A high school teacher went viral this week with a video showing his students’ horrified reaction to his instructions to write a paragraph.

When he clarifies that a paragraph means five complete sentences, the outcry intensifies, leaving both the teacher and viewers stunned at how dire the situation has become.

Can high school kids write a paragraph?

In the video posted Wednesday, high school teacher and coach Eli Carbullido demonstrated how dire the situation is in American schools. The footage shows him sitting at his desk as he begins to relay instructions for a simple writing exercise.

“In a paragraph,” he said before the students moaned and muttered their objections. “Oh my gosh!”

It then skips ahead to him explaining what a paragraph means.

“You know what a complete sentence is,” he said with a hint of fear in his eyes. “Five sentences.”

At this demand, the class erupted in outrage.

“Five sentences?” multiple students gasped.

“That’s like a test on its own,” claimed another.

“That’s a test on its own?” Carbullido echoed in disbelief. “Five complete sentences?”

This young man is new to teaching at just 23 years old and may not have yet realized just how bad things have become in U.S. public schools. At the end of the previous school year, one TikTok teacher said she quit because her own sophomores couldn’t even read.

“Technology is ruining education,” she said. “[It’s] directly contributing to the literacy decrease we’re seeing.”

@eli_carbullido They literally act like the world is ending 😭 #fyp #apathy #historyteacher #highschoolstudent #youngteacher ♬ original sound – Eli Carbullido

“They’d have died growing up in the 90’s”

Stories like these about the decline in students’ abilities to read, write, and do basic math have been horrifying the internet for years now. In the comments on Carbullido’s video, adults reminisced about how writing assignments used to be.

“How is 5 sentences crazy,” asked @loraxitive. “Paragraphs used to be like 8-12 stg.”

“They’d have died growing up in the 90’s,” wrote @genx79.stephanie. “We had to write rough drafts AND final drafts.

As always, there were folks convinced that this spells the end of all things.

“5 sentences is nothing,” said @mollie.beth, “we’re cooked chat.”

“This is genuinely scary,” @isswunga wrote.

The fear continued after the video spread to X, where @capableoflovers expressed that “this is actually so scary to me like we quite literally have watched the world be dumbed down before our very eyes.”

The Nation’s Report Card, compiled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), returned disappointing results for 2024. They found that reading scores for high school seniors fell to their lowest since 1992. These scores declined significantly for grades four and eight as well.

Harvard Graduate School of Education dean Martin West also suspects the culprit is modern technology.

“I don’t think we have smoking gun evidence that the rise of screen-based childhood is a direct contributor to the literacy trends that we’re seeing,” he said on Harvard Thinking. “But I’m willing to put it very high on my list of potential suspects.”

The Daily Dot has reached out to @eli_carbullido for comment via TikTok.

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The post “Genuinely scary”: Teacher shows students’ meltdown after being asked to write one paragraph appeared first on The Daily Dot.

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