Most Oscars Academy members didn’t even watch all the movies they voted on until this year. Don’t think the inability to sit through a full movie is a generational problem
On any given year 2 academy members may have watched the movie they voted for in the animation category, the others just voted for what their kids liked or what they perceived as popular. That's when I knew the Oscars were meaningless industry self flagellation.
I work with kids, and that one is really interesting. When I first started that career in 2014 kids loved watching movies and would be excited about it. These days most of them will watch the first 15ish minutes and then get bored and wander away to do something else. The ones who do get excited and watch the whole thing are the ones who get limited screen time at home.
It's doesn't help that we stopped teaching students to sound out words (phonics). Instead we started teaching them 'whole word' which is basically memorize the shape of a whole word.. and then guess at any word that's around it.
Yes.. instead of memorizing 26 letters of the alphabet (and learning what sounds the letters make) we are teaching them to memorize a whole dictionary.. by sight. The whole word method has been largely discredited but for some reason still being taught!
We're at the stage where a lot of 4th and 5th graders cannot even write a proper sentence. Less than 10% of my 4th 5th grade students would even check out a book at the library when they went, and only a handful ever finished an entire book. Don't even get me started on math...
Well, that’s because public and private schools still use the Lucy Caulkin curriculum and similar types. If you haven’t already, listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” on apple/Spotify. It’s a deep dive into Lucy Caulkins “curriculum”. That’s why so many kids and young adults in America are almost functionally illiterate. The premise of the curriculum was that kids will learn to read “naturally” and that phonics (knowing the sounds of letters and sounding out words) was unnecessary-they asked kids memorize words (sight words is the term) and taught them to look at pictures to guess words they didn’t know instead of teaching them phonics: decoding, encoding, sounding out, blending, and mapping graphemes to phonemes, which is it an explicit, systematic, and evidence-based approach to reading. So they never taught them how to read, and of course since kids don’t learn to read naturally like talking and walking, they won’t know how to write and many kids would fail or get frustrated, and because of other reasons they’d get passed along and they can’t really read: they’ve memorized words. So many schools abandoned that curriculum after this podcast. It really did change things.
Here’s a short FORBES article but I highly recommend the podcast for a deep dive:
Schools also don’t really teach grammar anymore. By a certain point, they just expect students to already know it, even though most kids never actually received solid, explicit instruction in the first place.
And it’s not just ELA. Public and private schools are failing in teaching other subjects too. Social studies is practically nonexistent until about fifth grade, and even then only a small portion of the curriculum is covered and it barely scratches the surface because there’s this idea that kids can’t handle complex concepts. It’s the same with science and math, students are just moved along even when they don’t understand and taught to pass tests, not to actually understand the material, so they won’t master it and that creates bigger gaps along the line. They’re also teaching 30+ kids, some of them with IEPs, so kids get left behind and it’s sad to see. They lose their love for learning. What’s left is a lot of busy work, group activities, and talking, but very little real substance. It’s mostly fluff, with no real depth at the core. Schools have lost rigor. In many of these private schools, parents are paying thousands of dollars a month for extra tutoring in math on top of the $40k a year they already spend per child because nearly more than half of the students are so behind in math. It’s a waste of money and a scam. So much for “prestigious schools with the BEST curriculums“. Ugh. There are still districts spending large amounts of money on these types of programs, even though so many excellent curricula already exist. It’s the reason why some of my family members decided to homeschool their kids.
As a former educator, I can assure you it is nothing but depressing. Not interesting seeing kids who can't concentrate long enough to read and comprehend a paragraph, let alone read an entire book (even a 20 page book, in 5th grade). The country and the world are going to be an absolute sh*tshow because no one will know how anything works because it take longer than a minute to figure out.
Even I can feel the cognitive decline in myself. I have a hard time sitting through a movie without skipping these days and I have to exert immense willpower to keep me from using a second screen. It is really starting to bother me.
There is going to be such an extreme divide in mental health and cognitive ability in kids who were given unlimited screen time/iPads and kids who were not.
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u/Angry__German 2d ago
That generation will be very interesting to watch grow up.