Today, teaching is subjecting yourself to severe abuse by at least 20 people at the same time. The past two generations of parents have raised soft, sensitive, entitled children who believe everything is only about them. They have no respect for elders and the fact that college students believe it’s necessary to report teachers for anything they say in the classroom because it made them feel uncomfortable or unsafe is just ludicrous. I’ve been teaching college since February 16, 2016. That’s over 10 years. I’m just plumb tired of the idiocy I have to deal with on a daily basis. These young people, today, cannot read, write like they are texting someone, don’t put a period at the end of a sentence, do not know how to conjugate the verb, or make noun/verb agreement. Academic writing is about providing evidence in the form of researched citations and references. It is NOT about their opinion or what they think, which most of them do not have a clue about. Critical thinking is a skill. They are not open to being taught how to think because they can find out about any and everything on Google. It’s painful to sit in front of a class of 19, 20-25-year-olds who look at you like a deer in the headlights when you ask a simple question. So, after 10+ years of teaching Communication skills, I am DONE.
I know she is right. As a senior, I need to be protected from these students who report me to the Dean for words I say in the classroom. I’m not working for the FBI, CIA, or any other governmental agency. I bring seven decades of experience and skills to the classroom. When I get evaluated, I don’t expect to be accused of making students feel unsafe because I say a word. They are pathetic and I do not care to subject myself to this generation any more.
So, today, I feel like crying because it is impossible to be happy about teaching, earning very little, paying $100 a month for gas out of the little money I earn to teach a face-to-face college course in Texas. It is ridiculous that teachers earn so little. But it is reflective of the lack of skills students have. Perhaps, if teachers were respected more by the education system, students would be more productive.
What are the solutions to this problem? According to Claude AI, when asked the following question:
What are the solutions to the lack of college freshman to read and write?
Many college freshmen arrive underprepared for reading and writing, and the research points to a handful of approaches that tend to work. They fall roughly into three levels: what colleges do, what K-12 schools do, and what students can do themselves.
What colleges can do
- Corequisite support instead of remedial courses. Traditional non-credit remedial classes often become a place where students stall or drop out. Placing students directly into credit-bearing English composition, paired with extra support (a linked workshop or additional class hours), has produced noticeably higher completion rates in studies from places like Tennessee, Georgia, and the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program.
- Better placement. Using high school GPA and multiple measures rather than a single placement test reduced the number of students wrongly assigned to remediation.
- Writing across the curriculum. Writing improves when it’s practiced in every discipline, not just in one freshman composition course. Short, frequent, low-stakes assignments with feedback help more than one big paper.
- Writing and reading centers with trained tutors. Peer and professional tutoring worked best when it was easy to access and integrated with coursework.
- Teaching reading explicitly. Many professors assume students know how to read academic texts. Teaching annotation, previewing, summarizing, and how to approach dense material helps a lot.
- Smaller writing classes and faster feedback. Feedback loses much of its value if it arrives weeks after the assignment.
- Early alert systems and bridge programs. Summer bridge programs and early identification of struggling students let colleges intervene before problems compound.
What K-12 schools can do
- Evidence-based early reading instruction, including systematic phonics and knowledge-building curricula, so fewer students reach high school with weak foundations.
- More writing across subjects. Students often write very little in high school, especially in non-English classes.
- Better teacher training and manageable class loads. Responding to student writing is labor-intensive, and teachers with 150+ students can’t do it well.
- Alignment between high schools and colleges so expectations are clear and dual-enrollment or college-readiness courses actually prepare students.
What students and families can do
- Read regularly and widely, including long-form material, since reading volume strongly shapes vocabulary and writing.
- Write often and seek feedback, using campus writing centers early rather than as a last resort.
- Practice revision, which is where most writing improvement happens.
- Limit reliance on shortcuts. Heavy use of AI tools to generate text can undercut skill-building, though used well (for feedback, explanation, or practice) they can help.
Broader factors
Some of the problems are structural:
- Attention fragmented by phones
- Less pleasure reading among teens
- Uneven school funding.
Solutions that address motivation and reading habits, not just skills instruction, tend to matter over the long run.
If you’re asking for a specific purpose, such as an essay, a policy proposal, or advice for a particular student, let me know and I can tailor this or go deeper on any of these areas.
What will the education, medical, legal, and environmental fields look like in the next 10 years without people who can think, read, and write in a scholarly manner?
Is English obsolete?
Where does the United States of America stand in the list of countries when it comes to education?
These questions and more must be resolved for the human race to move forward. Of course, robots may be taking over our jobs, so there is that!
