I’m sorry but a child reaching freshmen year with their documentation that shows they are developmentally at a third grade level for reading and writing is unteachable. I know that may be a crazy opinion but I’ve never seen it this bad till this year.
Half a co-taught class developmentally 6 years behind where they should be. My co-teacher is losing their mind. I’m losing my mind. We’re doing stories that are 3 pages long and they forget what was 1 paragraph before. They don’t know how to operate a google document. Many have lost their homework sheets in their folder less book bags.
I don’t even really know the other half of my class since I have no time to talk to the students who are demonstrating the basic ability to follow a 2 step direction since I’m busy putting the fire extinguisher to other half who seemingly have never been told to do anything their entire life.
I cannot scaffold things any lower without it literally being a third grade level class. One child literally had documentation showing they don’t understand that stories begin and end.
Our biggest challenge of the year so far was writing a singular scaffolded paragraph with sentence starters based off a short story. Multiple paragraphs contained characters that simply did not exist in the story.
I’m losing my brain
It is not uncommon for me to have situations when talking to americans where it is obvious that their reading comprehension is very very bad. I’m not talking about political conversations, just general conversations I might have in gaming forums, movie forums, discords, etc.
I’ve long since gotten in the habit of trying to rephrase and restate the core point I’m trying to get across multiple times when talking in general and generally to avoid making any sentence hinge on a single word to be interpreted correctly since even people who are literate tend to skim text and miss key words. I don’t always remember or succeed though: even here I had one particular old power poster blow up on me on several occasions when we were actually in agreement, because he missed a key word and reversed the meaning of what I was saying.
Oh now that you mention it I have seen that situation occur here where people miss one word and don’t realise they actually agree with each other. I may even be guilty of that myself though tbh.
“Why are we having a meeting/talking on the phone when you could just send an email” takes on a whole new meaning when that is paired with the average Burgerlander being functionally illiterate.