Students can’t read. Literacy rates and education is getting that bad #education #teachersoftiktok

I'm a first year English teacher for junior high. I have 7th and 8th graders who can't spell basic words, who don't know where to put punctuation, who don't know that eyes need to be capitalized when they're standing on their own. They don't know how to use synonyms, they don't know how to make their language interesting and pretty. And in the midst of all of this, I have a principal who has banned my entire class library on the basis that it's inappropriate. These people aren't lying. If you've worked with kids you've seen, they don't know how to read. They're not learning, and we're not even really trying, or we're getting in the way of everyone who actually is. Luck in here today, women's free, because I need to scream about this, because I've been collecting all the reasons and things I've been seeing for this, but if you think it's bad that 21% of American adults are illiterate, and over half of them clearly struggling to keep up with the rest of us apparently, that we constantly see online, being souping, every single thing, they're not smart enough to understand, so it makes them uncomfortable. You should be equally concerned and angry that even more children are coming up behind them at even higher numbers with even worse literacy skills. Literacy applies to like everything in life, so we're seeing it in reading and math and science, and across the board people are becoming dumber. I know, we all didn't think it's possible, and that's why we should all be really scared. The worst part is there's so many reasons recorded and reported for this, right? Originally, it was of course no child left behind. We saw a lot of that, and then everyone wants to blame COVID, but it's going beyond that. All right, we have teachers out here justifiably concerned that they're told they're not allowed to teach phonics anymore in school, because there's exceptions to rules, and those people who can't sit in things they don't understand got too upset about it, and so now they're dragging everyone else down with them, I guess. That's right, we're way past being nice to stupid people, okay, because we can't be anymore. We just got to tell them what they are, so we can try and fix things, because we got teachers out here saying that they're not even allowed to recommend books over like fourth or fifth grade levels of reading, which makes this stat make a lot more sense, because if you're not given anything above a fifth grade reading level, why would you have ever learned? Then we have the obvious mainstream cop out, which is smartphones and technology, which yes to some degree, but in my opinion, AI, have you ever seen an adult try and ask the most basic question to an AI system, and thought, hey, we're actually all cooked? I have every single day, and that's why I think we need to start by blaming the adults, because they're the ones who don't even know how to Google a question, they have to have AI, handhold them through it, because they don't know how, and now they don't want us to teach their kids.