I’m a tutor and a substitute teacher working on getting a full time credential. The mantra is always something about no child left behind or how every kid has potential to do good.

No. Some kids are just fucking stupid.

I’ve tutored a high schooler who legitimately did not know what 2+2 was, and they weren’t special Ed or trying to be funny or anything like that. Some people are just stupid and it’s their own fault they fail, not the fault of anyone around them. No amount of extra hard work from their teachers or tutors will make them smarter. They’ll always be stupid. They’re the kids where you painstakingly walk them through every single step in solving a problem, and then for the next one they have no idea what to do even though it’s the exact same problem with slightly different numbers or words, and then you repeat this process every day 5 days a week until it’s summer break and you’ve gotten nowhere the entire time with them.

They should be given up on. These people don’t even want to succeed in academics. They’re the ones talking about how you can’t ask a fish to climb a tree to justify how it’s okay that they suck at important life skills but they’re semi decent at fortnite dancing and hot dog eating, as if the skills are comparable in value. Not only are they so thick that their brain is locked behind an impenetrable brick wall, but they straight up don’t even think an education is valuable so they don’t give a shit anyways. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to force teachers to teach at the pace of the slowest kid, take time away from those who can learn to dedicate more time to the idiot, and to hire a tutor to try to magically make the idiot smarter.

Valuable time and resources dedicated to helping these failures shouldn’t be given to them. That extra time should be spent working with the kids who actually can learn and want to learn. Plenty of parents have thrown hundreds of dollars at me a month to make their kid smarter and get better grades, only for their kid to be completely hopeless. It was a waste of their money and I knew from the first day that their kid wouldn’t learn shit from me.

These kids just need to be left behind. It’s not right to make everyone else worse off just to try to pour resources and time into a human who’s brain is a bag with a hole in the bottom