A teacher in Texas broke down in tears after realising that the seniors he was teaching could not complete a simple written exercise. Red-eyed from crying, Darius Williams, a teacher at Wheatley High School in the Houston Independent School District, said in a video posted on social media that he was unable to finish the first lesson of the second day of the school year.
The reason, according to what he said in the video, was the extremely low literacy level of his students, which overwhelmed him.
“I’d just finished a three-hour lesson and I literally broke down in the middle of the classroom,” Williams said in a video he posted on Instagram during his lunch break on Tuesday.
Williams, who teaches Career and Technical Education under Houston ISD’s New Education System (NES) programme, said he gave his students, all of them seniors, two paragraphs to read and asked them to complete a sentence he had almost entirely prepared for them. He was left stunned when they could not finish the task.
“I basically completed the sentence for them,” he said. “These are 17 and 18-year-old kids and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words!” Williams exclaimed.
“I gave them the script, we took notes together. I gave them the answers before we’d even looked at the problem, and they still couldn’t do it. I don’t know, I honestly don’t know where the problem lies,” he said, visibly frustrated.
“It’s only the second day and I’ve got seniors who simply can’t read, and seniors who can’t write. They can’t write,” he shouted, in tears.The exhausted teacher said his students are able to speak, argue and defend their thinking, but cannot apply those skills to written work.
Teacher faces harsh backlash
Williams faced fierce criticism after the video was published, with critics questioning his qualifications as an educator, according to the New York Post.
The teacher, who also has a following as a cooking influencer, pointed to his second degree, awarded by Berklee College of Music last April, and said he is enrolled on a postgraduate programme at the American College of Education, where he is studying Curriculum and Instruction.
He also listed his numerous certifications, including those from the State of Texas and the Texas Education Agency.
“For those of you who might have an issue with me teaching young adults, take it on yourselves, go and do it. Get certified, go into these schools, take a class, stand in front of 22 kids every single teaching hour, and let’s see how well you do,” he said.
Williams’ breakdown in the middle of class came just days after it emerged that the majority of New York students in grades three to five had failed their English Language Arts (ELA) exams last school year.
Preliminary results released this week by the state’s Department of Education showed that 57 percent of third-graders, 52 percent of fourth-graders and 57 percent of fifth-graders failed to reach the required scores on their exams for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Just 48 percent of students in the grades tested were rated proficient in English, a “significant” five percentage point drop compared with the previous year, the department said.
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