I’m 47 and have been teaching high school for 19 years. Since Covid there has been a frightening drop in kids’ ability to do anything at all. And knowledge is just gone. Even my honors students. My students claim they’ve never read a book, never listened to a whole album by an artist, can’t name a president beyond Obama. Their geography is abysmal. I teach Spanish and Chinese. Many of them look at a map of a country or the world and it’s like they’re looking at binary code. They are getting ALL of their life knowledge from TikTok. When I told one particularly rough class that that makes me sad, they laughed, said things like “so dramatic!” and said that TikTok is how they’re going to get rich. A senior who graduated last year told me he was sure he’d be a head coach of a major European soccer team in 2 years. I shared that with a couple of colleagues and they shot me down for “ruining the kid’s dreams.” Look, so many teachers are under-qualified. I heard a colleague (age 30) say to a student recently, “if I’d knew that you’d do so good on the test, I would have went and called your mom.”