"the kids can't read!" TikTok isn't being dramatic this time? | Khadija Mbowe

Let’s get Colleen to 1000 subs!! youtube.com/@booksthehausdown?si=ucpTWjYMRWq1bcjz

When I hear kids can't read, I feel the need to remind everyone of the study that said over half the adults in the USA can't read past the 6th grade; this means this isn't a "kids these days" thing, it's a deeper systematic issue that's been going on for decades now

Gentle parenting isn't about letting kids do whatever. It's about respecting your child as a human being while still setting rules and boundaries. Lots of people are doing it wrong.

As a mother of a third grader i will add my two cents. My child did do kindergarten on zoom which was terrible. She struggled in first grade. By second grade I had to turn into her own personal tutor. She did great in math but reading was a struggle. I started buying her chapter books and making her do book reports and answer questions after each book she read and by the end of second grade not only was she ok grade level but she was a little higher than grade level. Now we’re in the third grade and she fell behind in the summer so we went back to workbooks ( on top of her homework everyday ) and she already got an award for most improved students. I have open communication with her teachers on her grades and I stay on her. It is not the teachers job to do all the work, it’s a partnership between the parent and the teacher

I work as a literacy tutor in the public schools, helping small groups of elementary-age kids with phonics and reading comprehension. It's honestly my favorite job I've ever had, because yes, the kids are struggling with reading and yes, it's not easy to teach them, but THEY WANT TO LEARN. And it's beautiful to see how much they want to learn, and the progress they are able to make over time when they get the resources and support they need.

"They struggled so I could call my cats their grandchildren." is the best sentence EVER 😭

As a teacher, it rubs me the wrong way how people are shaming the illiterate children online. We are meant to be compassionate and take action (even though our hands are tied more often than not). We have to sit with the parents and the children and ask ourselves, “If the institutions are failing these kids what can we do outside of these confinements?” Yes, the teachers are stretched thin and can’t keep up but a lot of teachers tend to blame the system and stop trying.

A speech therapist recently talked to elementary teachers in my city in Germany and pointed out how speech impediment-rates have been rising. Her explanation for this was that toddlers and children partially learn to speak by observing people's mouths. But parents are not interacting with their kids as much and instead handing them tablets and stuff, where they watch animated or synchronized media, where the mouth movements and what's being said don't add up.

As an Art Teacher i can tell you that some of my second graders can’t differentiate between a circle and a triangle….and I describe them every single day

As a middle school teacher, one of the things that bothers me is the “kids need to read at grade level by third grade”. This has less to do with development and more to do with the fact that our school system does not want to meet kids where they’re at. Because the reality is that the reason why kids need to be able to read by third grade is that we just stop teaching kids how to read. The curriculum goes from “learning how to read” to “reading to learn”. This then causes a kid who might be reading one grade level behind to being 5 grade levels behind simple because they never got the extra literacy help in the 4th grade. A lot of our literacy problems can be fixed if kept teaching kids how to read past the third grade. I saw 8th grade kids at the previous school I worked at grow 2-3 grade levels simply because a tutor sat with them and taught explicit reading instruction. If they had another year of targeted reading instruction, they would likely be on grade level by 9th or 10th grade. But they didn’t get that instruction in high school and are still behind. Also what wasn’t mentioned is that the way we teach kids how to read fucked them up. Many schools de-emphasized phonics instruction. So the instruction went from “sound the word out” to “look at the picture to figure out the word”. The result is that many kids (and I saw this A LOT when I briefly worked in a high school) have no idea how to sound out words (ie. read).

I think another huge problem is deliberate cuts to education funding over the last 2 decades. I come from a family of teachers. Every year, the schools are expected to get by on less and less. The schools were stretched to the point of breaking well before the pandemic. My mom was being pushed to pass 8th graders who couldn't read in 2005. She got fired for refusing to lie about these kids, for referring them to remedial services the school system didn't want to pay for and didn't want to admit were so widely needed. Now, at most schools where I'm from, those remedial services don't exist. They've been cut. If a kid needs additional help, the only option is expensive private tutoring, because the public education system has been starved of the funds it would need to provide those services.

as a gen z kid i just wanna add a take from my pov. personally i was a huge reader as a kid, the motivation to do so fizzled out as i approached high school but up until the pandemic i burned through books like wildfire. i think a big part of it was that my parents encouraged it a lot - we went to bookstores as families where i could pick out whatever i wanted, i got books as presents a lot, my mom would drive us to the library and let us read sitting with this huge stuffed tiger they had there. before i could even read, i apparently would hold books in my hand and make sounds, just mimicking what i’d seen from my parents reading to my older brother and me. as a result of this i read so, so much. like i burned through the complete harry potter series in 2 weeks. i read in my free time, read during school. and an interesting thing about all this was with all these books, i kind of osmosised my way into learning a lot about grammar and language structure. like i could write a lot better than a lot of my peers and spell much better, just because i absorbed the “rules” of writing and words through all that reading. i was never taught how to split up dialogue and dialogue tags, but when i sat down to write dialogue for the first time, i just knew. basically, to all parents or people who hope to have kids, reading is important for obvious reasons but it also feeds in to a lot of other skills. make reading something fun for your kids, not a chore. let them engage in it, let them make their own choices about what to read. it does a lot for them.

As a long-term substitute teacher, I'll put in my two cents: it feels like there's no one student that isn't behind. There just aren't enough hands to make sure that every student is getting what they need, and disruptive children make it even more difficult to keep everyone on the same page. I have so many kids who are just desperate to learn, but often it's a game of catch-up for the kids who are behind.

As someone who is Gen Z and has a toddler daughter, early literacy is SUPER important at a young age. Take your child to the library, use a whiteboard, sing songs and offer books often, have a bookshelf for your baby/toddler at a young age! My daughter is going to be able to read Bc mama isn’t giving up on her ever! There is always something the parent can do to help their children, not all parents will follow though.

I was very briefly a literacy and reading tutor (a few months) and I feel like the pandemic really exposed the fact that a lot of people don’t genuinely want kids/know what it takes to raise them. They used school as a substitute for daycare, and when miss rona forced them to have to pick up some educational slack, they wouldn’t/couldn’t. This has left kids way behind without the support to catch up EDIT: READ TO YOUR KIDS. Have designated family reading time. Have designated no-screen time. Get them their own kid dictionaries. Buy them graphic novels if they’re struggling with interest in reading

I'm a gen Z and also a high school student, and the way I've seen teacher(s) flat out refuse to answer questions or help the kids in my classes out is insane to me. There's a genuine lack of care for students, and we can tell. It makes us not want to show up or pay attention because it feels like it doesn't matter.

A good thing to remember about screentime studies is that we can't currently untangle 'screentime' from other factors like neglect or socioeconomic status. The negative outcomes seen in some screentime studies could then be attributed to other environmental factors (e.g. a single parent might rely on screentime to occupy their child as they have limited time/energy).

I love how we currently exist on the spectrum of “Read a book!” to “The kids can’t read”. So much to learn.

Man, as a millennial parent, when do we get the chance to be a goddamn parent?! I gotta work 50 hours a week. I only see my kids on the weekend and when I'm off. I don't have issues with my kids because I create the environment that helps them succeed. We never had a problem with screen time because there was a rule - do your stuff/reading/chores, do you workout, then you get screens. A lot of times, they would rather play with Legos. Also, they had to learn to read before they could have a tablet. But I know so many people who don't even get as much time as I get with my kids because of work. Literally, the problem is the same. It's capitalism that has pushed everything to the pain point. Everything costs as much as it possibly can. Everything is squeezed for every dollar. We need a new deal.

I'm a Millenial/GenZ cusper and when I was in college, one of my professors was really candid about the fact that he anecdotally noticed students capacity for protracted reading to be in decline. He said he used to assign one book a week to students and had since needed to reduce the books to one every two or three weeks. He was fortunately really understanding about it. I was certainly in that category that couldn't read a book a week, and while I used to be the kid who would be constantly reading in class, I can now only make it through audiobooks (which I still consume vociferously). This has been discussed before, but the impacts of social media on our ability to read long text is apparent across generations.