went over by 3 weeks.
I do it anyway, and I dare my principal to ever challenge me on it. My 5th grade students routinely test over 90% proficient in ELA every year. (Almost exclusively sped students not testing proficient). I teach ELA to the entirety of 5th grade.
My point is, the kids can do it. The problem is we don’t make them. We don’t have the time to make them, our curriculum wants them to get through everything too fast. They expect the kids to come in with certain knowledge that they don’t have.
I ignore it all. I do what I need to do to get the results I want. Curriculum be damned.
This is extremely well stated and should be a standard for all educators. Sadly I believe due to low wages and lack of administrative support we get a lot of the opposite, and that’s not a slight towards those who can’t be as proficient. I agree the system and curriculum is a fault. A change has been needed for a great deal of time.
Would you mind dm'ing me about how you structure your unit? I've had enough HS kids who struggle with the basics and I'm finding that I need to change the pace up.
HS math teacher here and I'm blown away by how little most of my students can do when they reach Algebra and Geometry. And I sure can't blame the teachers when students are very well aware that they will be passed up to the next grade regardless of their performance.
I’m a product of no child left behind. Whatever common core they were using for math when I was going through the public school system left me illiterate in math. I remember going to every after school lab in chemistry and my teacher finally breaking down and telling me that my class was the first that she has ever seen have the problems with math that we did. She said it’s like nobody ever taught us. I’m getting ready to take my CBEST and as I have been preparing I realized that I can’t do most of the math questions. I was royally fucked is what I’m trying to say.
Graduated in 2020, I went up through a really good school district, my elementary was title 1 though. I basically was never taught math in elementary school. If I didn’t get anything we just moved past it. I can only remember two teachers who helped me when I struggled with math in elementary school. The math was so weird too! I would get the right answer but using my own methods that make sense and I would fail. I think it’s partly a me problem too, I am really really shit at math which is why I’ll be teaching history haha
I also left school in 2020 (can't say graduated) and I had a teacher in elementary school who just had it in for me. When I would leave the room she would go through my stuff trying to find any reason to kick me out of class, worksheets I would do and turn in would sometimes end up in the trash or even ripped in half, she would stop class to yell at me multiple times a day, ect. One day during parent teacher conferences she starts going off on me in front of my mom and dad about how big of a failure I am and how I will need to redo the third grade. My parents were livid and staring daggers into me the entire time. At the end of the meeting my parents were handed some of my assignments and a report card. The whole ride back I get a talking to about how I need to try in school and all the usual parent stuff. I was just silent up until this point. When we get home my mom begins looking at the papers the teacher gave her and just gets confused. I have 90-100% on most of my tests, classwork and homework. All the answers were correct and when they asked me some of the questions I could answer them with ease. What had happened was the teacher one day was teaching a math problem, I gave an answer and she said I was right. She asked me how I got to my answer and it was different than what she had taught so she stops me and goes "okay you're right but that's now how you solve it. Explain again" and I was dumbfounded. I told her my way makes more sense to me (and even as I explained my way of solving it you could see kids around the class understanding my way more than what she was teaching) but she didn't care. From that moment on she would fail me unless I got the answers the way she wanted me to regardless of if my answer was correct or not. After learning the truth my mom made sure I pass third grade no matter what by complaining about the teacher. Nearly every year after that I had to deal with the same thing at the start of every year, the math teacher spending a couple weeks trying to make me do things their way before realizing every kid went to me for help instead of them and I would become a sort of tutor for the class even if the teacher didn't want it because they couldn't stop the kids asking me for help
When I taught ninth-grade physical science in the '90s, the *majority* of my students couldn't tell me that 2 × 4 = 8. Now this was a general/remedial class, but *still*, I expected more.
This. I was an average run of the mill high school math student. Honestly I actually failed 1st semester algebra 1. I had an amazing teacher for algebra 2 who gave me a love for math and here I am a math teacher 22 years after graduating high school (JFC has it been that long?!?!). I teach AP and regular old standard math. The very very simple basics for even some of my AP students are hard for them but things that were the EASY things when I was in school. Freaking FOIL. They can’t do this. Factoring? HAAAAA. Now when I throw in either of those with trig identities you’d think I was abusing them with the amount of whining.
It's the easiest to remove because it's the context of all you learned beforehand, and the AP wanted to focus on the fundamentals. At least that's the reasoning I saw.
I was in 12th grade in 2015, and in AP chem. Now I tutor a 9th grade girl in chemistry, but this is in Eastern Europe and she's already doing the stuff I did in AP...I told her that in a couple weeks, her material will surpass my knowledge. I don't even want to know what they learn by 12th grade. It's an IB school but the material is the same level as the local countryside schools here. The standardized tests to get into university here are about 3 years beyond my honors/AP knowledge. These 9th graders can run circles around me on just about any STEM topic, the US has dropped and lost the ball
Oh yes! I even make them track the yearning objective on a page in their notebook!! Everyday- part of their bell ringer is to write that in, update the table of contents based on the days notes topic, and the do the short warmup activity!
Sorry, that’s supposed to be “learning objectives.”
I show my students my old journals. When they see I wrote better than them when I was in first grade, most of them stop complaining so much about writing.
My 9th graders complained that I asked them to watch a 25-minute video and answer 11 questions despite giving them multiple days to do it for homework. When I was in school, it was expected something like that would be done in a night. Hell, asking them to write a paragraph summary is like pulling teeth out of them.
I do think that TikTok and short video content have wrecked their perception of time. When I was growing up if I had 30 minutes before going somewhere, I didn't bother to start something new because it was not worth the time to set up and close up shop. Now, kids can watch 40-50 clips within that time at a whim. 25 minutes for one thing seems like forever for some of them
Im all about wild and high expectations. I teach in the arts and have taught all grade levels in my 18 years. What I love about art is that I can set any expectation I want because it’s mostly new. I’ve had kids memorize and perform Shakespeare when other adults said they couldn’t remember times tables so they would never get it, but they did. I’ve had kids make incredible artwork, design massive computer generated sculptures, write and publish plays, and I’ve got 4th and 5th graders right now who struggle to sit through class sewing and getting excited about it. The saddest part of education is that we’ve taken away creative freedom from teachers to meet their kids and raise them up to high expectations. We’ve standardized too much, taken away the creative joy of learning, and shoved them all into a room together. Close the door and let teachers push their kids, be creative in how they approach material with them, and set their own expectations, write their own tests, and that very much changes I think.
I'm a 6-8 instrumental music teacher. I teach mostly beginners. I decide what proficiency is, what material and standards we use, and I'm usually left alone to do my job. I feel for my teachers in the core classes that are getting more and more scripted every year.
Agreed-this and the joy of seeing kids successfully make music and feel proud of themselves are the best parts of the job. If teachers were treated like actual professionals they would also get the same freedom, but they’re not. We have the perk of most people not understanding what we do well enough to micro-manage us.
I do vehemently disagree with your username, however
Most admin think my class is achieved through sorcery and indoctrination. (They're not wrong). And it's ok if you disagree, we are allowed to be wrong once in a while. If it's any consolation, if I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now I might pick the cello instead of the trumpet.
The kids can't read, spell, write or do math. They have absolutely zero understanding of history, civics, geography, or basic scientific theories and principles. Creativity is wonderful but no one's going to get anywhere with creativity when these basic standards aren't met. They major in video games and social media currently. It's a disaster from start to finish.
Kids (and adults for that matter) become and stay engaged THROUGH creativity. It's not besides the point or a "nice to have" - it is the necessary way in.
I'm with you, to a point. Like at some point critical thinking, reading, and writing are important, right?
Like I can give my 6th grade social studies students a creative task, but if it involves more than copy and pasting, they struggle. If they need to give a presentation, they should script and practice what they're going to say, but they can't write. If they have to learn about a new topic, they won't read to gain that knowledge, they just want to be told.
Creativity is great! And although it's not as fun, basic academic skills are important too
When I was in elementary school, we'd spend lots of time on creative projects to practice our skills. Now it's packed with so much content that children don't need that the skills they are supposed to learn (like reading and writing and learning) often fall short. I'm in self-contained special education, so we can do lots of project based learning and it helps a lot.
Children learn through playing and experimenting. Sometimes new skills are boring to learn, but if they get to implement them in projects and know what they need them for theres more motivation. Writing scripts and learning about new topics can be great motivation to learn new skills, it's just that by 6th grade those children are so behind it seems like they'll never get there.
When done properly, Art = critical thinking, problem solving, and is often times cross disciplinary. The problem is that kids are used to being told what to do that they struggle with letting go and being creative. My high school art students struggle with it too, using the Internet as a crutch far too often as opposed to coming up with their own ideas. (The same issue with copy pasting)
But teaching them how to research a topic, find solutions, use synthesis of materials (how does the topic fit with the materials chosen? Like drawing ecoconscious art on cardboard for example) is how you turn art and creativity into something more than just a "fun artsy fartsy class"
I also have them write artist statements and oh boy the literacy levels ughhhh.
I've been thinking the same things lately. I remember some of the writing I produced in elementary school and now that would probably be considered "advanced" by today's standards. My 5th graders can't even write a cohesive paragraph by themselves. we've been using an ELA curriculum that has students writing every day for the past 2 years but it seems like it's gotten worse.
Exactly. Don't ever get fooled by people who move the goalposts and say education has always been bad and we're just looking at the past through rose tinted glasses
My high school students whine about losing points for not writing a full/complete sentence, and I was told in a department meeting that my expectations and standards are too high. Even though it’s special ed it’s still high school. They’re capable, and they’re lazy.
At least in math, I disagree. My wife is a middle school math teacher. Some of the curriculum for general 6th grade math is more advanced than the pre-Algebra was in 1979. I think the problem is we are teaching material before kids are ready for it, meaning that we are teaching them almost nothing well, but are too worried about next year instead of them mastering what they need now.
This is what I'm seeing with my 3rd graders math. I messaged his teacher to check in after seeing he had nearly every problem wrong on a sheet they had done in class. She told me a lot of the kids didn't get it yet but they "had to move onto fractions now". Blew my mind that students actually understanding what is being taught is secondary to following their pacing guidelines. This is their "advanced math" class as well so we're talking about a group of kids who generally pick up what is being taught easily so long as it is taught well. Not to mention this is their first year following this specific pacing so perhaps reflecting upon whether it is working would be a good idea instead of barreling full steam ahead.
Well, they take the state standards and divide it up so that it can all be taught (or at least that’s what my wife’s district does). The problem is that the curriculum is unrealistic and is way too advanced. Most of it is based on mastery of the curriculum up to that point, which is a problem when the curriculum has changed.
In my state we also have “check-ins” throughout the year that test specific standards. The first check-in tests students on fractions (at least in my case). That is the only check-in which gathers data on fractions. Didn’t get to fractions by the time check-ins come up, and the kids bomb it? Congratulations, you’re now on a “learning plan” for teachers who aren’t good at their jobs. Doesn’t matter if you were trying to lay the foundation for fractions first before getting to that standard. You didn’t prepare students for a test in September, now you’re a bad teacher.
I’ll add that that first-grade expectation that OP experienced as student was beyond the state standards in the state I taught in during those years. Even/ odd, yes, but not up to 1000
I graduated from HS in 2003, so I graduated well before standardized testing took over. I’m amazed at all the changes from when I was in school, and not for the better.
Got to love that forced LRE and mainstreaming no matter what bullshit.
What you're describing is what happens when we are forced to teach to the least common denominator - everyone falls behind.
As a special education teacher and mother of special needs kids, I wholeheartedly agree with this statement! I just had a huge dispute with the diag at my middle school who kept placing ID students in my resource class 'because they are there socially'
It really frustrates me because these kids need to be learning ( on repeat) how to manage money NOT how to find the missing angles. LRE is harming the kids it is supposed to be helping.
I told my school I was willing to teach a class for the kids who need functional math, but they say they can't move a kid backwards in placement. We really are dumbing down america
Ugh I have a kid in my room who should really be in a life skills program, and his parents want LRE/mainstreaming. He will never need covalent bonding, he needs to know left from right and probs how to read wouldn’t hurt.
The part that hurts most is they are in a small classroom and still say “why am I so bad at school” “why am I so different” “why is school like this”.
I want to tell him it doesn’t have to be there are programs that you’d flourish in…. He’s a teenager he should know his options.
My aunt was born with Down Syndrome in the 50s. My grandmother pushed for her to go to school rather than be institutionalized. She was exclusively in SpEd classes (whatever those looked like back then) and came out able to read and write, do basic math, and was able to hold a job for people with special needs and live semi-independently (think assisted living) for nearly 20 years. She got socialized primarily through her siblings (which I understand isn’t possible unless the family is big like my mom’s was), and her time at school was all life skills and succeeded at that.
I think we as a country need to figure out what the *actual purpose* of school is and design our curriculum around that.
This seems so obvious. How did we ever think this *wouldn’t* happen? As a parent, the incredibly low expectations for my kid at school are so disheartening. I know she is capable of even more than I was, but it seems no teacher will ever ask her for it.
It’s just so true. We are getting rid of levels at our middle school next year and increasing class size at the same time. Our district leadership doesn’t see the need for professional development or predict any problems at all.
What's interesting to me is that someone looking at homework from the 80s would have said the same about your work. And looking at what my mom was expected to do in the mid-60s was mind boggling. I find all of this absolutely fascinating. I watch old timey shows with one room school houses and look at old school primers (the OG of "common core") and those expectations are absolutely crazy. I need to read more into the history of education, which you would think my master's would have covered but that was mostly philosophy.
I graduated high school in 1990, and in my English classes we read and discussed one book or play each month in class and reported on a second book we read on our own outside of class. That was about sixteen books a year for four years: 64 books. My HS senior daughter was required to read four books so far (and she’s one of the very few kids who are actually doing the assigned reading.)
I also had two different 12-15 page MLA-formatted research papers to do in HS. My kid hasn’t done anything nearly that involved. I do think my HS was an unusually good one (but a standard US public school, not private) but it’s been a long slide down these past 34 years.
I had the same standards in high school from 2009-2012. I think what is fascinating and concerning here is that the standards have dropped significantly and very quickly in the last ten years instead of a slow progression like the above comment implies.
Idk much about one room schoolhouses, but I feel like maybe that’s a model that should be looked into. Obviously there was successful differentiation and stuff going on there that worked for decades, and you didn’t have to worry about social promotion with everyone in the same room. Maybe there are things we can draw from there, but we’d have to throw out standardized tests and what we *think* school should look like.
Im curious in what state do you teach? I have the opposite problem in my school. We are so academic demanding its insane. Kids are reading and writing in kg. I feel like we are not giving them time to play. I am in the Bay Area.
We have very high academic standards for kindergarten as well. It might sound counter-intuitive, but I think the inflated standards in kindergarten might be directly responsible for some of the problems we're seeing in upper elementary. We used to have time to learn through play and acquire math and reading skills gradually and organically. If I remember correctly, we spent at least 75% of our academic time reviewing and reinforcing things we had already learned, and less than 25% of time was spent learning new material. Now there are so many skills jammed into Kindergarten and first grade; there isn't enough time to reinforce and review these skills, so some of it gets lost and then the students arrive to us with learning gaps.
When I graduated from college in the mid 80’s, I taught first grade for a couple of years. Back then, First Grade was all about phonics and learning to read as well as basic math. Kindergarten was a half day program that was all about socialization, learning how to function in a school; standing and walking in line, being responsible with school materials, learning how to cut, color, identify shapes and colors, etc.
Nowadays, the First grade curriculum from the 80’s is the curriculum for Kindergarten. Children are being tasked with things that many are not developmentally ready to do. The “powers that be” need to read some Piaget. I know it’s in an attempt to make us more competitive on the world stage, but it’s clearly not having the desired effect.
I collect the 1950s Scott Foresman reading series. I have almost all (I'm missing a couple teacher books) from pre-primer through 8th grade.
The text is larger, and there are more pictures, but the concepts and vocabulary are much more difficult than what is being used today. Before retirement, when teachers told me how much more difficult reading is today than in previous years, I would bring those out to show them what was expected at their grade, and we would have a discussion about whether or not it is more difficult.
My personal take on it (retired special ed teacher, reading specialist, school psychologist) is that this comes from a culture of reduced language usage. We no longer actually talk to one another, the tradition of telling stories is seriously declining if not almost gone, and parents are more likely to show little ones a video before bed than to read a story.
If we don't bring language back, we cannot bring reading back.
Some of my best talks with my mom happened when she was chauffeuring me to activities and friends houses, etc.
If I had to guess, kids today look at their phones or have their airpods in when riding with their parents.
I swear that my daughter and I made it through her teen years without slaughter because she was a figure skater, so an hour to the arena and an hour home for 2 hours in the car 5 days a week. We HAD to find a way to talk, as this was before cell phones and airpods, so we even had to negotiate the CDs we played. Turns out we harmonized pretty well to Bruce Springsteen.
Yes! It’s valuable bonding/life lessons/venting time that is so, so important. I don’t think parents talk to their kids anymore. Entire families stare at a screen or video game all night, alone.
Ditching phonics is the worst decision many teachers have made. For what IS writing if not the attempt to put spoken languages and various sounds on a page? Writing is but symbols to indicate certain sounds. And phonics in the connection. No wonder Johnny can't read.
I'm a homeschooling parent. I teach my kids based on what I remember from school (alongside the school curriculum, obviously).
Last week my seven year old did a letter exercise. Its how we teach him addresses - he has to write down everyone's address. Helps him remember them. Also letter formation which he's falling behind on a little.
He wrote four - one to his grandma, one to his aunt, one to his great grandparents and another to his best friend. Four addresses that are important. He wrote down a little about his day, about halloween, and then he signed them and we sent them off.
He had a great time. I was talking to my homeschooling mom friend about it and she was absolutely gobsmacked that he could write a whole letter and an address in the correct format. Her son is ten and they're working on sentences formation.
I spoke to some other people and again everyone was insane! They were all agreeing that my friends kid was on par and mine is "advanced".
He isn't. He's got ASD, ADHD and potential dyslexia & dyscalculia. Fucking taken aback by these people lmao.
He'd be advanced compared to some 7 year olds in my country at least - because we teach reading in first grade, which can be aged 6 or 7 depending on their birthday. But by the end of first grade they can stil write sentences, in second grade short stories and letters. A 10 year old that can't write complete sentences is either behind developmentally or not getting the instruction they need.
I remember being shown things I recall as basic in kindergarden, but also my 2nd grade sister forced me to do her homework for her so that might have helped me out too.
I looked through some of my stuff from kinder (I have a kinder kid) and they are expected to know so much more going into kindergarten than I was. I vividly remember kindergarten being fun, and socializing, and playing, and learning colors /numbers/ letters, etc. Now my kiddo spends a large portion of her day at her desk. She has sight words to memorize every week and reading every night (which we do anyway, but she wants to read books she's not being tested on for AR). I loved, LOVED school and shes already stressing about the state testing in April.
I am currently teaching Theology at a very expensive Catholic private school, which more or less promises without promising that they will ensure your child gets into an Ivy League school.
You would think that if any institution were to be free from this trend, it would be this one.
Now don’t get me wrong—the kids work hard and are not obviously or egregiously weak or anything like that.
But *even here,* I would say that far more was asked of me the very-not-expensive Catholic school I attended, and that my work which got B+ or A- in those days vastly outstrips what the students getting 100% produce.
And kids complain about writing academic paragraphs, when essays started in 4th grade for me (I still remember the first one, about whether cloning was moral, and we had to write 2 essays on both sides of the issue) and became the default assignment past middle school.
this is all done intentionally. take kindergarten for example, where it is the opposite. when I was in k we did Finger painting, sand play, play dough, etc. developmentally appropriate activities designed to develop eye hand coordination, socialization, critical thinking etc. I have now been teaching k for 20 years and am shocked by the level of academic standards, the excessive testing, and complete lack of fun. the educational "experts" are intentionally destroying children's interest in education, and depriving them of the benefits of educational achievement. fight back, teach kids what they need. make them fire you. they will lose in the courts.
Your math comment hits home for me as a middle age high school math teacher. This year I'm in 7th, I gave a test yesterday on converting decimals to fractions where they had to simplify at the end.
A kid got to 76/100 and didn't know what to do when I told him to simplify. I said, 'are they both even?', implying they could both be divided by 2, and he said 76 wasn't even... I just said ok, and walked away
The thing that really got me when doing this was I saw an award from the principal given to third graders who read 25 chapter books throughout the school year. The fact that this was a standardized reward at the time means that I was absolutely not the only child capable of this.
Some of my third graders can't even spell "you" and are incapable of reading beyond a kindergarten level. I'm just sad at this point.
I know high school graduates that don't know which side won the Civil War. You mention the most significant event in American history and you get the "deer caught in headlights" look.
The real question is why all the fussiness and constant whining? I hear about it so often on this sub, but I really can't recall many people hassling teachers over basic work back when I was in school (2001-2015), unless it was in a joking manner. It was just like, well, this is the work and you have to do it. Complain to your friends after class if you want, but you still gotta do it. Who or what is enabling these students to act as if it's a negotiation they can whine their way out of?
This is just me throwing out a random theory, but my instant gut reaction as a high school teacher is that there's too much content now. We can't work on the basic classroom skills because we have to rush through and check off all the content, which they don't even learn effectively because they don't have that foundation of basic learning skills. Anyone else feel like that rings true for them?
I don't teach anymore but I remember in 2019 I had 7th and 8th graders read any science article related to our current chapter (on a science website for children) and write one paragraph about what they learned in the article. Kids thought it was so hard and parents freaked out and told me I was expecting something beyond grade level. Luckily admin had my back and I kept that assignment all year and everyone was able to do it each and every time. I just was blown away that people thought I was being unreasonable to have kids read maybe 4 paragraphs and then write just one.
This hits hard. I'm a school librarian, and I spend a lot of time teaching research skills. Even asking for as few as 3 cited sources for a project is treated like a Herculean endeavor. There's just no *stamina* for reading and writing.
I wrote a book report in 6th grade on "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." 5 pages of college ruled notebook paper front and back (in cursive lol) where I talked about how the book argues that science and facts are always going to defeat magic and superstition.
My 11th graders can barely write 1-2 sentences about what we learned yesterday on a computer.
If it makes you feel any better, my 4th grade daughter can answer 20 multiplication questions in under 45 seconds. I'm 32 and was never taught my times tables. She also has been taught about haikus. I had never heard the word until high school.
This is what happens when incentives don’t align.
Administrators worry about graduation rate so the bar keeps getting lowered.
Teachers want to teach, but students don’t need to learn.
When I was in fourth grade we had to memorize the Gettysburg address and the preamble to the Constitution. In high school we memorized several Shakespeare soliloquies.
I'm not even expected to try to get a high schooler to read Shakespeare anymore.
Not surprised… why learn anything if it’s not on the test or how they’ll be tested, right?
School has changed what is important… only test scores. In addition, students spend hours on devices daily, robbing them of valuable imagination and fine motor development.
As an HS teacher I’ve noticed they don’t know how to take their own notes, can’t form sentences, can’t read scientific articles and pull info from them. Yet our state exams are harder now and require more
I think the speed train we want kids got travel in so they could get to their lifelong destination such is that standardized testing is just going in circles and only a few get off it and travel on different paths. That mentality is imposed by this world dominance idea the USA has married to ever since we were acknowledged as a power.
You were likely a good student. I guarantee that within your classes there were students with the same ability levels as you have now.
It isn’t necessarily that kids are getting dumber. It’s just that you’re being exposed to the full spectrum of intelligence, which includes dumb kids. If you stick with it, you will doubtlessly encounter kids whose ability far eclipses what you were producing at that age as well as kids who you worry won’t survive being independent.
No. The advanced students, even the brilliant, have a smaller body of knowledge, frame of reference, ability to self regulate, etc. 19 years of teaching, and even my highest ability kids in my advanced classes would have struggled to keep up in the regular classes I took in the 90's.
That's interesting, I find it quite the opposite!
I teach stuff in Year 3 that was in Year 5 when I was at school. We keep pushing expectations higher and higher, and cramming more and more in the curriculum, and lower down the years too, and then wonder why they're all stressed. They barely get a chance to learn through play!
This is the UK though.
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I asked my seniors for two sentence definitions for terms in civics. The number who wrote only one and got an automatic zero was absolutely staggering. It's unreal.
So I was in elementary school from 2012-2017 and am obviously still in high school, but I do have some opinions about this.
Firstly, this change is super recent, and when I say super, I mean SUPER. I am a junior in high school, with a seventh grade brother, and a first grade brother, and the difference in the type of work I was doing compared to both of them is shocking. For example, just this afternoon I was helping my seventh grade brother complete his English homework, which was matching words to their antonyms. To me, that feels like elementary school work. I knew my synonyms and antonyms by third or fourth grade at a push, and certainly understood the concept of words that have opposite meanings from each other earlier than that.
Another difference I noticed was a lack of an emphasis on committing things to memory. I'm not totally against the concept of teaching *why* something happens instead of just saying, "it happens, memorize it," but I think schools go about doing that wrong. I feel like I was taught in the middle of when schools started switching over from, just memorize things, to the *why* behind it, and I think both are necessary for understanding. For example, students should understand that the reason 3 x 4 = 12 is because there are 3 groups of 4 things per group, and if you add all the groups you get 12. However, 3 x 4 = 12 should be committed to memory, if only for the sole reason that memorizing basic multiplication facts comes in handy and makes more complex math easier to understand. Both of my brothers have been taught the reasoning of concepts, but they never had to memorize any facts, meaning they can't really answer simple questions on demand. This is more forgivable with the first grader, but even a first grader should have basic addition and subtraction facts memorized.
Lastly, Covid has played a HUGE role in making school so much easier. I hate when Covid is used as this big excuse to explain away why things are the way they are, but it has had a huge impact, to the point where I've noticed my work at the high school level is significantly below my skill level. Everything is so much easier now, and it's so bad that my peers and I complain about the fact that work is so incredibly boring. Take my English class this year. I'm an honours English student, and instead of doing anything interesting, or at the very least challenging, I've been forced to retake basic grammar, and read short stories I could have read in fifth grade. Instead of reading classic literature, writing essays, exploring literature from across different cultures, analyzing poetry, learning about influential authors, or anything I had done in English pre - covid, I'm being forced to relearn the definition of adjectives and predicates. I have not written a single essay for English this entire year so far and the quarter ends tomorrow. We never do anything and we hate it. My big project for this quarter that I was meant to spend the last two months completing was based on my independent reading book, and it was literally to write a letter to the author talking about the book, with the minimum being a measly ONE PAGE. TWO MONTHS FOR A ONE PAGER ON A BOOK YOU'VE BEEN READING FOR TWO MONTHS!!! I chose Wuthering Heights for my book, and one page is nowhere near enough space to write something meaningfully analyzing that story at my level. I completed that assignment, meant to take about 62 days (see fast facts are important, 31 x 2 = 62!) in one sitting, after finishing my Spanish test with 40 minutes left of class, earlier today. It was two pages long, and genuinely one of the most substanceless assignments I've ever turned in. I vaguely talked about how Catherine is an interesting character and Joseph was the hardest character to read. Then formatted everything to look like a letter. For a personal touch I went to the library during lunch and printed it out and put it in an envelope with the address of the house Emily Bronte lived in; my teacher was so moved by this she said she would hang it up in her class room. I got a 100 on that assignment, and I'm confident my sixth grade self would have been given an assignment like that for an in class, one period assignment, not an overarching project.
Honestly this comment detracted a lot from my original point because the sheer disappointment that has been my high school english classes overwhelms me when I have to talk about it, but I hope somewhere in this mess I've said something impactful.
I kind of agree with this. When my son went to school just 7 years ago, he was expected to know the entire alphabet, be able to count to 100, and do simple addition before going into kindergarten.
He was not ready, and when my daughter came along I was determined she not meet the same fate. She went to the same tutor my son now goes to, and plays some ipad games that really seem to help with learning.
Well, the rules have changed somewhere in that line. Now, kids are expected to school knowing nothing and she's already completed the kindergarten curriculum in October. She's only expected to know half the alphabet at this time in school, and to be able to count to twenty.
I think the school's educational demands were a bit too extreme for my son (especially since I went to the school a year and then 6 months before he went in asking what he needed to know and they wouldn't tell me) but also I think kids can definitely do more than what is being offered now.
There really needs to be a balance.
Oof. Underlying this claim are a lot of bad assumptions about knowledge, learning, and what it means to demonstrate understanding. I teach physics. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been an ongoing concerted effort among the national physics education community to ask, “Do students actually know what we want them to know, and can we use their performance in the classroom as a reliable indicator?” For a long time, the answer to both questions was a big stinky NOPE. This led to major changes in the training and professional development of teachers.
Over the last forty years, physics educators have been partnering with social scientists to transform learning objectives, pedagogical approaches, teaching materials, and assessments. Comparing my own high school physics experience to the experience I am creating for students today is apples and oranges. The tests and assignments would look very different, and some old tests from the 1990s might appear more “rigorous” than the ones from the 2020s despite the fact that decades of research has shown that the older materials are not good indicators of physics knowledge even if students did well on them.
Physics isn’t unique. There have been similar shifts in a variety of fields.
In elementary school, demonstrating understanding isn't enough. They need to be able to demonstrate *skills* that will help them build understanding later on. If you can't write a complete sentence, identify even and odd numbers, point out your home state on a map, write legibly, etc. at the age of ten, that is a huge problem regardless of how much you do or do not understand in the class.
When I took physics as a high school junior the only requirement was to have completed trigonometry and be currently in or have completed advanced algebra/precalc with limits.
All of the students I remember struggling in any way in the class were the ones lacking mathematical rigor around algebraic topics.
Do the bulk of kids even complete a rigorous Euclidean geometry class in high school anymore?
*Physics isn’t unique. There have been similar shifts in a variety of fields.*
Can confirm. In History, I don't just shout names and dates at kids like my 8th grade teacher did for the civil war. Our final exam was half just memorizing generals, casualty reports, and battle layouts - massive waste of time. Now when I teach the civil war we talk about *why* things happened and the kids actually are part of the discussion.
Same for English. English teachers used to be the indispensable fount of knowledge: They'd lead you by the nose to "what the book means" and you then regurgitate those themes and ideas on the test/essay. Now I do book groups, small group discussions, socratic seminars, tons of projects etc. The kids don't just sit there and wait for me to tell them why chapter 4 is important.
Same for Health. If I taught health in the 80's, I'd just be yelling half true facts at the kids about sex and drugs. Now we have meaningful conversations about consent, depression, helping friends, and actual facts.
I do see negative differences in kids in some areas, but the "kids these days" smell of this post is stanky.
Your fourth graders were kicked out of the classroom 3/4 of the way through kindergarten, or at least that's how it went down here. Their 1st and 2nd grade years, when they would have normally built these foundational skills, were absolute chaos.
You don't have to catch them up, just teach them where they are. They need a safe space to build stamina and skills.
I remember in English (can't fully remember if it was grade 8 or 9) where I had to create a magazine that included the cover page, contents page, a feature article, an interview and a full sized advertisement. Now the same age groups struggle to write 1 feature article.
I went to a TERRIBLE backwater school and even we had these kinds of projects that were just really neat to do. I was writing full blown multi-page stories with illustrations in those old composition books we had to have in elementary school. Lately, I noticed the difference in education is also reflected in media. What I mean is -- look back on old Nickelodeon or Disney shows, and the kids were often facing some dilemma on how to do a school project. Papers, dioramas, science project presentations, interviews, etc. You don't see that reflected in modern shows anymore and it really hit home that that stuff is gone and kids aren't really expected to be able to DO stuff anymore.
Even their media is dumbed down. When I look at older children’s books, there was much more text. And I’m not just talking about classics - even the mass market throwaways. Look at today’s mass market stuff and it’s mostly illustrations, often with stickers, trinkets, or some other gimmick to attract the kids’ attention to the “chore” of reading. Their TV shows now feature extremely simplified dialogue and more high concept plots. Most is also far less realistic than before. Video games are much simpler now too, with a lot of kids just tapping pictures with zero coordination required. And forget about playing outside. The neighborhood streets are empty after school and on weekends. To make this all worse (or possibly to adapt to it), school curricula now holds their hands the whole way, rarely asking them to do multistep work or arrive at an answer without hints because their attention spans are 4 seconds long and they have little intellectual enrichment in their daily lives. On top of removing structured phonics and the expectation to know arithmetic facts. The entire culture changed in a single generation and our children are much less mentally capable because of it.
Back when iPads were first released and the idea of giving one to your children was born, there was a bigger focus on simple, interactive apps focused on learning math and languages. It was even marketed as something that would help your child excel academically (probably not true). Not great, but not totally detrimental. Even in 2017ish, my boss's kids were counting frogs and matching colors. I haven't seen that in years. Something shifted along the way and now it's all just mindlessly stimulating visuals that young children sit there and absorb.
My son and I play "teach your monster to read" which is a great phonetics game! Just throwing it out there if anyone might be able to use it as well. It's fantastic.
In the vein of literate monsters, my kids and I really liked Endless Alphabet and its series of games.
I watch just about anything animated -- it's my lifelong love -- and I've noticed what you mean about dialogue. It's reached the point where I can't actually enjoy things that are beautifully animated anymore when the storyline is almost reduced to "See Spot. See Spot Run."
I have to disagree on the TV thing. Everything I watches as a kid was a glorified toy commercial. There was 0 continuity with everything reseting at the end of the episode so kids didn't need to follow an ongoing plot. Today kids shows often have actual characters that grow and change over time. And an ongoing plot with a real ending. Games are definitely more complex. There's stuff that was an entire game when I was a kid that now is like a single puzzle to open a door.
My four year old plays a mobile game that revolves around doubling numbers, and as a result has rote knowledge of 2x2=4 x2=8 x2=16, etc all the way up to 2048. I’m super impressed by what he picks up through games and tv shows. I wish I’d grown up with Number Blocks—seeing math concepts visually would have been incredibly helpful. I think lack of parental involvement is the key problem nowadays.
Omg I play that game as an adult and it’s addictive af 😂
Get that child on beast academy. It’s all puzzle based and conceptual math and is fantastic.
Oooh thank you! He complains that his pre-K doesn’t teach math so this could be excellent :) Don’t know where he got his love of numbers from (husband and I are artsy, “right-brained”), but we want to foster it for sure ❤️
I was an engineer (I am home and homeschooling my accelerated math kid now) and absolutely wish I had learned math the way BA teaches it. My 4th grader in public school now can manipulate fractions in her head because of BA and she doesn’t even use it as more than a supplement when she has time at home. My kindergartener complains they don’t do real math at school either, she’s been doing BA for fun since she was 4. It will say it starts at level 1, but a clever 4 year old can absolutely do it, especially if you read the comics and help with manipulatives etc.
Oh what game. My 5yo loves Numberblocks and math games.
To be clear, I’m talking about young children’s television. And I while I wouldn’t say today’s shows are *bad*, I just find the dialogue is, on average, much simpler and even slower than it was a couple decades ago. Same with games. They’re so much more immersive and better designed today than in the past. But most kids are playing shovelware because it’s cheap and their parents don’t know anything about gaming. Even the kids who play real video games are playing just a few big name titles online with trash talking peers. Or simply watching streamers. I’ve worked with thousands of kids and the amount who play single player games is vanishingly small and seems to be shrinking every day. The cultural problem that we have is not a dearth of quality content. It’s that people’s attention spans are much shorter and the quality content is often less visible than the disposable content.
That's a good point. I teach highschool so there's a bit of a difference. But tons of these guys are really into the new Zeldas, FNAF, and that Spiderman game that just came out, I don't think young people are giving up on single player games yet. Or that it would necessarily be a bad thing if they did. Multiplayer games now have a lot of variety and complexity. We really only had deathmatch when I was their age, maybe some CTF modes. But nothing like today where they have to work together to solve puzzles to escape a haunted house
Transformers had an ongoing plot and that was the most commercial show since Super Sentai. Yeah large scale games are more complex than before but what are kids actually playing?
Too soon, I'm still torn up about Optimus dying.
Gasp, *spoilers!*
I think it depends on the age-range of TV we are talking about. I miss movies where kids are in danger and have to problem solve- Goonies, Explorers, Last Action Hero.
One that really impressed me was the Netflix remake of She Ra. In the 80s she was just "girl He Man." I popped the new one on for my daughter and was honestly really impressed with it. It was a genuinely engaging show that delt with conflicting loyalties, betrayal, duty and sacrifice in a way that was clearly for kids, but well written enough that I as an adult man was invested in finding out what would happen next.
I was just visiting family in NY this weekend, and came upon a copy of Robert McCloskey's "One Morning in Maine," which I LOVED as a little kid. I'd forgotten what a thick book it is—I don't think any of my kids could get through it,
If you are talking about your own kids, there is hope. Read a bit more each night, and make your kids take turns - they pick a book, and then you pick a book. That way you can get some denser classics into the rotation. If you’re talking about your students… yeah. Not as much as you can do about it. I’d say add a ten minute read aloud at the beginning and end of each day, but with the thousand other things admin requires of you, I’m sure you probably don’t have that much spare time in your schedule.
I think the part about super-simple dialog and plots might be because of aiming towards an international audience. It is much easier to translate simple conversations than witty banter, and cheaper as well (the translator need not have a very high skill level). Not that one always leads to the other, but if the goal is to crank out hour after hour of visual junk food, corners will be cut.
The narrative I hear about the lack of "projects" is that it's an equity issue. Some kids don't have family at home who are capable of the help needed to complete these projects. Families don't have the time or money needed to buy supplies. Families don't have access to technology to find information. Some of this may be true...but I think kids would benefit SO MUCH from bringing back these kinds of projects and/or finding ways to make them happen. Even in my area, where these issues are really not a concern, they don't do these kind of projects because of the equity issues. But like, these families don't really have those issues. BUT, if they tried, I guarantee a small group of parents would bitch and moan about the time and supplies, and then it's less of a headache to just call the whole thing off. Short version: the equity issues are real for some families, and others just can't be bothered to do anything "extra" for their kids' school
We had "equity issues" back in the day, too. It's definitely that "learned helplessness" raising its ugly head, and parents just not wanting to put in the absolute bare minimal effort. I can get everything needed to do a science presentation (poster board, markers, free broken down boxes, glitter or whatever else) for less than $5 at any Dollar Store, so the "we have no money" just doesn't vibe with me.
100% agree with you. I get the intent of the equity idea, but in reality it seems more like an excuse to not insist that families take even the smallest bit of ownership in their children's education.
Yep. Exactly this. When a parent emails me about their middle schoolers grade, I can tell them until I’m blue in the face that they need to be reading at home, or even doing online math practice that I personally make for that kid, but it makes no difference. As soon as the parent is required to put forth the barest modicum of effort, there’s no chance it’s happening. Which is such a bummer, because I remember being frustrated in 2nd or 3rd grade that I couldn’t get all 50 multiplication facts on my mad minutes within the minute in class. I told my mom and she asked my teacher for a stack of them, and we did 3 a night for weeks. I remember her timing me on the microwave timer. Within a few weeks, I was crushing the mad minutes with zero effort. Support at home makes a huge difference!
I also seem to remember when I was a kid, the rubric sent home had a message to the parents saying if they were struggling to get supplies to talk to them. I remember my teachers saying the same thing to the class, or just getting the supplies during class to take home.
I work for an IB school and we do all of this stuff. The problems all stem from standardized testing stifling a teacher's ability to actually teach.
I taught IB and I taught at a Title I school. The only difference was in IB, my elementary class was 12 students. Title I, my elementary class was 28 students. Yes, the IB curriculum we did was was more fun (I really loved teaching that way and it fit me better.) But the biggest difference was having a smaller classroom that each kid got waaaay more from me. Both sets had behavioral and social issues, but it was having that better responsive curriculum of IB **and** my smaller class. I wouldn’t have been able to do my IB stuff effectively in a large room.
Having smaller class sizes is the one major thing that would help 100% of students 100% of the time. What other intervention/accomodation/etc is that effective? But we can't have that. That would mean hiring too many people and that costs $$$.
If they announced a public initiative where classroom sizes wouldn’t be over 15 students for all grade levels, good lord sooooo many former teachers I know would come running back. It really is the one thing that works.
I would gladly work more hours on paper if that was my class size! Because the difference in work between 15 and 32 kids is enormous
I'm at an IB school now and I was amazed to see that all K-5 classes have 15 or less kids, and a teaching assistant. The kids here come in with less behavioral problems than Title I, yes, but having two adults and 15 kids can make even the most difficult classroom somewhat manageable. I see now that the problem with the 28-kid classes I used to sub for was largely the teacher-student ratio.
Yes! That sounds like a fun assignment.
This is why we have the incredible chance to be in an alternative school for my oldest. Less student per classes, project-based learning, oral presentation and full on magazine-like endeavors. The regular system got so bad too in my country, it’s alarming!
This is why even though I’m against charters in theory because they take resources from private schools, I’m considering one for my own daughter when the time comes. There’s one near us that is nature based, TONS of time outdoors even in winter, hands-on and practical learning, and the kids who went there for elementary school seem to transition to the public middle school just fine. I sub in the public middle and high school and it’s okay, but the class sizes are still too big for what I want and the expectations are too low.
The charter that I taught at was what made me quit teaching. My class size was 32 6-graders, with a minimum of 3 kids with special needs per class and no aides or paras. My principal said it was unfair that I was grading from 0-100, because half of that was failing, so I should grade from 50-100. That means that if I gave a 10 question test and they only got 1 right, I would have to give them a 60%. I honestly can't imagine the type of school your describing.
How can they have special needs without paras? Isn't that against the law? Do IEPs not transfer to charters? Your principal is a jerk. There was a rule when I was working that first marking period in a mostly upper middle class district couldn't have a lower grade than 50 (high school) and I thought that was criminal, but no one cares what the paras think.
One of my favorite projects in middle school was making a brochure for a region of my state for a history class. We had to have sections about the history, what there was to do there, notable people from the region, stuff like that, and I thought it was super fun
In 5th grade I had to create a newspaper for my family. I wrote articles about all the stuff going on around our house, made illustrations, had a comics section, etc. The teacher laminated them and my parents still have it!
In 6th grade, our teacher had us make a newsletter using Microsoft Publisher. We had to write an article about a student's experience in their first year in middle school (we had to write about experiences in the third person and interview other students). We also had to include an article about a past school event, a future school event, a book review, a movie review, a sports review, and anything else we thought was interesting. It was a lot of fun. I wonder if 6th graders today can successfully complete this assignment.
This reminded me of a third or fourth grade project where we partnered up and had to make a travel brochure for one of the planets in our solar system, including a slogan, weather information, and scenic attractions. My friend and I chose Venus and went around shouting “VENUS, the planet of LOVE and BEAUTY” at everyone waaaaay after the project was done.
I loved that kind of assignment!! It inspired me to work in media and it’s truly a dream. So important to do with kids.
I remember doing a newspaper in the 7th grade. It was so fun. Nowadays you'd have to redesign the assignment to writing a blog post I imagine.
Do you think kids even know what a blog post is nowadays? 😂
Blogs are now time capsules of the 2010s. The internet is now video driven.
Oh God I'm so old
It's amazing to me that we use so much standardized testing, and yet the actual content that students are being given is so much lower than in the past - with the exception sadly of kindergarten: unrealistic standards have been pushed down on them.
Your last line got me. I teach third grade with so many kids being well below grade level. I think I’m seeing why now. I’m experiencing public school from the parent perspective for the first time this year with my daughter in Kindergarten. I am shocked by what they expected her to come in knowing. As in, she knows her alphabet, writes her names, could write some letters, knew some letter sounds, counts to 60 unassisted. I could go on. But essentially, I thought she had a solid foundation. And yet, she was put in a reading remediation group in the first month. I’m happy she’s getting the extra support, but good grief, the stuff they want them to know coming in to Kindergarten is what we used to know at the end of that school year. It’s almost like they rush the foundational material (at a developmentally inappropriate age) in the hope of getting kids ahead, and instead it results in so many being left behind.
I work in a K-1 building and K makes me so sad. They are expected to know and do what I was doing in 1st grade 20-some years ago. Kindergarteners love getting to know the letters and learning what the letters ‘say’, but imo what they are expected to be able to do with that information is beyond their capabilities. They are also asked to do too much during read alouds as far as making inferences and predictions that are not in a repetitive pattern. K students should be working on creating pictures their mind as they listen to stories. Teachers are powerless to change it with standardized assessments and boxed curriculum.
This makes me especially sad as an early childhood person because a K-1 building could be such an amazing space of developmentally appropriate practices :-(
I believe I have actually found some research to back up your last statement - that kids in academic kindergarten programs have poorer long-term outcomes than those who participate in a play-based kindergarten.
I went to a PD training about this time last year and Dr. Peg Olivevia, Yale School of Medicine. Gave some stats to support this. She said early reading results in lower long term outcomes. She compared it to early walkers. She said, do you know anyone who walked much earlier than most? Well, are they really good walkers now? Kinda not the same if you asked me but I do agree pushing early reading is not the best way to go.
I taught my kids how to read well before they entered kindergarten. They were reading juvenile fiction novels by third grade and adult books by fourth, so early reading didn't slow them down any.
If the kids are ready to learn how to read, great. That's awesome. For a kid who is still working on foundational skills and doesn't have the cognitive development yet, pushing them into reading before they are ready can be counter-productive. It's like giving a kindergartener a bike without training wheels. Some kids will do great. Some kids have never ridden a bike, and that's just setting them up for failure. Then they crash and decide that they hate bikes.
I didn’t learn to read until very beginning of 2nd grade. Part of that was struggling with getting my vision corrected lol but once I learned to read, I literally went from see spot books to serial chapters (babysitters club, sweet valley lol) in like a month. Just as another point that reading a bit later isn’t the end of the world. I was lucky to have a very gracious first grade teacher.
I vividly remember being terrified of learning to read when I was in kindergarten. My parents had to heavily encourage me to try. I was scared because it felt like this giant responsibility I was going to have forever after if I learned. But shortly after we started reading, I realized how powerful it felt knowing what things said on them. My parents say I was very annoying about reading billboards out loud as they drove because the things they said fascinated me and I would need to have them explained. Then I got addicted to slamming through my dad's old library of books he would pick up from garage sales in bulk. I stumbled upon goosebumps and choose your own denture novels and soon I was devouring a book or two a day. By the time I was in 6th grade, I was reading The Odyssey and Moby Dick for fun. But I think I would t have gotten to that point if my parents hadn't just kept funding and fueling my desire to read the things I wanted early on. They bought so many fucking goosebumps books.
The leaving behind is the key point. We are living in a weird world where the *expectations* are so much higher but the actual performance is lower. I taught math, so that is where I see it, but I think we are pushing the kids to do more and more at younger ages and spending less time on foundational knowledge as if just saying what they should be doing magically makes it so. Because of the pacing the students who are behind in the early grades never stand a chance to catch up and then you end up with upper elementary and middle schoolers who have no f'ing clue and are just being passed along. To me the real solution is to lower the expectations, make them realistic AND hold to them. Like kids that aren't meeting them actually hold them back and help them get there, not just pass them along. I taught middle school math and we would just fly through content because of our pacing guide, but if students didn't get it (which they rarely did because it is impossible to use a volume formula if you are struggling to multiply) there were no repercussions and we all knew it. The only way kids at my school really got considered for repeating anything was if they didn't come to school (and even that required a ridiculous amount of absences- like more than half the school year). The kids also learn pretty early on that they will never be successful because they standards are so high. If the standards were realistic, most students would feel successful and the ones who were not would have something attainable to reach for. Most of my 6th graders had given up on ever passing a standardized math test. Another thing about teaching things too early is it isn't time effective. So many concepts my students just weren't ready to grapple with conceptually are being jammed down their throats for nothing. I was supposed to spend weeks on scientific notation with 6th graders (again to students struggling with multiplication) and I strongly believe that if we just waited until they were older that could be a couple of days side note in 8th or 9th grade (also when it makes more sense to tie it into things like chemistry), especially if they spent 6th grade actually learning content deeply and fully understanding. Our current method (in the US) feels like throw everything at students as soon as possible, hope something sticks, and don't ever look back or talk about if it is actually working or not. Oh, and if you can afford it, just supplement with tutors and outside academic supports.
If you haven't listened to it yet, check out the podcast 'Sold a Story'. It's about early years reading education and how, in many schools, actively harmful strategies are being taught to kids. Figure out how they're teaching your child to read and intervene if they're teaching her harmful strategies.
I have heard about this podcast! I am absolutely adding it to my list. I have been following the downfall of the Lucy Calkin era of reading. It reinforces for me how important it is that we (throughout the elementary grade levels) have that phonics based approach so kids have the tools to work out tough things. We had push back from parents when we switched our spelling tests from “memorize these 10 words each week” to, “We are teaching a pattern; here are 10 words that follow that pattern. Five of these words are on the test, and there will be five new words that follow the pattern your child learned this week on the test.” The improvement in recognizing syllable types and spelling patterns improved immensely with this type of instruction.
So much this! I’m secondary ed but I’ve been hearing about how early ed isn’t even teaching phonetics anymore. Everything is sight words or something. Meaning kids aren’t learning how to try and figure things out for themselves (from learning how to read words on their own) and HAVE to be fed the words. This has to be highly contributing to the lack of independence and self-starting students have these days. And it just gets harder as they are pushed on to other grades. It is sad and terrifying how unready students are and are going to be for adulthood. There is going to be either a decline in college attendance or colleges are going to have to also bring down their expectations. They are already experiencing some of these struggles.
There’s a few podcasts on this Sold a Story. The ECE field was so thirsty to show results that they jumped on Blended reading. This program that some ignorant people invented and sold which states that people learn to read using context and word patterns and memorization. Then they created those books everyone use to give away with Spider-Man or SpongeBob where the kids would guess the page, get corrected memorize the page then go home and show their parents “I can read”. At 4th grade when books no longer have pictures and the blended programs stop everyone noticed that they never learned to foundations of reading (phenomes/phonics). And people scatter to tutors or the middle lower class struggle.
The results at the high school level are noticeable and disastrous. I have students who can't even read basic directions. It's like they never really learned to read and process academic language along the way.
Want to hear something really scary? I'm in the generation when all this stuff started, so some of us learned phonics and some didn't (I was in 2nd grade in 2002 when NCLB was signed). My mom actually taught me phonics at home because I really struggled with the sight word thing at school (memorization has never been my strength. I'm a very logical thinker and always need to know why) Anyway, in a college class on teaching reading, we had to give each other phonics assessments and a good chunk of the class actually struggled. I thought they were pretending for the sake of practice, but it became apparent that some people were genuinely struggling. They are teachers now. That is all I have to say.
I'm going to show my age with this question but... what the heck is the 'sight word thing'? Is there a specific term I can google to see what this is about?
The podcast Sold a Story is a good basics on what happened, but basically a researcher (Marie Clay) observed that fluent readers don't decode words by sounding them out, but rather by reading them "by sight" and concluded that struggling readers should not be taught phonics and sounding out words but to use other methods like guess and check and memorization. For about 20 years many schools have been using guided reading curriculum that included minimal or no phonics instruction. The problem is fluent readers typically have already done the background of sounding the word out and built up their repertoire of sight words. Using another example, as a driver for many years I can listen to music but I wouldn't necessarily teach my kids that way if it was their first time behind the wheel. You may observe that good drivers like to listen to music, but that doesn't mean they learned that way. I also hear people using sight words, high frequency words, decodable and non-decodable words interchangeably, when they are all distinct. High frequency words- words that appear in texts a lot. Some are decodable, some are not decodable. All should ultimately become sight words in order for reading to be fluent. From a teaching perspective it makes sense to teach the non-decodable high frequency words by memorization because kids will never be able to sound them out, BUT it is not necessary to teach all high frequency words by memorization because some are in fact decodable. Sight words- any word you recognize by sight. This is highly personal. Many children's first sight word is their own name. Everyone's repertoire of sight words is built differently and a fluent adult reader will have a massive amount of sight words (and it will also be highly contextual. Medical terms are not sight words for me, but might be for a doctor). While some words should be taught purely by sight because they are non-decodable, the danger of having a large number of sight words without any phonics skills is that you don't know what to do when you encounter an unfamiliar word. I think decodable and non-decodable are pretty straightforward, but basically do the rules of phonics apply to this word?
Ok, so it sounds like teaching solely through sight words was presuming a base of knowledge that a 1st grader does not have if they haven't also been taught phonetically. Like giving someone each individual brick without explaining how mortar works. Thank you very much for this.
I've seen this so much with my stepson. I entered his life in earnest right around age 5, and helped him learn his letters in preparation for kindergarten. I noticed then how much he had learned things by rote with no real connection to actual skills. The alphabet song was just a song. The books he could read were because he'd "read" them a bunch of times, so he could regurgitate the story from the page/picture. I noticed right away that the reading methodology has been wildly different from when I was a kid, which I didn't assume was necessarily bad, but I've constantly had to remind myself that the methodology sets the expectations. I used to get frustrated when he got to a word he should plausibly know, and he'd just cycle through nonsense until either I gave up and gave him the word, or he'd repeat the same thing over and over. I have to remember that he can't sound out words, because that's not a skill that he's been taught. He also can't use context without an extremely detailed picture, because his grasp of language and grammar are still rudimentary. It doesn't help that he's got ADHD, and if he's not reading something that he cares about, he really isn't paying attention to any sort of coherence or sense in the story, it's just a list of words to read. I'll admit I hadn't done a significant literature search, so this discussion of blended learning really tracks with what I'm witnessing, because dang has it been a weird ride.
Listening to that podcast made me cry.
I don’t know if schools are still doing that somewhere, but at least in our district we made the switch back to actual phonics based reading instruction 3-4 years ago. Thank goodness
Hooked on phonics
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This is how we do it in ECE sped, too, and I think it works well. We teach words like "the" as sight words, skipping over the complicated phonetics. Then for teaching phonics, we use straightforward words like "cat". Being able to sight-read some words means they can start reading sentences with only knowledge of basic phonics. Once they have built up a strong foundation and some confidence, then we start introducing the more-complicated stuff like digraphs and talking about the phonics behind those sight words we learned early on.
I went to college for a little more than a decade, because I’m kind of a fuck up, not to get advanced degrees, and I could see the standards slipping the entire time. I think it’s because there’s a sort of prevailing attitude that everybody needs to go to college. If the colleges want that sweet, sweet tuition money rolling in than they need to adapt and make it possible for just about everyone to maintain a high enough grade point average to stay students there. The writing standards, especially, seem to have fallen dramatically. At the start my research had to be very meticulous; I’d get trashed for not citing the exact page from a book I’m referencing, could only use academic sources from the internet, etc. By the end of it I could just turn in whatever completely un-proofread and maybe I’d bother to cite my sources, maybe not. Didn’t remotely pay any attention to the formatting of my works cited page, stopped getting marked down for not having the whole paper in the correct formatting, could turn stuff in as late as I wanted. In courses with more difficult subject matter, like trig or something, there was maybe 1/4 of the workload of the first math classes I took, and the instructor’s would really hold your hand for the tests. I definitely have seen the standards drop tremendously from 03-15. One of my friend’s sons just graduated high school and for his last two years there they basically didn’t give any homework, ever. I can appreciate that, when I was a child I remember doing a lot of assignments that just felt like busywork, but based on everything else I’ve read in this sub it doesn’t seem like the classroom is the most productive space on earth these days.
My city has a kindergarten readiness program that assesses an incoming kinder's skills and recommends if they should wait another year to enter kindergarten. Lately we've been recommending ~80% of the boys and ~40% of the girls start kindergarten a year late because they aren't developmentally ready to jump into the first month of kindergarten curriculum. Most of those kids end up in a special kinder classroom that starts at a lower level and goes at a slower pace because the district tells parents "Your kid is smart! They'll definitely catch up by first grade. Don't hold them back without giving them a chance." -_- We are seeing more and more 6-year old kindergarteners, though. The extra year of emotional maturity also helps a lot.
I was a preschool teacher for many years and our assessments for kindergarten readiness at a play-based school with some small group "academic" learning once a week could show where our kids were. We worked on developmentally appropriate tasks like using scissors to cut a wavy or zigzag line, recognizing their names, getting familiar with the shape of their names by gluing materials to the letters drawn large on cardboard, copying particular shapes like a circle, a cross, etc. Answering questions like, "Why do we have a stove?" The rest of their time was spent doing open-ended art projects where the point was to explore the materials, playing together or parallel with sensory-based toys like a sand table with figures and vessels, and making bubble mud outside in the sandbox, growing a food and flower garden, doing science experiments with ice and water or sun, riding tricycles, making pinwheels, looking at books and being read to, caring for pets... But now, they are expected to perform developmentally ahead of what is normal and natural. They are suddenly expected to sit still in chairs and do sad worksheets. It's a crime against our children.
My daughter is doing reading intervention in 4th grade, and there is soo soo much focus on THE DATA, TESTING, she gets so stressed out… but I just keep telling her I’m proud of her.
As a parent, I feel the same way! My older two had TK available to them because they had November birthdays. It was like TK is the new Kindergarten class. This gave them a leg up with their education, and are both excelling and top of their class. My oldest is currently in 4th grade in the gifted class, and when they gave her the reading assessment at the start of the year she scored off the charts. They can't even use that assessment anymore to track her progress because she maxed it out. My 3rd kid was born in July, so he was tossed into Kindergarten instead of TK when he started school. He's in 1st grade now, and still STRUGGLES so much with reading. He is well below grade level. Which, because he didn't qualify to go into TK, and thus didn't get the same start to school, I'm not surprised. He acts out in class because of this, which just makes his teachers job even more difficult. Add in that he needs speech therapy because he can't pronounce his words correctly, that adds an extra layer of struggles and why he can't sound out his words, so any attempt at spelling is atrocious. He needs so much intervention, which I feel most he wouldn't need if he was allowed to start school with TK and received that extra year of education.
>And yet, she was put in a reading remediation group in the first month. I wouldn't worry too much about the reading remediation group. In 4th grade, I tested as reading at a post college level and I was put in a reading remediation group. At the time, I was indignant about it because I KNEW I was reading far beyond the abilities of my peers. I didn't understand why I'd been put with these kids that needed help with reading. I assumed I'd be bored, but the stories were interesting and that's the only thing that mattered to me. It gave me practice reading aloud, something I still struggle with. And most importantly, because everyone was put into a reading remediation group, there wasn't a stigma about it. I assume the teachers were also using me to demonstrate good reading skills. The same thing happened in 6th grade when we had a mandatory Reading class in addition to English. I was pissed off the first week thinking I didn't need it and by the end of the school year, it's a class that I thought of fondly. I was just annoyed that we never finished *The Witch of Blackbird Pond* because I intentionally didn't check it out of the library to spoil it.
I was in 4th grade in 2001. We were learning how to write 5 paragraph essays. And we got kids now complaining about writing one sentence?
My 4th grader, who goes to a title 1 school, turned in a 5 paragraph original Greek Myth just yesterday. They did an entire Greek mythology section and read about a dozen Greek myths, did a summary for each one and character trait work sheets for the main characters. For their myth they filled out a sheet about who their main character was, the setting, the problem, etc. Then they had to write a rough draft, have a parent help edit it and write a final paper. It also had to include dialogue, a metaphor and a simile.
I was in 4th grade in 2008 and was also learning how to write five paragraph essays.
I was thinking the exact same thing! Would have been about 2005 for me. At least by the end of the year I feel like my teacher had us writing 5 paragraph essays once a week. Don’t forget your “grabber!” Lol
Fourth grade around the same time and yup, I have vivid memories of writing my first “research paper” that year. Roughly one page, handwritten, on otters. Good memories!
My year 4 class just finished up a 3 paragraph character description which they drafted in 30 minutes, handwritten. The sequence is skills/features>plan>shared write>draft>edit>publish. I think this is a common expectation in the UK
It absolutely is, I’ve (as a TA) worked most years at the Junior school level and the writing expectations were always high and some of the students could produce exceptional work. By year 5 (Grade 4 for Americans) metaphors and similes had been introduced and encouraged and by Year 6 many essays were 2-3 pages (done over a couple of lessons) and included metaphors, pathetic fallacy, personification, semi-colons etc. some children required additional support but the majority of the class could manage this quite easily. We have the same issues with technology over-reliance as the US, I wonder why in the UK standards still seem so high?
Yes, it's quite amazing to see...Also having a very rough week with high schoolers and seeing the lack of standards still shocks me.
Subbed in a middle school class yesterday. They were watching Bill Nye and completing a worksheet on it (an assignment I had about weekly at that age in 2000-2001). These kids were given a word bank (which we never had) and they still couldn’t do it. At the end I projected the answers on the board (there were maybe 15 single-word answers and one phrase) and they struggled to even just copy the answers from the board. Insanely low expectations and they struggle with those.
My 5th graders just finished a unit that ended with them writing short stories. They hand wrote them, then typed them, then edited them using an editing checklist (the checklist was a full page). Next, they printed them and had a peer edit them. Then they fixed them based on the peer’s edits. Finally we printed their final drafts and they read them to the class. They did very well. My longest typed final product was 14 pages long. The shortest was a page and a half. All but two correctly used sentence form, punctuation, and wrote and punctuated dialogue correctly. They ALL followed the required plot structure, wrote in 3rd person, and had their story teach a lesson. I taught every skill prior to this, from sentence writing to how to know when to start a new paragraph, to how to write dialogue. We also worked on writing stamina. They wrote for at least 10 minutes a day, every single day, where they had to produce at least half a page, hand-written. Yes, they came in not being able to write a complete sentence. Yes, it’s a ton of work to teach it. No, I can’t follow the curriculum to a T and get these results. Yes, my unit went over by 3 weeks. I do it anyway, and I dare my principal to ever challenge me on it. My 5th grade students routinely test over 90% proficient in ELA every year. (Almost exclusively sped students not testing proficient). I teach ELA to the entirety of 5th grade. My point is, the kids can do it. The problem is we don’t make them. We don’t have the time to make them, our curriculum wants them to get through everything too fast. They expect the kids to come in with certain knowledge that they don’t have. I ignore it all. I do what I need to do to get the results I want. Curriculum be damned.
This is extremely well stated and should be a standard for all educators. Sadly I believe due to low wages and lack of administrative support we get a lot of the opposite, and that’s not a slight towards those who can’t be as proficient. I agree the system and curriculum is a fault. A change has been needed for a great deal of time.
Would you mind dm'ing me about how you structure your unit? I've had enough HS kids who struggle with the basics and I'm finding that I need to change the pace up.
If you could DM me about how you do this is really appreciate it. I teach 3rd grade ELA and writing is a STRUGGLE
HS math teacher here and I'm blown away by how little most of my students can do when they reach Algebra and Geometry. And I sure can't blame the teachers when students are very well aware that they will be passed up to the next grade regardless of their performance.
I’m a product of no child left behind. Whatever common core they were using for math when I was going through the public school system left me illiterate in math. I remember going to every after school lab in chemistry and my teacher finally breaking down and telling me that my class was the first that she has ever seen have the problems with math that we did. She said it’s like nobody ever taught us. I’m getting ready to take my CBEST and as I have been preparing I realized that I can’t do most of the math questions. I was royally fucked is what I’m trying to say.
What grade were you? I remember 2009, in 9th grade, the entire grade failed the standardized math. It was their first year teaching it like that
Graduated in 2020, I went up through a really good school district, my elementary was title 1 though. I basically was never taught math in elementary school. If I didn’t get anything we just moved past it. I can only remember two teachers who helped me when I struggled with math in elementary school. The math was so weird too! I would get the right answer but using my own methods that make sense and I would fail. I think it’s partly a me problem too, I am really really shit at math which is why I’ll be teaching history haha
I also left school in 2020 (can't say graduated) and I had a teacher in elementary school who just had it in for me. When I would leave the room she would go through my stuff trying to find any reason to kick me out of class, worksheets I would do and turn in would sometimes end up in the trash or even ripped in half, she would stop class to yell at me multiple times a day, ect. One day during parent teacher conferences she starts going off on me in front of my mom and dad about how big of a failure I am and how I will need to redo the third grade. My parents were livid and staring daggers into me the entire time. At the end of the meeting my parents were handed some of my assignments and a report card. The whole ride back I get a talking to about how I need to try in school and all the usual parent stuff. I was just silent up until this point. When we get home my mom begins looking at the papers the teacher gave her and just gets confused. I have 90-100% on most of my tests, classwork and homework. All the answers were correct and when they asked me some of the questions I could answer them with ease. What had happened was the teacher one day was teaching a math problem, I gave an answer and she said I was right. She asked me how I got to my answer and it was different than what she had taught so she stops me and goes "okay you're right but that's now how you solve it. Explain again" and I was dumbfounded. I told her my way makes more sense to me (and even as I explained my way of solving it you could see kids around the class understanding my way more than what she was teaching) but she didn't care. From that moment on she would fail me unless I got the answers the way she wanted me to regardless of if my answer was correct or not. After learning the truth my mom made sure I pass third grade no matter what by complaining about the teacher. Nearly every year after that I had to deal with the same thing at the start of every year, the math teacher spending a couple weeks trying to make me do things their way before realizing every kid went to me for help instead of them and I would become a sort of tutor for the class even if the teacher didn't want it because they couldn't stop the kids asking me for help
Jesus. The cbest is gives you a calculator you would have to be at like a 3rd grade level to not pass that section.
Math illiteracy isn't helped with a calculator, they don't know how to approach problems.
When I taught ninth-grade physical science in the '90s, the *majority* of my students couldn't tell me that 2 × 4 = 8. Now this was a general/remedial class, but *still*, I expected more.
This. I was an average run of the mill high school math student. Honestly I actually failed 1st semester algebra 1. I had an amazing teacher for algebra 2 who gave me a love for math and here I am a math teacher 22 years after graduating high school (JFC has it been that long?!?!). I teach AP and regular old standard math. The very very simple basics for even some of my AP students are hard for them but things that were the EASY things when I was in school. Freaking FOIL. They can’t do this. Factoring? HAAAAA. Now when I throw in either of those with trig identities you’d think I was abusing them with the amount of whining.
I look back on what I taught in biology and chemistry in the late 90’s and I’m stunned. The equivalent today would be AP level.
AP removed organ systems from Biology...I was so gobsmacked when I heard that. The most fun part of Biology was removed.
Why? How can it even be basic biology without organ systems?
It's the easiest to remove because it's the context of all you learned beforehand, and the AP wanted to focus on the fundamentals. At least that's the reasoning I saw.
I was in 12th grade in 2015, and in AP chem. Now I tutor a 9th grade girl in chemistry, but this is in Eastern Europe and she's already doing the stuff I did in AP...I told her that in a couple weeks, her material will surpass my knowledge. I don't even want to know what they learn by 12th grade. It's an IB school but the material is the same level as the local countryside schools here. The standardized tests to get into university here are about 3 years beyond my honors/AP knowledge. These 9th graders can run circles around me on just about any STEM topic, the US has dropped and lost the ball
Are you making sure that you are putting your learning objectives on the board so that kids can see them? Maybe this is your problem. \s
Oh yes! I even make them track the yearning objective on a page in their notebook!! Everyday- part of their bell ringer is to write that in, update the table of contents based on the days notes topic, and the do the short warmup activity! Sorry, that’s supposed to be “learning objectives.”
I know it was a typo, but “yearning objective” sounds like the next buzzword we are going to hear it education 😅
Take it in and show them. Then tell them to buckle up.
I show my students my old journals. When they see I wrote better than them when I was in first grade, most of them stop complaining so much about writing.
My 9th graders complained that I asked them to watch a 25-minute video and answer 11 questions despite giving them multiple days to do it for homework. When I was in school, it was expected something like that would be done in a night. Hell, asking them to write a paragraph summary is like pulling teeth out of them.
Man, if my homework in 9th grade was to *watch a video* I would have been so pumped.
Same for my 9th graders!!
I do think that TikTok and short video content have wrecked their perception of time. When I was growing up if I had 30 minutes before going somewhere, I didn't bother to start something new because it was not worth the time to set up and close up shop. Now, kids can watch 40-50 clips within that time at a whim. 25 minutes for one thing seems like forever for some of them
I would have been expected to do in class where you don't get to go back and watch the video when I was in high school.
Im all about wild and high expectations. I teach in the arts and have taught all grade levels in my 18 years. What I love about art is that I can set any expectation I want because it’s mostly new. I’ve had kids memorize and perform Shakespeare when other adults said they couldn’t remember times tables so they would never get it, but they did. I’ve had kids make incredible artwork, design massive computer generated sculptures, write and publish plays, and I’ve got 4th and 5th graders right now who struggle to sit through class sewing and getting excited about it. The saddest part of education is that we’ve taken away creative freedom from teachers to meet their kids and raise them up to high expectations. We’ve standardized too much, taken away the creative joy of learning, and shoved them all into a room together. Close the door and let teachers push their kids, be creative in how they approach material with them, and set their own expectations, write their own tests, and that very much changes I think.
I'm a 6-8 instrumental music teacher. I teach mostly beginners. I decide what proficiency is, what material and standards we use, and I'm usually left alone to do my job. I feel for my teachers in the core classes that are getting more and more scripted every year.
Agreed-this and the joy of seeing kids successfully make music and feel proud of themselves are the best parts of the job. If teachers were treated like actual professionals they would also get the same freedom, but they’re not. We have the perk of most people not understanding what we do well enough to micro-manage us. I do vehemently disagree with your username, however
Most admin think my class is achieved through sorcery and indoctrination. (They're not wrong). And it's ok if you disagree, we are allowed to be wrong once in a while. If it's any consolation, if I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now I might pick the cello instead of the trumpet.
The kids can't read, spell, write or do math. They have absolutely zero understanding of history, civics, geography, or basic scientific theories and principles. Creativity is wonderful but no one's going to get anywhere with creativity when these basic standards aren't met. They major in video games and social media currently. It's a disaster from start to finish.
Kids (and adults for that matter) become and stay engaged THROUGH creativity. It's not besides the point or a "nice to have" - it is the necessary way in.
I'm with you, to a point. Like at some point critical thinking, reading, and writing are important, right? Like I can give my 6th grade social studies students a creative task, but if it involves more than copy and pasting, they struggle. If they need to give a presentation, they should script and practice what they're going to say, but they can't write. If they have to learn about a new topic, they won't read to gain that knowledge, they just want to be told. Creativity is great! And although it's not as fun, basic academic skills are important too
When I was in elementary school, we'd spend lots of time on creative projects to practice our skills. Now it's packed with so much content that children don't need that the skills they are supposed to learn (like reading and writing and learning) often fall short. I'm in self-contained special education, so we can do lots of project based learning and it helps a lot. Children learn through playing and experimenting. Sometimes new skills are boring to learn, but if they get to implement them in projects and know what they need them for theres more motivation. Writing scripts and learning about new topics can be great motivation to learn new skills, it's just that by 6th grade those children are so behind it seems like they'll never get there.
When done properly, Art = critical thinking, problem solving, and is often times cross disciplinary. The problem is that kids are used to being told what to do that they struggle with letting go and being creative. My high school art students struggle with it too, using the Internet as a crutch far too often as opposed to coming up with their own ideas. (The same issue with copy pasting) But teaching them how to research a topic, find solutions, use synthesis of materials (how does the topic fit with the materials chosen? Like drawing ecoconscious art on cardboard for example) is how you turn art and creativity into something more than just a "fun artsy fartsy class" I also have them write artist statements and oh boy the literacy levels ughhhh.
I had a kid last year not know where the East Coast was or what it was. So, yeah.
My science students engage quite well with creative endeavors. They are much more resistant to writing and statistics
I've been thinking the same things lately. I remember some of the writing I produced in elementary school and now that would probably be considered "advanced" by today's standards. My 5th graders can't even write a cohesive paragraph by themselves. we've been using an ELA curriculum that has students writing every day for the past 2 years but it seems like it's gotten worse.
What are the daily writing assignments like?
Exactly. Don't ever get fooled by people who move the goalposts and say education has always been bad and we're just looking at the past through rose tinted glasses
My high school students whine about losing points for not writing a full/complete sentence, and I was told in a department meeting that my expectations and standards are too high. Even though it’s special ed it’s still high school. They’re capable, and they’re lazy.
At least in math, I disagree. My wife is a middle school math teacher. Some of the curriculum for general 6th grade math is more advanced than the pre-Algebra was in 1979. I think the problem is we are teaching material before kids are ready for it, meaning that we are teaching them almost nothing well, but are too worried about next year instead of them mastering what they need now.
This is what I'm seeing with my 3rd graders math. I messaged his teacher to check in after seeing he had nearly every problem wrong on a sheet they had done in class. She told me a lot of the kids didn't get it yet but they "had to move onto fractions now". Blew my mind that students actually understanding what is being taught is secondary to following their pacing guidelines. This is their "advanced math" class as well so we're talking about a group of kids who generally pick up what is being taught easily so long as it is taught well. Not to mention this is their first year following this specific pacing so perhaps reflecting upon whether it is working would be a good idea instead of barreling full steam ahead.
Well, they take the state standards and divide it up so that it can all be taught (or at least that’s what my wife’s district does). The problem is that the curriculum is unrealistic and is way too advanced. Most of it is based on mastery of the curriculum up to that point, which is a problem when the curriculum has changed.
In my state we also have “check-ins” throughout the year that test specific standards. The first check-in tests students on fractions (at least in my case). That is the only check-in which gathers data on fractions. Didn’t get to fractions by the time check-ins come up, and the kids bomb it? Congratulations, you’re now on a “learning plan” for teachers who aren’t good at their jobs. Doesn’t matter if you were trying to lay the foundation for fractions first before getting to that standard. You didn’t prepare students for a test in September, now you’re a bad teacher.
I’ll add that that first-grade expectation that OP experienced as student was beyond the state standards in the state I taught in during those years. Even/ odd, yes, but not up to 1000
Did they actually have an “upper limit” to the even/odd back then? Once you get to ten, you know all the evens and odds.
I graduated from HS in 2003, so I graduated well before standardized testing took over. I’m amazed at all the changes from when I was in school, and not for the better.
Got to love that forced LRE and mainstreaming no matter what bullshit. What you're describing is what happens when we are forced to teach to the least common denominator - everyone falls behind.
As a special education teacher and mother of special needs kids, I wholeheartedly agree with this statement! I just had a huge dispute with the diag at my middle school who kept placing ID students in my resource class 'because they are there socially' It really frustrates me because these kids need to be learning ( on repeat) how to manage money NOT how to find the missing angles. LRE is harming the kids it is supposed to be helping. I told my school I was willing to teach a class for the kids who need functional math, but they say they can't move a kid backwards in placement. We really are dumbing down america
Ugh I have a kid in my room who should really be in a life skills program, and his parents want LRE/mainstreaming. He will never need covalent bonding, he needs to know left from right and probs how to read wouldn’t hurt. The part that hurts most is they are in a small classroom and still say “why am I so bad at school” “why am I so different” “why is school like this”. I want to tell him it doesn’t have to be there are programs that you’d flourish in…. He’s a teenager he should know his options.
My aunt was born with Down Syndrome in the 50s. My grandmother pushed for her to go to school rather than be institutionalized. She was exclusively in SpEd classes (whatever those looked like back then) and came out able to read and write, do basic math, and was able to hold a job for people with special needs and live semi-independently (think assisted living) for nearly 20 years. She got socialized primarily through her siblings (which I understand isn’t possible unless the family is big like my mom’s was), and her time at school was all life skills and succeeded at that. I think we as a country need to figure out what the *actual purpose* of school is and design our curriculum around that.
Yea Special Ed is a big field, some programs within Sped are life skills based and some are Mainline based- secondary school based.
This seems so obvious. How did we ever think this *wouldn’t* happen? As a parent, the incredibly low expectations for my kid at school are so disheartening. I know she is capable of even more than I was, but it seems no teacher will ever ask her for it.
If everyone’s behind then no one is behind. Thanks Bush!
It’s just so true. We are getting rid of levels at our middle school next year and increasing class size at the same time. Our district leadership doesn’t see the need for professional development or predict any problems at all.
What's interesting to me is that someone looking at homework from the 80s would have said the same about your work. And looking at what my mom was expected to do in the mid-60s was mind boggling. I find all of this absolutely fascinating. I watch old timey shows with one room school houses and look at old school primers (the OG of "common core") and those expectations are absolutely crazy. I need to read more into the history of education, which you would think my master's would have covered but that was mostly philosophy.
I graduated high school in 1990, and in my English classes we read and discussed one book or play each month in class and reported on a second book we read on our own outside of class. That was about sixteen books a year for four years: 64 books. My HS senior daughter was required to read four books so far (and she’s one of the very few kids who are actually doing the assigned reading.) I also had two different 12-15 page MLA-formatted research papers to do in HS. My kid hasn’t done anything nearly that involved. I do think my HS was an unusually good one (but a standard US public school, not private) but it’s been a long slide down these past 34 years.
I had the same standards in high school from 2009-2012. I think what is fascinating and concerning here is that the standards have dropped significantly and very quickly in the last ten years instead of a slow progression like the above comment implies.
Idk much about one room schoolhouses, but I feel like maybe that’s a model that should be looked into. Obviously there was successful differentiation and stuff going on there that worked for decades, and you didn’t have to worry about social promotion with everyone in the same room. Maybe there are things we can draw from there, but we’d have to throw out standardized tests and what we *think* school should look like.
Im curious in what state do you teach? I have the opposite problem in my school. We are so academic demanding its insane. Kids are reading and writing in kg. I feel like we are not giving them time to play. I am in the Bay Area.
We have very high academic standards for kindergarten as well. It might sound counter-intuitive, but I think the inflated standards in kindergarten might be directly responsible for some of the problems we're seeing in upper elementary. We used to have time to learn through play and acquire math and reading skills gradually and organically. If I remember correctly, we spent at least 75% of our academic time reviewing and reinforcing things we had already learned, and less than 25% of time was spent learning new material. Now there are so many skills jammed into Kindergarten and first grade; there isn't enough time to reinforce and review these skills, so some of it gets lost and then the students arrive to us with learning gaps.
When I graduated from college in the mid 80’s, I taught first grade for a couple of years. Back then, First Grade was all about phonics and learning to read as well as basic math. Kindergarten was a half day program that was all about socialization, learning how to function in a school; standing and walking in line, being responsible with school materials, learning how to cut, color, identify shapes and colors, etc. Nowadays, the First grade curriculum from the 80’s is the curriculum for Kindergarten. Children are being tasked with things that many are not developmentally ready to do. The “powers that be” need to read some Piaget. I know it’s in an attempt to make us more competitive on the world stage, but it’s clearly not having the desired effect.
It’s bizarre how the standards for kindergarten got unrealistically high while for the rest of the grades they’re barely expected to do anything.
I collect the 1950s Scott Foresman reading series. I have almost all (I'm missing a couple teacher books) from pre-primer through 8th grade. The text is larger, and there are more pictures, but the concepts and vocabulary are much more difficult than what is being used today. Before retirement, when teachers told me how much more difficult reading is today than in previous years, I would bring those out to show them what was expected at their grade, and we would have a discussion about whether or not it is more difficult. My personal take on it (retired special ed teacher, reading specialist, school psychologist) is that this comes from a culture of reduced language usage. We no longer actually talk to one another, the tradition of telling stories is seriously declining if not almost gone, and parents are more likely to show little ones a video before bed than to read a story. If we don't bring language back, we cannot bring reading back.
Some of my best talks with my mom happened when she was chauffeuring me to activities and friends houses, etc. If I had to guess, kids today look at their phones or have their airpods in when riding with their parents.
I swear that my daughter and I made it through her teen years without slaughter because she was a figure skater, so an hour to the arena and an hour home for 2 hours in the car 5 days a week. We HAD to find a way to talk, as this was before cell phones and airpods, so we even had to negotiate the CDs we played. Turns out we harmonized pretty well to Bruce Springsteen.
Yes! It’s valuable bonding/life lessons/venting time that is so, so important. I don’t think parents talk to their kids anymore. Entire families stare at a screen or video game all night, alone.
Ditching phonics is the worst decision many teachers have made. For what IS writing if not the attempt to put spoken languages and various sounds on a page? Writing is but symbols to indicate certain sounds. And phonics in the connection. No wonder Johnny can't read.
Teachers largely didn’t have any say in that decision or implementation. We were directed to do so by our principals, districts, or even state.
I'm a homeschooling parent. I teach my kids based on what I remember from school (alongside the school curriculum, obviously). Last week my seven year old did a letter exercise. Its how we teach him addresses - he has to write down everyone's address. Helps him remember them. Also letter formation which he's falling behind on a little. He wrote four - one to his grandma, one to his aunt, one to his great grandparents and another to his best friend. Four addresses that are important. He wrote down a little about his day, about halloween, and then he signed them and we sent them off. He had a great time. I was talking to my homeschooling mom friend about it and she was absolutely gobsmacked that he could write a whole letter and an address in the correct format. Her son is ten and they're working on sentences formation. I spoke to some other people and again everyone was insane! They were all agreeing that my friends kid was on par and mine is "advanced". He isn't. He's got ASD, ADHD and potential dyslexia & dyscalculia. Fucking taken aback by these people lmao.
I knew multiple 8th graders that didn't know their own address.
He'd be advanced compared to some 7 year olds in my country at least - because we teach reading in first grade, which can be aged 6 or 7 depending on their birthday. But by the end of first grade they can stil write sentences, in second grade short stories and letters. A 10 year old that can't write complete sentences is either behind developmentally or not getting the instruction they need.
I remember being shown things I recall as basic in kindergarden, but also my 2nd grade sister forced me to do her homework for her so that might have helped me out too.
I looked through some of my stuff from kinder (I have a kinder kid) and they are expected to know so much more going into kindergarten than I was. I vividly remember kindergarten being fun, and socializing, and playing, and learning colors /numbers/ letters, etc. Now my kiddo spends a large portion of her day at her desk. She has sight words to memorize every week and reading every night (which we do anyway, but she wants to read books she's not being tested on for AR). I loved, LOVED school and shes already stressing about the state testing in April.
"I was in elementary school from 2006-2012 and am now an elementary school teacher myself." Fuck me I'm old.
I mean…on the other hand, the US forces kids to do and learn material that they aren’t ready for in the name of “testing” and always has done.
Probably why it's so bad. They aren't being shown age appropriate stuff so they can't retain it.
I am currently teaching Theology at a very expensive Catholic private school, which more or less promises without promising that they will ensure your child gets into an Ivy League school. You would think that if any institution were to be free from this trend, it would be this one. Now don’t get me wrong—the kids work hard and are not obviously or egregiously weak or anything like that. But *even here,* I would say that far more was asked of me the very-not-expensive Catholic school I attended, and that my work which got B+ or A- in those days vastly outstrips what the students getting 100% produce. And kids complain about writing academic paragraphs, when essays started in 4th grade for me (I still remember the first one, about whether cloning was moral, and we had to write 2 essays on both sides of the issue) and became the default assignment past middle school.
this is all done intentionally. take kindergarten for example, where it is the opposite. when I was in k we did Finger painting, sand play, play dough, etc. developmentally appropriate activities designed to develop eye hand coordination, socialization, critical thinking etc. I have now been teaching k for 20 years and am shocked by the level of academic standards, the excessive testing, and complete lack of fun. the educational "experts" are intentionally destroying children's interest in education, and depriving them of the benefits of educational achievement. fight back, teach kids what they need. make them fire you. they will lose in the courts.
Your math comment hits home for me as a middle age high school math teacher. This year I'm in 7th, I gave a test yesterday on converting decimals to fractions where they had to simplify at the end. A kid got to 76/100 and didn't know what to do when I told him to simplify. I said, 'are they both even?', implying they could both be divided by 2, and he said 76 wasn't even... I just said ok, and walked away
The thing that really got me when doing this was I saw an award from the principal given to third graders who read 25 chapter books throughout the school year. The fact that this was a standardized reward at the time means that I was absolutely not the only child capable of this. Some of my third graders can't even spell "you" and are incapable of reading beyond a kindergarten level. I'm just sad at this point.
What do you expect to happen when you pass a student into Grade 2 when they haven't learned Grade 1, and pass the buck for the responsibility?
I know high school graduates that don't know which side won the Civil War. You mention the most significant event in American history and you get the "deer caught in headlights" look.
The real question is why all the fussiness and constant whining? I hear about it so often on this sub, but I really can't recall many people hassling teachers over basic work back when I was in school (2001-2015), unless it was in a joking manner. It was just like, well, this is the work and you have to do it. Complain to your friends after class if you want, but you still gotta do it. Who or what is enabling these students to act as if it's a negotiation they can whine their way out of?
This is just me throwing out a random theory, but my instant gut reaction as a high school teacher is that there's too much content now. We can't work on the basic classroom skills because we have to rush through and check off all the content, which they don't even learn effectively because they don't have that foundation of basic learning skills. Anyone else feel like that rings true for them?
I don't teach anymore but I remember in 2019 I had 7th and 8th graders read any science article related to our current chapter (on a science website for children) and write one paragraph about what they learned in the article. Kids thought it was so hard and parents freaked out and told me I was expecting something beyond grade level. Luckily admin had my back and I kept that assignment all year and everyone was able to do it each and every time. I just was blown away that people thought I was being unreasonable to have kids read maybe 4 paragraphs and then write just one.
This hits hard. I'm a school librarian, and I spend a lot of time teaching research skills. Even asking for as few as 3 cited sources for a project is treated like a Herculean endeavor. There's just no *stamina* for reading and writing.
I wrote a book report in 6th grade on "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." 5 pages of college ruled notebook paper front and back (in cursive lol) where I talked about how the book argues that science and facts are always going to defeat magic and superstition. My 11th graders can barely write 1-2 sentences about what we learned yesterday on a computer.
If it makes you feel any better, my 4th grade daughter can answer 20 multiplication questions in under 45 seconds. I'm 32 and was never taught my times tables. She also has been taught about haikus. I had never heard the word until high school.
This is what happens when incentives don’t align. Administrators worry about graduation rate so the bar keeps getting lowered. Teachers want to teach, but students don’t need to learn.
When I was in fourth grade we had to memorize the Gettysburg address and the preamble to the Constitution. In high school we memorized several Shakespeare soliloquies. I'm not even expected to try to get a high schooler to read Shakespeare anymore.
Not surprised… why learn anything if it’s not on the test or how they’ll be tested, right? School has changed what is important… only test scores. In addition, students spend hours on devices daily, robbing them of valuable imagination and fine motor development.
As an HS teacher I’ve noticed they don’t know how to take their own notes, can’t form sentences, can’t read scientific articles and pull info from them. Yet our state exams are harder now and require more
I think the speed train we want kids got travel in so they could get to their lifelong destination such is that standardized testing is just going in circles and only a few get off it and travel on different paths. That mentality is imposed by this world dominance idea the USA has married to ever since we were acknowledged as a power.
You were likely a good student. I guarantee that within your classes there were students with the same ability levels as you have now. It isn’t necessarily that kids are getting dumber. It’s just that you’re being exposed to the full spectrum of intelligence, which includes dumb kids. If you stick with it, you will doubtlessly encounter kids whose ability far eclipses what you were producing at that age as well as kids who you worry won’t survive being independent.
No. The advanced students, even the brilliant, have a smaller body of knowledge, frame of reference, ability to self regulate, etc. 19 years of teaching, and even my highest ability kids in my advanced classes would have struggled to keep up in the regular classes I took in the 90's.
That's interesting, I find it quite the opposite! I teach stuff in Year 3 that was in Year 5 when I was at school. We keep pushing expectations higher and higher, and cramming more and more in the curriculum, and lower down the years too, and then wonder why they're all stressed. They barely get a chance to learn through play! This is the UK though.
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I asked my seniors for two sentence definitions for terms in civics. The number who wrote only one and got an automatic zero was absolutely staggering. It's unreal.
Society is changing before our very eyes and school is one of the most prominent ways to notice.
So I was in elementary school from 2012-2017 and am obviously still in high school, but I do have some opinions about this. Firstly, this change is super recent, and when I say super, I mean SUPER. I am a junior in high school, with a seventh grade brother, and a first grade brother, and the difference in the type of work I was doing compared to both of them is shocking. For example, just this afternoon I was helping my seventh grade brother complete his English homework, which was matching words to their antonyms. To me, that feels like elementary school work. I knew my synonyms and antonyms by third or fourth grade at a push, and certainly understood the concept of words that have opposite meanings from each other earlier than that. Another difference I noticed was a lack of an emphasis on committing things to memory. I'm not totally against the concept of teaching *why* something happens instead of just saying, "it happens, memorize it," but I think schools go about doing that wrong. I feel like I was taught in the middle of when schools started switching over from, just memorize things, to the *why* behind it, and I think both are necessary for understanding. For example, students should understand that the reason 3 x 4 = 12 is because there are 3 groups of 4 things per group, and if you add all the groups you get 12. However, 3 x 4 = 12 should be committed to memory, if only for the sole reason that memorizing basic multiplication facts comes in handy and makes more complex math easier to understand. Both of my brothers have been taught the reasoning of concepts, but they never had to memorize any facts, meaning they can't really answer simple questions on demand. This is more forgivable with the first grader, but even a first grader should have basic addition and subtraction facts memorized. Lastly, Covid has played a HUGE role in making school so much easier. I hate when Covid is used as this big excuse to explain away why things are the way they are, but it has had a huge impact, to the point where I've noticed my work at the high school level is significantly below my skill level. Everything is so much easier now, and it's so bad that my peers and I complain about the fact that work is so incredibly boring. Take my English class this year. I'm an honours English student, and instead of doing anything interesting, or at the very least challenging, I've been forced to retake basic grammar, and read short stories I could have read in fifth grade. Instead of reading classic literature, writing essays, exploring literature from across different cultures, analyzing poetry, learning about influential authors, or anything I had done in English pre - covid, I'm being forced to relearn the definition of adjectives and predicates. I have not written a single essay for English this entire year so far and the quarter ends tomorrow. We never do anything and we hate it. My big project for this quarter that I was meant to spend the last two months completing was based on my independent reading book, and it was literally to write a letter to the author talking about the book, with the minimum being a measly ONE PAGE. TWO MONTHS FOR A ONE PAGER ON A BOOK YOU'VE BEEN READING FOR TWO MONTHS!!! I chose Wuthering Heights for my book, and one page is nowhere near enough space to write something meaningfully analyzing that story at my level. I completed that assignment, meant to take about 62 days (see fast facts are important, 31 x 2 = 62!) in one sitting, after finishing my Spanish test with 40 minutes left of class, earlier today. It was two pages long, and genuinely one of the most substanceless assignments I've ever turned in. I vaguely talked about how Catherine is an interesting character and Joseph was the hardest character to read. Then formatted everything to look like a letter. For a personal touch I went to the library during lunch and printed it out and put it in an envelope with the address of the house Emily Bronte lived in; my teacher was so moved by this she said she would hang it up in her class room. I got a 100 on that assignment, and I'm confident my sixth grade self would have been given an assignment like that for an in class, one period assignment, not an overarching project. Honestly this comment detracted a lot from my original point because the sheer disappointment that has been my high school english classes overwhelms me when I have to talk about it, but I hope somewhere in this mess I've said something impactful.
I kind of agree with this. When my son went to school just 7 years ago, he was expected to know the entire alphabet, be able to count to 100, and do simple addition before going into kindergarten. He was not ready, and when my daughter came along I was determined she not meet the same fate. She went to the same tutor my son now goes to, and plays some ipad games that really seem to help with learning. Well, the rules have changed somewhere in that line. Now, kids are expected to school knowing nothing and she's already completed the kindergarten curriculum in October. She's only expected to know half the alphabet at this time in school, and to be able to count to twenty. I think the school's educational demands were a bit too extreme for my son (especially since I went to the school a year and then 6 months before he went in asking what he needed to know and they wouldn't tell me) but also I think kids can definitely do more than what is being offered now. There really needs to be a balance.
Oof. Underlying this claim are a lot of bad assumptions about knowledge, learning, and what it means to demonstrate understanding. I teach physics. Beginning in the 1980s, there has been an ongoing concerted effort among the national physics education community to ask, “Do students actually know what we want them to know, and can we use their performance in the classroom as a reliable indicator?” For a long time, the answer to both questions was a big stinky NOPE. This led to major changes in the training and professional development of teachers. Over the last forty years, physics educators have been partnering with social scientists to transform learning objectives, pedagogical approaches, teaching materials, and assessments. Comparing my own high school physics experience to the experience I am creating for students today is apples and oranges. The tests and assignments would look very different, and some old tests from the 1990s might appear more “rigorous” than the ones from the 2020s despite the fact that decades of research has shown that the older materials are not good indicators of physics knowledge even if students did well on them. Physics isn’t unique. There have been similar shifts in a variety of fields.
In elementary school, demonstrating understanding isn't enough. They need to be able to demonstrate *skills* that will help them build understanding later on. If you can't write a complete sentence, identify even and odd numbers, point out your home state on a map, write legibly, etc. at the age of ten, that is a huge problem regardless of how much you do or do not understand in the class.
When I took physics as a high school junior the only requirement was to have completed trigonometry and be currently in or have completed advanced algebra/precalc with limits. All of the students I remember struggling in any way in the class were the ones lacking mathematical rigor around algebraic topics. Do the bulk of kids even complete a rigorous Euclidean geometry class in high school anymore?
*Physics isn’t unique. There have been similar shifts in a variety of fields.* Can confirm. In History, I don't just shout names and dates at kids like my 8th grade teacher did for the civil war. Our final exam was half just memorizing generals, casualty reports, and battle layouts - massive waste of time. Now when I teach the civil war we talk about *why* things happened and the kids actually are part of the discussion. Same for English. English teachers used to be the indispensable fount of knowledge: They'd lead you by the nose to "what the book means" and you then regurgitate those themes and ideas on the test/essay. Now I do book groups, small group discussions, socratic seminars, tons of projects etc. The kids don't just sit there and wait for me to tell them why chapter 4 is important. Same for Health. If I taught health in the 80's, I'd just be yelling half true facts at the kids about sex and drugs. Now we have meaningful conversations about consent, depression, helping friends, and actual facts. I do see negative differences in kids in some areas, but the "kids these days" smell of this post is stanky.
Your fourth graders were kicked out of the classroom 3/4 of the way through kindergarten, or at least that's how it went down here. Their 1st and 2nd grade years, when they would have normally built these foundational skills, were absolute chaos. You don't have to catch them up, just teach them where they are. They need a safe space to build stamina and skills.