As I have tutored, taught, substitute taught, and volunteered over the past few years, I have learned some lessons that I wish everyone knew.
First: Our children do not need smart phones.
The phones are actively interfering with academic growth because they displace advanced reading practice. Not even half of US adolescents can read what should be high school level texts in history, science, and so on. Reading--the basic skill of education, the skill which makes all the other aims of education independently achievable--is alarmingly on the decline right up through the university level (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-read-books/). Do the children a favor and get them a "dumb phone" instead.
Second: Teaching beginning readers to guess words from context is harming their ability to read.
Beginning readers are not knowledgeable enough to understand how to successfully deduce a word from context. They just hear us adults say, "Guess...." And so they guess....too often wrong. We are wasting precious literacy development time when we tell kids things like "look at the first and last letter and guess what the word is from context." Yes, that is really what they are told in some reading programs.
Children will be much better off if we teach them how to read new words by sounding them out, left-to-right, with allowances for the different letter patterns that come from French/Greek/German/Latin. (Children like maps and stories of cool cultures. What if we taught them that English is partly French? That could actually rescue their interest in language arts.)
Third: We have some confusing curricula out there, and we should blame it before blaming children or teachers.
Yes, teachers are underpaid. Yes, students are distracted. But the curricula adopted in many schools is frequently illogical in how it presents material. I see much that is unclear in textbooks' approaches and expectations. In our concern over poor educational outcomes, we need to look harder at confusing, frustrating curricula. "Common Core" isn't the problem; rather, it's the poor implementation of the Common Core standards in some curricula.
We certainly shouldn't be blaming little kids for not having enough "grit." We are the responsible adults, and we should give them instruction that is genuinely effective for their age level.
