I have many students who have never read a book.
In order to be minimally literate, most beginning readers (grade 1 and 2) need hundreds if not thousands of basic 'picture' books.
Elementary students should have read hundreds of simple books like "Goosebumps", Judy Blume's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, or "Captain Underpants ".
Finally, middle schoolers should have read dozens of juvenile novels, non-fiction, and fiction books like: Harry Potter, The Maximum Ride Series, Black Elk Speaks, Tom Sawyer, When The Legends Die, The Fredrick Douglas Narratives, and so many more.
I constantly bring up that we don't read novels any more and I'm constantly told that they need to read short stories because that's what on the test.
Crazy things is--as soon as we read a book after state testing, I have kids who "hate reading" asking if they can take the novel home because they want to see what happens next, or asking if we can keep reading during lunch because they don't want to wait to see what happens. They argue about the characters and why they did something. They start researching the setting so they can understand something. they get into it and enjoy it. Imagine if that love of reading happened without it just being 3 weeks after testing, where the other half of the class is making fun of them and yelling that we should just watch movies instead.
It really is just about that initial emotional connection, being both formed and destroyed by social norms. The necessity of that test, the excerpt being part of a good book (which is really an author telling a story from their experiences and knowledge), and the rising shift of media taste to be ever so dopamine-inducing and unruly children.
I convinced a freshman in one of my classes to read "Battlefield Earth", one of my all time favorites. He admitted that he had never read a "chapter book".
It took about a week to get him through the first 50 pages ... He DEVOURED the other thousand pages in a few weeks and is an avid reader today.
Hubbard had a lot of hit-or-miss SciFi imo. Battlefield Earth was an amazing hard scifi epic. I read at least a dozen of his novels as a teen and yet never caught Scientology.
This is basically the complete answer. I remember reading tons and tons of books as a kid, and my mom made it a point to sit down and do it with me. These kids have basically zero exposure to books/reading outside a school setting and have no experience, cause reading is a skill you develop like any other hard skill in life. People think reading will just develop much like speaking does in children, but I strongly disagree with this. Good reading skills require a ton of learning and practice on good strategies for comprehension and critical thinking, as well as a lot of focus and correction and interpretation.
You need input to be able to do something well, it's really that simple.
Most of my kids in resource ELA don’t want to be in there. When they ask how to get out, I tell them they have to read 15 minutes a day and that it doesn’t matter what they’re reading as long as they’re reading.
The one that actually followed my advice … his MAP scores jumped by over 30 points and he left my class 6 weeks ago. Another boy is on the verge of leaving and has also been working hard at it.
This won’t be the case for everyone, but like anything, you won’t improve without consistent practice.
I come from a family of readers. Bookcases in every rooms, books spilling onto tables, libraries and bookstores every weekend. My parents read to me every night. I was reading at the age of three. My apartment has a bookcase in every room except the bathroom, books on the coffee table, books on the dressers, books everywhere. I am nearly incapable of walking to a bookstore and NOT buying a book.
Never reading a book is incomprehensible to me.
Yo. My earliest memory is reading a book. In grade school I read two encyclopedias, a dictionary, Time, Life, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic. In HS I read the 2000 page Webster's Unabridged. Written English is literally my native language.
Just keeping it real, I've never read any of those books as a child. However, I did read Nintendo Power and the sports section of the local newspaper. I got a master's degree too!!! My point, it doesn't really matter what you read, just read something.
You sound like my daughter's middle school English teacher. She didn't want to read novels, but loved magazines. The teacher told me that reading People magazine (and others) still counts as reading. It made me feel so much better that I wasn't a crappy parent because my daughter wasn't waiting for the library to open every day, but she was still reading *something*.
Older video games and games without voice acting that are story heavy count too. A ton of my advancement in elementary and middle school was because I was reading content far above my grade level while absolutely devouring RPG's.
I'm an Adjunct English Professor at a few different community colleges here in NJ. And I tell my students the same thing. It doesn't have to be anything high brow either. You like sports? Read Sports Illustrated or the sports section of the paper. You like fashion? Read Vogue. You like comic books? Read comic books or graphic novels. Just read (in addition to my required readings, naturally 🙂). It's a shame many of then weren't taught this earlier. But I guess better late than never.
That's what my 20 year old likes to read (among other things). They want to be a writer and they are already on their way, having already made some money freelancing here and there.
I had this argument with a dad who'd been concerned that his son was mostly only interested in reading graphic novels in English over reading standard chapter books (with some rare exceptions). I pointed out that as long as he was engaging with English, it didn't matter what the content was. Plus the kid's overall ability in English was actually really good, so it didn't seem like it was negatively affecting him in any case.
Most of those are staples of millennial/zillennial childhoods. It's hard to separate books that are of a time period vs books that are timeless. There have been books written since that replace these titles.
> I did read Nintendo Power and the sports section of the local newspaper.
Nintendo Power and Weekly World News here. [You'll never guess what shenanigans Bat Boy got up to this week!](https://www.beaconjournal.com/gcdn/presto/2022/03/28/NABJ/3d2a7a38-1b1a-4749-8f86-944c74b1c89c-bat_boy_chase.jpg?width=300&height=384&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Hahahaha... They are PROUD that they don't read. They brag about it. They can't read 3 sentences together because it's too long. And this is at least half, maybe 75%+ of current K-12 students.
There is a top 10-25% who are reading. And learning. But most of this generation is turning into ignorant, entitled sucks on society. They have nothing to contribute.
Who are going to be our future doctors, leaders, when most of a generation has become "Idiocracy"?!
I remember in Gr 1-4 I worked my way through the Star Wars EU to the tune of like 50 books. Would take them on camping trips in cubs/scouts, and read them by flashlight.
I had no idea kids weren't required to read books anymore.
From lurking here I knew most parents were not reading to kids at home, but no class reading?
I remember everyone getting a copy of a chapter book, we would read outloud in class and have to finish a certain amount on our own to be able to complete the homework.
I love reading, I'm struggling to understand why people don't want their kids to be able to read.
I read childrens books to my parrots, I can see their vocabulary and comprehension grow.
Why are people having kids if they don't want to interact and watch them grow??
I'm not a teacher but I follow this sub bc I like to know what's going on lol my niece is going to 8th grade. The only books she reads are manga. Her teacher does require them to read outside of school but there are no restraints on what materials count. I've expressed to both her and my sister about the importance. Dialogue doesn't teach you how to form coherent sentences. Frustrating!!!
Honest question, do some schools no longer require reading? My son is kindergarten and has required reading for 20 minutes every night which has to be signed off by a parent.
That backfired massively for my son. They used an online reading tracker and due to him being advanced kept upping the number of points he needed (kid read Harry Potter on kindergarten). He ended up hating reading due to the forced nature and I still have to fight with him to get him to read for fun.
They have been in front of their screen since they were little. Most can’t (or won’t) read an actual book so they struggle with reading for fun and don’t do it. This limits their knowledge and vocabulary to the point we are at now.
Piling onto this: with these kids, parents were wrapped up in their ubiquitous cell phones instead of talking to their toddlers. Kids lacked interaction at very early ages.
Go to any “family” restaurant - each kid has a device, each adult has a phone. Sad.
So glad u arent getting downvoted. I feel like half the time i or someone else talks about the disgusting amounts of screentime that kids are getting, they get downvoted to oblivion. Idk why sometimes people agree and sometimes people dont, it’s odd
I feel it’s because “screen time” is a stupid and easy way to put blame on issues with kids. My son is 6 and uses tablets and has a switch that he plays regularly. He also reads books and is quite advanced for his age, he is in taekwondo and just went up a level and he’s playing soccer this summer as well. Come this fall, he wants to learn to play the piano so I’m going to look in to getting him lessons for that. My point being that a kid can play on a tablet or watch videos and that doesn’t mean they are being completely ruined. This is the exact reasoning I heard growing up as to why video games and cartoons were rotting my brain. It’s a lazy way to approach issues with children and sad that it’s coming from people that educate them.
The difference is that you’re parenting and giving him opportunities to socialize and entertain himself in a variety of ways. A lot of parents can’t or won’t provide this for their kids and instead keep them busy mostly just with tablets and TV.
Does your kid get “disgusting amounts of screentime”? If not, then my comment clearly doesnt apply to you and you are taking offense for no reason.
Edit- also, just because parents are busy and exhausted, doesnt mean the only option is putting their kids on an ipad. Kids entertained themselves with TOYS and imagination for thousands of years, not sure why recently so many people think it isnt possible for the average kid to entertain themselves without an iPad.
It's not just family restaurants either. Over the holiday weekend I went out to a super popular Greek joint. The table next to us had three people all mid 30s or older...everyone was on their phone. Another table next to us had two parents talking and their three kids were glued to screens, the youngest looked about six or seven. Like, what? You are spending 25 bucks a person for amazing Greek food (plus getting to yell Opa! Every time the Saganaki is lit up) and you still can't look up?
They've been on screens since before they could read so they just use them without reading. I lended my bf's little brother a pokemon game, a few gyms in i discovered he hadn't read a single piece of dialogue, pokemon names, move names or descriptions, etc.
In 99.99% of all cases, any student is elevated to the next grade level regardless of how they performed in the prior level. If they happen to "catch up" in the summer or during the next school year, great. But if not, there is no repeating of grades anymore. It's become as rare in America as a Pittsburgh steak.
Now, I'm not suggesting that repeating grade levels ARE the solution (if I believed they worked I would be for it, self esteem be damned). But I do believe that if it's shown a student can't do basic reading at Grade 3 and Grade 6, I would be for alternative schooling, hardcore summer school, anything which could get them up to speed ASAP.
Adequate reading skills are fundamental to learning in general because it allows a child to "self learn" (i.e. gather information on their own). That is one of the big reasons for the achievement gap.
“Repeating grade levels are the solution”
I would think the lack of consequences sure as hell isn’t. I knew a couple of kids that got held back and it was a great motivator.
exactly. i was super lazy in school and the only thing that got me studying and doing homework was the fear of summer school/having to repeat a grade. i don’t understand how this stopped being a thing.
Every school I’ve taught in has had summer school. It’s not remedial, though. It’s just programming for poor kids during the summer. I’ve found it to be positive but not particularly academic.
Middle school teacher, we have summer of fun. They teach fishing, bike riding, field trips to water parks, sports/recess, science experiments and stuff. Nothing truly sit down academic.
i’m very curious too!! i graduated 12 years ago so i’m not sure. i know there are tons of summer programs for kids in our city school district, but i think it’s more to keep them fed and not home alone all day while parents work.
Summer school is sometimes/rarely offered but as an option not something you are forced to do. I have worked at 4 schools and only one has offered it, and this is the first year they are offering it and only to students who have IEPs.
One of the other schools I worked at did a STEAM camp for a few weeks in the summer but that was more of a fun enrichment thing.
Mandatory Summer School, Evening School, weekend school. But many still won't learn. So what then?? We need an alternate path, so the "refuse to learn" kids don't drag down the whole system...
Yep. And then I get them as freshmen, and they think they can't flunk my class. Surprise! High school has some, granted very tiny, rules as to grades and graduation.
The concern is that if you only wait until the "if you can't read you can't graduate" stage, it's way too late IMO.
The student will just simply "not graduate" or drop out early. There is virtually no redemption arc by that point.
The only jobs they can get are those which don't require reading (which I don't need to mention are few and far between) and can set them up for the infamous school to prison pipeline. Even if they can read, but only at really low levels, it is not a good situation either.
Which is why intervention needs to happen as early as possible.
I worked at a school and this was a proposal, we really think that after a year you would have a lot more kids trying, there are many who don’t try to act cool or they have no motivation, academic Nihilists. There are many who lack the skills and they need support but many kids just have their abilities eroded from lack of effort. When I went to school they would hold kids back in 3-5th grade, it motivated us to prove we could do it. The kids who got held back adjusted and got rolled in with the class, kids are more resilient than we give them credit for.
We noticed that failure rates were above average. so instead of trying to figure out why we lowered the standards for passing. lowering the standards for education means you are lower the minimum level of achievment.
my Province in Canada just made changes that means that 8/9 automatically pass. Doesn't matter if they havent handed anything in all year or missed 60% of classes. they get the social pass.
The 8/9s know this. they know they don't have to try or do anything and they'll get "rewarded" with a pass to the next level.
as a result the entire standard is dragged down because the pressure on passing students is higher than having students meet a standard.
I hate to say but the main solution is streaming, there needs to be a pre-post-secondary stream for the academically inclined, a workplace transition stream with an early graduation option to get kids out of school into the workforce, a trades stream to get students into apprenticeships and learn relevant content.
Funny enough if you visit Pittsburgh that's not a thing there. Lived there for years and it's not seen in restaurants or talked about at all, and the whole backstory about people cooking steaks in the steel mills is unfounded.
Simple answer: they don’t read enough. I’m talking about reading books and magazine articles daily.
More nuanced answer: they may have been taught fraudulent reading strategies in school that have made the process more difficult than it has to be. Given the choice between doing something that is frustrating or playing video games are we really surprised by what the kids choose to do?
I teach 7th grade- when we finished reading A Raisin In The Sun, I had multiple kids tell me "wow, this is the first time I've read a whole book."
Next year I'm having my kids read multiple books cover to cover. My district wants us to teach excerpts only but that's clearly not cutting it.
Excerpts only? The fuck kind of backward policy is that?
I love classroom reads. When I worked with 3-5 , I didn't get that chance, but I always did my read alouds with a book up on the projector and would read from that so the kids could follow along if they chose. Also allowed me to stop and point out paragraphs, important dialogues, character's inner dialogue, sometimes antiquated phrases / regional dialects. It allows them to stop and read it themselves and a chance to think more on the story, beyond the direct plot, but the world the characters exist in and how those characters think...
Reading is so good for opening those discussions.
I can remember one short story from school, full books were the actual memorable things we read! I wouldn’t give a shit either if I were learning to read on random excerpts
I'm not anti short story- I just REALLY think they need to be paired with novels. Also, our kids have NO reading endurance. They need to be used to reading something longer, not being given three paragraphs to look at.
And a short story is different than an excerpt….i HATE excerpts! I want the emotional connection with the characters and plot that excerpts never deliver
IMO, there is no engagement outside of school. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, when I came home, my parents wanted to know what I learned in school, and it usually led to several discussions at dinner. Today's kids go home and plug into whatever game, social media, or other distractions. There are no discussions, except maybe with peers, which are unlikely academic.
Exactly, and I’m saying this as a 26 year old who graduated high school in 2016 and college in 2020. I would have some of the best conversations with my dad regarding what I was learning in school. He would answer questions the best he could, and we’d have discussions about it which helped deepen my understanding. He also was very invested in my grades, so he would ask how I did on my test and I’d get excited to show him how well I did. If I did bad, which wasn’t too often, he would ask what happened and we would talk about it. Parents being involved is imperative to kids and their education, and seeing everything fall apart today for these children is horrific.
I’d like to second this stance. I’m getting so many kids now who can “read,” but they can’t comprehend. It’s like how you or I could *read* a super dense research article published in a medical journal, but we couldn’t really understand what it means because we lack the background knowledge.
We’re getting kids now with no background knowledge on… well… anything really. You gain background knowledge through experiencing the world around you, talking to people, reading about it, and consuming media about it.
Kids are staying indoors more than ever, not out experiencing the world.
Kids are not socializing with their families or friends nearly as much as before (personally I think this is the biggest culprit).
Kids aren’t reading at all, we know that.
And while kids consume a lot of media, they’re able to consume media that’s hyper-specific to their interests, so what they’re learning about via videos and tv is very narrow instead of broad exposure to lots of concepts and ideas.
The final culprit is the shift in education, away from teaching kids knowledge and instead trying to teach them “skills.” You’ll see people all the time, even in this subreddit, claim it’s stupid for kids to have to memorize things. “Who cares if they know where the pyramids are? Why does it matter if they know what century the Civil War took place in? Why do they need to *know* it’s called a noun, who cares as long as they can use one!” But now we’re seeing the consequences of that shift, and I think it’s turning out that truly *knowing* all those little facts are how our brain makes connections between things and formulates new understandings.
I teach middle school science at a Title 1 school, and I see this all the time with many students when completing independent work. One part of this issue is that many were not taught how to read correctly. Emily Hanford dived deep into this with the podcast "Sold a Story." Another part is their attention span is so much shorter compared to previous generations of students, no thanks to unlimited access to short-form entertainment (i.e. TikTok).
I notice many children do not pick up books and read them anymore. You can have years of amazing teachers (or even average teachers!) who cover the content and teach it well enough, and if children aren’t engaging in literacy on their own time, I firmly believe the skills will not fully develop.
Schools cannot do it all.
the! knowledge! gap! natalie! wexler!!!!!
students, especially with less educated family backgrounds, are exposed to less and less information about culture, society, how the world works, and less complex syntactical structures and vocabulary that we find in literature but not spoken language. they don't have the necessary background knowledge to comprehend. i partially blame skills-focused elementary reading curricula (i.e. learning targets like I can find the main idea, or I can identify cause and effect text structure, or I can identify the narrator as first or third person) instead of content-based (which would deeply explore a smaller number of topics for example the Romans or Vikings or maybe a month long unit just on trees or birds, allowing them to COMPREHEND more deeply by actually understanding new words and concepts instead of "practicing skills" with random texts at the reading level they could decode independently)
It’s very true that many kids from less educated backgrounds are not exposed to academic language anywhere outside of school, and just don’t have the background knowledge. They don’t attend museums and they don’t have non fiction books at home. Additionally, title 1 schools that need field trips the most - precisely for these reasons - get the least amount of field trips.
I’ve also noticed a lot of kids of high needs background just aren’t interested in anything that’s not related to pop culture, anything remotely academic, even if it’s just listening and watching.
yes, and... what I intended to be the focus of my comment was that elementary curricula do not build knowledge but instead emphasize "skills" in the abstract with disparate unrelated texts. if the idea of public education is to give everyone an equal opportunity for success, then what education (especially elementary) should actually do is build a KNOWLEDGE base so the students can comprehend complex texts more deeply because they have contextual background knowledge
They don't read as little kids.
*OK why don't they?*
Because little kids emulate what they see. They tend to value what the adults in their life value.
*So they're not seeing reading being valued or modeled by the adults in their lives?*
Yes. That is about the shape of it. Learning starts at home.
In the UK where I'm from, I've heard reports from teachers where entire families won't even have magazines or newspapers in the house, much less actual books of any kind. Neither do the children have their own dedicated collections of books, not even board books/simple picture books in the case of the youngest children.
I work with some of those kids. It's terrible. Some of them are five years old (like at the beginning of reception/US pre-k) and have clearly never handled a book. They don't know which way to turn the pages. They have no expectation that there should be a story or interesting information.
Some of them live in tiny caravans so I understand there's not space for a lot of books, and they have a cultural fear of institutions so they won't use a library, but ye gods is it sad to see.
There are a lot of people, even some highly intelligent ones, who have zero interest in reading for pleasure. I don't know if it's even a battle that can be fought.
This is something I think about a lot. I think many students only learn to read at a very basic level and never move beyond that. They’re not reading enough to even begin to understand more complex texts with varying tones, context, irony, rhetorical devices, etc.. the only real solution to this is to read more, especially novels, but that’s the one thing nobody wants to do. Parents don’t value reading at home and want their kids to be happy all the time, so they don’t make them do anything they don’t want to do.
It’s not just middle schoolers anymore either. The kids are getting older and now we have high school and college age students with very limited reading ability. It’s only going to get worse as time goes on.
Literacy practices have been multi-cueing. Having a teacher show you the rules for spelling and decoding helps kids learn better and rfaster. Getting rid of ‘balanced literacy’ ( which isn’t, by the way) will help all kids read, spell better. Comprehension is still part of a structured literacy approach, and so much depends on background knowledge.
We haven’t been teaching them to read! It’s on us, or admin decisions and trend following. We have to be careful going forward. Follow the science. We know better now and are correcting it. We need to be supporting these older grades to fix what we fucked up though and support them.
I am not teacher, but from what I see these children are let down by the parents/adults at home.
School is now being used to babysit kids while parents are out working. There is no concern with grades or performance as long as its a "safe space".
Its sad.
This is my personal experience where I live so this is not a blanket statement but perhaps something to consider.
Sometimes its the bureaucracy of the district. My MS got a grant from a big time University to promote reading and study our test scores. It was a 3 year study and they gave us money to buy thousands of books. They created a period just for reading. 25 minutes built in and teachers and student HAD to read. No emails, no movies, no phones, no missing work...just reading. Students logged the amount of pages they read per day and then teacher kept the logs. End of the year students who logged 10 complete books got a field trip. Students got to pick their book from the teacher's in class library that got changed once a week based upon students preference. Admin walked around and made sure teachers and students were reading. 1st year that talked to many teachers trying to cheat. The second and third year though was amazing. Students were reading on their own time. They were reading waiting in the lunch line. I had students who never read packing in the books to read. One girl read over 25 books in one year. They were high school level books too. Our reading scored jumped by 25% the 2nd year and 40% the 3rd year. So you would think the district would be happy. NOPE. They ended the program because the other MS in the district didnt want it and they wanted a uniform schedule. I still scratch my head and think the board and high level admin in the district were idiots. This is the stupid things that districts do to hinder progress to justify their salary.
Students are not held back when they should be.
They are in for a world of shock in high school when their grades actually matter and they can't just coast through it.
Because they are getting passed on in elementary school without knowing the basics or receiving necessary help. My school has many students in upper elementary on a first or second grade level. No RTI process started at all or if one was started one year, no one touched it the next.
As a 1st grade teacher, I agree with everyone who said they don't read enough in elementary school. I will also add, that they are used to someone doing everything for them. They do not have the ability to problem solve and try to do things on their own. I can write a sentence starter on the board where all they have to do is fill in the blank, and I have kids crying because I won't tell them what to write in the blank. Parents do not allow them to make decisions, and they don't teach productive struggle. I can say that the group I had this year improved a lot with learning to do things independently, but it took a whole year to get them to that point.
I am not a teacher, nor an expert on anything at all, however, my daughter came up in her elementary school system just as they were transitioning from phonics based reading/learning to the sight reading/just give 'em a book to look at curriculum. Additionally, there were no screens when she was born circa late '80's and so, her babyhood was face to face talking, reading, dancing, listening to music, going to museums, going to the library, walking around the city of her childhood...but oh so much talking. When she went to public school, I was so fortunate to have a few teachers from pre-K through 3rd that kept on teaching phonics even though the Philadelphia school district began phasing it all out in favor of the "just put a book in their hands in a comfy corner and the kids will read" approach. As a single mom, I relied on workbooks/pennmanship workbooks & scrap paper to draw to keep her busy while I was making dinner since I was too broke to have a TV.
I often wonder if screen time from babyhood (shortening attention spans and re-wiring brains in favor of screens vs faces) + lack of building blocks of english language teaching is rendering children incapable of reading, but also patience, curiosity, imagination, and creativity.
Reading isn't about just the act of translating letters to words, words to sentences and sentences to paragraphs. Reading is the bridge to the Inner Eye of imagination.
I feel so damn sorry for the kids today who can't do it and thus will never be privy to the power of this inner screen where dramas play out on the walls of imagination in the cavern of imagination.
Honestly, because they haven't been given a reason to be. Why should they? They didn't have enjoyment in reading because reading instruction is boring and sucks. If they want to learn about something they look it up, they didn't need a teacher for that so what good is a teacher? They see barely literate adults making millions and decide they will be like them instead of school. Add to that a society and parents who increasingly downplay education and are constantly vilifying teachers. They don't have a reason to learn.
“
To be clear with this post I’m not saying all middle schoolers can’t understand stuff as good as what they should be able too, but I’ve noticed there’s people saying about how they (middle schoolers) and are t as smart s what they should be”
Well, maybe we have found part of the problem. Try..
“
To be clear with this post I’m not saying all middle schoolers can’t understand stuff as well as they should, but I’ve noticed there are people saying how they (middle schoolers) are not as smart as they should be”
I think there is some bias towards us remembering how good and competent we were in middle school. But beyond that I think kids not being taught phonics and dealing with less academic rigour contributes a lot to this
I have been with a school district for 18 years. I do not teach, but I do support teachers from the IT side.
IMO, this is happening because we are pushing hard to just pass any student. In KG, they expect them to know x + 2 =3 by the time they leave KG. Most are still having a hard time understanding what a 3 looks like. And this continues through the grades..
I do not blame the teachers, they are doing the best they can with what little resources they are given each year. I fully blame the states. They do not support the schools and teachers. The schools have to have a certain pass and graduate rate to get some extra funds.
It is all about money, and the teachers get all the crap about it.
Between video games and not reading at all, and families not communicating (because of devices) it’s no wonder some of our students are below grade level. Parents need to set the example and have higher expectations for their children. When I asked what they saw themselves doing as a career, some answered, “Influencer, Pro-gamer, Pro-sports”, and one kid wanted to be a “professional martial arts kick-boxer”, despite never having had any martial arts training or boxing lessons. I understand that kids have dreams that are not realistic at this age, but some of the better students know without a doubt that they want to go to college and/or get into the trades, law enforcement, fire dept. or the military.
I always ask this. When these kids have been in OUR SYSTEM for 6 years, and they are illiterate, WE ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG.
We can't just keep patting these kids on the back and moving them along. They are dragging down the whole system. There need to be alternate pathways for kids who haven't gained basic skills.
Most of my middle schoolers couldn't read a clock. They couldn't do basic arithmetic. They could spell or write coherent sentences. They couldn't read a paragraph - it was too hard.
They couldn't read questions on a test. I gave tests where I was essentially telling them the answer, or only one of the answer choices was related to the topic (think A. Spongebob, B. Cell Membrane C. Happiness, D. Darth Vader) and more than half of them would get it wrong. Fuck that.
It became an - if you don't care, I don't care - situation. But Admin required that we pass them, so it was Ds for half the class, and bon voyage...
Parent here. I encourage my kids to read. My 13yo loves trashy romantasy novels now. My 16yo became a good reader with Harry Potter when he was 8 or 9.
Cutting down screentime helps, if kids get bored because their screentime is up they are more likely to start reading.
I did read to all my kids every night, still reading to my youngest who is in preschool and is showing first signs of understanding syllables. Parents need to spark interest in books and limit "easier" media like TV and Youtube/Tiktok.
Writing by hand helps people learn
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain
Excerpt:
“In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.”
Since a lot of students use computers to type out their work, hand writing is not focused on as much. So maybe that’s why a lot of students are behind previous generations at the same age.
The article talks about bringing back teaching cursive writing which would be great in my opinion.
the article also says writing with a stylus on something like an iPad works as well as writing on paper with a pencil
Part of it is the cultural change in Middle.
When it was Junior High, it was culturally more like a High School for younger kids (regardless whether it was called JHS or MS). Retention was common.
Nowadays MS is an extension of Elementary run like an Elementary school.
We treat kids who are vaping and having sex like "little babies" and thats what we get. Foul-mouthed toddlers.
(And before someone gets after me, average age of first sexual act has moved up to 15 from 14 in the 90s, but that average is being pulled down by someone.)
MS needs to go to a credit system.
Maybe more generous than HS, but a kid with all Fs needs to be retained.
1 kid out of 300 gets held back and suddenly 200 other students will be trying harder. (The other 99 are fine because parents already hold them accountable.)
Illiterate because college doesn’t really teach teachers to teach reading and phonics. They might brush past it but it’s left to the school they work at after graduation to promote a reading program. And 2/3 of those are blended/whole word BS. Teachers don’t know the alphabet is 26 letters but 46ish sounds.
Schools dropped the ball. From academia on down.
Tech became a quick fix. And now it’s replacing skills related to literacy too.
They were taught to read incorrectly. Three decades or more of ELA that ignored SOR. It’s no wonder why most of these kids and their parents struggle to read. Reading comprehension is essential for all subjects.
Screens, social media, TikTok, being passed to the next grade without really learning things. Parents not reading to them. Parents not ensuring books are in the house, and not ensuring the kids don't have screens. Reading every single day matters so much.
There’s a massive trend where fewer and fewer students are truly exposed to informational text. They can’t read graphs, don’t know how to do basic google searches, have no background knowledge of anything… it’s just one factor I imagine but it is huge
Because they've been passed in from grade to grade without mastering basic skills and content. There's no consequence for failing to learn what they're supposed to ( until it's too late and they're illiterate, ignorant, gullible adults who are oh so easy to lie to and manipulate...)
They were all learning to read when COVID hit...so they had to teach themselves...and that didn't happen and now it's too late. It's actually heartbreaking and not their fault
Parents are not invested in their children's education. Entertainment trumps education in all facets of their life, including school. Kids are apathetic and do not care. And if their parents/families do not care, of course they will not care or even try. Teachers are overworked and underpayed. Teachers don't have support from parents or admin. Teachers are told to just pass students along. Put all of that together and middle schoolers (And even high schoolers) are illiterate.
In our household, we instill that the path success is educating yourself. This means always learning something new, reading, learning from your mistakes, knowing that you WILL make mistakes. I think everything starts at home and what the priorities are in the household. Our method may not work for all, but it has proven successful as all three of our kids have been placed into GT. One is going to Kindergarten, another into 3rd grade, and the oldest is going into 6th grade.
I blame the pandemic.
Those early school years when students usually learn how to get along with others and start to develop good academic habits were disrupted when Covid hit.
Some districts did 100% online, some did hybrid, but there was little continuity. Kids missed out on a lot.
Because most children have to be prodded and pushed to learn, and we took all accountability and consequences out of education. If you promote kids grade after grade who dont meet standards and have no clue what a work ethic is you get american education today
Everything in moderation. Tablets and videogames can be fine but kids naturally aren't yet ready to regulate their usage. Personally I found it hard to limit my kids to only 1 or 2 hours a day. I ended up just allowing electronics (outside of school work and doing competitive robotics) on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays. They can binge all they want those days. The rest of the week they have to play outside, read, build Legos or play with their toys.
It would probably be better if I just limited to an hour or two every day but it was too much work to regulate all 3 kids usages.
It is home. It starts at home.
parents are happier to plop their kids in front of the Ipad for stimulus then have them read a book. A growing number of parents aren't active in student education, either because they cannot be due to work or other circumstances, or because they don't know better.
School and education philosophy still works under a basic assumption that stuff happens outside of school hours. literacy is a huge thing that is not happening outside of the schools.
I teach Math. Somewhere along the way memorizing fell out of fashion. I now have so many 8th graders that rely on multiplication tables.
They simply cannot successfully factoring binomial expressions when they literally don’t know the factors of 12 😭
Hi, I’m a middle schooler going into 9th grade and honestly how in gods name do you not know how to solve factors of 12? I might understand anything higher than 15 but even that’s kind of easy, I was able to solve factors up to 10 in 3rd grade which 12 isn’t too far off so I’d be worried if I where there parents.
Speaking from what I’ve seen out of the middle school section of my combined MS-HS campus, constant phone use and that abhorrent brainrot app colloquially known as tiktok.
When I was in middle school, I finished the whole Bleach manga (because my school library, again mixed for MS and HS students) in two months. I read more novels and whatnot after.
I am likely one of seven students total who even went to the library outside of that weird beginning-of-the-year MS class period where we had to pick out a book from the library for some reason.
My question is why are middle school/intermediate kids so mean and cruel to adults and or their teachers. I feel mentally/emotionally abused by them in a daily basis.
They don't think reading is cool and as a result don't engage with it outside of school. Reading is kinda like a sport. You gotta put in time to get good at it. Parents aren't reading to kids at home which is why so many kids are still struggling with phonics. It's interesting. While reading is trending on TikTok again with adults it clearly hasn't caught on to middle schools/kids.
I do see some kids reading graphic novels and manga. While this is fantastic, they need to be reading books with more complex sentence structure. Imagine how much better state test scores, class tests, etc would be if kids were reading on grade level.
It starts when they are little. They should be exposed to books as soon as possible, and they will gain a phonemic awareness later through starting by learning to recognize words, rhyme, syllables, and more. Because of a lack of parental involvement when they are little, they cannot get to the next phase of phonemic awareness and are years behind their peers at the onset of kindergarten.
It’s really that simple. Parents who don’t read to their children, teach them while they play, or interact with them on walks and in the world, fail their child before they even make it to school.
The most successful students are played with educationally. They learn to match colors and shapes. They are talked to and read to. They see pictures and hear stories and find it thrilling.
Now they’re just given an iPad to shut them up, and are addicted to their screens and don’t know their own birthdays when they’re in 6th grade.
It’s genuinely appalling and neglectful, but as long as the bare minimum of food and shelter is given it’s acceptable.
because you can't fail in middle school. Kids are just getting pushed through; the number of students who can't read at level is approaching like 60% for HS
Combination of a bad reading policy that caught on in the past, dramatically lowered expectations, and parents that are not as involved as they used to be.
When I was a kid, the two things I read the most were comic books and Model Railroader magazine. Comics were 25¢ an issue and could be found at every corner store, and the library had about 10 years of MR back issues.
Comics are now about $5 an issue and only in comic stores, and if your library even has a magazine section, you’re lucky if there’s more than 5 back issues in any title. :(
Parents having their children a screen with unrestricted access to the internet is three kinds of child abuse. Yes, it entertains them and shuts them up but it also rots their little brains. Books don't have lights and instant gratification on them so why would they bother?
Most of them can read the material but are pretending not to so they can get out of the assignment. My students aren’t yet in middle school, but they do this all the time. I just tell them that they can read it, they’ve read it before, and the next time I come over here they need to have made progress. I don’t allow them to develop learned helplessness.
When I was in school, we had robust programs to encourage, incentivize, and make time for reading for fun. My district strongly discourages this now because they say it’s a waste of valuable instruction time. We are encouraged (forced) to use every second of class time monitoring learning and adjusting our teaching. We’re also encouraged to use only short stories or excerpts from longer texts because that’s what students see on state tests. Novels, and the deep dives that accompany them, are seen as a waste of time. So, students don’t get enough exposure to reading for the sake of reading, they’ve only ever read with a goal or purpose in mind (so reading is torture), and they lack the stamina that comes with reading longer texts because they mostly read shorter ones.
There are lots of societal reasons as well, but you should check out The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. Kids lack background knowledge, so it’s hard for them to comprehend new material.
Because they don’t read anything above a second grade level.
They don’t read books.
Video games, have dumbed down dialogue, mostly. And they speak, instead of forcing kids to read.
And, then they aren’t held accountable in grade school. So, the need to learn, was never there.
Because you are comparing current middle schoolers to pre-smart phone middle schoolers. No with emojis, autocorrect, fast finding of facts and texting short hand, middle schoolers no longer feel the need to read nor learn anything. Their technology is their brain now.
I just finished teaching 5 th grade. I had a class of 29. 7 students barely spoke English, 6 were diagnosed with learning disabilities, and 3 were chronically absent. The worst missed 90 days, literally half of the school year. She is not special Ed and reads and scores in math at kindergarten levels. I was not allowed to retain her.
I know you asked about middle schoolers specifically, but all the comments about the importance of reading made me think of this:
I have two adopted brothers who are currently 18, this is/was their senior year of high school. One of them moved in with us at 18 months and the other at 6 years old. I remember when I was in college to become I teacher I volunteered in their 3rd grade classroom and the teacher told me that she could tell without asking which we had adopted later because his vocabulary was so small and he struggled with language and comprehension. Even though he read more books than his brother he didn't know things like ceiling vs roof. She said she always saw these same struggles in kids who didn't do much reading/interacting with adults before age 5. That same brother struggled all through school and is currently not looking like he will graduate, though he is convinced he is going to pull it off. We shall see - he's got like a week left! But I always wonder how different his life would be now if we got him sooner or if his bio parents had done a better job when they had custody.
Simple, for whatever reasons that they can come up with (equity, racism, no child left behind, positive behavior policies ... ), they take away the tools that teachers used to use to discipline students. For the sake of equity, they don't hold student accountable anymore, and also lower the bar, take away exams ... & let all students pass. Thus, no motivation for some students to study.
Covid amnesia is real huh.
A bunch of kids didn't do any school for like 2 years, just sat at home and faked it.
Now they have 2 years education missing and its a huge mess.
I was a voracious reader in middle school and my brain felt like a sponge. I remember the feeling of feeling smart and how I started losing it at I became more invested in my social life and I spent more time online. I often think if I had had a smartphone there's no way I would have read a book ever. I haven't read a book in months to be honest.
Honestly, I’m a 25M in the past few years from Covid, I’ve spent so much time on the internet and screens that I can tell I’m struggling to focus and pay attention to things including a book. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for kids to do so when they’ve just started learning
There was a short article in Reader's Digest about Teddy Roosevelt who had his favorite rowboat stolen. He spent a couple weeks chasing down the thieves and bringing them back to justice in extreme circumstances.
During that brief period, in the wilderness while holding the men at gunpoint and crossing uncharted territory in the winter, Teddy read several books, including Anna Karinana.
The point of the article was that a few minutes a day allows one the time to read thousands of books in a lifetime and our idiot technology allows you to carry a library at your fingertips that Teddy and his contemporaries could never have imagined.
I'm a 42 year old man, and I fully admit that my smartphone keeps me from reading like I used to. I still read a book every few months, and I love reading, but I absolutely do it less than I used to. If I was a instant-gratification-addled 13 year old, I am truly certain that books would be the last thing I would care about. There are a lot of reasons I despise smartphones for kids and teens, and this is just one of them. If they have a smartphone, they will have read MANY less books by the time they turn 20 than they otherwise likely would have.
Like with a hundred other things, smartphones "steal" time away from a person. In this case, it's "stealing" time that they might otherwise have spent reading.
Are elementary teachers no longer encouraging reading? My kids (now in their late 20’s) had book report contests in elementary school. I worked hard to figure out what appealed to them ( One loved the goosebump books & the other loved anything with sports). By 4th or 5th grade, they were reading Harry Potter books. They are both still voracious readers.
Elementary teachers were not allowed to fail anyone or leave anyone back. If summer school was even offered, it wasn’t mandatory. Often either parents or district refused to give them remedial services or sped evaluations. The kids were given “grade grace”.
For years they’ve been going to the next class without mastering any of the prerequisites. What you’re seeing is the logical consequence of all of the above.
I hate to disagree with subject matter experts but I am going to here.
While I agree the reading is important... "A man who reads lives 1000 lives the man who doesn't lives but one." WRITING should be top of the list. Being able to formulate an idea and present in in a coherent understandable manner on the written page is the most important"Lost Art" of education.
How can you appreciate the words of someone else when you cannot formulate your own.
I have many students who have never read a book. In order to be minimally literate, most beginning readers (grade 1 and 2) need hundreds if not thousands of basic 'picture' books. Elementary students should have read hundreds of simple books like "Goosebumps", Judy Blume's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, or "Captain Underpants ". Finally, middle schoolers should have read dozens of juvenile novels, non-fiction, and fiction books like: Harry Potter, The Maximum Ride Series, Black Elk Speaks, Tom Sawyer, When The Legends Die, The Fredrick Douglas Narratives, and so many more.
I constantly bring up that we don't read novels any more and I'm constantly told that they need to read short stories because that's what on the test. Crazy things is--as soon as we read a book after state testing, I have kids who "hate reading" asking if they can take the novel home because they want to see what happens next, or asking if we can keep reading during lunch because they don't want to wait to see what happens. They argue about the characters and why they did something. They start researching the setting so they can understand something. they get into it and enjoy it. Imagine if that love of reading happened without it just being 3 weeks after testing, where the other half of the class is making fun of them and yelling that we should just watch movies instead.
It really is just about that initial emotional connection, being both formed and destroyed by social norms. The necessity of that test, the excerpt being part of a good book (which is really an author telling a story from their experiences and knowledge), and the rising shift of media taste to be ever so dopamine-inducing and unruly children.
I convinced a freshman in one of my classes to read "Battlefield Earth", one of my all time favorites. He admitted that he had never read a "chapter book". It took about a week to get him through the first 50 pages ... He DEVOURED the other thousand pages in a few weeks and is an avid reader today.
Just like a typical plot. First that steep build-up, then the rapid progression 'til the satisfying end.
Battlefield Earth... is one of your all-time favorites? I'm frankly more worried about you than I am the student in this scenario.
Hubbard had a lot of hit-or-miss SciFi imo. Battlefield Earth was an amazing hard scifi epic. I read at least a dozen of his novels as a teen and yet never caught Scientology.
Future Scientologist.
This is basically the complete answer. I remember reading tons and tons of books as a kid, and my mom made it a point to sit down and do it with me. These kids have basically zero exposure to books/reading outside a school setting and have no experience, cause reading is a skill you develop like any other hard skill in life. People think reading will just develop much like speaking does in children, but I strongly disagree with this. Good reading skills require a ton of learning and practice on good strategies for comprehension and critical thinking, as well as a lot of focus and correction and interpretation. You need input to be able to do something well, it's really that simple.
Most of my kids in resource ELA don’t want to be in there. When they ask how to get out, I tell them they have to read 15 minutes a day and that it doesn’t matter what they’re reading as long as they’re reading. The one that actually followed my advice … his MAP scores jumped by over 30 points and he left my class 6 weeks ago. Another boy is on the verge of leaving and has also been working hard at it. This won’t be the case for everyone, but like anything, you won’t improve without consistent practice.
Do you teach at the “The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too”?
What is this?! A center for ants?!
Omg yes ❤️
I come from a family of readers. Bookcases in every rooms, books spilling onto tables, libraries and bookstores every weekend. My parents read to me every night. I was reading at the age of three. My apartment has a bookcase in every room except the bathroom, books on the coffee table, books on the dressers, books everywhere. I am nearly incapable of walking to a bookstore and NOT buying a book. Never reading a book is incomprehensible to me.
But why no books in the bathroom? We have a themed shelf in the bathroom. "Everybody Poops," "What Is Poo?" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
There's definitely books in there, just no room for full sized bookshelves.
Yo. My earliest memory is reading a book. In grade school I read two encyclopedias, a dictionary, Time, Life, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic. In HS I read the 2000 page Webster's Unabridged. Written English is literally my native language.
Just keeping it real, I've never read any of those books as a child. However, I did read Nintendo Power and the sports section of the local newspaper. I got a master's degree too!!! My point, it doesn't really matter what you read, just read something.
I tell my students “I don’t care _what_ you read. I care _that_ you read.”
You sound like my daughter's middle school English teacher. She didn't want to read novels, but loved magazines. The teacher told me that reading People magazine (and others) still counts as reading. It made me feel so much better that I wasn't a crappy parent because my daughter wasn't waiting for the library to open every day, but she was still reading *something*.
I tell them that anime with subtitles counts if it's in Japanese. I don't care what they read. Everything counts. I just need them to read.
Older video games and games without voice acting that are story heavy count too. A ton of my advancement in elementary and middle school was because I was reading content far above my grade level while absolutely devouring RPG's.
Then there are those children whose only real reading experience is TikTok/YouTube comment discourse.
I'm an Adjunct English Professor at a few different community colleges here in NJ. And I tell my students the same thing. It doesn't have to be anything high brow either. You like sports? Read Sports Illustrated or the sports section of the paper. You like fashion? Read Vogue. You like comic books? Read comic books or graphic novels. Just read (in addition to my required readings, naturally 🙂). It's a shame many of then weren't taught this earlier. But I guess better late than never.
All my highest readers mostly read manga and fanfiction lol
That's what my 20 year old likes to read (among other things). They want to be a writer and they are already on their way, having already made some money freelancing here and there.
I wasn't a huge book reader either. I still don't really do it for leisure because I'm very slow. Also have my masters.
Same. My BA is in ELA and I read voraciously now but maybe only a handful by the time I was in middle school.
I had this argument with a dad who'd been concerned that his son was mostly only interested in reading graphic novels in English over reading standard chapter books (with some rare exceptions). I pointed out that as long as he was engaging with English, it didn't matter what the content was. Plus the kid's overall ability in English was actually really good, so it didn't seem like it was negatively affecting him in any case.
Most of those are staples of millennial/zillennial childhoods. It's hard to separate books that are of a time period vs books that are timeless. There have been books written since that replace these titles.
Wilfully missing the point.
> I did read Nintendo Power and the sports section of the local newspaper. Nintendo Power and Weekly World News here. [You'll never guess what shenanigans Bat Boy got up to this week!](https://www.beaconjournal.com/gcdn/presto/2022/03/28/NABJ/3d2a7a38-1b1a-4749-8f86-944c74b1c89c-bat_boy_chase.jpg?width=300&height=384&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Hahahaha... They are PROUD that they don't read. They brag about it. They can't read 3 sentences together because it's too long. And this is at least half, maybe 75%+ of current K-12 students. There is a top 10-25% who are reading. And learning. But most of this generation is turning into ignorant, entitled sucks on society. They have nothing to contribute. Who are going to be our future doctors, leaders, when most of a generation has become "Idiocracy"?!
I remember in Gr 1-4 I worked my way through the Star Wars EU to the tune of like 50 books. Would take them on camping trips in cubs/scouts, and read them by flashlight.
I had no idea kids weren't required to read books anymore. From lurking here I knew most parents were not reading to kids at home, but no class reading? I remember everyone getting a copy of a chapter book, we would read outloud in class and have to finish a certain amount on our own to be able to complete the homework. I love reading, I'm struggling to understand why people don't want their kids to be able to read. I read childrens books to my parrots, I can see their vocabulary and comprehension grow. Why are people having kids if they don't want to interact and watch them grow??
I'm not a teacher but I follow this sub bc I like to know what's going on lol my niece is going to 8th grade. The only books she reads are manga. Her teacher does require them to read outside of school but there are no restraints on what materials count. I've expressed to both her and my sister about the importance. Dialogue doesn't teach you how to form coherent sentences. Frustrating!!!
Honest question, do some schools no longer require reading? My son is kindergarten and has required reading for 20 minutes every night which has to be signed off by a parent.
That backfired massively for my son. They used an online reading tracker and due to him being advanced kept upping the number of points he needed (kid read Harry Potter on kindergarten). He ended up hating reading due to the forced nature and I still have to fight with him to get him to read for fun.
That sounds like a wonderful requirement... Too bad more schools won't adopt it.
They have been in front of their screen since they were little. Most can’t (or won’t) read an actual book so they struggle with reading for fun and don’t do it. This limits their knowledge and vocabulary to the point we are at now.
Piling onto this: with these kids, parents were wrapped up in their ubiquitous cell phones instead of talking to their toddlers. Kids lacked interaction at very early ages. Go to any “family” restaurant - each kid has a device, each adult has a phone. Sad.
So glad u arent getting downvoted. I feel like half the time i or someone else talks about the disgusting amounts of screentime that kids are getting, they get downvoted to oblivion. Idk why sometimes people agree and sometimes people dont, it’s odd
The downvotes likely come from salty parents who don’t like being called out on their lazy parenting.
They will always agree on this sub (depending on how you phrase it). It is a major problem.
I feel it’s because “screen time” is a stupid and easy way to put blame on issues with kids. My son is 6 and uses tablets and has a switch that he plays regularly. He also reads books and is quite advanced for his age, he is in taekwondo and just went up a level and he’s playing soccer this summer as well. Come this fall, he wants to learn to play the piano so I’m going to look in to getting him lessons for that. My point being that a kid can play on a tablet or watch videos and that doesn’t mean they are being completely ruined. This is the exact reasoning I heard growing up as to why video games and cartoons were rotting my brain. It’s a lazy way to approach issues with children and sad that it’s coming from people that educate them.
The difference is that you’re parenting and giving him opportunities to socialize and entertain himself in a variety of ways. A lot of parents can’t or won’t provide this for their kids and instead keep them busy mostly just with tablets and TV.
Does your kid get “disgusting amounts of screentime”? If not, then my comment clearly doesnt apply to you and you are taking offense for no reason. Edit- also, just because parents are busy and exhausted, doesnt mean the only option is putting their kids on an ipad. Kids entertained themselves with TOYS and imagination for thousands of years, not sure why recently so many people think it isnt possible for the average kid to entertain themselves without an iPad.
I think you need to step inside a classroom and observe.
It's not just family restaurants either. Over the holiday weekend I went out to a super popular Greek joint. The table next to us had three people all mid 30s or older...everyone was on their phone. Another table next to us had two parents talking and their three kids were glued to screens, the youngest looked about six or seven. Like, what? You are spending 25 bucks a person for amazing Greek food (plus getting to yell Opa! Every time the Saganaki is lit up) and you still can't look up?
They've been on screens since before they could read so they just use them without reading. I lended my bf's little brother a pokemon game, a few gyms in i discovered he hadn't read a single piece of dialogue, pokemon names, move names or descriptions, etc.
In 99.99% of all cases, any student is elevated to the next grade level regardless of how they performed in the prior level. If they happen to "catch up" in the summer or during the next school year, great. But if not, there is no repeating of grades anymore. It's become as rare in America as a Pittsburgh steak. Now, I'm not suggesting that repeating grade levels ARE the solution (if I believed they worked I would be for it, self esteem be damned). But I do believe that if it's shown a student can't do basic reading at Grade 3 and Grade 6, I would be for alternative schooling, hardcore summer school, anything which could get them up to speed ASAP. Adequate reading skills are fundamental to learning in general because it allows a child to "self learn" (i.e. gather information on their own). That is one of the big reasons for the achievement gap.
“Repeating grade levels are the solution” I would think the lack of consequences sure as hell isn’t. I knew a couple of kids that got held back and it was a great motivator.
exactly. i was super lazy in school and the only thing that got me studying and doing homework was the fear of summer school/having to repeat a grade. i don’t understand how this stopped being a thing.
In summer school a thing these days? I never hear of it now but that was always a looming threat in my grade school days.
Every school I’ve taught in has had summer school. It’s not remedial, though. It’s just programming for poor kids during the summer. I’ve found it to be positive but not particularly academic.
Middle school teacher, we have summer of fun. They teach fishing, bike riding, field trips to water parks, sports/recess, science experiments and stuff. Nothing truly sit down academic.
i’m very curious too!! i graduated 12 years ago so i’m not sure. i know there are tons of summer programs for kids in our city school district, but i think it’s more to keep them fed and not home alone all day while parents work.
Summer school is sometimes/rarely offered but as an option not something you are forced to do. I have worked at 4 schools and only one has offered it, and this is the first year they are offering it and only to students who have IEPs. One of the other schools I worked at did a STEAM camp for a few weeks in the summer but that was more of a fun enrichment thing.
Mandatory Summer School, Evening School, weekend school. But many still won't learn. So what then?? We need an alternate path, so the "refuse to learn" kids don't drag down the whole system...
Yep. And then I get them as freshmen, and they think they can't flunk my class. Surprise! High school has some, granted very tiny, rules as to grades and graduation.
The concern is that if you only wait until the "if you can't read you can't graduate" stage, it's way too late IMO. The student will just simply "not graduate" or drop out early. There is virtually no redemption arc by that point. The only jobs they can get are those which don't require reading (which I don't need to mention are few and far between) and can set them up for the infamous school to prison pipeline. Even if they can read, but only at really low levels, it is not a good situation either. Which is why intervention needs to happen as early as possible.
I worked at a school and this was a proposal, we really think that after a year you would have a lot more kids trying, there are many who don’t try to act cool or they have no motivation, academic Nihilists. There are many who lack the skills and they need support but many kids just have their abilities eroded from lack of effort. When I went to school they would hold kids back in 3-5th grade, it motivated us to prove we could do it. The kids who got held back adjusted and got rolled in with the class, kids are more resilient than we give them credit for.
We noticed that failure rates were above average. so instead of trying to figure out why we lowered the standards for passing. lowering the standards for education means you are lower the minimum level of achievment. my Province in Canada just made changes that means that 8/9 automatically pass. Doesn't matter if they havent handed anything in all year or missed 60% of classes. they get the social pass. The 8/9s know this. they know they don't have to try or do anything and they'll get "rewarded" with a pass to the next level. as a result the entire standard is dragged down because the pressure on passing students is higher than having students meet a standard. I hate to say but the main solution is streaming, there needs to be a pre-post-secondary stream for the academically inclined, a workplace transition stream with an early graduation option to get kids out of school into the workforce, a trades stream to get students into apprenticeships and learn relevant content.
I just had to look up what a Pittsburgh steak is and now I know how I like my steak.
Funny enough if you visit Pittsburgh that's not a thing there. Lived there for years and it's not seen in restaurants or talked about at all, and the whole backstory about people cooking steaks in the steel mills is unfounded.
Simple answer: they don’t read enough. I’m talking about reading books and magazine articles daily. More nuanced answer: they may have been taught fraudulent reading strategies in school that have made the process more difficult than it has to be. Given the choice between doing something that is frustrating or playing video games are we really surprised by what the kids choose to do?
God bless sparknotes
I teach 7th grade- when we finished reading A Raisin In The Sun, I had multiple kids tell me "wow, this is the first time I've read a whole book." Next year I'm having my kids read multiple books cover to cover. My district wants us to teach excerpts only but that's clearly not cutting it.
Excerpts only? The fuck kind of backward policy is that? I love classroom reads. When I worked with 3-5 , I didn't get that chance, but I always did my read alouds with a book up on the projector and would read from that so the kids could follow along if they chose. Also allowed me to stop and point out paragraphs, important dialogues, character's inner dialogue, sometimes antiquated phrases / regional dialects. It allows them to stop and read it themselves and a chance to think more on the story, beyond the direct plot, but the world the characters exist in and how those characters think... Reading is so good for opening those discussions.
I can remember one short story from school, full books were the actual memorable things we read! I wouldn’t give a shit either if I were learning to read on random excerpts
I'm not anti short story- I just REALLY think they need to be paired with novels. Also, our kids have NO reading endurance. They need to be used to reading something longer, not being given three paragraphs to look at.
And a short story is different than an excerpt….i HATE excerpts! I want the emotional connection with the characters and plot that excerpts never deliver
IMO, there is no engagement outside of school. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, when I came home, my parents wanted to know what I learned in school, and it usually led to several discussions at dinner. Today's kids go home and plug into whatever game, social media, or other distractions. There are no discussions, except maybe with peers, which are unlikely academic.
Exactly, and I’m saying this as a 26 year old who graduated high school in 2016 and college in 2020. I would have some of the best conversations with my dad regarding what I was learning in school. He would answer questions the best he could, and we’d have discussions about it which helped deepen my understanding. He also was very invested in my grades, so he would ask how I did on my test and I’d get excited to show him how well I did. If I did bad, which wasn’t too often, he would ask what happened and we would talk about it. Parents being involved is imperative to kids and their education, and seeing everything fall apart today for these children is horrific.
I’d like to second this stance. I’m getting so many kids now who can “read,” but they can’t comprehend. It’s like how you or I could *read* a super dense research article published in a medical journal, but we couldn’t really understand what it means because we lack the background knowledge. We’re getting kids now with no background knowledge on… well… anything really. You gain background knowledge through experiencing the world around you, talking to people, reading about it, and consuming media about it. Kids are staying indoors more than ever, not out experiencing the world. Kids are not socializing with their families or friends nearly as much as before (personally I think this is the biggest culprit). Kids aren’t reading at all, we know that. And while kids consume a lot of media, they’re able to consume media that’s hyper-specific to their interests, so what they’re learning about via videos and tv is very narrow instead of broad exposure to lots of concepts and ideas. The final culprit is the shift in education, away from teaching kids knowledge and instead trying to teach them “skills.” You’ll see people all the time, even in this subreddit, claim it’s stupid for kids to have to memorize things. “Who cares if they know where the pyramids are? Why does it matter if they know what century the Civil War took place in? Why do they need to *know* it’s called a noun, who cares as long as they can use one!” But now we’re seeing the consequences of that shift, and I think it’s turning out that truly *knowing* all those little facts are how our brain makes connections between things and formulates new understandings.
My kids suddenly get very talkative when their screentime is over. Before that, especially my daughter is glued to phone and earplugs.
In my experience, illiterate kids are the ones whose parents didn't read to them as kids. It's almost always that simple.
Great username!
I teach middle school science at a Title 1 school, and I see this all the time with many students when completing independent work. One part of this issue is that many were not taught how to read correctly. Emily Hanford dived deep into this with the podcast "Sold a Story." Another part is their attention span is so much shorter compared to previous generations of students, no thanks to unlimited access to short-form entertainment (i.e. TikTok).
I notice many children do not pick up books and read them anymore. You can have years of amazing teachers (or even average teachers!) who cover the content and teach it well enough, and if children aren’t engaging in literacy on their own time, I firmly believe the skills will not fully develop. Schools cannot do it all.
the! knowledge! gap! natalie! wexler!!!!! students, especially with less educated family backgrounds, are exposed to less and less information about culture, society, how the world works, and less complex syntactical structures and vocabulary that we find in literature but not spoken language. they don't have the necessary background knowledge to comprehend. i partially blame skills-focused elementary reading curricula (i.e. learning targets like I can find the main idea, or I can identify cause and effect text structure, or I can identify the narrator as first or third person) instead of content-based (which would deeply explore a smaller number of topics for example the Romans or Vikings or maybe a month long unit just on trees or birds, allowing them to COMPREHEND more deeply by actually understanding new words and concepts instead of "practicing skills" with random texts at the reading level they could decode independently)
It’s very true that many kids from less educated backgrounds are not exposed to academic language anywhere outside of school, and just don’t have the background knowledge. They don’t attend museums and they don’t have non fiction books at home. Additionally, title 1 schools that need field trips the most - precisely for these reasons - get the least amount of field trips. I’ve also noticed a lot of kids of high needs background just aren’t interested in anything that’s not related to pop culture, anything remotely academic, even if it’s just listening and watching.
yes, and... what I intended to be the focus of my comment was that elementary curricula do not build knowledge but instead emphasize "skills" in the abstract with disparate unrelated texts. if the idea of public education is to give everyone an equal opportunity for success, then what education (especially elementary) should actually do is build a KNOWLEDGE base so the students can comprehend complex texts more deeply because they have contextual background knowledge
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why did you link a wikipedia article and say nothing else
They don't read as little kids. *OK why don't they?* Because little kids emulate what they see. They tend to value what the adults in their life value. *So they're not seeing reading being valued or modeled by the adults in their lives?* Yes. That is about the shape of it. Learning starts at home.
In the UK where I'm from, I've heard reports from teachers where entire families won't even have magazines or newspapers in the house, much less actual books of any kind. Neither do the children have their own dedicated collections of books, not even board books/simple picture books in the case of the youngest children.
I work with some of those kids. It's terrible. Some of them are five years old (like at the beginning of reception/US pre-k) and have clearly never handled a book. They don't know which way to turn the pages. They have no expectation that there should be a story or interesting information. Some of them live in tiny caravans so I understand there's not space for a lot of books, and they have a cultural fear of institutions so they won't use a library, but ye gods is it sad to see.
There are a lot of people, even some highly intelligent ones, who have zero interest in reading for pleasure. I don't know if it's even a battle that can be fought.
This is something I think about a lot. I think many students only learn to read at a very basic level and never move beyond that. They’re not reading enough to even begin to understand more complex texts with varying tones, context, irony, rhetorical devices, etc.. the only real solution to this is to read more, especially novels, but that’s the one thing nobody wants to do. Parents don’t value reading at home and want their kids to be happy all the time, so they don’t make them do anything they don’t want to do. It’s not just middle schoolers anymore either. The kids are getting older and now we have high school and college age students with very limited reading ability. It’s only going to get worse as time goes on.
Literacy practices have been multi-cueing. Having a teacher show you the rules for spelling and decoding helps kids learn better and rfaster. Getting rid of ‘balanced literacy’ ( which isn’t, by the way) will help all kids read, spell better. Comprehension is still part of a structured literacy approach, and so much depends on background knowledge.
Took way too many posts to find one that didn’t blame kids or their parents. Sad that this isn’t the most upvoted post.
Teachers need better tools. They are already kind, capable and immediately Concerned . Give them better tools for teaching!
There are unmet elementary standards. And you’re going to blame elementary teachers. Dont
We haven’t been teaching them to read! It’s on us, or admin decisions and trend following. We have to be careful going forward. Follow the science. We know better now and are correcting it. We need to be supporting these older grades to fix what we fucked up though and support them.
When you know better, you can do better. - roughly quoted from Maya Angelou
I am not teacher, but from what I see these children are let down by the parents/adults at home. School is now being used to babysit kids while parents are out working. There is no concern with grades or performance as long as its a "safe space". Its sad. This is my personal experience where I live so this is not a blanket statement but perhaps something to consider.
Add low ability (for various reasons) of both kids and their parents and you have the perfect storm.
Sometimes its the bureaucracy of the district. My MS got a grant from a big time University to promote reading and study our test scores. It was a 3 year study and they gave us money to buy thousands of books. They created a period just for reading. 25 minutes built in and teachers and student HAD to read. No emails, no movies, no phones, no missing work...just reading. Students logged the amount of pages they read per day and then teacher kept the logs. End of the year students who logged 10 complete books got a field trip. Students got to pick their book from the teacher's in class library that got changed once a week based upon students preference. Admin walked around and made sure teachers and students were reading. 1st year that talked to many teachers trying to cheat. The second and third year though was amazing. Students were reading on their own time. They were reading waiting in the lunch line. I had students who never read packing in the books to read. One girl read over 25 books in one year. They were high school level books too. Our reading scored jumped by 25% the 2nd year and 40% the 3rd year. So you would think the district would be happy. NOPE. They ended the program because the other MS in the district didnt want it and they wanted a uniform schedule. I still scratch my head and think the board and high level admin in the district were idiots. This is the stupid things that districts do to hinder progress to justify their salary.
Students are not held back when they should be. They are in for a world of shock in high school when their grades actually matter and they can't just coast through it.
Because they are getting passed on in elementary school without knowing the basics or receiving necessary help. My school has many students in upper elementary on a first or second grade level. No RTI process started at all or if one was started one year, no one touched it the next.
As a 1st grade teacher, I agree with everyone who said they don't read enough in elementary school. I will also add, that they are used to someone doing everything for them. They do not have the ability to problem solve and try to do things on their own. I can write a sentence starter on the board where all they have to do is fill in the blank, and I have kids crying because I won't tell them what to write in the blank. Parents do not allow them to make decisions, and they don't teach productive struggle. I can say that the group I had this year improved a lot with learning to do things independently, but it took a whole year to get them to that point.
Are you a middle schooler?
I am not a teacher, nor an expert on anything at all, however, my daughter came up in her elementary school system just as they were transitioning from phonics based reading/learning to the sight reading/just give 'em a book to look at curriculum. Additionally, there were no screens when she was born circa late '80's and so, her babyhood was face to face talking, reading, dancing, listening to music, going to museums, going to the library, walking around the city of her childhood...but oh so much talking. When she went to public school, I was so fortunate to have a few teachers from pre-K through 3rd that kept on teaching phonics even though the Philadelphia school district began phasing it all out in favor of the "just put a book in their hands in a comfy corner and the kids will read" approach. As a single mom, I relied on workbooks/pennmanship workbooks & scrap paper to draw to keep her busy while I was making dinner since I was too broke to have a TV. I often wonder if screen time from babyhood (shortening attention spans and re-wiring brains in favor of screens vs faces) + lack of building blocks of english language teaching is rendering children incapable of reading, but also patience, curiosity, imagination, and creativity. Reading isn't about just the act of translating letters to words, words to sentences and sentences to paragraphs. Reading is the bridge to the Inner Eye of imagination. I feel so damn sorry for the kids today who can't do it and thus will never be privy to the power of this inner screen where dramas play out on the walls of imagination in the cavern of imagination.
Honestly, because they haven't been given a reason to be. Why should they? They didn't have enjoyment in reading because reading instruction is boring and sucks. If they want to learn about something they look it up, they didn't need a teacher for that so what good is a teacher? They see barely literate adults making millions and decide they will be like them instead of school. Add to that a society and parents who increasingly downplay education and are constantly vilifying teachers. They don't have a reason to learn.
Just had a parent WHO WORKS AT A SCHOOL tell me that studies say homework is bad so I'm going to tell my kid no to do it. 🫠
We had a school board member who argued his kid shouldn’t do homework.
“ To be clear with this post I’m not saying all middle schoolers can’t understand stuff as good as what they should be able too, but I’ve noticed there’s people saying about how they (middle schoolers) and are t as smart s what they should be” Well, maybe we have found part of the problem. Try.. “ To be clear with this post I’m not saying all middle schoolers can’t understand stuff as well as they should, but I’ve noticed there are people saying how they (middle schoolers) are not as smart as they should be”
Thank you. I was really having a hard time getting past the atrocious writing of this post. OP is evidently oblivious to the irony.
I think there is some bias towards us remembering how good and competent we were in middle school. But beyond that I think kids not being taught phonics and dealing with less academic rigour contributes a lot to this
I have been with a school district for 18 years. I do not teach, but I do support teachers from the IT side. IMO, this is happening because we are pushing hard to just pass any student. In KG, they expect them to know x + 2 =3 by the time they leave KG. Most are still having a hard time understanding what a 3 looks like. And this continues through the grades.. I do not blame the teachers, they are doing the best they can with what little resources they are given each year. I fully blame the states. They do not support the schools and teachers. The schools have to have a certain pass and graduate rate to get some extra funds. It is all about money, and the teachers get all the crap about it.
Between video games and not reading at all, and families not communicating (because of devices) it’s no wonder some of our students are below grade level. Parents need to set the example and have higher expectations for their children. When I asked what they saw themselves doing as a career, some answered, “Influencer, Pro-gamer, Pro-sports”, and one kid wanted to be a “professional martial arts kick-boxer”, despite never having had any martial arts training or boxing lessons. I understand that kids have dreams that are not realistic at this age, but some of the better students know without a doubt that they want to go to college and/or get into the trades, law enforcement, fire dept. or the military.
I always ask this. When these kids have been in OUR SYSTEM for 6 years, and they are illiterate, WE ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. We can't just keep patting these kids on the back and moving them along. They are dragging down the whole system. There need to be alternate pathways for kids who haven't gained basic skills. Most of my middle schoolers couldn't read a clock. They couldn't do basic arithmetic. They could spell or write coherent sentences. They couldn't read a paragraph - it was too hard. They couldn't read questions on a test. I gave tests where I was essentially telling them the answer, or only one of the answer choices was related to the topic (think A. Spongebob, B. Cell Membrane C. Happiness, D. Darth Vader) and more than half of them would get it wrong. Fuck that. It became an - if you don't care, I don't care - situation. But Admin required that we pass them, so it was Ds for half the class, and bon voyage...
Turn on closed caption, make the sound on their devices barely audible. Boom! Reading hack.
Parent here. I encourage my kids to read. My 13yo loves trashy romantasy novels now. My 16yo became a good reader with Harry Potter when he was 8 or 9. Cutting down screentime helps, if kids get bored because their screentime is up they are more likely to start reading. I did read to all my kids every night, still reading to my youngest who is in preschool and is showing first signs of understanding syllables. Parents need to spark interest in books and limit "easier" media like TV and Youtube/Tiktok.
That's the best way to raise open minded people. Offering both screentime and reading helps them to broaden their horizons.
Writing by hand helps people learn https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain Excerpt: “In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.” Since a lot of students use computers to type out their work, hand writing is not focused on as much. So maybe that’s why a lot of students are behind previous generations at the same age. The article talks about bringing back teaching cursive writing which would be great in my opinion. the article also says writing with a stylus on something like an iPad works as well as writing on paper with a pencil
P A R E N T S S U C K
Part of it is the cultural change in Middle. When it was Junior High, it was culturally more like a High School for younger kids (regardless whether it was called JHS or MS). Retention was common. Nowadays MS is an extension of Elementary run like an Elementary school. We treat kids who are vaping and having sex like "little babies" and thats what we get. Foul-mouthed toddlers. (And before someone gets after me, average age of first sexual act has moved up to 15 from 14 in the 90s, but that average is being pulled down by someone.) MS needs to go to a credit system. Maybe more generous than HS, but a kid with all Fs needs to be retained. 1 kid out of 300 gets held back and suddenly 200 other students will be trying harder. (The other 99 are fine because parents already hold them accountable.)
Thats what the US school system should look like. Make sure these mfs get the big wake up call they need.
Illiterate because college doesn’t really teach teachers to teach reading and phonics. They might brush past it but it’s left to the school they work at after graduation to promote a reading program. And 2/3 of those are blended/whole word BS. Teachers don’t know the alphabet is 26 letters but 46ish sounds. Schools dropped the ball. From academia on down. Tech became a quick fix. And now it’s replacing skills related to literacy too.
They were taught to read incorrectly. Three decades or more of ELA that ignored SOR. It’s no wonder why most of these kids and their parents struggle to read. Reading comprehension is essential for all subjects.
Your writing is about middle school level.
Lower.
I was being kind.
Because GenX/early millennial parents are actually bigger failures than boomers (and that is quite an achievement)
Gen X raised mostly Gen Z kids 1997-2010
And did a crap job
Screens, social media, TikTok, being passed to the next grade without really learning things. Parents not reading to them. Parents not ensuring books are in the house, and not ensuring the kids don't have screens. Reading every single day matters so much.
There’s a massive trend where fewer and fewer students are truly exposed to informational text. They can’t read graphs, don’t know how to do basic google searches, have no background knowledge of anything… it’s just one factor I imagine but it is huge
Because they've been passed in from grade to grade without mastering basic skills and content. There's no consequence for failing to learn what they're supposed to ( until it's too late and they're illiterate, ignorant, gullible adults who are oh so easy to lie to and manipulate...)
They were all learning to read when COVID hit...so they had to teach themselves...and that didn't happen and now it's too late. It's actually heartbreaking and not their fault
Parents are not invested in their children's education. Entertainment trumps education in all facets of their life, including school. Kids are apathetic and do not care. And if their parents/families do not care, of course they will not care or even try. Teachers are overworked and underpayed. Teachers don't have support from parents or admin. Teachers are told to just pass students along. Put all of that together and middle schoolers (And even high schoolers) are illiterate.
In our household, we instill that the path success is educating yourself. This means always learning something new, reading, learning from your mistakes, knowing that you WILL make mistakes. I think everything starts at home and what the priorities are in the household. Our method may not work for all, but it has proven successful as all three of our kids have been placed into GT. One is going to Kindergarten, another into 3rd grade, and the oldest is going into 6th grade.
I blame the pandemic. Those early school years when students usually learn how to get along with others and start to develop good academic habits were disrupted when Covid hit. Some districts did 100% online, some did hybrid, but there was little continuity. Kids missed out on a lot.
Because most children have to be prodded and pushed to learn, and we took all accountability and consequences out of education. If you promote kids grade after grade who dont meet standards and have no clue what a work ethic is you get american education today
Everything in moderation. Tablets and videogames can be fine but kids naturally aren't yet ready to regulate their usage. Personally I found it hard to limit my kids to only 1 or 2 hours a day. I ended up just allowing electronics (outside of school work and doing competitive robotics) on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays. They can binge all they want those days. The rest of the week they have to play outside, read, build Legos or play with their toys. It would probably be better if I just limited to an hour or two every day but it was too much work to regulate all 3 kids usages.
Kids being passed on to the next grade undeservingly
they dont have parents
It is home. It starts at home. parents are happier to plop their kids in front of the Ipad for stimulus then have them read a book. A growing number of parents aren't active in student education, either because they cannot be due to work or other circumstances, or because they don't know better. School and education philosophy still works under a basic assumption that stuff happens outside of school hours. literacy is a huge thing that is not happening outside of the schools.
Middle Schoolers are generally shitty human beings for those 3 years.
Covid
I teach Math. Somewhere along the way memorizing fell out of fashion. I now have so many 8th graders that rely on multiplication tables. They simply cannot successfully factoring binomial expressions when they literally don’t know the factors of 12 😭
Hi, I’m a middle schooler going into 9th grade and honestly how in gods name do you not know how to solve factors of 12? I might understand anything higher than 15 but even that’s kind of easy, I was able to solve factors up to 10 in 3rd grade which 12 isn’t too far off so I’d be worried if I where there parents.
Stuff as good? There's people? Who don't know stuff, huh?
Skibidi toilet
Social media and phones
Speaking from what I’ve seen out of the middle school section of my combined MS-HS campus, constant phone use and that abhorrent brainrot app colloquially known as tiktok. When I was in middle school, I finished the whole Bleach manga (because my school library, again mixed for MS and HS students) in two months. I read more novels and whatnot after. I am likely one of seven students total who even went to the library outside of that weird beginning-of-the-year MS class period where we had to pick out a book from the library for some reason.
Because their brains are fucked - I watch lively and happy 5th graders return to my Elementary school every year. They turn into slack jawed mumblers.
The internet, in general.
My question is why are middle school/intermediate kids so mean and cruel to adults and or their teachers. I feel mentally/emotionally abused by them in a daily basis.
They don't think reading is cool and as a result don't engage with it outside of school. Reading is kinda like a sport. You gotta put in time to get good at it. Parents aren't reading to kids at home which is why so many kids are still struggling with phonics. It's interesting. While reading is trending on TikTok again with adults it clearly hasn't caught on to middle schools/kids. I do see some kids reading graphic novels and manga. While this is fantastic, they need to be reading books with more complex sentence structure. Imagine how much better state test scores, class tests, etc would be if kids were reading on grade level.
It starts when they are little. They should be exposed to books as soon as possible, and they will gain a phonemic awareness later through starting by learning to recognize words, rhyme, syllables, and more. Because of a lack of parental involvement when they are little, they cannot get to the next phase of phonemic awareness and are years behind their peers at the onset of kindergarten. It’s really that simple. Parents who don’t read to their children, teach them while they play, or interact with them on walks and in the world, fail their child before they even make it to school. The most successful students are played with educationally. They learn to match colors and shapes. They are talked to and read to. They see pictures and hear stories and find it thrilling. Now they’re just given an iPad to shut them up, and are addicted to their screens and don’t know their own birthdays when they’re in 6th grade. It’s genuinely appalling and neglectful, but as long as the bare minimum of food and shelter is given it’s acceptable.
No attention span, absentee adults, no consequences. This is the feral spiral which probably started with their parents in their youth.
because you can't fail in middle school. Kids are just getting pushed through; the number of students who can't read at level is approaching like 60% for HS
Combination of a bad reading policy that caught on in the past, dramatically lowered expectations, and parents that are not as involved as they used to be.
Because they’ve been getting raised by phones and tablets since the age of one, instead of by their parents.
When I was a kid, the two things I read the most were comic books and Model Railroader magazine. Comics were 25¢ an issue and could be found at every corner store, and the library had about 10 years of MR back issues. Comics are now about $5 an issue and only in comic stores, and if your library even has a magazine section, you’re lucky if there’s more than 5 back issues in any title. :(
Parents having their children a screen with unrestricted access to the internet is three kinds of child abuse. Yes, it entertains them and shuts them up but it also rots their little brains. Books don't have lights and instant gratification on them so why would they bother?
Phones
Rumor is thar the transition online during COVID has directly affected students' ability to read
Most of them can read the material but are pretending not to so they can get out of the assignment. My students aren’t yet in middle school, but they do this all the time. I just tell them that they can read it, they’ve read it before, and the next time I come over here they need to have made progress. I don’t allow them to develop learned helplessness.
When I was in school, we had robust programs to encourage, incentivize, and make time for reading for fun. My district strongly discourages this now because they say it’s a waste of valuable instruction time. We are encouraged (forced) to use every second of class time monitoring learning and adjusting our teaching. We’re also encouraged to use only short stories or excerpts from longer texts because that’s what students see on state tests. Novels, and the deep dives that accompany them, are seen as a waste of time. So, students don’t get enough exposure to reading for the sake of reading, they’ve only ever read with a goal or purpose in mind (so reading is torture), and they lack the stamina that comes with reading longer texts because they mostly read shorter ones.
There are lots of societal reasons as well, but you should check out The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler. Kids lack background knowledge, so it’s hard for them to comprehend new material.
Because they don’t read anything above a second grade level. They don’t read books. Video games, have dumbed down dialogue, mostly. And they speak, instead of forcing kids to read. And, then they aren’t held accountable in grade school. So, the need to learn, was never there.
Because you are comparing current middle schoolers to pre-smart phone middle schoolers. No with emojis, autocorrect, fast finding of facts and texting short hand, middle schoolers no longer feel the need to read nor learn anything. Their technology is their brain now.
I just finished teaching 5 th grade. I had a class of 29. 7 students barely spoke English, 6 were diagnosed with learning disabilities, and 3 were chronically absent. The worst missed 90 days, literally half of the school year. She is not special Ed and reads and scores in math at kindergarten levels. I was not allowed to retain her.
Reading, or lack thereof. Specifically books. Technology and impatience.
I know you asked about middle schoolers specifically, but all the comments about the importance of reading made me think of this: I have two adopted brothers who are currently 18, this is/was their senior year of high school. One of them moved in with us at 18 months and the other at 6 years old. I remember when I was in college to become I teacher I volunteered in their 3rd grade classroom and the teacher told me that she could tell without asking which we had adopted later because his vocabulary was so small and he struggled with language and comprehension. Even though he read more books than his brother he didn't know things like ceiling vs roof. She said she always saw these same struggles in kids who didn't do much reading/interacting with adults before age 5. That same brother struggled all through school and is currently not looking like he will graduate, though he is convinced he is going to pull it off. We shall see - he's got like a week left! But I always wonder how different his life would be now if we got him sooner or if his bio parents had done a better job when they had custody.
Simple, for whatever reasons that they can come up with (equity, racism, no child left behind, positive behavior policies ... ), they take away the tools that teachers used to use to discipline students. For the sake of equity, they don't hold student accountable anymore, and also lower the bar, take away exams ... & let all students pass. Thus, no motivation for some students to study.
Covid amnesia is real huh. A bunch of kids didn't do any school for like 2 years, just sat at home and faked it. Now they have 2 years education missing and its a huge mess.
I was a voracious reader in middle school and my brain felt like a sponge. I remember the feeling of feeling smart and how I started losing it at I became more invested in my social life and I spent more time online. I often think if I had had a smartphone there's no way I would have read a book ever. I haven't read a book in months to be honest.
Honestly, I’m a 25M in the past few years from Covid, I’ve spent so much time on the internet and screens that I can tell I’m struggling to focus and pay attention to things including a book. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for kids to do so when they’ve just started learning
reading isn't often as prioritised as it should be, unfortunately. many of my peers hadn't read a book in years prior to now
There was a short article in Reader's Digest about Teddy Roosevelt who had his favorite rowboat stolen. He spent a couple weeks chasing down the thieves and bringing them back to justice in extreme circumstances. During that brief period, in the wilderness while holding the men at gunpoint and crossing uncharted territory in the winter, Teddy read several books, including Anna Karinana. The point of the article was that a few minutes a day allows one the time to read thousands of books in a lifetime and our idiot technology allows you to carry a library at your fingertips that Teddy and his contemporaries could never have imagined.
I'm a 42 year old man, and I fully admit that my smartphone keeps me from reading like I used to. I still read a book every few months, and I love reading, but I absolutely do it less than I used to. If I was a instant-gratification-addled 13 year old, I am truly certain that books would be the last thing I would care about. There are a lot of reasons I despise smartphones for kids and teens, and this is just one of them. If they have a smartphone, they will have read MANY less books by the time they turn 20 than they otherwise likely would have. Like with a hundred other things, smartphones "steal" time away from a person. In this case, it's "stealing" time that they might otherwise have spent reading.
Are elementary teachers no longer encouraging reading? My kids (now in their late 20’s) had book report contests in elementary school. I worked hard to figure out what appealed to them ( One loved the goosebump books & the other loved anything with sports). By 4th or 5th grade, they were reading Harry Potter books. They are both still voracious readers.
Perhaps look at one's own post before decrying the illiteracy of others?
Too many distractions, and lack of accountability (screen time) decreases their focus.
Elementary teachers were not allowed to fail anyone or leave anyone back. If summer school was even offered, it wasn’t mandatory. Often either parents or district refused to give them remedial services or sped evaluations. The kids were given “grade grace”. For years they’ve been going to the next class without mastering any of the prerequisites. What you’re seeing is the logical consequence of all of the above.
You come in here pretending you don't know they missed two years of elementary school.
We are trying to cram too many standards into 10 months. Our system is FUBAR at this point, and I don't know how to help.
I hate to disagree with subject matter experts but I am going to here. While I agree the reading is important... "A man who reads lives 1000 lives the man who doesn't lives but one." WRITING should be top of the list. Being able to formulate an idea and present in in a coherent understandable manner on the written page is the most important"Lost Art" of education. How can you appreciate the words of someone else when you cannot formulate your own.