American public school teacher on spring break here. Taking a moment away from housework to bitch about teenagers.
We're currently undergoing a huge administrative change in our school. Some of the changes are good, some are very bad. But part of the shift is that our scores are terrible. We're in the bottom 1/3 of schools in the state, our literacy scores are abysmal, and many of our sophomores (15-16) still haven't mastered Algebra.
Here's the thing, though. Instead of a radical shift in how we teach, the types of students we accept, or a simple reallocation of funding, the new admin has decided to ramp up the services we provide and hold teachers even more accountable than we already are..
As a teacher of 8 years who doesn't even break $60k, I work like a dog to educate my classes, advise clubs, mentor kids, and perform all the duties or extra duties of my profession. It's my passion project, I suppose.
But consistently and without fail, I receive weaker and weaker students, year after year. I keep my bar set high and rarely alter the level of my content, but I have had to reteach very basic skills students should have by their teen years. Things like writing an essay longer than 1 page, long division, graphing, reading for pleasure, handling money, or even academic discourse are all skills lost on modern American youths.
I sound like a grandpa, I know. "Kids were always this way," you'll say. But this feels so different to me. This can't be the same thing as when I was in school. It just can't. My teachers complained, but it was on a whole different level.
The other week, we had a boy fall from the bleachers and nearly crack his back. He was carried out on a stretcher. And what was his first concern? He had to post the story on Snapchat. He was more scared of his PHONE breaking than him being injured. I watched as he was being carried out. The boy was crying for his friends to toss him his phone so he could take pictures of his accident and "snap" it.
