Posted on 05/03/2026 2:31:29 PM PDT by DFG
A high school student in Philadelphia exposed how his classmates are struggling to read easy words and comprehend relatively simple sentences in a viral series of videos.
And he may have gotten in hot water for his trouble.
The videos, posted on TikTok, show the teenagers failing to read a sentence on a piece of paper while being filmed at the city’s Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers.
In the clip, made by user “whatthevek” earlier this week, not a single high school-aged student was able to read the sentence, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.”
He made a follow-up video a day later in which the students were apparently unable to make sense of the sentence, “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.”
The two videos racked up a combined 1.7 million likes and thousands of comments, but “whatthevek” later claimed he wouldn’t be making a third due to threats from authorities at Prep Charter.
“I would post a part three, but the school board is trying to expel me, stop me from going to prom, and stop me from walking at graduation. I don’t know chat,” he wrote in an Instagram story on Friday.
South Philly-based Prep Charter, one of the most diverse schools in the state, did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
State test scores show that just 53% of students at the school tested proficient in reading, and just 19% were proficient in math.
The video has sparked outrage, with many calling out the parents as well as the school.
“Yo late Gen Xers and older Millennials have failed their kids so badly. How can you neglect your child so badly, you don’t make sure they can read?!” one X user wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
It’s a very easy word.
You don’t have to go far to find evidence that many students today are poorly educated. Just watch some videos on Youtube channels like Prager U, Liberty Hangout or Mark Dice (Q: What year did Karl Marx, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth sign the Declaration of Independence? A: 1492).
Sorry to disappoint you. You’re in the right.
Agreed, that’s a p+ss poor sentence. Seems written to force the use of those three uncommon words. Probably conjured up by some unqualified TA that got the assignment to make sentences from a list of target words, and the test creator was too lazy to check it.
And then I had a cookie and that made everything ok again.
Thank goodness. Well I, for one, will reform.
There was a gameshow skit on SNL that was as bit like Password and Family Fued. Two teams of two people. One teammate pitching questions to the other. The goal was not to give the correct answer but the most popular answer.
Which war ened slavery? World War One? World War Two!
What year was America discovered? 1776!
What orbits the earth? You see it at night. Almost every day… Oh! The Sun!
Elton John is… The Queen of England!
A cast member played Jean Kirkpatrick, former US ambassador to the UN. She gave correct answers and was going nuts because her teammate kept saying “No…Nope…Nooo…”
“Remember, Jean: we’re looking for the most _popular_ answers to the question!”
This very sentence was a topic of heated discussion on Reddit the last couple of days, and some in the fashion business defended the use of “silhouette” as a fashion industry term and thus appropriate, while most didn’t like the choice of “silhouette” but were mainly arguing about the verb “were” vs. “was” in the sentence: was it the silhouette that was extraordinary but gauche, or the clothes that were extraordinary but gauche?
The clothes are collectively called a ‘silhouette,’ yes? Then I should think if “silhouette of clothes” is a proper term, then _it_ (the silhouette) _was_ “extraordinary but somewhat gauche.”
She told me what they were and how to spell it.
I was 5 at the time.
Oh please.
That’s it!
I can define every word in that sentence, but I have no idea what that sentence means.
A silhouette is an image where light and dark shade high light one image with respect to a back ground image.
So...she was wearing...perfectly coordinated light and dark clothing?
What!
this
Common Core
the intentional dumbing down
My grandma taught in NYC Public for 55 years.
Her two most durable comments on what can and cannot be done by the teachers were:
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, and “well, somebody has to clean the subways”.
At her funeral (she was 96) people in their 70s that she taught as children on the Lower East Side came to express their gratitude for how she “made them Americans”.
I went to school in the 50s and 60s, when I went to the NCO Academy in the early 80s, before any college, we had to take a literacy test before the course - I scored as 3rd-4th year college grad level. Today, I might be awarded a PHD ....
In the garment industry and the world of fashion design, a garment's "silhouette" refers only to the shape it takes when it is worn by a person, and not to its color.
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