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WYFP – Summer Break [1]

['Chloris Creator', 'A Pagan In Arizona', 'Nanny Ogg']

Date: 2026-06-06  

I’m about a year into my job now, I’m a professional kids tutor for a charter school in the North East US. The school offers us as an option for their kids, and we just finished the spring semester panic season and school ends Monday. I have regular kids I teach every week. Now I don’t get to know them like a regular teacher would, but I get enough time with each kid to see where they are and how they operate.

I get frustrated by the limits of the software, and the somewhat cryptic nature of my handlers – we communicate through text, and sometimes I can’t tell what they are intending because autistic and not enough context. But over all it’s been a good work experience. It’s also been humbling.

I am a smart guy. I know a lot of things and I am generally smarter than a 5th grader. Fractions sometimes trip me up, as does graphing, but I don’t have to do that often. I am going to spend the summer reviewing those weak spots this summer. But I’m scared for the future given the levels of competence these kids have – or more correctly don’t have.

Most of them read very poorly, well below grade level. They don’t know how to sound words out, because we stopped teaching phonics about 30 years ago. They apparently don’t have time to go over Greek and Latin prefixes and endings, so they can’t even make a good guess on what some words mean.

They get frustrated and either google or chatGPT the answer. They can’t read analog clocks, no matter how many times you tell them the short hand is hours and the long hand is minutes. They don’t know their times tables, or orders of operation. They can’t count by 3s or 5s, or 10s, or any number other than one. They count on their fingers for addition and subtraction. Or they do this weird thing with circles and dots and then count the dots.

It’s scary because most of them pass. Some do summer school, but most of them are just passed on each year, never having a solid foundation of knowledge to begin with. This is why people can be so gullible and AI has only made it worse, because granny can’t see the 6th finger and thinks that trump IS Jebus healing Jon Stewart. Neither can Sam, the 6th grader who is tuning into Andrew Tate, a rapist and human trafficker that has a disturbing appeal to boys and young men.

I don’t want to be a real teacher, I would have a nervous breakdown, I almost did this semester just teaching a few hours a day. But I am nervous as hell about the future, because these kids do not know how to learn, or critically think. We’re in for a bumpy future, assuming we can get through this regime without bombing ourselves in some egotastic spasm of cruelty from the orange douche canoe.

So what’s your fucking problem?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/6/800051251/community/wy/

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