MONROE, N.C. — With tight budgets being an increasingly growing problem for grade schools in today’s economy, more schools are parting ways with the traditional teacher-student model of education. Many schools are now turning to the plentiful resources of Reddit, the popular website of seemingly endless content from around the internet.
One of these schools ditching teachers for computers is Andrew Jackson High School in Monroe, North Carolina. Principal Kenny Tedford argued, “It’s a huge money-saver for us. Plus, we’ve eliminated the hassle of dealing with teacher unions, and now kids are excited to come to school because they get to learn using something they’re probably already addicted to.”
A common trend among these ‘reddit schools’ is subreddit-specific classes. One class is TIL [Today I Learned], where students explore the TIL subreddit filled with extremely random and useless tidbits.
One student reported, “Today I learned Benjamin Franklin enjoyed getting lightly shocked by lightning striking his key on a kite contraption because he found it slightly arousing. You can’t get this stuff from textbooks. I feel like such a historian!”
Another frequent class is AMA [Ask Me Anything]. “In AMA class, students interact with individuals from interesting career fields and unique walks-of-life,” explained Principal Tedford. However, some parents believe these AMA’s can stray in to sketchy areas of discussion.
A concerned parent alleged, “My daughter’s class participated in an AMA with a meth addict, and he told the kids that you need drugs to be happy when you’re a grown up and the government’s trying to poison us all with those ‘damn vaccines.’ I don’t think our kids should be traumatized by strangers on the internet at school. They can do it on their own time while at home.”
