r/teachers

10:59 AM (of Thursday, February 29th 2024)

Today is Wednesday, February 28th 2024 and it was another normal day yet again. I did all of my dailies again today, the body exercises, the cleaning, the brain exercises, it didn't take very long at all.

A subreddit I found today is r/teachers. There was a viral post I saw on X about a teacher complaining about their students, and I was in disbelief. This teacher teaches high school students aged 15-18. When I was 9, I created my first website, it's surprisingly archived on web.archive.org, this is the website from 2004: coolmegg.tk. It looks really bad because the archiver didn't save all of the attributes, that is not what the background looked like, I mean it didn't look that bad, there was another blank image right in front of it so that the content of the page could be legible.

At 13 I made YouTube videos in 2006 when it was brand new. Very few people in the world even knew how to make videos or edit videos at that time. By age 15, I had created another website from scratch, and by age 18, that website received a million visitors per month. Yeah. Also I had mostly straight A's throughout school too, without really even trying. I did fail to get my IB Diploma though, because when I became a senior, I became depressed and defeated, suicidal even, because my entire school life which I had so much fun in, I knew was ending, and I felt like nothing mattered, not my grades or studying, so I didn't study for the IB exams and just failed them. That was one of the worst times of my life, that, and my first year of college.

So anyway, I read this post about how their 15-18 year old students can barely function, and I'm in disbelief. There is no way this is real? 15 year olds that don't know how to round numbers? So giving them 14.80 and they don't know how to round it to 15?

Subtracting double digit numbers in their head is understandable, I think most people can't do that. Most people aren't taught how. Like give someone 89-34 and most people probably can't. I can, that answer is 55, but I'm 30 with a lot of experience and thinking. The 15-18 year old version of me probably couldn't either. Maybe that problem wouldn't have stomped teenage me, but a problem like 34-89 (reversing the order of the numbers) would have.

Graphing is also understandable. It depends on how complicated the dataset is, and depends on what kind of graph (bar graph, line graph, scatter plot, etc.), and the teenage me would have probably had a hard time too. The rounding is just inexcusable though. I am unable to believe anyone can make it to age 15 and not learn how to round.

I think these complaints are just targeted at a handful of students, and that most of them are actually literate and intelligent, that's what I think anyway. I was put into all the honors / gifted / talented programs, without even trying, like the teachers just put me in there by default or something, so I have my own expectations and view for the average student. I am just unable to imagine students being this bad. Yeah I can imagine it, I would just have to imagine the dumbest students possible, and it's hard to imagine an entire generation like that.

Also from my interactions with people online, I think in general people are pretty smart? It's hard to tell really through just an exchange of words, but I fail to see them being as incompetent as these students, but they might be.

Anyway, I've read through the subreddit too a little, and it's pretty abysmal in there. It's just teachers complaining about how dumb their students are the whole time. I've not been around in 2008 or whenever this subreddit was created, so I don't know how it's evolved over the years, but my guess would be that it's largely the same. I remember in college, my English professor showed us this teacher forum, where teachers would post dumb answers and things their students did, and this was 2012, they were making fun of how dumb kids were in my generation. So I think it could just be a teacher thing in general, but who knows?

They are saying students are dumber today because of all the technology and mobile devices. I still can't believe it to be true.

I was supposed to gym tonight but we ended up not going because my friends had surfing lessons until 7 PM, and they wouldn't be ready until like 9:30 PM, plus all the driving so it would take a while, so we ended up just not going tonight.

I watched some Starship Troopers again today. Someone uploaded it to archive.org, and so it's watchable there for free. I laughed a lot because I knew the whole movie was satirical and a parody. My first few times watching it, I took it seriously though, since I didn't know it was satire. It's funny how the same movie can be completely different watching it with a different mind.

Anyway that was my day today.