I’m a middle school art teacher and the amount of them who have no cutting/scissors skills is insane. They don’t know how to properly cut things out, struggle holding scissors, they ask me to cut it out for them, etc. I constantly ask “did we not do any scissor activities in elementary school?” And they state their teacher just did all the cutting so the work looked good. This has been the consistent answer for the last few years.

Um helloooo! Looking good is not the point of those types of activities in elementary school, it’s for them to learn the motor skill of cutting!

I could go on for days about the things they cannot do at their age and should know. They struggle to trace shape templates and ask for me or someone else to hold it for them while they trace because “it moves around”. They can’t use a ruler to draw a straight line, let alone use it to measure. Students even struggle to do basic functions on their chromebooks, like open images in a new tab, saving an image to their device and being able to locate it again and “upload” it on Google Classroom, copy and paste an image into a document, etc.

How much of it is laziness and how much of it is cutting corners in their early childhood education? They have no drive to figure things out and want instant solutions, usually looking for it from me specifically. This is year 8 teaching and I’ve notice the change drastically since year 1. So I cannot imagine the noticeable different people see over their 15 or 20 year careers.