Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam | Hacker News Reader

Math Scores Fell in Nearly Every State, and Reading Dipped on National Exam

nytimes.com

4 pointsfortran776 comments

The bar keeps falling and it only makes the rest of us more valuable

I am Generation-X we had no Internet and iPhones and PCs and online gaming consoles to distract us and we actually studied to get to use what we had or we couldn't use them. Atari 2600 with block graphics, Commodore 64 for a computer no Internet but a MODEM to access BBSes.

Plus all this woke stuff being taught instead of math and reading doesn't help. Teach math and reading let the parents teach the woke stuff.

I'm late Gen-X. The "woke stuff" is actually long overdue, regarding teaching.

edit: Oh and also, it's not taught "instead of". It's being taught alongside.

Did the school day increase in length? If not, then anything added means something else was taken out. Or are there multiple teachers speaking to the same class simultaneously, each teaching their own subjects, alongside each other?

What was taken out was the narrow focus on only the works of white men.

By the time I was in high school in the 1980s, this included reading from Zora Neal Hurston (Harlem Renaissance, US) and Chinua Achebe (post-colonial Nigeria). I don't think that was so common in the 1960s.

In elementary school in the 1970s we learned about Wernher von Braun (though not about his Nazi membership). This was the post-Apollo era, after all. Nowadays I suspect the focus might be more on Katherine Johnson.

I don't think that's a bad thing.

I'm Gen X, part of the MTV generation, aka the Slacker generation. Quoting a quote from Wikipedia about us: "today’s students have short attention spans, lower literacy rates than previous generations, and bore easily". That was what adults thought of us.

My first video game console was in 1974, a Heathkit Pong derivative. By the early 1980s, a lot of kids in my neighborhood had Atari 400s, C64s, etc. -- mostly to play games. And video game parlors were a thing too. I would mostly watch people play, because a quarter a game was a lot.

We were the first kids to have Black History month (1970s) and observe MLK Jr. Day (1980s, for most people) - and yes, the anti-woke people of the time opposed both.

For that matter, my 1st & 2nd grade school had only desegregated about the time I was born.

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