“This time it’s different”: Teacher of 29 years says this year’s students are the most disrespectful and distracted yet—and others agree

A 9th-grade teacher with nearly three decades of experience says this year’s students are the hardest to manage yet, citing unprecedented levels of disrespect and distraction. Parents, teachers, and researchers have worried for years that the ever-increasing use of the internet and smartphones among children is impacting their ability to learn.

Teacher says, “this year’s 9th graders are the worst I have ever had”

Especially since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. teachers have been reporting an alarming decline in performance among students of all ages. Kids are behind in reading, math, and general knowledge, and they can’t seem to pay attention for more than a few seconds.

One teacher on the r/confessions sub echoed these concerns in their post.

“I have been a teacher for 29 years. During that time, I have had good classes of students and not-so-good classes of students,” they wrote. “NEVER in my life have I experienced the level of frustration that I am experiencing with this year’s 9th graders.

“Don’t get me wrong, there are some great kids in my classes, but on the whole, the level of disrespect and inability to stay focused on their tasks is off the chart. My patience is at an end. This might be the year that I am done.”

Teachers across grade levels say the problem is getting worse

Other teachers on Reddit assured u/mcub66 that they’re not alone in their experience.

“I feel you 100% friend, I teach Kindergarten,” said u/ruby–moon. “People regularly say to me, ‘They’re 5, how bad can they be?’ And I get it, because I never thought a 5 year old could be this bad either—but trust me, it’s bad.”

“It’s not you. We have no chance of holding their attention when their other option is to stare at a screen.”

The post spread to X, where users worried about what this means for the future.

“Can’t believe I’m saying this but… I think this time is different,” wrote @elocinationn. “Do scientific experiments imitate life, or does life imitate experiments? Short form video is like the operant conditioning chamber. You know, mouse in a box, pressing a lever.”

“I see the way my friends (educated, middle-class) are parenting their toddlers: no screen time, books galore, exposure to enrichment activities, and there’s going to be a divide along class lines so vast I don’t even think we can fathom it right now,” predicted @moniza_hossain.

How bad have our attention spans become?

Studies from 2024 confirmed that attention spans among young people are declining, and this corresponded with more use of social media. One study submitted to the National University Sanford College of Education posited that TikTok, in particular, is impacting the learning abilities of elementary school students.

In 2021, a follow-up study to one from the early 2000s that measured the average attention span while using tech devices at 2.5 minutes had to revise that average down to 47 seconds.

The researchers attributed this to the frequent “task switching” that the internet encourages. As users seek little dopamine hits from social media, they switch their attention frequently, and often faster, the more they use it.

While early promoters of social media hoped this would make us better multitaskers, it made our brains less able to stick to any one task, such as focusing on a lecture.

“It’s not just the fact that there’s algorithms catching our attention,” University of California Professor of Informatics Gloria Mark told TIME. “We have this sense that we have to respond, we have to check.”