From an English teacher's perspective... Yeah... you're getting the new wave of lower tier society applying for jobs. They can learn everything from Google and have no use for formal education. Just ask them.

We are expected to tap dance with a laser light show and make every single lesson SUPER awesome and engaging. And even when you do that, we are still dealing with kids that are 3 to 5 grades behind, and the curriculum won't let us adapt. Even if it could... some of these "kids" (taught senior credit recovery, so 18-21) have no desire to aquire useful skills.

I offered resume and cover letter writing as one of my options for that class at the start of the semester. TWO kids expressed interest all year.

I do teach in a low income district, so my experiences aren't necessarily the national norm, but damn they are frustrating. I try to tell them repeatedly, but they are convinced the world is going to fall into their pocket.

We've worked hard to ensure that few folks really have to experience adversity. So, of course, that has taught them that it's not really necessary to work your ass off. We, as a culture, have really screwed this up. We've changed out entire worldview into one that sees the result of hard work as "privilege", and we hold our heads high while we repeat the various litanies of our creed.

Once we started referring to the "under motivated" as "under privileged", we doomed the whole lot of them. With kindness and moral certitude we did. Every time I read/hear the phrase "under privileged", I grind my teeth for the damage that mindset has done. The phrase is an opiate to the masses. They're so desperate to occupy the moral high ground that, w/o a moment's reflection, they'll dismiss the damage the idea's done to self-discipline, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and tenacity.

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Please, I just can't take anymore relentless self-congratulation on the part of mediocre triathletes nostalgically yearning for a past that didn't exist (The 70's and 80's, the true "Greatest Generation"). Half of my high-school peers were stoned out of their mind every weekend. The smart students could write, the bad students couldn't. They all expected to be better off with or without a shred of talent or perseverance. They/we grew up during a sustained economic boom, and mistook that for inordinate levels of tenacity and virtue (some actually had it then, and some kids do today). Now if you'll excuse me, I have get those worthless kids off my lawn.

And the other half were stoned all week!

But the economy in the 70s and 80s was no picnic, this was the era of stagflation, oil price shocks, and 18% mortgages. But it seemed pretty damn good all the same!

the 70's was a downer, but most folks here have spent the bulk of their working careers in the 80's/90's/00's. Okay, that last part (2009) was a bit rough. The point is most of us "came of age" during those <pink>halcyon decades of self-reliance and tenacity </pink>

Oh, no doubt about it! "But you try and tell that to the young people of today" ...

A glass of Chateau de Chassilier to you, my good sir!

You know what they say about HR - they’re neither human nor a resource...:)

I've been working with my recruiters to understand one thing, "It takes talent to attract talent"

I went to three high schools in the late 1970s and even the worst performing of those schools did a better job of teaching because the students did not have any crutches like "white privilege", "discrimination" or any other buzz word of the last decade. Yes, that school had its share of fights, racial stress and problems, but those who wanted to succeed knew how and where to reach for that brass ring. The best of those schools was light years ahead of most schools today, no one slacked for some socioeconomic mantra, everyone had a goal for the program including the stoners hanging out just off campus.

The one thing that really stands out, and this is from the 1990s so its already been eclipsed, is the "baby classes" that were at middle schools in SoCal. Classes where the next door room was no longer a class but instead was a nursery, with a doorway between the two rooms. Adding a little to that, the room/nursery was overcrowded and the middle school was building a new dedicated building for the new 12 year old mothers. At the time, the "fathers", mostly gangbangers who hung out on the middle school grounds, were demanding "visitation" for their offspring in the nursery rooms!

We have long been on the idiocracy path in this country, some areas further than others but all states have gone down that road enough that the movie by that name is not quite as much a comedy as it is a documentary these days.

Teen birth rates are dramatically lower than they were in the 70 but somehow all these teen mothers are the problem? We should shame those mothers into dropping out, like the good old days.

This is a total cop-out, I went to a low income school where I as a white student was the minority, I still managed to go to college and receive an engineering degree and am doing pretty well at age 30.

The problem wasn't the school it was the students that don't have parents with a vested interest in their child's education. The problem doesn't begin when a kid gets to junior high, it started at age 2 when there wasn't a parent reading to their kid and extending their education outside of a school. They didn't get taken to the zoo or the science museum or the library or a play. They never were challenged intellectually after they left the doors of a classroom and that isn't on the district office to develop curriculum to fix that.

I suck at writing, bigly, but I try to have people review my work if it is important. In hindsight, the most important class I had in college was technical communications, I use it everyday.

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I thought teenage pregnancy rates have declined?

Looked it up, they have been declining for the last 20 years.

I graduated from HS in '80. In my experience, if a kid behaved poorly in school, they got sent to the principal/vice principal's office. This mean that the school would call your parents. Depending on the severity of the offense, the VP might give you some whacks in the ass.

When your father came home from work, there was hell to pay.

That chain of events gave teaches a mechanism to control the classroom. I mean other than the occasional whack in the head.

Fast forward to today. The only tool we've left teachers to control the classroom is force of personality. The kids have long ago figured out that there's no consequences to raising hell in the classroom and disrupting the whole thing. Neither the teacher nor school admin can do anything about it. And if they call the parent, many of them become outraged at the school, not their misbehaving child.

Our kids have stories of teachers spending an entire hour working phone calls to student parents trying to enlist the aid of the parent to get their kid under control.

A helova lot less learning occurs when the teacher spends much of their time controlling the problem kids in the classroom. And certainly the parents of those kids aren't putting any emphasis on the kids doing well in school. The whole idea of an education being material to someone's success has taken, imo, huge hits in many poor communities. There are groups that are positively "anti-learning". AFAIK, that kinda shit is pretty new.

Sure, my little rural logging town had it's share of stoners, but the stoners that I remember were neither disruptive nor any dumber then the rest of us.

IMO, for centuries education was seen by most folks as a means to get ahead. To make life less "nasty, brutish, and short". But it would seem that we've a couple generations now of parents that don't give a shit about education, that don't see significant value in teaching their children the basic personality attributes, self-discipline, tenacity, personal responsibility, etc. that successful people largely share.

What about our culture's systems of incentives is broken that these changes are happening?

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Have you considered that maybe the problem is one of perception and there are in fact no less amount of qualified kids out there, just a lot less qualified kids shooting for a job that's above their abilities. IOW, the kids who used to become "ditch diggers" now go to college and end up applying for lower tier office jobs.

Anyway, just a thought.

My step-dad is an administrator at a junior high in the school district I graduated from. The school he is at is in a wealthier area compared to the low income area I went to school in. In the name of diversity they started busing kids across the district to balance the racial profile of the schools. Well, a few years ago my step-dad suspends a kid, from the lower income area, calls the kids mom and says you have to come and pick your son up at school, her response "I don't even know where the hell that school is."

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well, i'm not sure i'd blame socialism.

but i will definitely say that the single best thing i think i've ever done to help myself in job searching is to be on the other side of the table. the process of reading CVs and conducting interviews sure as hell teaches you a lot.

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I wouldn't want to get in the way of a good ST rant, but this took 30 seconds on Google. The math chart looks much the same. Every generation is convince the next generation is screwed.




Figure 1. Average reading scale scores on the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), by age: Selected years, 1971 through 2012

I was just about to post that this thread is really just people complaining based on their biases and that some actual data might be useful.

My impression is that most social ills, including those among young people, peaked in the 1990s and generally as a whole society has been moving in a desirable direction in recent decades.

I don't buy that. The basic problem here is that a lot of these resumes are from 20-something kids that don't seem to understand that they are in competition with prob 100 other folks for the job. Therefore the resume and cover page have to "sell you".

What could be so broken in a kid's understanding of the world that they don't understand that they are in competition for the job? That they need to sit down and really give some thought as to the kinds of things that will be important to a prospective employer. Then they should use those predictions as a map to make the resume and cover letter appealing. This isn't science, it's just a matter of sitting down and thinking the situation thru.

I made a reference, early on, to a hypothetical socialist system where submitting a resume is simply a pro forma gesture that gives you a place in the job queue. Eventually you move up to the front of the queue and you get the job. I know that the kids don't think that way, but it is interesting to me that kind of system is a nice fit for what many of them are doing. And what a person "does" in a given situation tells you an lot about how a person sees the world.....are they a take charge person with control of their destiny, or are they a pinball being banged around the game of life by external forces.

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

It's totally unfair to use actual data in lieu of pure anecdote and bias!!

BTW, RangerGress, your logging town may well have skipped the 60's entirely (lots of rural areas did), and you are really in a nostalgic space similar to folks a generation previous. In suburban and urban areas, the past 40 years have been startlingly consistent. The biggest difference is that decades of strong growth helped a lot of slackers of my generation to succeed beyond their actual abilities. The "lower tier" was low then, it may be lower now. I'm a teacher, and the "upper tier" seems to be more driven than when I was young. Not surprising that widening income and wealth inequality manifests itself in widening disparities in many areas (job training, resumes, school applications, etc.). That said, folks aren't really much different from previous "good ole days".

I didn't "blame" socialism. I alluded to parallels between socialism and the reality that many entry level job seekers seem slow to understand that they are in competition for desirable jobs. Both contain a sense of "don't live in a competitive universe".

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

These are "lower tier job seekers," what are you expecting? They are at the lower tier due to their skills. Are you going to be paying them $12/hr or $15/hr or $20/hr. As the rate goes up, you expect more. It sounds like you're expecting the work of someone receiving $30/hr from someone you're going to hire for $10/hr.

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Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

Not "unfair", but certainly "not applicable". Was someone in this post complaining that 20 somethings can't read? The primary problem is that the kids slow to understand that they are in competition for jobs, and that their resume and cover letter needs to create a prospective employer reaction of "full of win".

There's a couple secondary problems too. Failure to sit down and consider the situation from the prospective employer's vantage point. "What can I write that would make me an interesting candidate and get me an interview". The other secondary problem is crappy writing skills.

Ain't about reading.

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"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

well, if you're looking for someone to tell you a sense of entitlement is really common and frustrating . . . i'm right there with you.

but maybe it's more useful to assume not that the job seekers are lazy or entitled, but that there's a skills gap there. i mean, why should these people know how to ace a job interview? is that a skill that they're being taught? who should teach them that? when?

i remember interviewing university students for a position, and although i got qualified and hireable candidates from all over, the one or two guys that i interviewed from the MBA program were way more polished than anyone else. clearly someone in that program was teaching people about how to dress, how to prep the CV, how to follow-up, etc.

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____________________________________
https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

Yup, your best schools had the BEST stoners!! BTW, the best of those schools (which were not doubt wonderful) should be compared with the best schools today (not the median). By and large, good schools have become better and bad schools have become worse (lots of exceptions, but that has been the trend). If the very best schools in your area are much worse than they were 30 years ago, then your area is in decline, and you should consider moving out of it.