20+ Teachers share their most unhinged Gen Alpha student stories that still keep them up at night: 'Several of them can't tell time... on a digital clock'

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Isabella Penn
Jun 14, 2025 1:00 PM EDT

Teaching has never exactly been a stress-free job, but these days, it feels like educators are dealing with pure chaos well above their pay grade. We used to think we had it rough growing up, but Gen Alpha? These kids are navigating a whole new level of brain rot. Teachers are now fighting an uphill battle against shrinking attention spans, a steady stream of TikTok misinformation, and the massive educational gaps left behind by you know what. That global event from five years ago uprooted everything.

While many of us in the corporate world were secretly thrilled to ditch our morning commutes and discover the joys of working in pajama pants, school-age kids weren't so lucky. Foundational learning just didn't happen. My mom's a teacher, and I remember her district giving every student a laptop to use for remote learning. Great in theory, but how exactly is a kindergartener supposed to attend Zoom school when they can't even read yet?

According to these teachers, the fallout is real, and they're here to share their unhinged Gen Alpha horror stories to prove it.

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  • "Teachers of Reddit, what are your most terrifying "Gen Alpha Can't Read/Behave/Etc." horror stories?"

    Elcenervant Unkocht bin ich deise und melde mich wine, ich kus sagin Mi Do F Mathe
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  • Your_Gonna Hate_This Teacher friend told me that for years she's been seeing ability to interact with technology decline.
    via Your_Gonna Hate_This
  • She says a lot of her students now basically have the same ability to solve problems on a computer that you'd expect from your grandparents. I suspect growing up in the very curated world of tablets and apps has allowed them to skip all the trouble shooting lessons millennials had to learn on old computers and the early internet.
    via Your_Gonna Hate_This
  • TheRexRider I graduated over 10 year ago with a class that was filled with seniors that had to slowly sound out every single letter. You're telling me it got worse?
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  • get_your_mood_right I teach highschool math. I've encountered many students who were operating at maybe a 2nd grade level of math.
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  • Seniors who couldn't do 2x3 in their heads. Juniors who didn't know what a square root was. Juniors who didn't know how to multiply by 0 or 1.
    via get_your_mood_right
  • Seniors who couldn't solve for x in x + 1 = 8. Freshmen who couldn't ADD OR SUBTRACT I had one sophomore this year who could not wrap her mind around "20 more than" in a certain type of problem. I tried for a few
    via get_your_mood_right
  • minutes before saying "let's say you and I go into a store. I'm going to buy some number of apples. and you plan on buying 20 more apples than what I buy. If I buy 5 apples, how many would you buy?" ...."20?"
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  • BLACKBIRD 3 Л D
    via CDC For Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story

  • THE_GR8_MIKE My friend teaches 5th grade. He's just now getting the kids that were learning to read when co id happened..
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  • He said several of them can't tell time. On a digital clock.
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  • gecko_sticky Not a teacher but an educator at a museum: I had a parent allow their child of 3-5 (I had no idea their age but they were walking and talking but still pretty small) to open random drawers and cabnets which included a cleaning supplies closet and attempt to play with industrial grade cleaning materials. When I
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  • asked her not to do that she told me I was discouraging his creativity and argued that since we are an interactive museum, everything is part of the exhibit (it isn't). Upon me asking him to stop she stormed off. The issue here is very much the parents, but I've also seen this type of behavior from children who
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  • would in theory know not to attempt to play in a janitor's closet or in one case climb on a 1905 firetruck behind a series of ropes. with a sign that says "DO NOT TOUCH". There were certain times we had to lock up our chickens (we had an outdoor component) in a tall fenced area or leave them in the coop all day due to children
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  • attempting to ride the chickens like a horse (no chickens were hurt) or throw things like pencils at them. And while this all happens; the parents are nowhere to be found or just do not intervene at all.
    via gecko_sticky
  • Edit: I do not really blame the children for any of this as it is primarily a parenting issue. Both being too violent/mean and being practically absent contribute to bad behavior, along with excessive device use from both kids and parents (especially parents who use devices as a "shut up" tool).
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  • Your kids are little people. They are not just accessories or robots to program to act how you want them to with enough beating or shouting. Working with your kids, explaining why things are and are not the way they are, and enforcing reasonable and logical consequences is how you get some of this to stop. I have had
    via gecko_sticky
  • a lot of "bad kids" come through my museum and behave well for me because | treated them with respect and gave them structure with my lessons which I included them in. I know not everyone has the ability to be as freeform with how they teach or parent. But
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  • its never the kid's fault and even if their behavior made my™ job harder I never blamed. them for it. Life sks when your new to the world and trying to figure it all out. The least we can do is be good. examples even if we only cross paths once.
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  • UniqueUsername82D I've taught 9-12th for the last 9 years. The scariest thing for me is they can't THINK. Problem solving, trouble shooting, reasoning... there are so many kids who have little processing power, and
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  • seems to be getting rapidly worse in the last couple of years. I think it's Tiktok; they don't even have time to think about the bite-size piece of media they just consumed before the next one is up.
    via UniqueUsername82D
  • Asleep_Breadfruit_18 I asked an undergraduate student for their opinion on ai text, they pulled out their phone, typed my question. into ChatGPT and then read aloud the answer it gave.
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  • Scottishdog1120 I had a pre-k student whose speech was unintelligible. He could not communicate. So I told his mom he needed to be tested for speech therapy and she replied, "Awww, so wont baby talk anymore? I'm gonna miss hearing that!"
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  • Outrageous_Owl_9315 High school student asked me what it means to "put it in his own words" instead of copying and pasting.
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  • fastfood12 One of my fourth graders was provisionally promoted from third grade in the middle of the school year. He was reading at a first grade leve!! when he arrived in my class.
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  • He hit his 14-day suspension cap quickly because he was constantly fighting with other kids instead of actually trying to learn. The guidance counselor pulled him out to do a therapeutic art project one afternoon. That's how we discovered that he doesn't know his shapes either. It was
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  • one of the worst cases of educational neglect that I've seen. Of course, the parent was upset that her kid was not on honor roll and demanded to know why he was failing every subject. Ohili yeah, the regional superintendent overruled us and promoted him to fifth grade.
    via fastfood12
  • mboron021990 I'm not a teacher but a former janitor, and all I can say is urine and feces EVERYWHERE!!!
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  • lucianw A friend is a music teacher in high school. He said that he hasn't observed gen-alpha brain rot in his students. He thinks it's specifically because music is an antidote for brain rot -- it encourages patience and attentiveness.
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  • wolfeyes555 More hilarious than terrifying. My good friend is a high school teacher, usually teaching Seniors. One day she gave a research assignment about the Legend of Sleepy Hallow.
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  • One of the papers she had gotten back really confused her because it started going off about mysteries and time travel. Then it hit her, this student had done the old "Look up the Wikipedia article and write about that" but had accidentally pulled. up the 2013 show.
    via wolfeyes555

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