It’s no secret that many kids are getting left behind in the education system. When I was a kid, America was all about not leaving kids behind in this exact setting (when I was a kid, I thought it was about getting left behind at the grocery store), but now that it’s been 20 years since that initiative, many kids were promoted when they shouldn’t have been. 

The emergence of the smartphone and the younger generations’ unfiltered access to social media has not made more technologically savvy kids. Instead, we have a generation of kids who know how to look up YouTubers but can’t use a Microsoft Word document. Things sound much more dire when you read the stories of teachers trying their best to educate a terribly uninformed group of kids. One teacher took to Reddit to share all of the basic skills her students don’t have, inviting other teachers to share their all too similar stories.