The Teacher Who Cried on the Second Day of School
spoon-feed: to give someone so much help or information that they do not have to think for themselves
On the second day of the school year, a high school teacher in Houston, Texas, filmed himself in tears on his lunch break. Darius Williams had given his students a simple task. They had to read two short paragraphs and then finish one sentence about them. Williams wrote most of the sentence for them, so only four words were missing. He had spoon-fed them almost everything. “These are 17 and 18-year-old kids,” he said, “and they couldn’t fill in four words.” The video of the crying teacher spread quickly online.
The numbers suggest he is not alone. The OECD, an international organization, tested the reading of 760,000 fifteen-year-olds around the world. In September they published the results. Reading fell in 56 out of 74 places. The scores of students from the richest families dropped the most.
The OECD found that one in four Danish fifteen-year-olds can’t understand a simple text. In response, the government plans to remove the tax on books. Denmark has the highest book tax in the world, 25 percent. Removing it would cost about 44 million euros a year.
Singapore is also worried, even though its teenagers scored better in reading than any other country. Since September 6, anyone who reads for fifteen minutes a day and records it online earns two Singapore cents. After 50 days they will get a whopping one dollar. Nobody knows whether two cents is enough to nudge a teenager to put down their phone for fifteen minutes.
Sample sentences
If you spoon-feed your kids every answer, they’ll never learn to solve problems for themselves.
Some TV channels spoon-feed their viewers one opinion and never show the other side.
Nobody here is going to spoon-feed you, so ask questions early and take good notes.
Read More
Teacher Breaks Down After Saying His Students Couldn’t Read or Write
Why global reading scores are dropping
Denmark cuts 25% book sales tax due to alarming low level reading crisis
Singapore Is Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
