a rant? on america's youth
i know, kind of random.
but if you've read some of my posts, you know that i'm currently working a part time job teaching kids how to code.
the kids i teach range from age 6 to 12, and i'm constantly fascinated, for lack of a better word, to see how lacking they are in some knowledge that i consider very fundamental.
these days, kids in the region where i live get chromebooks at school.
that's wild in my opinion.
you may think that this means they're extremely computer-savvy, but it's quite the opposite.
when i was in elementary school, we had a dedicated class in the computer lab where we learned how to type properly; although i had already learned how to use a computer from my dad and had my own preferred way of typing already.
either way, it made for efficient typers, and kids who knew what a pound symbol, an asterisk, and a colon were.
many of my students, including the ones who are now in middle school, are not efficient typers, and in fact many of them are slamming their pointer fingers down on keys one by one, the younger ones not even remembering where any of the letters are even after countless repetitions of the same words.
one of the languages i teach is python, which requires colons and like many other programming languages, parentheses.
some of my students don't know what either of those are, and every session i have to remind them that the parentheses are the round ones, and the colon is the two dots on top of each other.
and don't even get me started on their spelling skills.
there are students who are excellent spellers, but most don't know how to spell words like choice, import, and scissors, although i'll cut some of the younger ones slack on scissors.
i even have a student who can't spell her own last name.
even if she is 6, isn't that one of the first things you should learn how to spell?
something else i find pretty funny is that occasionally they'll try to touch the screen on the desktop to navigate.
something i find pretty not funny is that i had one student come in for a trial run and she didn't know how to use a desktop mouse.
and this is all coming from an area where many of the school districts are top in the nation.
did you also know that kids nowadays are more susceptible to online scams and malware?
have you ever illegally downloaded music and had a page that had 5 download buttons, but you knew exactly which one was the real one?
yeah, apparently kids these days can't tell.
and overall, kids throughout the nation are reading at a significantly lower level than they should be, even with schooling.
idk, it's all kinda concerning.
that's it from me, thanks for reading my rant:)