Why are 15-year-olds asking the kinds of questions that 5-year-olds used to ask? 

Schools have a major incentive to pass their students, even when they don’t deserve to pass and matriculate to the next grade. They don’t want their school’s graduation rate to be low. If only 60% of high school seniors graduate, the school looks bad. Long gone are the days of the 19-year-old high school sophomores. If a kid does not complete the work required of him in 10th grade, he’s passed along to 11th grade, just like the rest of his peers who actually did the work. 

When kids face no consequences for not doing their work, there is very little their teachers can do to motivate them to come to class and complete it. There will always be some kids who are genuinely motivated and want to get good grades to get into college, but they’re not the ones who make teachers’ lives miserable. The kids who don’t care whether they pass or fail need some external motivation to actually get their work done if they’re not getting it from their parents. If a kid actually thinks he’ll be held back and unable to graduate with his friends, he might become more inclined to do C-grade work instead of F-grade work. 

The kid in this story has been through at least 10 years of English classes, and he still isn’t capitalizing proper nouns, capitalizing his name, or using proper grammar. I’m not saying a high school sophomore should be writing like Voltaire, but the fact that he lacks a basic grasp of writing shows the system has failed him. His teacher is trying to pick up the pieces, but it doesn’t seem like he wants help. He wants to push back on the idea that there are any rules to writing, which may work in a PhD English Literature program but not in a high school classroom.