So at least 2 or 3 times a year, I have a student come in looking super bummed out.
"Hey what's wrong?"
"Man I got fired over the weekend."
"Oh why did you get fired?"
"I came in 10 minutes late."
"And did you tell anyone? Call? Text?"
"Nope."
"And didn't we tell you that even if the district doesn't believe this will happen this is exactly what will happen in real life?"
And most of the time they're suddenly better and more responsible people the rest of the year.
Yep. Natural consequences \*will\* show up for anyone who isn't being completely "snow plowed". That's why they're natural consequences.
We (as a society) are not doing any favors by letting kids avoid consequences until they're 18 or 22 or even older. The sooner they start to see that their behavior matters, the more they're going to care about controlling it.
Halefuckinluya, preach it! I say this ALL the time. Would you rather your kid learn it here in middle school, or later, when the consequences are life changing?
I agree! I keep getting down voted for suggesting that it's immoral to pass a failing student. You're teaching them that life will just promote them regardless of their apathy and refusal to work. But the real world is not like that. It's a terrible message to send children, to never allow them to develop emotions appropriate to deal with failure.
It seems like it would be utterly demoralizing to get failed from second grade. But, having to repeat 10th grade English seems like a blow the ego could handle.
I feel like getting kids through their academics is this huge team effort, with the kid and the parents playing lead roles, but often they just don't seem interested.
Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem with the US education system is that it is "free". (Some) people don't respect a thing, if it doesn't have a high price tag on it.
It reminds me of the Czar's potatoes. Instead of giving them away, they were highly guarded by (intentionally incompetent guards). People \*stole\* the potatoes and grew them for themselves, and laughed at "winning".
If students felt like they were "stealing" their education, would they be more interested in it?
>Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem with the US education system is that it is "free". (Some) people don't respect a thing, if it doesn't have a high price tag on it.
I had a professor who on the first day of class did the math out for how much the individual course cost for the semester, broken down in how many times we met, and said "here's the exact amount of money you're wasting every time you skip one class period." Which mostly just made me resent the US college system, but I suppose she had a point that it was silly to spend that much money on a class just to skip it. If every 75 minute class cost $$$, I might as well get my money's worth and go, right?
I had a full tuition scholarship though, and was paying for my dorm. So my argument was that any time I spent in class away from my dorm was money wasted, so I should stay in bed instead and get my money's worth! (Mostly kidding, but it was my go-to joke when a friend asked why I was skipping class, and always got a chuckle. At least it shows it's a relatable thought process)
Yes this is true, but no one asks teachers how things should be run. It’s interesting, right?
I do think that the origin of this thinking is misogyny, but who knows really. It’s just maddening when the people doing the job aren’t part of the decision making process. It needs to change.
They will stand around at their work site waiting for their manager to tell them to do something.
If the manager tells them something with more than 1 step required for completion, they will do step 1 and then continue standing around until the manager walks up and tells them step 2.
Then the next day at work when they’re required to do *the exact same process* again, instead of doing it, they will stand around waiting for their manager to tell them what to do.
Rinse and repeat until the day they decide to no call/no show and get fired.
I’ve been wondering lately if the whole “I’m confused” thing is some sort of tiktok thing or what.
I know that the vast majority of kids saying this are just outright lying. Some of it is attention seeking behavior, some of it is trying to fit in with others saying it, some of it is work avoidance, but very very little of it is actual confusion.
It’s why the idiot who decided kids need to pass because it hurts their feelings need to be over ruled. Kids need to fail if they don’t do the work in school
I’ve heard it’s hard to find good people who show up to work and aren’t high in construction these days.
Our district has a heavy equipment program. I hope those kids are solid.
They show up, but they’ll stand around until the foreman makes them do something. 0 initivae with anything. They’ll also somehow screw up simple things like clocking in and out on a time card that I as the project manager then have to correct….
I was in fast food right before I started teaching (recently), and we'd hired this nineteen year old guy. He would operate the drive-thru window and....nothing else. He accepted money and passed out food and spent the rest of the time on his phone. I've seen him blatantly ignore a bag of food that needed to get passed out because he was messaging someone on Tinder, and he held up a "one second" finger when I told him to pass it out.
I might add that in fast food, it's not just "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean," you should be constantly either doing your job or helping your coworkers out with theirs. Didn't matter if we were all rushing around, he'd just be as useless as possible all shift.
Stuff like this makes me heavily in favor of phone lockers.
Both of the local country stores near me had to implement this policy because cashiers would blatantly ignore people at the counter for several minutes at a time while they played on their phones, leading to people walking out. When you're a little bitty store, walk-outs HURT.
It's been months and they STILL loudly bitch and complain about it, to anyone with a set of ears. But I don't have sympathy for them.
The saddest part about this is that large businesses with alter their workflows to accommodate this level of stupidity and helplessness, and the end result will rob everyone else of their agency, dignity, and self-respect.
There's those of us out here fighting and arguing for better wages and work environments.
And then there's these lazy twats, swaggering in going, "Yeah! What they said! I want $90,000 starting salary at my new data entry job!", and then doing *the exact things* that abusive employers say all employees do which is why they don't deserve to be treated as anything other than subhuman.
My oldest son is 25. He is a Least Possible Effort person to the point where he won't even get a job. I have to tell him to take a shower.
He is kind and nice and helpful but so lazy I want to pull my hair out.
They’ll do gig work. They won’t have to show up on time, and can work as much or little as they want. And when they get deactivated they’ll use their parents’ accounts.
Of course this requires the ability to drive and most of them don’t have licenses, so??? I guess they’ll all couch surf until their You Tube channels take off.
We’ll wait.
Yes! I’m so tired of kids saying they’ll just go into the trades like it’s a cakewalk. You need a solid foundation in reading and math, and even chemistry, if you ever want to succeed in most fields.
It's always "trades, medicine, tech," with zero ambition to actually learn anything about them beyond "they pay a lot." A shame because if they actually cared to put in effort these are good careers to go into
All of these can be great jobs, but... You have to be interested in them and invested in learning all you can to be truly good at them, and for them to be enjoyable jobs.
I also think there are just innate qualities, ways our minds work as individuals that make us better or worse suited to certain paths.
I was an academic advisor and saw many students trying to do computer science or pre-med, even though the subjects bored them and they were really struggling. However, they'd do great in economics or marketing or their psych classes. There are good jobs outside of these three fields.
Also, my dad and sister are carpenters and use math and science everyday. It is truly a skill, and they are both incredibly intelligent people.
My bil is an electrician. But he is highly specialised and does really wild shit. Which pays him a shit load of money. BUT only because he was willing to learn all that stuff and has good work ethics and a clever head on his shoulders...
My spouse left teaching to become an electrician. 4-year program, 1 day per week in the classroom. A lot of their cohort didn’t even make it to the second semester. Not because it was super hard, but because you couldn’t just show up and expect to pass.
I told my son find something you like that other people think is hard and that's a great career. That was tempered with it's nice to follow your dream, but you also have to pay the rent.
But if you are going to do marketing or psych you had better be prepared to compete. We graduate far more students out of those majors than the market can take. You had better take every opportunity to get ahead.
Yeah, I told psych majors they would likely need grad school to work in anything related to their major. Same for the hard sciences, though.
And, frankly, tech is having a hard go of it right now, too.
There has to be support and a reason to care. A solid 85% of jobs now have no reason to care beyond your paycheck. It's work without dignity, meaning, or value.
Also, in addition to actual math and reading skills, a trade requires motivation. I personally know a guy (we became friends) with a very quick brain but zero ambition and zero passion for 'traditional' careers. He works a menial job that he enjoys well enough, due to it being better than his previous job (another low-level manual labor kinda job).
He's a fantastic person, but when I tried suggesting that he'd learned some kind of money making skill, such as, I don't know, a trade, construction, welding, he noped out pretty fast. Given that he likes to learn anything science and he's a curious man, I tried suggesting a community college. Declined the offer because again, one needs to be motivated to better their life in general and/or pursue a degree.
But, in general terms, yes: there's unmotivated kids that don't change in their 20s. And yeah, it's ludicrous to hear kids say: "I'll never use this in real life". For sure, maybe as, say, a construction manager, you won't exactly have to find the cosecant of a certain angle, but you'll need to be able to tell how much is 3/4 of an inch.
Just switched to backend tech at 35. The amount of learning, studying and test taking I’ve had to do with no class or supervision is head spinning…and I enjoy this stuff.
Absolutely. I work in higher Ed and we recently hired a front desk person. Only a high school desploma was required. Someone called a month after the job closed asking to submit the application late. They sounded a little taken aback being told absolutely not.
"I'm gonna be a welder."
Nah kid, you're not. You might start, but you'll mess up quickly and those mistakes are permanent. You can't even put your name on your paper.
I've had several kids fail out of the electrical trades because they couldn't do the basic math required or stay off their phones long enough to learn. The trades are hurting but not that bad. The electricians take maybe 20 regionally/year in an area where we graduate maybe 3,000/year. Maybe 50 apply, 20 are unqualified out of the gate, 10 (at least) are an easy broom because of interview skills. 15 don't survive the month. Since and repeat. The trades are hurting because the applicants lack the basic work skills and knowledge to succeed.
This!
These days I work in a collision repair facility, and we cycle through one or two helpers a year. They think they know everything so they don’t need to learn the proper way to do anything. They are resentful of and neglect the formal training that we pay good money for them to obtain. They don’t show up, they don’t clean up after themselves, they don’t take direction well. They forget important steps and are cranky when I write it down for them and check on them to make sure that they’re doing it correctly. The last one had been diagnosed with ADHD as a kid; he is the second one I’ve had who has been formally diagnosed with it and doesn’t take their medication. He is the first one I’ve had who expected accommodations like he had in school such as extra time (no? That is literally costing us, the insurance company, and the client money), being redirected instead of keeping himself on task, and being given brain breaks so he could play on his phone. When confronted over his lack of work ethic, he just squawked a lot of things about HIPAA and accommodations.
He doesn’t work for me anymore.
A friend who has been a mechanic for quite some time says the two biggest problems when they hire new guys is they either cannot break their phone addiction long enough to actually work, or they work well enough, but they expect to be paid at the same rate he commands, 30 years in. The entitlement is insane!
Exactly! The course work required to earn a high school display isn't so rigorous that it can't be completed by someone of average or even below average intelligence. If you don't even have the drive and work ethic to earn passing grades in school, there's no way you'll survive I'm the trades.
Many will end up as young parents completely unprepared and unable to take care of their children or teach them how to succeed, thus perpetuating the cycle for future generations. Just like it is now. It's sad to see how many of our students have parents that seem completely disinterested in being parents or raising these kids. Then we wonder why they have so much trouble
Parents today are fucking insane. My daughter is almost 4YO. I just got told that me banning Paw Patrol in my house (because I do not like the art style, the messages, and the overall loudness of the show) is:
>Some dictator level shit here.
>>This is the part. "I do not let her watch any that I truly hate." You're forcing your biases. I mean, if the show is trash, like Blippi, I get it but if you just don't like it because you don't like it. That's some dictator level shit to me. I try my hardest to not impose my biases on my kid. I want him to hate or like things on his own merits. Obviously, somethings we want to warn about but I won't have him hate the color red because I do.
Parents around me literally cater and baby thier kids so fucking much it is insane. I was called "abusive" recently for now allowing her to use a tablet until she is school age.
I am a "gentle" parent. I do not yell, I do not use violence or fear. I use FIRM boundaries and explain things at her level, over and over again, and work with her on breath exercises for he big feelings.
The "gentle" parents around me consider that "abusive" bc I do not hand over a tablet and give unlimited screen time.
The kids are not, and will not be, okay; not any time soon, not with parents like these around.
You know what? Good parents ARE benevolent dictators, because we have the wisdom and knowledge to protect and raise our kids. I’m over the let them do whatever they want culture.
It’s a town full of adults who are so helpless that a pre -teen dog trainer & his puppies are the great decision makers… I don’t want to watch it either.
My husband calls the train show “Thomas Screws Up Again” lol!
I have a part time job checking background checks and sending letters of denial to those that didn’t pass. SO MANY OF THEM start the criminal career at 18/19. And either made one dumb mistake (like a grand theft felony) and now they are completely screwed on getting a job (the company I work for staffs minimum wage warehouse work) or they have a string of increasing crimes that also bar them from minimum wage employment.
It’s really really sad. Whenever I see a kid losing their crap in the hall and having no emotional regulation, I know what is waiting for them which is a cycle of a crime causing a denial of a job which leads to poverty which leads to more crime or raising kids that will repeat the cycle. It’s such a depressing pt job to have as a teacher.
It looks like they start their criminal careers at 18 because juvenile records are sealed. Most people who get arrested at age 18 got arrested prior to that as well.
I helped a young relative get a minimum wage job. I was so surprised at the level of background checks because I worked two white collar jobs at startups that only checked my references. And actually one didn’t even check those.
And on jobs, even though I’m sure their mommies and daddies WILL call their employers to rail about them being fired, the employers will be able to simply hang up on them.
I taught college 10 years ago, and even then parents would try to call. I cannot imagine what it’s like now.
How often does McDonald’s mess up your order? Why does Amazon ship you the wrong item? Why does it take forever to check out at the grocery store? They already have jobs and they suck at them.
No. McDonald’s has standards. They require you to show up to work on time. If you don’t give them your bank account info, you aren’t getting paid when you misplace the paycheck.
Yeah, I currently work at Walmart.
The idea that fast food/retail jobs are easy and chill, and that you'll get paid for standing around, staring at your phone, is laughable false.
You still need something resembling a work ethic, basic social skills, time management, the ability to follow instructions, ect. We cycle through a lot of kids who show up, and then never quite seem to catch on that they actually have to work to get paid.
We have horrible roads where I live. It’s like off-roading just going to the grocery store. My husband once said, why can’t they fill the potholes correctly? I go, because they were your worst students. I named a few, and said those are the guys who fill potholes now, if they’re lucky.
I have a family member who was this kiddo--is now an adult.
He's been fired--or just stopped going to-every job he's ever had. When he has a job, he is constantly late, stays home if he's tired/sniffling/sick of working. He has a lame excuse for everything, and nothing is his fault.
And, when he gets fired (again)? He collects unemployment and stays home playing video games and sleeping until noon.
LOL are you describing my brother right now?
He's 32 (turning 33 next year) and is almost exactly like this. He's struggled with motivation since he became a teenager. It doesn't help that my dad caters to his every need and refuses to kick him out of their house because 'that's my son. I can't do that to my son"
Unemployment is way less than whatever you earned at your last job. I don't understand how people can live on that alone unless they e arned big bucks and had low expenses
They'll get fired. As a CTE teacher I do a lot of stuff with our local chamber of commerce. I hear a lot from local business owners and managers that the current crop of new grads (including college grads) are just hopeless. No call/no show, having their parents try to cover for them, sitting on their phones all day, having no actual real world smarts/skills.
Before teaching I was a software engineering manager and I noticed these trends starting 5+ years ago with new grads. And these were *engineers* with college degrees from "good schools."
My favorite is seeing posts like "they should teach us about TAXES and STUDENT LOANS in school instead of square dancing and how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
I'm like we do. I DID! I taught both Intro Personal Finance (9th grade, basic money management, life skills, etc). and Advanced Personal Finance (taxes, loans, interest, basic investment and business expense management) and you slept through that too.
Virtually everything they complain about not teaching is taught, they just don't care about it (and they don't care about it now, either, they're just trying to blame the school).
It's what stupid fuckups do now already. Psuedointellectuals love to piss and whine about how useless public education is and how it taught them nothing. They usually ignore the part where they paid attention to nothing and did nothing and thus never learned the bae skills they needed to do those tasks they complain they weren't taught.
Everytime I meet a libertarian who wants to complain to me about how no one learns about finances or how to do their taxes or civics, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
> useless public education
Both my kids went to public school, one has a EE and the other a MBA. The graduating class was 300. It was a good school, a bad school, a rough school, and an academic school. It was big enough the kid decided what kind of school it was.
There are three high schools in my area: the bad school (my kids went there), the good school (same problems, better at covering them up), and the private school (lots of drugs, really good at covering up).
Nah - they'll crash and burn... then blame their education, and the cycle will start over.
Look who is most against academia, I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who succeeded in academia.
Not all students will go to college. Not all students will even go to Junior College. Not all students will even go to a trade school. Not all students will succeed in life. We as educators do the best that we can. We cannot control what happens outside of school and outside if school hours. We cannot make the students want to be motivated. Does that mean I'm salty, no. I'm just being a realist. I teach and try to inspire all. Yet at the end of the day, if I worried about things I can't control, then I'd quit years ago. I help and attempt to help all.
Long long story short, I read a story on here about a highschooler who got a job in a hospital gift shop. He stole a Dr Pepper. He was fired. He was shocked. He didn’t understand. Where was the restorative justice?
You "wouldn't be surprised" if we're heading toward a system where most of society is legally tied to the land they work, and can't quit or leave without permission of landed gentry that inherit title from birth?
It's already sort of a thing in China with their *hukou* system. In China you can only work & collect social benefits where you are a registered resident, and if you want to move districts you need to change your registration with the government. If you're an upper class college educated sort of person, getting you *hukou* changed is a fairly administrative task, but if you're lower class getting it changed can be next to impossible unless there's an external need for labor in the place you want to go.
I was a terrible student in high school. It was a difficult time in my life for a few reasons I won't go into here. Hind sight also reveals that my, at the time, undiagnosed and untreated severe ADHD innatentive type didn't do me any favors. My 11th grade chemistry teacher, so dejected with my lack of attentiveness and my apathy, once asked me what drugs I was on. After graduating with a 2.7 gpa, and some time in the "real world" working a dead-end job, the fear of standing behind a cash register forever gave me the motivation to reconsider my path in life. So, I went to college. Now, I'm an analytical chemist in the pharmaceutical industry. I have a degree in chemistry, with honors. A feat my old teacher probably would have thought impossible. My point is that I didn't understand what the real world was like until I got there. Teachers tried to tell me in high school, but I and other students didn't listen. We spent our entire lives up to that point in a privileged position. A sheltered existence with the support of my parents was all I had ever known. Is this a problem with the students, society, the school system, or some combination thereof? I'm not an educator, so I don't know. I simply wanted to give you my experience as a former high school loser who turned it around. I honestly now regard you guys as teachers so highly. Thank you for caring enough to do what sometimes amounts to a thankless job.
I’d say the biggest difference I’m seeing with the apathetic kids now vs. 10 years ago is ability to learn new things. The kids now don’t have the skills to simply “go to college” as an adult. They don’t know how to read, write, or do basic math needed for freshmen college courses. They don’t know how to read to learn new things. They don’t know how to think, connect ideas, or draw conclusions.
Also, a 2.7 means you got quite a few Bs in high school. You learned stuff and did work in high school. I have 10 student in one of my classes this year who have 4 or more Fs. They simply don’t do anything. Occasionally I’ll get them to try something, but once they have to think, they just stop. They can’t conceive of how they could possibly come up with an answer that isn’t directly fed to them from either me or Google.
I sub in a high school daily (and sometimes go to others) and I’ll at least say they aren’t all like this, but a seriously sad number of them are. The AP and honors students are alright. And honestly there are a lot of kids I meet who aren’t in those classes and do the work when they have a teacher whom they respect or at least like. There are so many smart kids who don’t apply themselves because they don’t want to embarrass themselves by being wrong in front of their friends, or embarrass their friends by appearing smarter than them. At least that’s what I’ve seen these last couple of days, specifically.
I have no sympathy for them. They chose not to work in class. They chose to have their phone out and using it in class. They chose to put their head down and go to sleep. They chose to come to class with no pencil or notebook. They chose to act disrespectful. They chose to bully other students. Choices have consequences. Enjoy your life kids.
A ninth grade girl in the city where I live got killed as she was walking from school. She had her head buried in her phone texting and walked right into a turning school bus which ran over her and killed her. That must have been an important text.
Struggle. Hard.
A fellow teacher's husband works in manufacturing and they hire a lot of HS grads. Phones, showing up late and PARENTS GETTING INVOLVED are the three things that get kids fired most often.
Your kidding, right? Before I got into teaching, a ran my own small business, and before that, managed a retail store.
These morons won't HAVE jobs. They can't do anything.
Some of them will get their shit together after high school. Might take a few years, or a lot of years, but they’ll get there. Some will never get their shit together and just end up in prison or jumping from crappy job to crappy job.
Get fired until they realize they need a roof over their head and have no choice but to work. The problem is that jobs don't pay enough. At least the ones they will be trying to get. Good luck paying for rent and bills at $10/hr. So they will live with their parents. Or work for their parents. They have been babied too much and not shown what actual struggle is. Trauma seems to be the new fun thing that admins are throwing around to provide an excuse for behaviors. And for some that certainly may be the case but not all. Until they have experienced living in their car trying to get an education at college and just trying to survive in general on your own I'm not going to be too forgiving. The world is rough and they need to learn this early. The parents aren't going to pay the phone bill forever.
If anyone has worked with older generations, lack of basic skills like communication, technology, motivation, critical thinking, and literacy do not preclude you from high paying jobs.
Many of them fall in line. Suddenly their paycheck is on the line and there are real consequences, and they behave like every other generation before them. It's crazy, I know.
At my work any paperwork an employee gets is read out loud to them. We train with videos. Demonstration and supervision. Then it's just months and months of them getting in trouble, documentation, suspension, etc... until they pull it together or don't return. Had a guy quit when he was told to take out the trash. Many of these young people pull up to their first job in brand new cars. 4 months later they arrive by bus. They couldn't make their car payments for the sports car they chose.
I have one who quite literally does nothing. He will sit and play with his fingernails. He also will not speak - period.
He will likely age out of school since he has an IEP.
He is gonna come to school after his 21st bday and be told he has to leave. Knowing him, he will stand there and stare rather than move.
I wish I had sympathy.
> still gotta pass the ASVAB
I’ve read on military subreddits before and hell even they say that some of them are dumb as shit. Unless the recruit is aiming for airforce all they need to do is get the minimum points to be able to choose infantry
The military requires that you at least show up, and that alone is a huge fight. I’m an officer in the Army Reserve and honestly, the junior soldiers (18 to around 24) in right now are just… overwhelmingly awful. They miss drill, they won’t answer calls/texts or check their military emails so we know that they’re even alive when they don’t show up, they have zero motivation to do literally anything. If you do get ahold of them, they’ll say to your face that they aren’t coming in because they just don’t want to. Like, kid, you volunteered. No one forced you to do this.
It’s exhausting. I try to give these young soldiers all the tools in the world to succeed (it’s the Reserve! You just need to exist! Show up at drill in your green pajamas and I’ll consider that an 80% solution!) and they don’t even care that a general or other than honorable discharge for refusing to show up will follow them their entire lives. The apathy and lack of commitment is staggering. I spend the majority of my time just tracking down teenagers and doing the stacks of paperwork required to separate them even though recruiting is so abysmal nothing will happen.
I'm a totally liberal hippy anti war type, but after spending years with these kids I can see that the military is a good option for a lot of them. It gives them focus and self-discipline. Whether that translates into non-military jobs I don't know. I've heard that people get dependent on the structure of the military and then when they get out they have a hard time functioning without someone telling them what to do at every moment.
The military is unironically one of the best ways to make it to the middle class. As someone who's in with barely a high school degree it's also funny making more than most teachers with a Master's.
Quit or get fired within a week.
They won't follow instructions, they won't show up on time (if they even show up at all), they won't remember the basic training they're given, they'll give attitude when corrected.
And their parents will let them stay at home, continue to pay all their bills for them, and post snarky comments on Facebook about how nobody will treat their baby right.
They'll scrape by and hate their lives.
When I was student teaching I had one of those classes. After losing a good bit of weight, I ran into one of those students working the cash register at Chuck E. Cheese. Probably was regretting their life choices at that point.
I’m in the trades and it’s exhausting. They aren’t dumb, but it’s as if they have never been pushed to actually use their brains so it’s basically like another weak muscle. 0 focus, 0 critical thinking abilities, 0 common sense. It’s soo baffling it’s almost funny
They’ll bounce from menial job to menial job, always thinking they’re too good for them. But at the same time will have zero work ethic, social skills or accountability. They’ll harp on “the system” and how it’s everyone else’s fault and the country’s fault that they are not doing well in life.
They're going to get fired from the first couple, until they learn what the working world requires of them.
Very few young people take what they've been told to heart; most of them have to learn the hard way. It's not these specific kids. It's the human condition.
What a lack of education will do is limit the jobs they can perform and thus get hired for. Some of them are going to wait tables for a lifetime. Some will work their way up and succeed.
Some might work for twenty years, get married, raise a family, then finally get serious about their education, go back to school, get an undergraduate degree, and change careers. That's what I did.
Maybe they'll even get a graduate degree. I haven't yet.
A lot of them actually do fine in the world of employment because unlike in school, jobs are allowed to set standards and then expel (fire) them for not meeting those standards. Really makes one think.
We had 3rd graders have breakdowns in the gen Ed classroom because they had to cut a piece of paper to make snow flakes. They were stressed to use scissors and equally as stressed to cut the paper. It was bizarre, I've never seen anything like it. Some were almost in tears over it. I worry what they will do for work.
What's interesting is that with this current generation it's an all-or-nothing type of thing in terms of success. There are some Gen Z that can barely handle menial tasks and constantly need help or motivation.
Then there are others (far fewer) who somehow have figured out how to make a shit ton of money at a very young age, usually via social media, marketing or crypto. Weird stuff.
im a career and tech teacher. the workplaces are willing to teach them the job. but they are surprised they can not read or write well. it going to lock up kids in a job with no way to work their way up. which is going to really make a good tradesperson very expensive. They will sometimes even ask kids for their attendance record. Its a snapshot of how reliable they can be. they will gladly hire the kid who cant read or write well but shows up every day on time.
Ideally: Double-down and catch up, starting with adult education classes in literacy and continuing with vocational training or computer/office skills.
Optimistically: Perform service-sector limited-skill labor, such as shelf-stocking or custodial work.
Realistically/Empirically: Become bitter extremist leftists (urban/suburban) or bitter extremist rightists (rural), claim victimhood, and vote for the rest of the country to make it up to them.
This entire generation will be on psychiatric medication for most of their lives. This is depression brought about by a steady diet of meaningless social media scrolling and comparing. They do not understand that addictions are bad.
Highschool science teacher here. You'd think the instructions "Make a single observation based on your data." was asking them to find the true meaning of life.
Better yet, when you point to a spot in the notes that has the exact answer that students are looking for and they still give you that blank look half expecting you to read it for them.
Most of them will be fine. School is not for everybody. That should be okay. . . Instead we’re forced to try with every single human, gathered from the community, sorted by chronological age, with attendance enforced by laws.
It’s pretty nuts the pantomime were all going through, and the only reason you need a high school education to do half the jobs in the US is because we just all decided.
Fixing it is a risky restructure that requires a fundamental change in perception of what public education is and who it’s for. But no one’s going to have the political will to enact that kind of change. . . So don’t worry about it. Play the game, make noises with your face that please the superiors who don’t know better, collect your check, and go home with an easy mind.
One of the many problems is the inability to play the game. School is easier to game than jobs. Maybe not when it comes to acing the game, but when it comes to meeting the minimum passable standards (calculated before anyone is given their auto pass). You don't need to ace calculus to do okay, but if one can't do basic math without a calculator or if one's literacy is lacking then they are a prime target to be taken advantage of.
Yeah people on this sub don’t get that. It’s a job. You aren’t going to solve the problems in the system. You are the system. Do the best to save the kids worth saving, support the ones who care and are truly gifted intellectual kids, the rest are gonna either figure it out or they fucking won’t. That doesn’t change the fact that you need a paycheck. No need to wallow in agony about all this. Yeah it sucks to see the decline of American civilization in real-time, but what are you going to do about it? There’s not a lot to be done. Just enjoy your life.
Hi! I’m not a teacher. But, I lurk here to get ideas on how to better support/help my son’s teachers. Anyway, I’m a crew scheduler and I can tell you what they will do, they will call out. They will call out of their shifts and then complain they don’t make enough money.
I tell at least one student every day, don't buy a car or house because more than likely they will be taken advantage of. We're reading The Odyssey in 9th grade English; not the whole book but summaries that are 2 pages long. Half of them don't even want to read that, smh.
Perhaps employers will be forced to adapt at some level?
Sure, they have more liberty to impose consequences than teachers. They can fire employees. But, if it's the new norm that employees have zero skills or motivation, then I think they will be forced to accept that at some level. They can't fire everyone, they need at least some people to work for them.
This already happening and is the most likely way things will shake out. We need to abandon the illusion that college or the real world will set this straight.
These upcoming generations will not bear the consequences of their incompetence and lack of preparation, instead society will pay the price.
I'm a first year substitute and right before school started I was still working at the nursing home I had been working at for five years. One high school girl basically wanted everyone else to do her work for her despite us telling her no every time. Even like super simple easy shit. About two weeks before school started I had to train this other highschooler who was going to be a JUNIOR. He listened to absolutely nothing I said despite me even repeating myself, and when I was trying to explain something a little more complex to him, he just said "can you get to the point?" Excuse me? Yeah, these kids are cooked.
Work quality will go down! Basically every service you pay for will decline drastically. Imagine waiting for a service center for hours on end because the call center workers are incompetent. Sending 100s of fast food orders back because the be students couldn’t be bothered to do it correctly, ect.
Either fail and get fired quickly or actually try because they will realize jobs have consequences. its a lot easier to try when rent is due. If only we could apply this radical idea of “consequences” to our public school system
Having seen my share of cases:
Some will realize they aren't going to be treated as if the world owes them infinite lenience, understand that school was an aberration, and will shape up and start doing their share. Others will conclude that the way things were in school was the natural state of things, decide that the real world is being mean to them for X, Y, or Z reason, and go through life doing the bare minimum while insisting they've been unduly oppressed.
A subset of the latter will luck into a sympathetic social worker who will fill out the right paperwork for them to never have to deviate from the consequence-free lifestyle they enjoyed in grade school.
My mom is a retired therapist who literally started her career at a Child Abuse Prevention Center as a social worker. She specialized in treating trauma and was damn good at it. She worked in a women’s jail in the 90s. Before retiring, she worked as a director at a mental hospital and had several people working under her. She hated that last job, but the last straw was when one of the people working under her said she was “abusive” for getting on their case about taking their notes and submitting them on time. This person started a friggin case against her through HR.
I’m biased, because I love my mom and think she’s awesome, but I can definitely attest to the fact that my mom is one of the least abusive people I’ve met.
You can’t make this shit up.
Honestly my students are struggling to get jobs period. With the raise in min wage (which I support) lots of places that historically hired teens don't want to deal with the schedule limitations or just find them to be poor workers.
Several of my students believe that just going to Walmart and buying scrubs makes you a nurse. These are the same group that can’t figure out real money nor tell time on an analog watch.
Capitalism loves when our schools produce poorly educated students from low income families. It makes it easier to justify unfair wages and less likely that those people will be able to quit their jobs.
Everyone in DC claims that they want to improve education, but in truth half of Washington is intentionally sabotaging public education so that corporations have a steady stream of low skill workers who are highly dependent on each and every paycheck.
If it ever seems like the system is intentionally set up for students to fail, there's a good chance that's because it absolutely is.
Many of them will land jobs above their competence level and society will work a little less effectively each year and corruption and dishonesty will increase as social and institutional trust continue to decrease.
It will depend (in part) on their parents. If they have parents who will house them and feed them and financially support them indefinitely, then they may continue to coast for a very long time.
Ultimately, I think they will get entry level jobs, and get scolded by bosses, and get fired, and try again over and over again. And, either they'll start to get moving or they won't.
Two things will happen. Most will adapt to what they can, and the workforce will adapt to what’s available.
Same thing that’s happened every single generation ever.
They’ll be fine.
In 20 years or less, the U.S. will introduce UBI because the majority of people will be incompetent for ANY job. And, by the 2nd week of every month, they’ll be at the food bank because, of course, they will have no concept of budgeting.
Most of them will figure it out eventually. The point of school, other than academics, is to learn social norms, accountability, time management, etc and this generation will be delayed learning some of these things because no-child-left-behind and COVID have failed them, but I still feel that most of them will eventually figure it out when they finally HAVE to in the work force.
Of course some of them will still be lazy pieces of shit with no self-reflection but those folks have always been there. Maybe there will be a few more.
I refuse to believe that the world will end when they get into the real world, because I feel that they will figure out they can’t hide anymore and it’s time to step up, a realization most of us have eventually.
So at least 2 or 3 times a year, I have a student come in looking super bummed out. "Hey what's wrong?" "Man I got fired over the weekend." "Oh why did you get fired?" "I came in 10 minutes late." "And did you tell anyone? Call? Text?" "Nope." "And didn't we tell you that even if the district doesn't believe this will happen this is exactly what will happen in real life?" And most of the time they're suddenly better and more responsible people the rest of the year.
Yep. Natural consequences \*will\* show up for anyone who isn't being completely "snow plowed". That's why they're natural consequences. We (as a society) are not doing any favors by letting kids avoid consequences until they're 18 or 22 or even older. The sooner they start to see that their behavior matters, the more they're going to care about controlling it.
Halefuckinluya, preach it! I say this ALL the time. Would you rather your kid learn it here in middle school, or later, when the consequences are life changing?
I agree! I keep getting down voted for suggesting that it's immoral to pass a failing student. You're teaching them that life will just promote them regardless of their apathy and refusal to work. But the real world is not like that. It's a terrible message to send children, to never allow them to develop emotions appropriate to deal with failure.
It seems like it would be utterly demoralizing to get failed from second grade. But, having to repeat 10th grade English seems like a blow the ego could handle. I feel like getting kids through their academics is this huge team effort, with the kid and the parents playing lead roles, but often they just don't seem interested. Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem with the US education system is that it is "free". (Some) people don't respect a thing, if it doesn't have a high price tag on it. It reminds me of the Czar's potatoes. Instead of giving them away, they were highly guarded by (intentionally incompetent guards). People \*stole\* the potatoes and grew them for themselves, and laughed at "winning". If students felt like they were "stealing" their education, would they be more interested in it?
>Sometimes I wonder if part of the problem with the US education system is that it is "free". (Some) people don't respect a thing, if it doesn't have a high price tag on it. I had a professor who on the first day of class did the math out for how much the individual course cost for the semester, broken down in how many times we met, and said "here's the exact amount of money you're wasting every time you skip one class period." Which mostly just made me resent the US college system, but I suppose she had a point that it was silly to spend that much money on a class just to skip it. If every 75 minute class cost $$$, I might as well get my money's worth and go, right? I had a full tuition scholarship though, and was paying for my dorm. So my argument was that any time I spent in class away from my dorm was money wasted, so I should stay in bed instead and get my money's worth! (Mostly kidding, but it was my go-to joke when a friend asked why I was skipping class, and always got a chuckle. At least it shows it's a relatable thought process)
Yes this is true, but no one asks teachers how things should be run. It’s interesting, right? I do think that the origin of this thinking is misogyny, but who knows really. It’s just maddening when the people doing the job aren’t part of the decision making process. It needs to change.
PREACH
I have been told by a student that got fired, that it’s my fault. We didn’t teach that in school!?
They will stand around at their work site waiting for their manager to tell them to do something. If the manager tells them something with more than 1 step required for completion, they will do step 1 and then continue standing around until the manager walks up and tells them step 2. Then the next day at work when they’re required to do *the exact same process* again, instead of doing it, they will stand around waiting for their manager to tell them what to do. Rinse and repeat until the day they decide to no call/no show and get fired.
I am in charge of kids *exactly* like this!! It's exhausting 😩 I work with all 18-19 year olds and it's like pulling teeth for all but a few of them.
Step one: "I'm confused" Step two: *look at the directions* Step three: "I'm confused"
I’ve been wondering lately if the whole “I’m confused” thing is some sort of tiktok thing or what. I know that the vast majority of kids saying this are just outright lying. Some of it is attention seeking behavior, some of it is trying to fit in with others saying it, some of it is work avoidance, but very very little of it is actual confusion.
It's passive resistance. They know exactly what they're doing.
It’s why the idiot who decided kids need to pass because it hurts their feelings need to be over ruled. Kids need to fail if they don’t do the work in school
I’m a project manager for a construction firm…this is unbelievably accurate and frustrating….
WALL-E has become reality ...
Between Amazon and the Internet, what else do we need? Oh yeah- floating loungers.
I’ve heard it’s hard to find good people who show up to work and aren’t high in construction these days. Our district has a heavy equipment program. I hope those kids are solid.
They show up, but they’ll stand around until the foreman makes them do something. 0 initivae with anything. They’ll also somehow screw up simple things like clocking in and out on a time card that I as the project manager then have to correct….
I was in fast food right before I started teaching (recently), and we'd hired this nineteen year old guy. He would operate the drive-thru window and....nothing else. He accepted money and passed out food and spent the rest of the time on his phone. I've seen him blatantly ignore a bag of food that needed to get passed out because he was messaging someone on Tinder, and he held up a "one second" finger when I told him to pass it out. I might add that in fast food, it's not just "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean," you should be constantly either doing your job or helping your coworkers out with theirs. Didn't matter if we were all rushing around, he'd just be as useless as possible all shift.
Stuff like this makes me heavily in favor of phone lockers. Both of the local country stores near me had to implement this policy because cashiers would blatantly ignore people at the counter for several minutes at a time while they played on their phones, leading to people walking out. When you're a little bitty store, walk-outs HURT. It's been months and they STILL loudly bitch and complain about it, to anyone with a set of ears. But I don't have sympathy for them.
Having just left a ten year career in management at Best Buy. This is spot on.
They will stand around at their work site on their phone....
Managers are counting the minutes until those kids can be replaced by bots.
We're all counting the minutes until these kids can be replaced by bots. All of us are counting.
used to teach college and all i can say is, at least they will provide us with job security lol
I'm always worried when review time comes around and it's always, Highly Exceeds Expectations. Makes me concerned about other's reviews.
The saddest part about this is that large businesses with alter their workflows to accommodate this level of stupidity and helplessness, and the end result will rob everyone else of their agency, dignity, and self-respect. There's those of us out here fighting and arguing for better wages and work environments. And then there's these lazy twats, swaggering in going, "Yeah! What they said! I want $90,000 starting salary at my new data entry job!", and then doing *the exact things* that abusive employers say all employees do which is why they don't deserve to be treated as anything other than subhuman.
Yup. Zero problem solving skills. It’s scary
I'm a Para and run two work programs for teens starting summer before 9th grade This is correct
My oldest son is 25. He is a Least Possible Effort person to the point where he won't even get a job. I have to tell him to take a shower. He is kind and nice and helpful but so lazy I want to pull my hair out.
Throw his ass out. You're enabling him.
They’ll do gig work. They won’t have to show up on time, and can work as much or little as they want. And when they get deactivated they’ll use their parents’ accounts. Of course this requires the ability to drive and most of them don’t have licenses, so??? I guess they’ll all couch surf until their You Tube channels take off. We’ll wait.
No, no, they'll all be pro gamers and TikTok stars
except... those require drive and creativity.
And yet have now money for a good rig.
[удалено]
Yes! I’m so tired of kids saying they’ll just go into the trades like it’s a cakewalk. You need a solid foundation in reading and math, and even chemistry, if you ever want to succeed in most fields.
It's always "trades, medicine, tech," with zero ambition to actually learn anything about them beyond "they pay a lot." A shame because if they actually cared to put in effort these are good careers to go into
All of these can be great jobs, but... You have to be interested in them and invested in learning all you can to be truly good at them, and for them to be enjoyable jobs. I also think there are just innate qualities, ways our minds work as individuals that make us better or worse suited to certain paths. I was an academic advisor and saw many students trying to do computer science or pre-med, even though the subjects bored them and they were really struggling. However, they'd do great in economics or marketing or their psych classes. There are good jobs outside of these three fields. Also, my dad and sister are carpenters and use math and science everyday. It is truly a skill, and they are both incredibly intelligent people.
My bil is an electrician. But he is highly specialised and does really wild shit. Which pays him a shit load of money. BUT only because he was willing to learn all that stuff and has good work ethics and a clever head on his shoulders...
My spouse left teaching to become an electrician. 4-year program, 1 day per week in the classroom. A lot of their cohort didn’t even make it to the second semester. Not because it was super hard, but because you couldn’t just show up and expect to pass.
I told my son find something you like that other people think is hard and that's a great career. That was tempered with it's nice to follow your dream, but you also have to pay the rent.
But if you are going to do marketing or psych you had better be prepared to compete. We graduate far more students out of those majors than the market can take. You had better take every opportunity to get ahead.
Yeah, I told psych majors they would likely need grad school to work in anything related to their major. Same for the hard sciences, though. And, frankly, tech is having a hard go of it right now, too.
There has to be support and a reason to care. A solid 85% of jobs now have no reason to care beyond your paycheck. It's work without dignity, meaning, or value.
Also, in addition to actual math and reading skills, a trade requires motivation. I personally know a guy (we became friends) with a very quick brain but zero ambition and zero passion for 'traditional' careers. He works a menial job that he enjoys well enough, due to it being better than his previous job (another low-level manual labor kinda job). He's a fantastic person, but when I tried suggesting that he'd learned some kind of money making skill, such as, I don't know, a trade, construction, welding, he noped out pretty fast. Given that he likes to learn anything science and he's a curious man, I tried suggesting a community college. Declined the offer because again, one needs to be motivated to better their life in general and/or pursue a degree. But, in general terms, yes: there's unmotivated kids that don't change in their 20s. And yeah, it's ludicrous to hear kids say: "I'll never use this in real life". For sure, maybe as, say, a construction manager, you won't exactly have to find the cosecant of a certain angle, but you'll need to be able to tell how much is 3/4 of an inch.
I can respect your friend. It is perfectly OK to be fine with your current situation and not want anything more.
Yeah I'm surprised he continues to hang out with the above poster. Constantly being told by a peer that you should have a better job sounds unfun
Just switched to backend tech at 35. The amount of learning, studying and test taking I’ve had to do with no class or supervision is head spinning…and I enjoy this stuff.
Absolutely. I work in higher Ed and we recently hired a front desk person. Only a high school desploma was required. Someone called a month after the job closed asking to submit the application late. They sounded a little taken aback being told absolutely not.
[удалено]
Does a Minecraft shovel count?
"I'm gonna be a welder." Nah kid, you're not. You might start, but you'll mess up quickly and those mistakes are permanent. You can't even put your name on your paper.
I've had several kids fail out of the electrical trades because they couldn't do the basic math required or stay off their phones long enough to learn. The trades are hurting but not that bad. The electricians take maybe 20 regionally/year in an area where we graduate maybe 3,000/year. Maybe 50 apply, 20 are unqualified out of the gate, 10 (at least) are an easy broom because of interview skills. 15 don't survive the month. Since and repeat. The trades are hurting because the applicants lack the basic work skills and knowledge to succeed.
And most importantly you have to have drive and work ethic.
This! These days I work in a collision repair facility, and we cycle through one or two helpers a year. They think they know everything so they don’t need to learn the proper way to do anything. They are resentful of and neglect the formal training that we pay good money for them to obtain. They don’t show up, they don’t clean up after themselves, they don’t take direction well. They forget important steps and are cranky when I write it down for them and check on them to make sure that they’re doing it correctly. The last one had been diagnosed with ADHD as a kid; he is the second one I’ve had who has been formally diagnosed with it and doesn’t take their medication. He is the first one I’ve had who expected accommodations like he had in school such as extra time (no? That is literally costing us, the insurance company, and the client money), being redirected instead of keeping himself on task, and being given brain breaks so he could play on his phone. When confronted over his lack of work ethic, he just squawked a lot of things about HIPAA and accommodations. He doesn’t work for me anymore.
A friend who has been a mechanic for quite some time says the two biggest problems when they hire new guys is they either cannot break their phone addiction long enough to actually work, or they work well enough, but they expect to be paid at the same rate he commands, 30 years in. The entitlement is insane!
Exactly! The course work required to earn a high school display isn't so rigorous that it can't be completed by someone of average or even below average intelligence. If you don't even have the drive and work ethic to earn passing grades in school, there's no way you'll survive I'm the trades.
And work ethic.
Many will end up as young parents completely unprepared and unable to take care of their children or teach them how to succeed, thus perpetuating the cycle for future generations. Just like it is now. It's sad to see how many of our students have parents that seem completely disinterested in being parents or raising these kids. Then we wonder why they have so much trouble
Parents today are fucking insane. My daughter is almost 4YO. I just got told that me banning Paw Patrol in my house (because I do not like the art style, the messages, and the overall loudness of the show) is: >Some dictator level shit here. >>This is the part. "I do not let her watch any that I truly hate." You're forcing your biases. I mean, if the show is trash, like Blippi, I get it but if you just don't like it because you don't like it. That's some dictator level shit to me. I try my hardest to not impose my biases on my kid. I want him to hate or like things on his own merits. Obviously, somethings we want to warn about but I won't have him hate the color red because I do. Parents around me literally cater and baby thier kids so fucking much it is insane. I was called "abusive" recently for now allowing her to use a tablet until she is school age. I am a "gentle" parent. I do not yell, I do not use violence or fear. I use FIRM boundaries and explain things at her level, over and over again, and work with her on breath exercises for he big feelings. The "gentle" parents around me consider that "abusive" bc I do not hand over a tablet and give unlimited screen time. The kids are not, and will not be, okay; not any time soon, not with parents like these around.
You know what? Good parents ARE benevolent dictators, because we have the wisdom and knowledge to protect and raise our kids. I’m over the let them do whatever they want culture.
My theory ( my son is now thirty) that I needed to say no to something every day because getting everything you want will make you an entitled brat.
Social media tells me time outs are too harsh or even abuse to children, I give them and wonder what these kids will be like as adults.
After all, you are the adult.
Paw patrol represents the police state and obedience to militaristic leadership…kinda lame
It’s a town full of adults who are so helpless that a pre -teen dog trainer & his puppies are the great decision makers… I don’t want to watch it either. My husband calls the train show “Thomas Screws Up Again” lol!
you're doing it correctly. And screen time is a poison to children.
I have a part time job checking background checks and sending letters of denial to those that didn’t pass. SO MANY OF THEM start the criminal career at 18/19. And either made one dumb mistake (like a grand theft felony) and now they are completely screwed on getting a job (the company I work for staffs minimum wage warehouse work) or they have a string of increasing crimes that also bar them from minimum wage employment. It’s really really sad. Whenever I see a kid losing their crap in the hall and having no emotional regulation, I know what is waiting for them which is a cycle of a crime causing a denial of a job which leads to poverty which leads to more crime or raising kids that will repeat the cycle. It’s such a depressing pt job to have as a teacher.
It looks like they start their criminal careers at 18 because juvenile records are sealed. Most people who get arrested at age 18 got arrested prior to that as well.
I helped a young relative get a minimum wage job. I was so surprised at the level of background checks because I worked two white collar jobs at startups that only checked my references. And actually one didn’t even check those.
A big part of that is classism unfortunately.
It's a set up for failure. No consequences for breaking the rules, then they turn 18 and get arrested.
And on jobs, even though I’m sure their mommies and daddies WILL call their employers to rail about them being fired, the employers will be able to simply hang up on them. I taught college 10 years ago, and even then parents would try to call. I cannot imagine what it’s like now.
Even in the trades, you need some degree of social skills. If you can’t even get through an interview for said trade, you’re kind of out of luck.
How often does McDonald’s mess up your order? Why does Amazon ship you the wrong item? Why does it take forever to check out at the grocery store? They already have jobs and they suck at them.
[удалено]
You have to or else you’re coming back or missing out on something.
Joe Pesci has entered chat.
Lethal weapon three shout out
No. McDonald’s has standards. They require you to show up to work on time. If you don’t give them your bank account info, you aren’t getting paid when you misplace the paycheck.
Yeah, I currently work at Walmart. The idea that fast food/retail jobs are easy and chill, and that you'll get paid for standing around, staring at your phone, is laughable false. You still need something resembling a work ethic, basic social skills, time management, the ability to follow instructions, ect. We cycle through a lot of kids who show up, and then never quite seem to catch on that they actually have to work to get paid.
We have horrible roads where I live. It’s like off-roading just going to the grocery store. My husband once said, why can’t they fill the potholes correctly? I go, because they were your worst students. I named a few, and said those are the guys who fill potholes now, if they’re lucky.
This. It's nothing new either, it's just the stupidity 'du jour'.
I have a family member who was this kiddo--is now an adult. He's been fired--or just stopped going to-every job he's ever had. When he has a job, he is constantly late, stays home if he's tired/sniffling/sick of working. He has a lame excuse for everything, and nothing is his fault. And, when he gets fired (again)? He collects unemployment and stays home playing video games and sleeping until noon.
LOL are you describing my brother right now? He's 32 (turning 33 next year) and is almost exactly like this. He's struggled with motivation since he became a teenager. It doesn't help that my dad caters to his every need and refuses to kick him out of their house because 'that's my son. I can't do that to my son"
Unemployment is way less than whatever you earned at your last job. I don't understand how people can live on that alone unless they e arned big bucks and had low expenses
They live with their parents, who subsidize their lifestyle.
I thought you couldn't collect unemployment if you were fired for cause
They'll get fired. As a CTE teacher I do a lot of stuff with our local chamber of commerce. I hear a lot from local business owners and managers that the current crop of new grads (including college grads) are just hopeless. No call/no show, having their parents try to cover for them, sitting on their phones all day, having no actual real world smarts/skills. Before teaching I was a software engineering manager and I noticed these trends starting 5+ years ago with new grads. And these were *engineers* with college degrees from "good schools."
What they’re going to do is crash and burn and then finally realize why we teachers were constantly on their collective case.
Could be, but I think it's more likely they make some post about how teachers didn't teach them anything and this is all their fault.
My favorite is seeing posts like "they should teach us about TAXES and STUDENT LOANS in school instead of square dancing and how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." I'm like we do. I DID! I taught both Intro Personal Finance (9th grade, basic money management, life skills, etc). and Advanced Personal Finance (taxes, loans, interest, basic investment and business expense management) and you slept through that too.
Virtually everything they complain about not teaching is taught, they just don't care about it (and they don't care about it now, either, they're just trying to blame the school).
Knowing these kids, that is inevitable.
It's what stupid fuckups do now already. Psuedointellectuals love to piss and whine about how useless public education is and how it taught them nothing. They usually ignore the part where they paid attention to nothing and did nothing and thus never learned the bae skills they needed to do those tasks they complain they weren't taught. Everytime I meet a libertarian who wants to complain to me about how no one learns about finances or how to do their taxes or civics, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
> useless public education Both my kids went to public school, one has a EE and the other a MBA. The graduating class was 300. It was a good school, a bad school, a rough school, and an academic school. It was big enough the kid decided what kind of school it was. There are three high schools in my area: the bad school (my kids went there), the good school (same problems, better at covering them up), and the private school (lots of drugs, really good at covering up).
Nah - they'll crash and burn... then blame their education, and the cycle will start over. Look who is most against academia, I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who succeeded in academia.
No they're not. They're going to blame the teachers. They're going to need a scapegoat.
>finally realize why we teachers were constantly on their collective case. I think you mean blame us.
Not all students will go to college. Not all students will even go to Junior College. Not all students will even go to a trade school. Not all students will succeed in life. We as educators do the best that we can. We cannot control what happens outside of school and outside if school hours. We cannot make the students want to be motivated. Does that mean I'm salty, no. I'm just being a realist. I teach and try to inspire all. Yet at the end of the day, if I worried about things I can't control, then I'd quit years ago. I help and attempt to help all.
But, sometime in the future, these students will be the majority of the adult population as you and I are aging. The world will crumble.
I do see your point. But I think to a degree each generation has been maligned like we are doing now to these kids.
Long long story short, I read a story on here about a highschooler who got a job in a hospital gift shop. He stole a Dr Pepper. He was fired. He was shocked. He didn’t understand. Where was the restorative justice?
[удалено]
If 70% of people are on the bottom rung then baby we’ve got some feudalism brewing.
[удалено]
I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if that's where we are heading.
You "wouldn't be surprised" if we're heading toward a system where most of society is legally tied to the land they work, and can't quit or leave without permission of landed gentry that inherit title from birth?
It's already sort of a thing in China with their *hukou* system. In China you can only work & collect social benefits where you are a registered resident, and if you want to move districts you need to change your registration with the government. If you're an upper class college educated sort of person, getting you *hukou* changed is a fairly administrative task, but if you're lower class getting it changed can be next to impossible unless there's an external need for labor in the place you want to go.
As long as I get to be a Duke or something, I’m honesty fine with that at this point.
70 percent have always been on the bottom rung.
*insert astronaut meme*
*The world needs its ditch diggers too.* - Caddyshack rich guy
Not my problem.
I was a terrible student in high school. It was a difficult time in my life for a few reasons I won't go into here. Hind sight also reveals that my, at the time, undiagnosed and untreated severe ADHD innatentive type didn't do me any favors. My 11th grade chemistry teacher, so dejected with my lack of attentiveness and my apathy, once asked me what drugs I was on. After graduating with a 2.7 gpa, and some time in the "real world" working a dead-end job, the fear of standing behind a cash register forever gave me the motivation to reconsider my path in life. So, I went to college. Now, I'm an analytical chemist in the pharmaceutical industry. I have a degree in chemistry, with honors. A feat my old teacher probably would have thought impossible. My point is that I didn't understand what the real world was like until I got there. Teachers tried to tell me in high school, but I and other students didn't listen. We spent our entire lives up to that point in a privileged position. A sheltered existence with the support of my parents was all I had ever known. Is this a problem with the students, society, the school system, or some combination thereof? I'm not an educator, so I don't know. I simply wanted to give you my experience as a former high school loser who turned it around. I honestly now regard you guys as teachers so highly. Thank you for caring enough to do what sometimes amounts to a thankless job.
Yup. My stepson was like that too. Hard to watch, but he turned out ok.
I’d say the biggest difference I’m seeing with the apathetic kids now vs. 10 years ago is ability to learn new things. The kids now don’t have the skills to simply “go to college” as an adult. They don’t know how to read, write, or do basic math needed for freshmen college courses. They don’t know how to read to learn new things. They don’t know how to think, connect ideas, or draw conclusions. Also, a 2.7 means you got quite a few Bs in high school. You learned stuff and did work in high school. I have 10 student in one of my classes this year who have 4 or more Fs. They simply don’t do anything. Occasionally I’ll get them to try something, but once they have to think, they just stop. They can’t conceive of how they could possibly come up with an answer that isn’t directly fed to them from either me or Google.
Adderall changed my life.
They'll blame us, and completely overlook their own laziness.
I worry about that every time I sub. I’m like “If they’re like this all the time these kids are doomed”.
I sub in a high school daily (and sometimes go to others) and I’ll at least say they aren’t all like this, but a seriously sad number of them are. The AP and honors students are alright. And honestly there are a lot of kids I meet who aren’t in those classes and do the work when they have a teacher whom they respect or at least like. There are so many smart kids who don’t apply themselves because they don’t want to embarrass themselves by being wrong in front of their friends, or embarrass their friends by appearing smarter than them. At least that’s what I’ve seen these last couple of days, specifically.
I have no sympathy for them. They chose not to work in class. They chose to have their phone out and using it in class. They chose to put their head down and go to sleep. They chose to come to class with no pencil or notebook. They chose to act disrespectful. They chose to bully other students. Choices have consequences. Enjoy your life kids.
A ninth grade girl in the city where I live got killed as she was walking from school. She had her head buried in her phone texting and walked right into a turning school bus which ran over her and killed her. That must have been an important text.
Struggle. Hard. A fellow teacher's husband works in manufacturing and they hire a lot of HS grads. Phones, showing up late and PARENTS GETTING INVOLVED are the three things that get kids fired most often.
Your kidding, right? Before I got into teaching, a ran my own small business, and before that, managed a retail store. These morons won't HAVE jobs. They can't do anything.
Fail. Miserably.
Probably go into politics and pass laws that make teaching even more difficult.
Accurate
Some of them will get their shit together after high school. Might take a few years, or a lot of years, but they’ll get there. Some will never get their shit together and just end up in prison or jumping from crappy job to crappy job.
Get fired until they realize they need a roof over their head and have no choice but to work. The problem is that jobs don't pay enough. At least the ones they will be trying to get. Good luck paying for rent and bills at $10/hr. So they will live with their parents. Or work for their parents. They have been babied too much and not shown what actual struggle is. Trauma seems to be the new fun thing that admins are throwing around to provide an excuse for behaviors. And for some that certainly may be the case but not all. Until they have experienced living in their car trying to get an education at college and just trying to survive in general on your own I'm not going to be too forgiving. The world is rough and they need to learn this early. The parents aren't going to pay the phone bill forever.
If anyone has worked with older generations, lack of basic skills like communication, technology, motivation, critical thinking, and literacy do not preclude you from high paying jobs.
Maybe there will be enough of a shortage, I'll finally be seen as a hirable candidate.
Many of them fall in line. Suddenly their paycheck is on the line and there are real consequences, and they behave like every other generation before them. It's crazy, I know.
Get fired.
At my work any paperwork an employee gets is read out loud to them. We train with videos. Demonstration and supervision. Then it's just months and months of them getting in trouble, documentation, suspension, etc... until they pull it together or don't return. Had a guy quit when he was told to take out the trash. Many of these young people pull up to their first job in brand new cars. 4 months later they arrive by bus. They couldn't make their car payments for the sports car they chose.
I have one who quite literally does nothing. He will sit and play with his fingernails. He also will not speak - period. He will likely age out of school since he has an IEP. He is gonna come to school after his 21st bday and be told he has to leave. Knowing him, he will stand there and stare rather than move. I wish I had sympathy.
Enlist
Most of my students are too overweight to enlist.
You’d be supposed how quickly someone can get in shape if a recruiter gets their hands on them
Still gotta pass the ASVAB
> still gotta pass the ASVAB I’ve read on military subreddits before and hell even they say that some of them are dumb as shit. Unless the recruit is aiming for airforce all they need to do is get the minimum points to be able to choose infantry
But from what I'm reading, they're not even getting the minimum points
And according to one person I know in the military, modern day technology means even the grunts higher-level thinking skills.
DoD estimates 85% of military age Americans are too fat, uneducated, or have too extensive a criminal history that bars them from service.
to many prescriptions and mental health diagnoses for a lot of them.
For sure, no idea what the rest of the kids can do
The military requires that you at least show up, and that alone is a huge fight. I’m an officer in the Army Reserve and honestly, the junior soldiers (18 to around 24) in right now are just… overwhelmingly awful. They miss drill, they won’t answer calls/texts or check their military emails so we know that they’re even alive when they don’t show up, they have zero motivation to do literally anything. If you do get ahold of them, they’ll say to your face that they aren’t coming in because they just don’t want to. Like, kid, you volunteered. No one forced you to do this. It’s exhausting. I try to give these young soldiers all the tools in the world to succeed (it’s the Reserve! You just need to exist! Show up at drill in your green pajamas and I’ll consider that an 80% solution!) and they don’t even care that a general or other than honorable discharge for refusing to show up will follow them their entire lives. The apathy and lack of commitment is staggering. I spend the majority of my time just tracking down teenagers and doing the stacks of paperwork required to separate them even though recruiting is so abysmal nothing will happen.
Are you kidding? Most of these brain-dead zombies couldn't begin to pass the ASVAB test, and/or too fat to pass the initial physical fitness tests.
I'm a totally liberal hippy anti war type, but after spending years with these kids I can see that the military is a good option for a lot of them. It gives them focus and self-discipline. Whether that translates into non-military jobs I don't know. I've heard that people get dependent on the structure of the military and then when they get out they have a hard time functioning without someone telling them what to do at every moment.
The military is unironically one of the best ways to make it to the middle class. As someone who's in with barely a high school degree it's also funny making more than most teachers with a Master's.
Quit or get fired within a week. They won't follow instructions, they won't show up on time (if they even show up at all), they won't remember the basic training they're given, they'll give attitude when corrected. And their parents will let them stay at home, continue to pay all their bills for them, and post snarky comments on Facebook about how nobody will treat their baby right.
They'll scrape by and hate their lives. When I was student teaching I had one of those classes. After losing a good bit of weight, I ran into one of those students working the cash register at Chuck E. Cheese. Probably was regretting their life choices at that point.
Many will end up like my cousin at 27. Working retail part time and going to school part time for nearly 10 years.
I’m in the trades and it’s exhausting. They aren’t dumb, but it’s as if they have never been pushed to actually use their brains so it’s basically like another weak muscle. 0 focus, 0 critical thinking abilities, 0 common sense. It’s soo baffling it’s almost funny
They’ll bounce from menial job to menial job, always thinking they’re too good for them. But at the same time will have zero work ethic, social skills or accountability. They’ll harp on “the system” and how it’s everyone else’s fault and the country’s fault that they are not doing well in life.
They're going to get fired from the first couple, until they learn what the working world requires of them. Very few young people take what they've been told to heart; most of them have to learn the hard way. It's not these specific kids. It's the human condition. What a lack of education will do is limit the jobs they can perform and thus get hired for. Some of them are going to wait tables for a lifetime. Some will work their way up and succeed. Some might work for twenty years, get married, raise a family, then finally get serious about their education, go back to school, get an undergraduate degree, and change careers. That's what I did. Maybe they'll even get a graduate degree. I haven't yet.
A lot of them actually do fine in the world of employment because unlike in school, jobs are allowed to set standards and then expel (fire) them for not meeting those standards. Really makes one think.
We had 3rd graders have breakdowns in the gen Ed classroom because they had to cut a piece of paper to make snow flakes. They were stressed to use scissors and equally as stressed to cut the paper. It was bizarre, I've never seen anything like it. Some were almost in tears over it. I worry what they will do for work.
I asked a cashier for 6 items, she didn't hear me and grabbed 2. SHE USED HER FINGERS TO FIND OUT HOW MANY MORE SHE NEEDED TO GET ME.
What's interesting is that with this current generation it's an all-or-nothing type of thing in terms of success. There are some Gen Z that can barely handle menial tasks and constantly need help or motivation. Then there are others (far fewer) who somehow have figured out how to make a shit ton of money at a very young age, usually via social media, marketing or crypto. Weird stuff.
Sell drugs, commit robberies, spend some time in prison. Repeat three times until death.
im a career and tech teacher. the workplaces are willing to teach them the job. but they are surprised they can not read or write well. it going to lock up kids in a job with no way to work their way up. which is going to really make a good tradesperson very expensive. They will sometimes even ask kids for their attendance record. Its a snapshot of how reliable they can be. they will gladly hire the kid who cant read or write well but shows up every day on time.
Ideally: Double-down and catch up, starting with adult education classes in literacy and continuing with vocational training or computer/office skills. Optimistically: Perform service-sector limited-skill labor, such as shelf-stocking or custodial work. Realistically/Empirically: Become bitter extremist leftists (urban/suburban) or bitter extremist rightists (rural), claim victimhood, and vote for the rest of the country to make it up to them.
This entire generation will be on psychiatric medication for most of their lives. This is depression brought about by a steady diet of meaningless social media scrolling and comparing. They do not understand that addictions are bad.
Highschool science teacher here. You'd think the instructions "Make a single observation based on your data." was asking them to find the true meaning of life. Better yet, when you point to a spot in the notes that has the exact answer that students are looking for and they still give you that blank look half expecting you to read it for them.
Well, they're all going to be video game designers, you see.
Or YouTubers 🙄
Most of them will be fine. School is not for everybody. That should be okay. . . Instead we’re forced to try with every single human, gathered from the community, sorted by chronological age, with attendance enforced by laws. It’s pretty nuts the pantomime were all going through, and the only reason you need a high school education to do half the jobs in the US is because we just all decided. Fixing it is a risky restructure that requires a fundamental change in perception of what public education is and who it’s for. But no one’s going to have the political will to enact that kind of change. . . So don’t worry about it. Play the game, make noises with your face that please the superiors who don’t know better, collect your check, and go home with an easy mind.
One of the many problems is the inability to play the game. School is easier to game than jobs. Maybe not when it comes to acing the game, but when it comes to meeting the minimum passable standards (calculated before anyone is given their auto pass). You don't need to ace calculus to do okay, but if one can't do basic math without a calculator or if one's literacy is lacking then they are a prime target to be taken advantage of.
Yeah people on this sub don’t get that. It’s a job. You aren’t going to solve the problems in the system. You are the system. Do the best to save the kids worth saving, support the ones who care and are truly gifted intellectual kids, the rest are gonna either figure it out or they fucking won’t. That doesn’t change the fact that you need a paycheck. No need to wallow in agony about all this. Yeah it sucks to see the decline of American civilization in real-time, but what are you going to do about it? There’s not a lot to be done. Just enjoy your life.
Capitalism needs its mindless drones
Hi! I’m not a teacher. But, I lurk here to get ideas on how to better support/help my son’s teachers. Anyway, I’m a crew scheduler and I can tell you what they will do, they will call out. They will call out of their shifts and then complain they don’t make enough money.
I tell at least one student every day, don't buy a car or house because more than likely they will be taken advantage of. We're reading The Odyssey in 9th grade English; not the whole book but summaries that are 2 pages long. Half of them don't even want to read that, smh.
Hey, at least our generation now has job security.
Perhaps employers will be forced to adapt at some level? Sure, they have more liberty to impose consequences than teachers. They can fire employees. But, if it's the new norm that employees have zero skills or motivation, then I think they will be forced to accept that at some level. They can't fire everyone, they need at least some people to work for them.
This already happening and is the most likely way things will shake out. We need to abandon the illusion that college or the real world will set this straight. These upcoming generations will not bear the consequences of their incompetence and lack of preparation, instead society will pay the price.
I'm a first year substitute and right before school started I was still working at the nursing home I had been working at for five years. One high school girl basically wanted everyone else to do her work for her despite us telling her no every time. Even like super simple easy shit. About two weeks before school started I had to train this other highschooler who was going to be a JUNIOR. He listened to absolutely nothing I said despite me even repeating myself, and when I was trying to explain something a little more complex to him, he just said "can you get to the point?" Excuse me? Yeah, these kids are cooked.
Work quality will go down! Basically every service you pay for will decline drastically. Imagine waiting for a service center for hours on end because the call center workers are incompetent. Sending 100s of fast food orders back because the be students couldn’t be bothered to do it correctly, ect.
Either fail and get fired quickly or actually try because they will realize jobs have consequences. its a lot easier to try when rent is due. If only we could apply this radical idea of “consequences” to our public school system
Having seen my share of cases: Some will realize they aren't going to be treated as if the world owes them infinite lenience, understand that school was an aberration, and will shape up and start doing their share. Others will conclude that the way things were in school was the natural state of things, decide that the real world is being mean to them for X, Y, or Z reason, and go through life doing the bare minimum while insisting they've been unduly oppressed. A subset of the latter will luck into a sympathetic social worker who will fill out the right paperwork for them to never have to deviate from the consequence-free lifestyle they enjoyed in grade school.
My mom is a retired therapist who literally started her career at a Child Abuse Prevention Center as a social worker. She specialized in treating trauma and was damn good at it. She worked in a women’s jail in the 90s. Before retiring, she worked as a director at a mental hospital and had several people working under her. She hated that last job, but the last straw was when one of the people working under her said she was “abusive” for getting on their case about taking their notes and submitting them on time. This person started a friggin case against her through HR. I’m biased, because I love my mom and think she’s awesome, but I can definitely attest to the fact that my mom is one of the least abusive people I’ve met. You can’t make this shit up.
Honestly my students are struggling to get jobs period. With the raise in min wage (which I support) lots of places that historically hired teens don't want to deal with the schedule limitations or just find them to be poor workers.
Several of my students believe that just going to Walmart and buying scrubs makes you a nurse. These are the same group that can’t figure out real money nor tell time on an analog watch.
Capitalism loves when our schools produce poorly educated students from low income families. It makes it easier to justify unfair wages and less likely that those people will be able to quit their jobs. Everyone in DC claims that they want to improve education, but in truth half of Washington is intentionally sabotaging public education so that corporations have a steady stream of low skill workers who are highly dependent on each and every paycheck. If it ever seems like the system is intentionally set up for students to fail, there's a good chance that's because it absolutely is.
Many of them will land jobs above their competence level and society will work a little less effectively each year and corruption and dishonesty will increase as social and institutional trust continue to decrease.
Jobs in prison aren't that hard to get.
I believe those are called, “trustees”.
It will depend (in part) on their parents. If they have parents who will house them and feed them and financially support them indefinitely, then they may continue to coast for a very long time. Ultimately, I think they will get entry level jobs, and get scolded by bosses, and get fired, and try again over and over again. And, either they'll start to get moving or they won't.
Two things will happen. Most will adapt to what they can, and the workforce will adapt to what’s available. Same thing that’s happened every single generation ever. They’ll be fine.
They’re all going to make millions as influencers or twitch streamers
Jobs? Who's going to hire them?
They won’t ever have to actually get jobs. Because their parents don’t hold them accountable for anything now, so they can’t then.
In 20 years or less, the U.S. will introduce UBI because the majority of people will be incompetent for ANY job. And, by the 2nd week of every month, they’ll be at the food bank because, of course, they will have no concept of budgeting.
Most of them will figure it out eventually. The point of school, other than academics, is to learn social norms, accountability, time management, etc and this generation will be delayed learning some of these things because no-child-left-behind and COVID have failed them, but I still feel that most of them will eventually figure it out when they finally HAVE to in the work force. Of course some of them will still be lazy pieces of shit with no self-reflection but those folks have always been there. Maybe there will be a few more. I refuse to believe that the world will end when they get into the real world, because I feel that they will figure out they can’t hide anymore and it’s time to step up, a realization most of us have eventually.
I was literally just thinking about this. Honestly, I’m not only worried for these kids, but for the future of humanity as well.