Students React to The Great Gatsby Amid Declining Reading Scores

I teach high school English, and we just got done reading The Great Gatsby in class, and these are some of the things my students said while we read it. "Why'd the dude write like this? Bro is doing too much.

It's like Old English or something." "Tom's tough, but Gatsby's tougher."

"Daisy is a bop, low-key. Like, am I wrong?

Exactly. No, I'm not." "There's no way people used to talk like this.

The writing is performative AF." And I said, "Yes, they did, because it's modern English, not Old English." And they said, "So what?

Did we all just get dumber or something?"

There was a line where Nick is describing how hot the day is and how they're all sweating and really uncomfortable, and he says that his underwear is snaking up his leg, and a student said, "Yo, Miss, why is he telling us about his snake?"

When we watched the movie, I asked them, "Were the characters what you thought they would be like?" And a reply was, "I mean, not really. Like, bruh, I thought Daisy be, like, hot."

And finally, I asked them, "Can anyone remind us what big event happened in chapter eight?" And someone replied, "Yeah, that dude came over and Gatsby got slimed out."

Thank you. The only thing I can think of after watching this is we are literally doomed. It just gets worse and worse for the kids that we have in school, and if you look at the comments, everyone seems to agree here.

The silence after, "Did we all just get dumber?"

and then she kind of rolls her eyes, I mean, that was just classic. Twenty-three thousand likes on that.

So did we all actually get dumber? Well, the answer to that is yes, and here are the results. The average reading scores have declined in recent years, further drops in twenty nineteen and then after the pandemic.

And look at this, twelfth grade reading, which is high school, this woman is a high school teacher, it looks like average scores were the lowest since the assessment began in nineteen ninety-two.

So right now, reading levels for high school students, even graduating high school students, are the lowest they have ever been. That is where we are.