I had no idea kids are THIS stupid.. 

A good friend of mine from college quit teaching a few years ago. She had won awards. She told me that she averaged 35 kids per class, with 30 desks. The most textbooks she had for any of her 7 classes was 28. She would go to businesses (law firms were pretty good to help out) to beg for pens, legal pads, post-it notes for her kids. She was living like a broke college student, while being in her 50's. The day she quit, she was walking out to the parking lot with the principal. He was so happy that his bonus for the year would pay off his new BMW X5, and my friend just stared at her 15 year old VW. Something like 70% of every dollar spent on Education goes to "administrative costs". Not teacher salaries, not materials for students, not learning programs.

I say this as a teacher...EVERY TIME, and I really mean EVERY TIME I have a problem student, whether it be poor attitude or straight up struggling, about 5 words into meeting the parents it's glaringly obvious why the child is the way that they are. Teachers aren't free from blame no doubt, but if parents don't do their part, it makes things near impossible.

This is why I always felt people telling me that I was a "gifted" child was complete BS. More like I just didn't have any friends and was bored af so I just paid attention in class and was actually performing at what should've been the average.

The biggest contributor to this is that schools are now prioritizing getting kids through school regardless of how bad their grades are in order to meet their district pass rate quotas. They intentionally set the bar low so they can have a high pass rate and look good to the school boards + the state.

The worst part is that public school caters to the lowest common denominator. Kids that are actually way ahead of their classes are forced to sit there in boredom while everyone else catches up (k-12). Personally experienced it. I burned out at about sophomore year of high school and just did what i considered the minimum and still made all As K-12 without really trying. The issue is that since i wasn't challenged i had a ton of issues in college since i didn't know how to properly study for anything, and I know i'm not the only one who experienced that.

The sad part is, that is not only kids that are stupid, most adults share the podium with them too..

I know Asmon is laughing, but this is legitimately the saddest shit Ive heard all day

_"No child left behind."_ More like _"No child keeping up."_

I think the craziest part is we now live in a time when information and everything someone needs to learn is freely accessible yet no one is using it.

People really underestimate how important learning is in the developmental stages. I think a lot of people just don't spend the time raising their kids during that formative period when all their neural pathways are being made, and with the distractions brought by our current times this unfortunately makes a lot of sense.

Class of 2018 here. When I was in biology, probably my 1st or 2nd year of HS. My teacher was going over the Human body structure and describing how your muscles control your skeletal system. Basically doing an overview of things we have already previously learned. Pretty standard stuff in my opinion. My classmate raised their hand to ask a question and said "What do you mean? Aren't Muscles and Bones the same thing?". I was speechless to say the least. I was sad honestly. I always worked hard in school, and then there was someone sitting next to me asking that question. It really felt like I had been betrayed. I had always known some weren't the brightest and that's ok. But to be blatantly ignorant overall was an insult to the amount of effort I put in. I'm way past it now, but at the time it happened it just hit me harder than it should have I guess.

I was born in Venezuela, nothing made me want to learn English like video games did. First it was Pokemon games then Legend of Zelda games, then Warcraft 3. Eventually I started playing WoW on private servers with people that only spoke English. Getting on ventrillo and TS with them really fucking solidified my understanding of the language. Video games were always the motivator.

A history lesson taught by a football trainer is the most American thing i can imagine.

I knew a couple kids just like this and it was 100% due to parents neglecting their kids. The reason the disabled kids are doing better is probably because their parents are actually actively working with them at home. So many parents nowadays are too glued to their own devices or too self involved to actually help their kids learn anything while at home. Both parents having to work also causes issues. People are too tired after work. This is why traditional families had one working parent but nowadays people can't afford to have only one parent working. It's really sad. The family structure is breaking down and that is one of the beginning signs of societal collapse.

Teacher here, I can absolutely confirm this. I teach 7-12 art, and yeah I already know what some may say regarding art and it's importance. But you'd be amazed at kids who can't tell you how to mix colors, don't know shapes, cant color inside lines and who can't even properly use a ruler as a straight edge. Covid may have exasperated the situation, but policies over the last 15-20 years are absolutely the root cause. Passing kids who aren't proficient, not following through on disciplinary actions and giving slaps on the wrist instead of actual consequences, normalizing kids being in their phone all day, ending homework, normalizing kids cussing at teachers like a dog and excusing it as "issues verbalizing conflict", absolutely zero parental involvement. I could go on. Our educational system isn't just broken, it's shattered into pieces. I graduated in 2008, and I'm relatively new to teaching (only been in the game about 5 years), and never in my 34 years of life have I seen a generation who have so little control over their actions, impulses or language. An absolute absence of empathy, and the inability to accept being told no. Teacher pay is an issue, but before taxes I take home about 45k a year, and I get by just fine by living below my means and strict budgeting. Throwing money at it isn't a be-all-end-all to the problem. Simply going back to policies where students are held accountable, held to a high standard and held responsible for their actions will kill a number of the issues currently plaguing the education system

I think the breakdown of the family is impactful. It's very rare to find parents that aren't divorced and all the 'troublemakers' in my school came from broken homes.

I was raised by a single mother and I was one of these brain dead kids in middle and high school. If it wasn’t for video games I would absolutely still be brain dead. Video games was the only reason I learned to read at a high level and understand how to do basic math. Luckily I made it to college, public college but I got further than I was probably supposed considering all of the disadvantages I had. It’s doable. All a kid really needs is attention. Once you give them that you’ll be surprised what they’re capable of. I agree the teachers need to be paid more, but she’s 100% right it boils down to the parents. If all you’re gonna do as a parent is work and feed them, it’s not enough. You have to show you care.

I'm a teacher too, and I think one of the biggest problems is that kids can't fail. No matter what grade they get, they are just moved on to the next class. Everyone's just passing the buck.

I struggled with Algebra so much that my parents had to put me in a different school. After changing schools I excelled. The school I was in was failing me. However, when I failed math I was held back to repeat the whole grade. I can't comprehend schools pushing students up through the grades if they're unable to perform basic cognitive skills.

I will never forget my first day of senior year in an American School. My Physics teacher asked a girl while smiling when was the war of 1812. Her immediate response was "How the hell am I supposed to know that this is a science class!" I will never forget this.

Im from sweden and i got horror stories from school too. For 2 years our spanish lessons consisted of watching zorro in english with swedish subs where they say si senor sometimes. Stupid politics makes it illegal to cancel french,german or spanish classes(schools legally have to offer it , they had no qualified teacher). A sane society wouldve let us switch to french or german instead

I remember the aptitude tests we took in 5th grade, most of my friends and I tested at a level that was 3-4 grades above us in almost every subject. We all thought it was kind of a joke, because we didn't get great grades or feel particularly smarter than anyone else, we just didn't really care. This was the 90s, so I know things have changed, but there's a world of difference between flunking a class because you don't care, and not knowing what state you live in. I can't count the number of times I've heard the phrase "He would easily pass the class if he would just apply himself." This sounds like an entirely separate problem, this isn't just kids failing to apply themselves, it's much worse.

Yeah, this sounds right. I don't want to sound like *that* guy, but the librarians were always surprised to see someone walk into the library without being asked by another teacher. I was very competitive in the AR scene where kids read books and took quizzes on them to show that they read it, but also for points and end-of-the-year rewards. So, I binged Harry Potter books starting in 4th grade and finished by 5th because there were some other books I wanted to read like Hatchet. I always won 1st place pizza parties for myself and sometimes my class by myself with a large margin. Even when classes were competing for shared AR point scores, me taking a test on a Harry Potter book was like the ace up the sleeve. Looking back on it, I can't tell if people only liked me for the awards I won or if they actually liked me as a person. I was always just sitting alone in my classes, finishing work before everyone else and then reading and then having to explain to the teachers that I did my work only for them to give me more work to do at home which I instead just finished in their class. To my memory, no other kid got this treatment because most of them did the bare minimum to be considered done working and then do homework with their friend group outside of class to avoid getting more homework. In the schools I went to, it just felt like nobody wanted to be there and they just wanted to go home, which is understandable to an extent as they were kids, but most of them said "I don't know" about what they wanted to do in the future and brushed off the question entirely if another student asked.

One of my buddies decided he wanted to teach HVAC (we are both commercial hvac and refrigeration techs) at a local high schools vocational program. He quit and came back after 2 months because he was sick of dealing with 17 and 18 year olds that can't do basic math He told me he was spending more time teaching these kids to add and subtract than anything else, he even told me he had a few kids staying after class that he was trying to teach to add single digit numbers with paper clips. He quit because he just could do it, it was too frustrating when he supposed to teach them one thing but they don't have the basic knowledge prerequisites to understand what he is teaching them. Which he is right because one of the most basic concepts in A/C and refrigeration is superheat and subcooling (the simple versions of this is the temp above and below the boiling point of a substance) and you can't understand these concepts if you can't add and subtract. It's sad because we are really quickly moving towards the movie idiocracy being real life and it is alarming.

If kids with learning disability do better than kids without. Maybe it's time to reverse that label.

They put me into special ed because of trauma when I was in preschool. They kept removing me from special ed, but everytime I would enter a new grade they would hard reset and reevaluate me over again. Every year they would do this and take me out of special ed again. My senior year they finally fixed it. School systems are fun.

My mother was a high school math teacher for decades, thankfully for her, it was back before the kids turned to crap. I saw very closely the teacher side of the school as I was growing up consequently and I can guarantee to you that the problem is not our teachers. Well not all of them, yes there are those that would rather spend all day long indoctrinating your children rather than teaching them to read or write. The real problem is at home. These are the kids who were never told no growing up, never spanked or disciplined for acting badly. Billy is a good example in Asmon's video. He was getting away with the bad behavior till he was made an example of. The parents at home don't care, aren't invested in their own children, and for all practical purposes don't even know that their 15 year old is illiterate and does nothing but spend all day on some shooter game or tiktok streams and has zero ambition in life. Teachers cannot fix that when the fundamental problem is starting at home. Asmon hits the nail on the head. When I was young, every kind in America wanted to be an astronaut or an engineer. Now all they want to be is a sports star, youtube streamer, or professional video game player. You can throw in rapper or tv personality too I suppose. Nobody wants to be the person to cure cancer. No kids are running around with the dream of building rockets that will land us on other planets. China on the other hand. China produces more than 40 times as many engineers from college each year than the USA does. We are producing nonsense like gender studies, history, and political science majors. That has long term ramifications on the entire society and country as a whole.

That bit about Asmon being in school and his school used to lump the foreign language kids with the special needs kids is so on point. Back in the 90s, my school did the same thing to my brother. My family has just returned from being posted overseas. My brother spoke only French. They put him in special needs and said he had a speech disorder because he spoke "gibberish". My parents pointed out that it was an actual language he was speaking, and the school just stared at my parents like they said the sun was green. They genuinely didn't see how messed up their decision was.

Challenged kids and kids who speak spanish being put in same class made me laugh out loud. It is just so ridiculous that a good comedian can rarely come up with something better

This all started when they went “no kid left behind” mentality. Because the plan was to raise everyone to proper levels, BUT it ended up being “fuck it no one fails no matter how stupid they are”because the schools didn’t want to lose funding.

If you look at successful schools and they are always in successful neighborhoods. They need to kick kids out who can’t keep up so parents have to pay attention or deal with their own kids.

Her kid is extremely relevant to the point. You don't need great teachers to get students to have age appropriate skills, you just need teachers and parents who actually care.

While I went to school for English (as a second language up to B1 level), what really pushed me to almost native-level was my obsession with D&D since I was 12. Having to read all the rule books and campaign settings (and later on, novels, because I was a massive D&D nerd) enriched my vocab, reading and writing skills to insane levels, to the point where some years later I went and aced the C1 certification tests without actually having to study at all. Kids nowdays seem to have no hobbies other than scrolling on their phones.

I remember being in school and when the teacher would have us read paragraphs there were so few kids who could read well and pronounce words correctly. This was up into high school. It was painful hearing them read so slowly and get stuck on really simple words...its crazy that now its gotten even worse.

As a elementary student I have a difficult time with addition. I use to be able to add up the genders, but I'm so confused now..

School didn't fail me (Rural Canada) but I can absolutely say that School is not 100% responsible for a child's education. Learning doesn't stop after the bell rings, it goes on constantly. Not just academically, but socially, morally, etc. I learned a lot of things from my hobbies. Granted, many of them were video games related, but still. I learned a lot of reading from Pokemon. Back in generation 1, those stupid moves like Wrap, Bind, etc., would always say "the attack continues!" I pronounced it as "Contoonst" I had no idea what I was reading. I was 4 or 5 years old, my words weren't that long yet, not consistently. But eventually I learned it. Runescape taught me how to type, but also what slang even is. "Ty." "np" and the general emotes like smiles and the like, the classics. A ton of games taught me intuition and how to feel things out. Throwing a grenade in a game, bouncing it off of a wall. Momentum in a racing game, etc. Toss the Turtle/Kitten Cannon, games that parents would call gross, dumb, bad for kids, etc., because they were... Well, gross, taught me how to angle for the best distance, how to budget my resources to maximize the use out of it, when to use what... Video games don't make kids academically smart, but it sure doesn't make them stupid either. If you get someone to engage with something in a meaningful way, they WILL come out of it for the better, even if it's just something small like a better understanding of time budgeting, or reflexes.

Parents absolutely have a duty in their child’s education. As much or more than teachers. I came home and my parents helped me with homework, they read to me when I was young and made me read when I got older, they quizzed me. And most of my friends parents did the same. My graduating class had 30% over a 3.8 gpa in almost all honors classes. Everyone of my friend got a academic scholarship to college and now are successful. Every single one. Parents need to step up. And this was public school in WV. We aren’t talking about some expensive private school. And now those kids I grew with up have children of their own and doing the same thing with their kids.

There is actually a pretty good chance that social media is making kids dumber.

1:08: i can totally relate to this. i was at a middle school where, as someone with adhd and autism, was in a school with regular classes and then got my iep (individual education plan) read wrong after i was put in a special ed class where everyone who had an iep, was stuck there, and was disabled, i.e. a kid who was older than me and was mute, or someone who liked to rock their body in place while sitting in their non-rocking chair and it was just a regular school chair they got, until i got put back into somewhat regular classes where the kids function similarly to me or better than me, and had other classes than being stuck in just 1 class where i functioned better than most of the kids who were able to only have that one class (of course it was supervised which is understandable). edit: for the other people who are also disabled, they will understand, too, that a disabled person may perform better in some things a lot better than someone, who, for instance, has autism as well, can perform better than someone who isn't disabled at all, which will happen from time to time.

Both of my parents struggled in high school, didn't go to college, worked all the time, but STILL taught me more than parents these days teach their kids.

Also, the scariest part to me is that these kids are gonna grow up, and gonna be able to vote on important things while potentially being not much smarter than they are now.

The lack of literacy of the kids I went to HIGH SCHOOL with was extremely sad. We'd read a play or book out loud as a class, and some of these mfs would take ages just to get through a single paragraph...

I was one of those kids that "fell through the cracks." I was a troubled kid, abused at home, and we moved a lot because we were broke. I had a job at 13 and have worked most of my life. We couldn't afford health care, and I later learned I had an auditory learning and processing disorder... which makes sense now, but I didn't know back then. I graduated learning division, but I excelled in every other class. In plano back in the 90s, if you couldn't keep up with the curriculum, they would put you in SpEd and detention or in school suspension. All of the things I should've learned in school, I ended up self-taught after I graduated high school. I spent the remainder of my time in detention, pulling books from the library that interested me, like college level psychology books.

I was fortunate enough to be around my grandparents as a child. Nobody talks about this, but having more than your parents to teach you about the world is very valuable as a child. Kids these days see their grandparents for 1 day a month.

Man I'm 33 years old and this was the case back when I was in school as well. I always hated when they would make us read out loud in chunks, cause half the class could barely read and it took fucking forever to get through it

If I had kids, as soon as they were old enough to use a toilet and say a few words I'd be teaching them to play Yu-Gi-Oh and they'd have 1000 IQ.

Gotta blame the Gen X and Millennial parents that give their kids everything they want without making them go out to learn the real world

I remember not paying attention to the multiplication tables in like grade 3 or 4 and didn't know them. The teacher told my parents, and I was grounded all weekend to learn them. When I came back to school Monday I had them memorized and was one of the best kids in class with them. I will be 40 years old next month and still remember this.

There is a 19-year-old girl at my work that literally said the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard the other day and she does and says something dumb every single day so I said to her one day “thank God you were pretty“ and she didn’t get that either. But we were talking about the difference between bugs in the north and the south and I said “I’ve lived in Alabama and Georgia” and I think that she thought I said I have lived in Alabama IN Georgia…. So she responds with (and say this in the most valid airhead voice u can imagine) “are u sure Alabama’s in Georgia??? I’m pretty sure Alabama is in Texas…. U need to google that bc I’m sure ur wrong.” And she said it w the most serious face and all I could do was stare at her with my jaw dropped open and she just kept saying “what?? What is it??? What’s wrong??” And I said “ur kidding right?? Like ur fucking w me right?” And she said “what do u mean?? I’m sorry to call you out like that in front of everyone if that’s what ur upset about.” And I said “YOU called ME out????!!! Honey ALABAMA IS IN FUCKING ALABAMA!!!!”

Parents are addicted to social media in the USA. So they let their kids consume social media as a free babysitter while they themselves veg out. Nobody has time to read or write anymore because we spend so much damn time online. It's actually crazy. I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else but at least I don't have kids 🤣

Bro I'm 33 now but when I was in middle school, I had to do the SPED program because of severe mental illness + skipping school. There was a "kid" aka full grown adult IN MY CLASS who was pushing 25/26 yo who COULD NOT READ. It was going to be his last year in the school system because he was *too old* and they were kicking him out. It was determined that he just refused to learn. Not that he was incapable - just refused.

Saw this problem personally. Asked for a dozen cookies at subway and dude looked at me straight in the eye and said "what is that?". Guy didn't even know what a "dozen" meant.

I teach 7th grade also. The students are not stupid. They are not being held accountable and then they are being passed to the next grade. Thankyou Asmongold for commenting on this.

Asmond mentioning his mother teaching him to read by encouraging growth through his own interests and teaching him about mythology made me feel sudden extreme nostalgia.

I'm German. I done with school now and dont have any special degree. I'm smart, but one half of my teachers just tell us uninteresting shit without any passion or interest at all because they make like 30k a year and hoped their job would be fun, while the other have made annoying us their hobby. Just one example, but, in 10th grade, my biology teacher told us to note the shit we had to learn for an exam as a mindmap. I asked if i could make regular notes because i dont like the extra ness of mind maps and think they make things more complicated than they have to be. He didn't allow me to do so, so i made it after arguing with him and him threatening to give me a 6 (worst grade) for the class. He wanted to check if i really did it, so i showed him and he told me that i had to re do it because i wrote it in cursive and didn't color it. I was in 10th grade and 16 years old. WHY THE FUCK WOULD I HAVE TO DO IT LIKE A PRESCHOOLER. I'M SMARTER THAN THAT. I'm interested in knowledge and love chemistry and pysics, which is why i know a lot about it, but school is so fucking disappointing while being one, if not the most important social instrument there is.

We had this whole discussion yesterday with a woman who is a retired teacher who now works at Santa's village about how kids aren't taught the same way they used to be. i.e. drawing leads to learning shapes and symbols which leads to coding, leads to print writing, leads to cursive writing, etc. You stack knowledge and habits onto each other and build from a base upwards. Alot of that gets skipped. Alot of kids also aren't diagnosed with things like ADHD and don't get additional support where needed. I have ADHD which presents with certain coding issues, though testing still places me above average when compared to peers. So my coding is bad compared to my other abilities, but I still outperform most people which is why my diagnosis was overlooked for 38 years. I was the smart quiet kid who was always daydreaming in the back of the class and never put any effort into school but always passed classes, made honor roll every year and only failed 1 test in his entire life due to being sick and missing a month of school in my last year. Education is in shambles.

Video games are a good motivator for learning. When I was in 6th grade, my dad bought me Deus Ex few days after release. At first I was mainly focused on gameplay and didn't pay much attention to all the lore, reading etc (english is not my first language). But eventually I craved to dig into the lore and all RGP elements, so I forced myself to learn english. I literally sat with paperback english-polish dictionary while playing Deus Ex, and lo and behold - I absorbed the language like a sponge, basically jumping several years above what was taught in school. I continued learning english from various media and eventually I passed the C1 certificate of advanced english before finishing high school. Lots of ways to instill curiosity in children.

I remember being pulled aside in 3rd grade for additional testing in reading and writing, and afterwards being told that I was reading and writing at a college level. 3 years after that, I was offered a partial scholarship based on my reading and writing skills. I wasn't some visionary, I wasn't special; I read a lot of books and understood how to competently read and write. I have friends in Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, ALL of whom can read and write in English better than virtually anyone I knew in high school. Like, the lacking literacy of US students is staggering. Now, I'm sure many people are perfectly good at reading and writing, but I've always found most people to be below average. It's seriously disappointing when you meet Europeans and it's thrown into perspective how far our education system has lagged behind and failed our youth.

"But brawndo's got what plants crave, it's got electrolytes."

I remember one kid about ten years old who said to his friend, “Well, I’m still small and stupid, but then I’ll definitely understand this in future.” I don’t remember what exactly he was talking about, but I know for sure that this is one of the smartest kids I’ve ever met in my life.

Man. This reinforces my desire to homeschool my kids, and keep em away from tech until they're 16-18 years old. I'm not going to raise children that are dumber than a bag of hammers.

I’ll never forget when the school system gave up on me. I had no motivation and had issues focusing in the class room and my adhd would always detract from the lessons. I eventually just put my head down and fall asleep and my teachers never bothered to wake me up or talk to my parents about it or even attempt to figure out how they can get me back on track. I just got sent to detention and got suspended over and over every week. Till I eventually refused to go back and dropped out in 8th grade and didn’t do anything till I was 18 and understood my adhd and how to focus better and managed to go to night classes to study for my GED and got it done in a month. I wasted my entire school years only to get the equivalent in a month.

I feel sad whenever Asmond talks about his mom now. It’s clear why he loved and why she was amazing. It must be a great loss for him.

My son is in 7th grade taking all accelerated or high school level courses including Mandarin. So many parents don't take the time to help children learn basic study habits or show interest in their child at all. I watched my sister take tiktok away from her 10year old and forced her to attend tutoring and all of a sudden she's not failing classes. Who could have guessed

That teacher probably did more for Billy in that moment than anyone has done for him up to that point. Constructive Embarrassment is a powerful tool.

It's a complicated problem, there are a lot of parents who for whatever reason either cannot or will not be as involved or as interested in their childrens education as the need to be (whether because they dont care or dont have time because of work or being a single parent or both.... whatever). Then the system is usually run by teachers unions who prioritize teachers benefits and job security over the ablility to actually educate the children that are placed in their classes (the unions protect them for being fired for failing at the job that taxpayers pay them for). And then of course there is the government that doesn't want schools to do well so that (take you pick, or pick them all) they can have dumb, docile, impressionable, and uninformed voters to blindly cast their ballots in whatever manner the politicians can sway them to do so, and or use the sad state of education in this country as a speaking point and rallying cry to their supporters during election years (of course it never gets fixed regardless who gets voted in because all sides of the political spectrum like this situation).

Middle/high school teacher here. American public education has been failing for decades and has only limped along this long because of teachers killing themselves working 16+ hour days and letting themselves get taken advantage of. Now with the new generation of teachers (called “lazy” by the older generation) coming in and demanding reasonable expectations and pay, coupled with parents letting iPads raise their children, the system is totally falling apart in all aspects. I had to teach my 10th graders comma rules and to capitalize the names of organizations last week!

Imagine watching Asmongold and he is watching a video of your teacher saying how dumb her students are...

I did my Masters in Education here in Australia. I passed all my classes and quit with one practical remaining. What I saw appalled me. Parents romanticised having kids without having the resources to raise them properly. Teachers not caring anymore and just wanting to get a paycheck. It was so sad.

I was in AP European History in the 12th grade. The class was pretty much just read a section of the text book, write something about it, sometimes the teacher would give a presentation because he didn't think the textbook covered it well enough but it was overall pretty lax as we were the smart kids and the teacher was a grad student who didn't really care too much but he was still a good teacher. One day while we're just chilling, the teacher is just looking really annoyed at his computer, eventually someone bothered to ask him what's wrong and he's like "well I really can't show you guys this for legal reasons... but come over and look at this" and proceeds to show us some of the papers that people in the US history class had written (same grade just the normal class). These people literally were copying and pasting from multiple random websites, not even bothering to change the text color and size. If they did bother to write at all it was at like the 6th grade level. I think out off all of them only one or two were written at an appropriate level. Worse is that those were the second chances to turn it in, because he had the same thing happen the day before ,l literally told them to go back and just rewrite it in their own words, and all they did was shuffle the paragraphs around.

It's definetly a culture thing. My parents raised me to respect educators and to take my education seriously. I didn't have access to social media or anything until i was 16. I still have ADHD, but i *wanted* to be successful in school because that's how i was raised. I could barely do 8th grade math but i still tried very hard.

4:05 Well to be fair I don’t think the President knows who the President is.

I had the same exact experience with a history teacher. He was ex military and everyone just respected him out of the box. He was never mean or anything and treated everyone fairly. What a good memory. There are very rarely teachers we remember and he was one of them.

If the parents are lazy then the children are more likely to also be lazy. Some people are self-directed while others require someone to point to the direction they need to go. My father had to drop out of high school because his father deserted his family, and my father and his brothers had to support the family. My mother dropped out of the fourth grade to go to work to help support her family also. During WW2 my father was turned Active Army (he was a reservist) and stayed in the Army until he retired as a CWO 5. He earned a college degree attending night classes. My mother did not go back to school but constantly work at improving her reading and math skills. She managed a retail store. We had a large family of 3 boys and 3 girls and all of us were hard workers and were successful at what we did. Thanks to a mom and dad who led the way.

The biggest factor in a childs success is the base laid by their parents at an early age. Could they afford, or did they decide to play with them, read to them and take care of their needs properly etc.. But the truth is it is incredibly easy to just hand over a tablet with headphones and be glad for a moment of silence - and it is tempting.

I had a similar experience with class mates acting out in high school. Had this Swedish teacher who just had enough with 2 dudes sitting in the back of the class talking during his lecture. He stopped what he was doing and said; "You two in the back. If you do not stop talking right now, I will personally strangle you". After that, whenever we had a new session with him, everyone took their seat in the classroom before it started and talked about whatever. Whenever he closed the door, ALL discussions stopped right away and everyone was focused on the teacher. He was also one of the most liked and best teachers we had during those 3 years. That's how little it took to change the attitude. Nowadays you can't do shit or you get fired.

The education system should have been reformed in the early 2000s and you cannot convince me otherwise

What's even more scary is that those kids will be allowed to VOTE and REPRODUCE! The movie "Idiocracy" was a prophecy.

Asmon touched on exactly what we need in school, kids used to get laughed at for being stupid. He should check out the MDE teacher skit too

My mom's a teacher and the amount of "work" she brings home is crazy. Creating lesson plans, making the worksheets from scratch, the parents have her phone number like she's a CEO that needs to update them asap, grading, and setting things up. It's crazy

One of the biggest things I saw teachers fail to realize growing up was that when no one speaks up in class, it's not always because no one knows the answer. Most of the time, especially in the lower level classes, the kids don't want to willingly answer the question and seem like a loser to their classmates. This would even pervade into the higher level courses, where a number of students guaranteeably knew the answer and chose not to answer to avoid being "that kid." The only between those two scenarios was that the kids in higher level courses had parents REQUIRED them to get high grades, whereas the kids in the lower level courses almost always had a terrible home life. Always falls back on the parents.

Hmm…I don’t know. Japanese teachers are also paid quite low but they still are so hardworking. My son had to stay home from school for a week due to a cold and the teacher visited the house mid-week to check on him. They often work until about 9pm and club/coaching duties are compensated only with a stipend (no extra salary) or sometimes, it’s on a volunteer basis. I do think that’s unfair, but the “you get the minimum if you pay the minimum” thing is also probably cultural? Just wondering out loud. (Note: While salary is low, the cost of living is about 30% lower than in the US. So, cost of living comes to only about a third of their salary.)

I'm sub teacher. and stuck with ESL(English as a second language) for middle school, last semester. because of the teacher shortage. I was often with those same students. They did put me in other class rooms every now and then. So I've done math a couple times, and I'm good at math, at least algebra. So I have taught it to them while the teacher was absent a couple times. It's not only that these students have the math comprehension of 2nd grade. But so many of them have the attention span of a dog. You can't grab their attention for more than 5 minutes before they just end up dazing off. You can't entirely blame the teachers when they have to teach over 25 students at a time. Most of these students don't care. Which I understand, I'm a student in college, it could get boring, I daze off sometimes. The older I grow though, the more I grow to hate smart phones and technology in general. It's just turning everyone into idiots, including my generation and myself. When I was in 9th grade back in 2015 -2016. I heard my math teacher complain about the same thing, now I get it. I'm 23 now.

"Some teachers go that extra mile and some don't do that at all". That's very relatable. I had a class where the teacher really engaged with the students and paid attention to everyone. Once, after I had turned in an assignment, I learned that my grammar hadn't been the best, so a sentence could be totally misunderstood (like in first grade where we got the sentence "Mom got apples for the children that she mashed", meaning she mashed the kids. Not the same sentence here, but the same principle) and the teacher read that aloud to the entire class and everyone laughed. It was embarrassing, but I was never mad, because I learned a valuable lesson. On the other hand we had an English teacher (I'm from Sweden) who didn't do anything. The class was complete anarchy and the teacher just tried to educate to anyone who tried to listen in a surrounding with kids jumping on the desks, running around, screaming constantly and playing games instead. I never learned anything, yet she gave me a higher grade than I should have because "I know you know more than you show". I really didn't. I was around 14 at this time. I didn't start to properly learn English until I was 18 and that was by sitting in front of a computer with an English to Swedish dictionary and later, when I had some vocabulary, meeting English speaking people online who kindly helped me with the grammar. I have nothing to thank school for for my English today.

somewhere there’s a tree that’s tirelessly producing oxygen for these people and I think they owe it an apology!

That little chart he drew up I have no shame in admitting that I've completely forgotten how to solve, despite the fact that even as a foundation maths student, would solve more complicated stuff on the daily in school. I left maths class just 6 years ago. Kind of proves just how useful that stuff is to the average person, and yet it's deemed "essential" to learn as at least one form of maths was a non-negotiable class choice up until year 10 where I live.

The story Asmon tells is what some teachers should do with students who have bad behavior that effects the class, catch the bad behavior early on and fix the problem before it grows to be a bigger problem in the class. ( while also, following the schools rules in that area)

Part of the problem i noticed, at least with my niece, is the new way they are teaching math is really fucking unintuitive. My niece was learning multiplication and couldn't figure it out at all so I had her show me how she was taught and I looked at her school book, and couldn't comprehend it. So I taught her how I was taught and within 30 minutes she could do basic multiplication on her own. A lot of the problems simply are that there are a lot of teachers who simply fucking suck at teaching, or teach in such a dead tone that you couldn't care less about what is being taught.

Imagine being a baker showing up for the weekend shift and there's supposed to be a fridge full of croissant dough that's already been folded and chilling before baking, which was your job. You open the fridge, and there's no croissant dough to be seen. Instead there are a bunch of bags of gluten-free flour, which is unusable for baking croissants. So there's no time to actually fulfill your orders, and you complain to the boss about the situation. The boss says to stop blaming everyone else for your problems and get to work! So you whip up some garbage tier biscuits and sell them as "croissants". To your complete surprise, people buy up all of these "croissants" and complain the entire time while eating them, but they just keep eating them and paying full price for them. So, you come to a decision: Should you quit this obviously fraudulent, garbage bakery and go open your own, or should you stay and hope you can fix this bakery from the inside because you want people to have good food to eat? This is public school teaching. You can quit and go private, but you'll be getting a different clientele of people with means. If you stay in public schools, you will be serving garbage tier education because you can't actually address the real problems students have that block them from learning, but you hope you can make some difference despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

"What state are you in?" The student: "umm.. solid?"

It's no secret that there have always been students who do not/did not get the help they needed in school. Personally, I believe it is from teachers (not all, but a few) telling kids they can't do it because they're not smart enough in the first place. Additionally, most of my family are teachers. My mom, dad, and step-father were high school and college professors - and that's not counting the teachers in my husband's family. There is increasingly little funding, no housing in many areas, stress, terrible benefits now, and too much emphasis on testing that doesn't prove anything other than who can memorize and regurgitate information better. Math concepts are being taught to students whose brains are not developed enough to understand those concepts. Books are extremely out of date - they're still teaching Linnaeus when Biology has moved on to phylogenetics and has done so since the 80s, iirc. Once these kids reach college level classes, they have to completely relearn *how* to learn because schools cannot or will not give them the tools they need to succeed in college. That said, it's also no secret that students have struggled considerably since the pandemic. I was in college for my second bachelor's in the sciences during it. I grew close with my professors (TA'd and did research under them) and the sheer discouragement and frustration from them due to their students' inability to follow basic instruction (when the only thing that had changed was the pandemic) was so disheartening. I think we're in for a ride the next decade as we try to get these pandemic kids through school.

I remember when I was 17. I got off work and I was eating lunch at Wendy's. A man and his daughter sit down next to me and immediately puts a tablet in front of her and says " let's get your Netflix going" I thought to myself, that doesn't seem right. Understatement of the century

I grew up with the public school system in the 60's & 70's. I could see, first hand, how quickly the state of education was being degraded into an idiocracy. By the time I got to college to learn electronic engineering, the school had just started phasing out Robotics classes for Mandatory English classes...Because the businesses were getting tired of hiring people who couldn't communicate or write coherent reports well. Even during grade school the teacher might say something & I would think, "how can that be right?" so I'd go look it up in the library (this was before the surge in home computer purchases & public access to internet; yes, I'm *that* old) & find out that it was wrong. I became like Mark Twain, who said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Year by year, we should be taking these words closer to our hearts. It's possible that lack of discipline & refusing to fail students back to repeat the grade they failed had a lot to do with it; Teachers for young students should be better trained in Crowd Control methods just so they can get the kids to frikkin' *pay attention* in class. Thank you for introducing "Common Core," President Bush. It seems to me that the businesses should have taken those specific concerns to the primary schools to fix because that's when the students are *supposed* to learn the primary language in use within this country! I mean, I could understand *additional* & advanced English for those who are intending to enter journalism or authorship careers of some kind but to make it mandatory for students who *should have* learned the basics years ago is just nonsensical. I saw entire curriculums devolve from "ingest, digest, excrete" into "ingest, regurgitate." Critical Thinking skills fell by the wayside; that's what we need to have again, Critical Thinking that teaches people *how* to think instead of what we have now, telling people *what* to think. Now realize that these people being deliberately taught idiocy are going to grow up & vote...Indeed, it's already been happening. Now I hear that the government is going to start cracking down on home schooling because they still teach subjects with the classical methods of teaching. Now that you know, what are you going to do about it, people?

The sad part is you are laughing at it while you should be terrified. People don't "decide" to be stupid, they either are born with less ability or are victims of a failing system. Its not a choice they make. And in the case of lesser ability, not even something they can fix. If its the fault of a failing system, it could be fixed if people don't wait another two generations. As you can't leave fixing the broken system up to the victims who don't even comprehend basic math. If children have less ability on birth in larger numbers, that would be very concerning. The problem of wage is clear though. My grandfather was a teacher and he was able to afford a huge house where he supported more then 7 children and grandma had no job aside from staying at home and taking care of the house/kids. On top of that they had a huge garden and farmland for horses. On a single teacher job. Meanwhile my sister is also a teacher today, and she can't even pay the rent of her small row-house while paying for it together with her boyfriend's wage. She also had to go work much more and at irregular hours due to the teacher shortage.

its soo sad but i couldnt stop laughing, as a tradesman in carpentry field, im glad my job is safe

My nephew learned how to read when he was 5. It was fascinating watching him learn. He struggled so hard initially, and then no joke, one sudden week, he was reading as if he's been reading for a few months/a year. It's as if it just suddenly clicked with him, and was reading without any major issues. Obviously he struggles with more advanced words. Still, the human mind is very impressive.

The point of the story about her children is to emphasize that parental involvement is necessary. I am always flabbergasted when a parent has never looked at a single assignment their student has turned in. I ask parents to read their kids’ essays, and 9/10 out of 10, they’re shocked bc they never took the time to pay any attention. I’ve asked students to read a paragraph in front of their parents. Same story.

This isn't an exclusively American issue. In Finland its become a big issue that new University freshmen can barely pass the easy classes. Courses that had a GPA of 3.7 (out of 5) 5 years ago, now have GPAs of 1.1. And this is Finland, a country that recently topped the charts for education quality... Subjectively, it seems that the freshmen just no longer have the ability to study and retain information. You can ask them about some fundamental fact for a course a week after the final exam and they won't be able to answer.

I have taken care of a child just like this. Sheltered with 6 other children in their home, rarely going outside, given technology to distract them while their parent works, cooks for them, and gives them what they want. This is negligence worse than most orphanages I've seen, and this is a case that is still salvageable. Imagine the ones that end up in highschool while living a life like that.

Had to change school for our kid, it was a gamechanger. From zero to hero. The way it works is that not every kid is the same. Some need to teach in more practical manners, while other can sit still and learn all day long. Some need smaller classes, while other want larger.