Pseudonym #9

That's what V-coding is. That is why they are so adamant about sending trans women to men's prisons, because sex trafficking trans women within the men's prison system is an essential part of that system. Being misgendered by this isn't even an issue that's on our radar!

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

there are four petals on the flower of “my stupid students are the stupidest ever.” of these, one of them is kind of new (only kind of…) 1. we cannot relate to our stupid students because we are very interested in a subject that 99% of students do not care about. this is because we educators are the end product of a filtration machine, and we should be patient with ourselves. when we were young we also had to take courses which we were not that into at the time. let us not take it personally that they do not really give a shit about electromagnetism. 2. we cannot relate to our stupid students because we are naturally inclined to perform a kind of thinking that they are not good at. why would a tone deaf person take so many music classes that they could teach them at the end of it? they wouldn’t. people specialize in things they are good at naturally, things they have a talent for. let’s say your postsecondary education lasted 8 years. of those 8 years, 7 of them were spent with people who shared your natural affinities. but the students you teach do not. that’s okay, because you get to be the last word on their education in the subject.

3. we cannot relate to our stupid students because they are young and we are old. when i started teaching, i wore suit jackets to class to emphasize my position. this is no longer necessary, as the lines on my brow and the white in my hair do it for me. but what is now routine for me is still novel to them. and the mindset of youth which is now far over my horizon: that maelstrom of sex, death, change, uncertainty, poverty and novelty; they are currently in the throes of it all. so what seems to me to be a rational priority, may not be clear at all to them.

4. we cannot relate to our stupid students because they were educated differently from us and lack the core foundation required to build a strong education. (the subject of the op editorial) listen: it’s true to some degree. some politicians have been trying to make public education worse. and furthermore, since post secondary education is becoming mandatory for getting sit-down jobs, more and more students who lack an academic mindset are being pushed into it. the result: more bad students. i get it. but dig this, chums. imagine ww2 has just ended and you’ve got all these students on the GI bill coming into your halls. they grew up in the great depression, probably with nutritional deficits at key stages of development. they haven’t read a book other than a walkie talkie manual in 4 years. they might have ptsd, and a huge chip on their shoulder. they want to be eating baloney sandwiches and reading girly magazines but their momma told them that they’ve got an opportunity no one else in their family has ever had, so now they’re sitting in front of you and you have to teach them calculus? now, back to the present. who do you think had worse students to work with?

the challenge of educating students always starts with crappy lumber. and it always has. because that’s the dream itself. that’s the dream of public education. we are not educating princes with royal tutors. we take the whole keg: from the brim to the dregs, and we try to turn them into something helpful to the future. we try to continue the tradition. we pass onto their shoulders the endowment of humanity. it is vitally important that we do not allow the differentiation and formation of an educated upper class. it is vitally important that we do not walk into the classrooms expecting failure. we need to expect improvement.

this said, it sucks that public schools are sucking in different bad ways. especially since teachers are much better than they used to be. and it sucks that universities aren’t built around educating students (have they ever been)? but the key thing, the thing the politicians and administrators can’t take away from us is motivation. the kids with the butts in the seats? they have a dream and —even though they do not know what changes will be expected of them to achieve it— they are willing to gamble their time and energies to achieve it. their motivation is what has educated generation after generation of successful students. their motivation is the reverse-osmotic pressure which pushes them through the filter of academe. and it will persist. and the second is our motivation. we do the work to bridge the gap. we do the work to show these crappy pieces of lumber how to shave away at themselves, and glue themselves back into something powerful. into someone who can think and reason and compare and discern. and the way we do that isn’t just with our textbooks (no one reads) or our lectures (no one listens to) but also with our hearts. there is a bond between the instructors and the students. and this bond helps push them forward. helps motivate them to change themselves. helps pass our dreams of scholarship from their hands into the unknown future.

"fact:

the arabic word هواء /hawa/ means wind

the arabic word هوى /hawa/ means love

test: [multiple choice]

abdelhalim said you left me holding wind in my hands

or

abdelhalim said you left me holding love in my hands

abdelhalim was left empty

or

abdelhalim was left full

fairouz said a wind take me to my country

or

fairouz said a love take me to my country

fairouz is looking for vehicle

or

fairouz is looking for fuel

oum kalthoum said where the wind stops her ship we stop ours

oum kalthoum said where the love stops her ship we stop ours

oum kalthoum is stuck

or

oum kalthoum is home"

Tuesday, Wednesday tread through muck

Thursday maybe eat a duck

It’s Friday, Flat as Fuck

If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.

So 

Hey like...

It was a hillside, viewed across a gully. The recorder was on one ridge, looking out over the hills. It was late at night, and that mattered not at all, because the picture was ablaze with light. There was so much fire.

Fire's noisy, you know, if you haven't seen the recordings coming out in their hundreds from that nightmare. Fire roars, it screams as it devours all the oxygen it can get to and makes it into more of itself, so at first I couldn't hear the airplane. When it appeared, engine roaring, very low over the ridge, there was only a moment to understand what it even was before it dropped its payload of water on the burning hillside, and all at once the picture went out. The fire went out. The screaming brightness was replaced with gentler dark. In an instant.

The airplane was one of the Canadian Super Scoopers, piloted by a Canadian fire pilot of incredible skill--you know what kind of mastery it takes, to fly a plane that size, that low to the ground, at night, in a place where it's being buffeted by horrific and uneven fire-spawned updrafts and turbulence, carrying a payload of over fourteen thousand pounds of water, and then to dump that weight and still be able to fly straight instead of being suddenly slammed around by the weight change? And this was a person who with others like him had come to California to fight a fire that had nothing to do with them, for no reason other than human fucking decency.

When I saw the video the first time I burst into sobs. I have cried more than once thinking of it since, feeling again that incredible relief as the light went out. My home was on fire. I couldn't be there to do anything about it; it doesn't belong to me anymore. And here came brave strangers to save it.

The statute of limitations on arson is 6 years.

So whenever I remember an embarrassing or shameful thing I’ve done, I ask myself if it was worse than arson. If it wasn’t, and it was 6 or more years ago, I forgive myself.

Yes, fuck those ugly ass cyber trucks but FUCK that Space Center.

Starship genuine danger to the people who live here. It's to the point many of the people here when they heard the explosion joked that it was probably another one of Elon's rockets.

This is a horrifying pattern we are becoming numb to, we hear about a planned test launch and brace ourselves for more debris.

Several of Musk's attempts at rockets, especially after the deregulation, have resulted in catastrophic explosions. Want the list? Here are a few!!

December 9th, 2020- Starship serial No. 8, or SN8. Exploded upon landing.

February 2, 2021- Starship SN9. Exploded upon landing.

March 3rd. 2021- Starship SN10. Landed in one piece. Fire at the skirt caused an explosion.

April 20, 2023- Starship. Exploded once more. Debris scattered in Port Isabell.

March 6, 2025- Flight 8. Spun out of control and exploded in a mass of fireballs. Planes had to be grounded due to the mass explosion and the debris are stills scattered in the ocean.

And now we have the most recent and the worse one yet.

June 18-19, 2025- Starship 36 during a GROUND test caused a mass explosion, the looming mushroom cloud causing locals in Cameron to believed they had been bombed.

The loser describes this it as a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" instead of what they are: fiery failures locals have to deal with as a result.

Pretty much everyone locally knows Elon Musk and his negative impact on our home, people who have had the unfortunate curse to have worked with him and the center call it Cultish, 8 members of his staff who spoke out against his behavior and sexual harassment were all fired.

Its a well known fact he hates the people here, and he goes out of his way to find employees who are not from this area and move them down here.

Musk has tried to encourage even more white people to come down to South Texas and live in his "Starship City". An attempt to gentrify and push out local citizens.

Rebekah Hinojosa, a local Activist with Another Gulf Is Possible, even had her home unlawfully entered by police after an alleged graffiti on a mural he commisioned (which didn't even obscure the mural).

This article is a good read on everything Musk has done to South Texas

I am TIRED of this going unnoticed and unheard of the People of The Valley. I need you to stop laughing and start taking this seriously.

If you want to read more on all the insane shit this man has done to South Texas here are a few more Articles I would Recommend

Regarding economic coercion, that's called having a job. But also I promise you there is a world of difference between trying to buy a person (for the love of fuck will you people ever aknowledge its not only women in porn and work conditions are a concern for EVERYONE involved) and someone making a career in porn.

To help trafficked and coerced sex workers we necessarily must end the demonization of sex work or else you are giving traffickers the literal tools to force unwilling people into it!

One of my family members was sex trafficked. Her case became a part of state legal precedent because her trafficker's conviction resulted in an expanded definition of one of the terms used to define trafficking (kept vague for the sake of my family's anonymity.) You know what one of the biggest barriers was to her getting help?

The fact that everyone she reached out to saw her as a stupid meth head "whore" and not a person who was fucking afraid for her life.

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

1 [https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/7123389]

this was just the beginning of the harassment, though. CC additionally used her friend heidi, a lawyer, to send cease & desist letters and other forms of legal harassment against ppl. none of it would hold up in court and these sort of things weren't even heidi's area of expertise as a lawyer, but it still happened.

CC was such a terrible serial harasser that people started to leave her alone about the plagiarism stuff after a while because it was just not worth her blowing up your entire spot. not just with her lawyer, but with her minions who harassed targets on her behalf. getting a deluge of harassment is a horrible experience that hurts people, so of course people tried to avoid it.

i hate CC because she hurt lots of people. she did it intentionally, repeatedly, and with singular focus on covering her own ass no matter who she hurt.

“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:

It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.

You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.

Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.

Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%

During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.

When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.

You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.

You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.

If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.

Please feel free to share this.

And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.

However, per CNN and numerous other news outlets, as of Thursday afternoon, the outbreak has been at least partially traced to lettuce supplied to Taco Bell from Taylor Farms, in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

Other states and/or businesses could have received the same contaminated lettuce, or there could be multiple simultaneous outbreaks with different sources: currently, it's not clear.