"I am routinely asked questions like, 'What's eight times zero?' Or, 'how many sides does a triangle have?' These are eighth graders."View Entire Post ›
Recently, Redditor Mark-reels asked, "Teachers of Reddit: Is Gen Alpha really struggling with basic reading, writing, and math skills? If so, what does that look like in your classroom?" And oof — I am concerned for the future of this country. Read on to see just how bad it is.
1.
"They refuse to think. I've literally had kids in my class not doing any work. When I asked them why, they said, 'I don't have a pencil.' I reminded them that I gave them one when I handed out the assignment, and they said, 'But I don't have one.' I asked them to see if maybe they lost it. Again, no. I told them to look around their desk. Lo and behold, the pencil was six inches from their shoe in the aisle. This is not a one-off. I ALWAYS hand out pencils/supplies with the assignment. EVERY DAY. Multiple kids, so many times, choose not to do basic problem-solving skills. It's mind-boggling."
—u/moonman_incoming
2.
"It's not just basic reading. It's learned helplessness. I have kids who simply cannot do anything independently. Attention span is part of it, but a lot of them just can't do it unless told exactly what to do, and yes, even if the directions are on the paper."
—u/DivineArbalest
"I'm back in college as a 41-year-old, and I'm doing a summer literature course right now. We have weekly discussion boards, and last week the average grade was 2.6/10 because 90% of the class didn't read the directions. We had to pick a specific prompt to respond to, and most just wrote about the lecture generally. The prompt involved quoting a passage from the weekly readings and writing 100-150 words about it; the class is not difficult at all. Not being able to follow basic instructions has been a consistent problem with my younger classmates. These are Gen Z kids. I imagine the problem is much worse with Gen Alpha."
—u/KingCarnivore
3.
"My boyfriend works at an after-school program. He is in charge of the nine to 10-year-olds. The other day, he put out board games for them all to play, such as Hungry Hungry Hippo, Sorry, and Twister. He left to do something quickly, and when he came back, they were all sitting there doing nothing. He asked what was wrong, and they all replied that they didn't know how to read the instructions and couldn't understand them. There have been times when kids will ask him how to spell 'cat.' He's beyond concerned for these kids."
—u/powere123
4.
"What's concerning to me as a Gen Z teacher is the lack of independence. They will shut down if their hand is not held through every step. If I say I'm not going to help and I want them to try and figure it out on their own, some will cry. 14-year-olds crying."
—u/PeachyPesco
5.
"I work at a university. You can have a perfectly written guide on how to do something, but unless it's a video explanation sourced directly into their TikTok, there will be droves of students that don't know what to do."
—u/IronGin
6.
"Not a teacher, but I work in higher education. We haven't gotten to Gen Alpha just yet, but OMG, the younger Gen Z kids are in bad shape. They cannot follow verbal **or** written instructions. If an email is more than four sentences long, they will not read any of it, and they require a lot of hand-holding because of this. If it's longer than a reel, it won't hold their attention, and the lack of understanding of consequences (like missing deadlines) is infuriating."
—u/ThatBChauncey
7.
"High school teacher here. I just finished a year with the worst junior class I've ever taught. The biggest shock for me is how transactional everything has become. First, the number of kids who just refused to work. Students who don't want to work have always existed, but this felt different. It wasn't just laziness, bad time management, or hating school. It almost felt like I had a lot of students on 'strike' from doing their work. I'd give out the assignment, and then they'd sit back with their hands behind their heads, basically daring me to make them do it. It didn't matter if the assignment was easy, engaging, or 'meaningful'; there was a persistent percentage of the class that just refused to even participate. When I tried to address it, the dynamic felt like I was a boss meeting with a union leader for contract negotiations."
"They'll pitch me 'compromises': they'd agree to do one small part of an assignment but expect full credit, or they'd tell me they were taking a break to game for 10 minutes but would 'get back to me' after. I remember one pair of girls who regularly sat for 40 goddamn minutes doing absolutely nothing, just waiting to see if I'd 'make an offer' to get them moving. When I did speak to them, it was to complain and make demands: sometimes they didn't like the questions I asked on the paper and wanted new ones, or maybe they timed me speaking for seven minutes when I said I would only take five, and now I owe them that time back.
When I gave a detention, instead of just getting mad or trying to weasel out of it, they'd pull out an encyclopedic 'memory' of the school handbook, looking for any loophole to justify why the rules didn't apply to them. There was a lot of tit for tat — trying to find the angle to get them to do what I wanted, while making them feel like I was giving them a special deal. I was flexing my brain every single day, having to think like a lawyer while still teaching these kids and acting like their babysitter. They were still way academically lower than they should be, and their behavior was atrocious on top of it. My colleagues are seeing the exact same thing.
The other issue that has come along is now also having to deal with guidance, administration, special ed, and the families holding water for these kids, playing defense over the kind of shit that was never ever a consideration before they came along. I've never gotten so many emails or phone calls asking me to change grades, modify assignments, or take back consequences. This is not what I signed up for. And I do wonder what exactly went on in these kids' lives before they got to high school that produced this attitude of everything getting to be debatable or flexible for them."
—u/AmbitiousProblem4746
8.
"College professor, so I get these students four years downstream. The specific deficit surprises people. It's not intelligence, and it's not even knowledge exactly. It's stamina: the ability to stay inside a hard problem for 20 unassisted minutes. Every friction point in their entire information environment has been optimized away, and now the deliverable itself can be generated on demand. So the muscle that grows during 'This is hard, and no one is helping me yet' never develops."
"What it looks like concretely: students who can produce a polished essay overnight but can't summarize it aloud the next morning. The polish is up, the ownership is down. And the fix every teacher I know is converging on is the same: make the live, unassisted moment the thing that counts, because it's the only thing left that can't be outsourced."
—u/RefuseWrong9803
9.
"Teacher for German high school here (Gymnasium). For me, it really is not the reading, writing, or math skills. While orthography is horrendous, it's been that way with young children for a while now. The main issue is the inability to deal with problems. Solving a task with some unknown components. Figuring out a way to a solution. Things like this. I've always liked to do projects across multiple lessons where researching parts of the solution was necessary. Nowadays, I'll put a wiki next to the project tasks from which they are to extract those things they are to research. It helps a lot, but some students are still unable to grasp the idea of 'I don't know, so I'll figure it out' and just give up."
—u/lantern2safety
10.
"I'm in grad school, working as a TA. I'll pose questions to the undergrads, and they try to turn the question around, reword it, or just completely misunderstand the question because they haven't done the reading or paid attention in class. Some of them openly challenge the textbook/disagree with it and call the professor a quack (he is the head of the department and working on his own textbook), and it's genuinely so disturbing."
"I asked them how they decide who an expert is, and not one of them said because of credentials or a PhD. That may not seem egregious, but they had been dismissing some of the textbook authors' 50+ year-long niche careers, countless foundational research contributions, and scientific innovations, while in a university-level science course.
They framed everything as left vs. right politically, and while it's great they're looking to be politically engaged, this particular area of study has far greater nuance than that framing, and to paint the theory we're learning and its experts as black-and-white or always up for debate hurts to hear. One of my professors says it's learned thoughtlessness. Ugh."
—u/heyfriendhowsitgoing
11.
"Even in grad school, most students won't read a single article. Even when lectures are recorded for their benefit (they can even watch them at a higher speed), they will still not watch the lectures. At best, they just want to learn the minimum to get a job. But they rarely even meet those standards. They're paying $6500 per course, and they barely work at learning."
—u/prove____it
12.
"I work with kids one-on-one, and it's astonishing to see how bad it is and how addicted to technology kids are. They can sit and watch the most mind-numbing things, but as soon as I ask them to do anything, any small amount of work, it's a meltdown. A tantrum."
"Most don't know how to spell their name or write on the lines."
—u/bluenervana
13.
"Teacher in Cali; most of last year's class could not read. If they can manage to read, they cannot understand and grasp the content they are reading. They can't focus. They are all running on constant cycles of vocal stimming phrases they heard on TikTok. They can't reach a conclusion on their own. And all their words are misspelled. I am afraid of returning in the fall."
—u/3amdadd
"Stimming is short for 'self-stimulating behavior.' It's when you do something for the sensory input, basically. It can either be a soothing thing (like block out a bad feeling by touching something nice instead) or a stimulating thing (like the brain not getting enough sensory input to know where your body is in space, so the person taps on something to ground themself). It used to be a thing you'd only hear about autistic people doing, as autism commonly leads to overstimulation or understimulation, depending on the individual. An overstimulated person can block out overwhelming sensory input with a more soothing one, and an understimulated person can stim to get the stimulation needed for the brain to function properly.
Stimming can be basically anything that gives sensory input, and is often done repeatedly. The stereotypical ones for autism tend to be things like rocking and hand flapping. A vocal stim is when the stimulation comes from making a noise, often an imitation of something that has been heard, usually over and over. I'm autistic, and when I was a kid, I'd imitate the same lines and sound effects from TV shows and toys over and over and over. Drove my parents wild.
It's very concerning that non-autistic individuals are doing it so much. It indicates they're used to being so constantly overstimulated (likely by high-dopamine screen content) that they can no longer function properly in a normal situation. So they start quoting the thing they like over and over as a socially acceptable way to try to bring back the stimulation they're craving."
—u/ShiraCheshire
14.
"The TikTok sound stimming is wild. Kids SCREAM in the classroom. Yes, we were loud as kids, but we would never scream. Just constant TikTok sounds on loop while they're working. 'We are Charlie Kirrrrkkkk' 'FAAAAAHHH' 'Oh heeeelll nooooo' 'Tung tung tung tung tung tung' neverending…it's neverending."
—u/PeachyPesco
15.
"Teacher in Sweden, and it's pretty freaking bad here too. Parents have failed their kids by not having them read more at a young age; instead, they gave them phones and social media. We, the teachers, can see that the kids that aren't always on their phones perform, in general, WAY better."
—u/Mark-reels
"The phone thing is wild to see in real time — like, you can almost predict their test scores by how many times they try to sneak a peek during class."
—u/Slight-Rip-3574
"At the end of the school year last year, my first grader brought home a phone number from one of his friends. What does a first grader need a phone for? Is he running a business, wandering around town, or setting his own appointments? They're probably buried in that thing for 12 hours a day. It's really bad for adults, and we aren't in key developmental years."
—u/TheGringoDingo
16.
"Kindergarten teacher in Thailand here. You can tell which kids read and interact with their parents, and those that are babied or neglected. At least here, parents have a tendency to give them screen time for most of their non-school time. They rarely read to their kids and hardly have a conversation. Those kids struggle to retain any form of information. Meanwhile, the kids who grow up reading as a daily routine with their parents at bedtime pick up our phonics program much faster. This year, only two of my 10 students finished kindergarten with a full understanding of our basic phonics program and are able to decode. The rest struggle to pronounce vowels and blend two sounds."
"It's clear as night and day. The two kids that do read can also tell me what their parents do for work and where they are from. They ask questions and are generally curious kids. The other eight couldn't tell me what their parents do, and some of them couldn't even tell me what country/city they are from. They dont want to know why fire is hot, they just want to be told it is."
—u/Nariot
"My nephew's teacher said something similar at parent night, basically told everyone the kids who read at home are miles ahead, and it's not even subtle."
—u/Slight-Rip-3574
17.
"I had MANY students who averaged a second-grade reading level in my fifth-grade classroom. And this is excluding those with IEPS or identified disabilities."
—u/MediocreVideo1893
18.
"I'm a former daycare teacher; it starts young. Four- to five-year-olds hated story time and hated 'reading' even more."
—u/Queer-deer
19.
"I'm a high school English teacher with 14 years of experience teaching 12- to 18-year-olds. The major issues I've seen appearing have been: 1) Dramatically reduced attention spans, particularly when watching films or longer reading. E.g., the film Holes is studied, and it's a slog getting students to pay attention and retain what they watched. 2) Spelling remains consistent; however, grammar and punctuation have gotten worse. Run-on and fragment sentences galore."
"3) Having empathy for characters is slower to develop. I would normally see it in 80% of the class by year nine; now it's year 10 onwards, and the majority of students understand character motivation and empathy at a decent level.
4) A decline in problem-solving, not when applied to complex problems, but general troubleshooting or finding a solution to small issues. It's almost a base-level learned helplessness.
5) A decline in personal responsibility, e.g., homework completed on time, remembering the correct items. Typically, these issues disappear in Senior years, but still remain.
6) Rise of right-wing extremism in general conversation and discussion. Asking for their evidence beyond 'Trust me, bro' works in making them question their beliefs.
It's not that they can't read. It's a much more complex issue. I have also found a lack of basic domestic skills in families. Such as fixing small tears or lost buttons on uniforms, getting stains out of uniforms, cleaning shoes and belongings. In the early 2000s, as an older teen, I was responsible for my school uniform, and I just don't see that now."
—u/paperconservation101
20.
"Teacher in New Zealand here, and an older Gen Z myself. It's quite bad. I have kids who can't pronounce words they should, and many more who can't/won't read even a paragraph, let alone comprehend it. Most of my class complains that writing two sentences is 'too much' and a shocking number can't read an analog clock (I teach high school). There's still some high flyers out there, and the main difference is that their parents limit screen time and encourage reading."
—u/Perfect_Pessimist
"I have to teach kids how to read an analog clock on the regular. I work with high schoolers."
—u/BlackFenrir
21.
"Professor here. When I have students read out loud in class, they have trouble with very basic words (latest examples: independence, expectation, agency). When asked to interpret what they've read, one student out of 40 can muddle through a cogent response. It's the worst environment I've seen in 30 years."
—u/SharonWit
22.
"I'm an English Teacher at a Sydney public school. I have been teaching since 2018, and I have noticed it's gone worse, like reading and comprehending short one-page texts is too much for them, so we need to break them down into paragraphs just so it's easier to comprehend what they are reading. Also, with their writing, we have given students heavily guided scaffolds with sentence starters and examples, but it seems it's too much for them. I actually get worried about how kids are going to be in the next five years."
—u/Ban_Hammer40K
23.
"Kids don't read. Kids aren't bored, so they don't get creative and do hands-on things. The schools and parents don't push the kids, so they can't handle anything. There are no consequences for failing, and thanks to No Child Left Behind, they move on regardless. They have no critical thinking skills and the attention span of a gnat. You can literally tell them the answer, and they can't write it down. The last five-ish years have been fucking hell; they just don't have the basic skills to function."
"There's a slow shift towards going back to paper and pen; the schools that have done this have shown drastically better results. I do paper assignments, and my kids do better than the kids in classes where it's tech-driven."
—u/KittenKingdom000
24.
"I'm a professor. My students cannot read a college textbook. I don't mean interpret and understand. I mean, read. I asked one class what happened because they bombed an exam. A student said he tries to do the reading, but doesn't get it. I asked if it was concepts, and he said no, the words. I told my class that day I cannot dumb it down further, or we'd use a high school textbook, and I'm not going to do that. They cannot read."
—u/1nf1n1te
25.
"I work with kids; recently, sixth to eighth graders were tasked with creating presentations for an idea that they were to present to a company, and I had several of them ask me how to spell basic words such as 'people', 'area,' and 'want', the latter of which they'd already spelled 'whant'. The kicker was when one of them asked me how to spell 'such as', and was surprised to learn that it was two words. Sixth to eighth graders. Almost high school-aged. And it wasn't just one or two that may be struggling with dyslexia or other learning disabilities — it was all of them. Scary and sad stuff."
—u/BigFanOfArtAndNature
26.
"Students are using ChatGPT for even the most basic assignments. Even asking them to do something personal and creative gets me AI-generated crap."
—uSmitzchtheKitty
27.
"There is a small but growing group of students who have basically surrendered anything that even approaches cognition to LLMs. We're talking, kids asking ChatGPT how they feel about their morning. It is only going to get worse."
—u/Bargeinthelane
28.
"I teach middle school math at a high-performing school. They cannot do basic math. They all assume AI will do it for them, so there is no point in trying. I am routinely asked questions like, 'What's eight times zero?' Or, 'how many sides does a triangle have?' These are eighth graders."
—u/threatlevelm1dnight
29.
"My wife is the head of the math department in her high school, and she says the number of kids coming out of elementary school that are basically math illiterate is astounding."
—u/Mpennerbball
30.
"There's no 'number sense' and just panic anytime there are numbers involved. There's no 'yeah that's about right' and then doing the work to get it exact. I had a student put 1+0 into a calculator this year because they panicked anytime numbers were around. Math has always been an issue, but never like this. There's no concept of how to approach any type of problem; it's always a 'let's throw everything at the wall and maybe something will stick.'"
—u/atleastonedan
31.
"If a math problem requires more than two steps, 80% of the class just completely blanks out."
—u/neilalex_official
32.
"They can't finish their times tables. Many of them give up. Even after finishing more than half of it. 'I forgot the rest.' Some can finish within 10+ minutes. A bit more in five+ minutes. My own PR is like 1m56sec as an adult math teacher. A few kids can do it in two+ minutes. I have a lot of friends from a lot of different backgrounds. Being able to complete the times tables (or even doing multiplication sprint sheets) was something we got actively trained in. I teach 10th grade, and by the time they get to me, a lot of them cannot complete their times tables. It's wild to me, but I try to teach them the Pythagorean theorem and the quadratic formula anyway (while trying to improve their mental math skills)."
—u/encognitowhetherman
33.
"I just quit my teaching job at a middle school this past year (for health-related reasons…mostly). It's exactly as bad as people are saying it is. Kids can't read well, and if they can, it's only short paragraphs. They struggle with basic instructions when they're written without constant support and repetition. Even in my 'honors' classes, the average reading level was at least one or two years behind. Now, I will stress that there were absolutely some phenomenal and very bright students in my classes in recent years. But that number has gone down consistently over the past decade. Curriculum is being dumbed down at a systemic level to push kids through to graduation."
—u/TheMasterFlash
34.
"We are passing kids through because the worst thing possible would be to keep them back, apparently. But they are failing and still graduating, where they are functionally illiterate and can't do basic math. It needs to start very early on, we need to hold kids back who can't read or do math on grade level, like second or third grade, and not worry about hurting their feelings or what the parents would think or whatever."
—u/atleastonedan
35.
"No Child Left Behind (NCLB) means that kids who are a year behind in learning development are still pushed onto the next grade. My dad literally isn't allowed to fail kids – if they refuse to do an assignment, they still get a 55. When they email parents about their kids' situations, the parents either say it's the teacher's fault or that they're too overworked to deal with it, and it isn't their problem. And the state requires so much standardized testing that they're forced to spend much of the year doing test prep and don't have time to actually tailor the curriculum to the kids' needs."
—u/Mossishellagay
36.
"Can't give Fs. I remember telling my principal that I had two students who were failing my class. Verbatim, she responded, 'Well, better find something they can pass.'"
—u/BdaMann
37.
"Director of a program that hosts young school-age children up to third grade in the summer here. Twelve of the 22 children enrolled in the school-age classroom have learning challenges, half of whom have formal IEPs and half of whom have apparent yet not officially represented learning challenges in a learning plan. The handwriting and general early literacy skills of these children are atrocious and frightening. Third graders who cannot reliably spell simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words or basic, first 100 HF (high frequency) words are shockingly common. Very few of them are able to read basic, beginner chapter books such as Henry and Mudge, Frog and Toad, or Amelia Bedelia, etc. General fine motor skills and problem-solving skills are also lacking in many of them. Some of these children struggle to focus to complete simple board games or learn and retain the rules of games they enjoy, but need a lot of adult support to successfully play."
"Not to bemoan how things 'used to be' but I distinctly remember our final spelling test in first grade included words like 'elephant' and 'giraffe' and we were expected to recognize and write most foundational high-frequency words (we had parents who came in to help us write little stories of our own in a writer's workshop-type set-up that got put in the classroom library) and the teacher regularly read books with complex vocabulary (his favorite word was 'pandemonium'). We were taught to check out and return our own books at the school library, memorize our lunch code and bus number, and color card (#264, Magenta), among so many other things.
The younger generation is not inherently less capable, though. The children in the school-age room love hearing complex chapter books and understand the storyline well. They are imaginative and creative, but often dont know how to express themselves. They are empathetic and much more inclined to include and not judge other children. Something has changed, and it is holding children back from learning critical capacities to be lifelong learners and to enjoy learning and reveling in pushing their abilities to the next level."
—u/ApplePieKitty87
"For those who don't know, CVC = consonant-vowel-consonant. 'The younger generation is not inherently less capable, though.' I agree with this. I've been running TTRPGs for kids as an extracurricular activity for a few years, and while it takes them a bit, a lot of these 'missing' skills show up by the end of my program."
—u/FixinThePlanet
38.
"I'm a librarian in California, and I've encountered several teens and middle schoolers who struggle to write their last names, addresses, and phone numbers. Yesterday, I spoke with an 11-year-old who forgot how to write her last name, and her mom said, 'It's summertime, it's normal to forget.' I'm in my 30s, and I don't remember that being normal?"
—u/Ewstefania
39.
"I'm not a teacher personally, but I have a couple in my family: my sister teaches elementary/middle school, and my father teaches high school. It is BAD. As a fun (scary) game, my sister will show me assignments from her students, and I try to guess what age they are. The handwriting and spelling skills that you'd expect from a six-year-old are now how 10-year-olds write. They simply can't do math. Some of the older elementary schoolers can't add single-digit numbers. Among the high schoolers, they often just flat out refuse to do assignments. Too many big words? They just say they won't do it. They sleep and vape in class."
"It's the parents' and the people in charge's fault. EVERYTHING is done on Chromebooks, so they genuinely never develop writing skills. In the middle schools, on the rare occasion that they have to read a book, they're given an audiobook option in case actually reading feels like too much work.
The students are, frankly, incredibly lazy, bordering on illiterate, and do not give a flying fuck. But that's a result of the environment they're in now."
—u/Mossishellagay
40.
"They're all over the map. There are kids who read 20 books over the summer and maintain a reading list of the classics a mile long. Kids who finish their math work so fast that you have to find six more things for them to do before class is over. Then there are kids who break down in tantrums over the least little thing. Those who just say 'no' when told to do an assignment. Second-graders who wander around the classroom writing 'fuck' on every surface. Kids who purposely kick other kids on the playground then gleefully run away. You can't say no to the kids. You can't send them to the principal's office. There are no consequences for any of their actions."
"You either coddle them, or you lose whatever imaginary control you have over the classroom. Every single classroom is dragged down by the kids with emotional problems that are impossible to solve."
—u/NoPoet3982
41.
And finally..."Our school traded the fifth-grade science fair project for 'career day' where they all 'researched' that they wanted to be YouTubers."
—u/GratefulHead420
Are you a teacher, or do you work with kids or teenagers? Tell us what you're noticing in Gen Alpha or younger Gen Z students in the comments or via this anonymous form.
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