Why My Teen Says ‘School Makes Me Dumber’ And What We Can Do About It
I’m pulling tater tots out of the oven last Tuesday, right after my 14-year-old Javi’s soccer practice, when he slams his hole-punctured backpack onto the kitchen counter and grabs for the ketchup I leave in the fridge door. His socks are caked in mud, he reeks of lemon Gatorade and cut grass, and when I ask how school went, he doesn’t give me the usual mumbled “fine.”
“I’m so frustrated,” he says, slamming the fridge door hard enough that the magnets rattle. “No one gets it. They don’t even stop to think about caring about our mental health. And what’s the point anyway? Do I need to know what the powerhouse of the cell is to buy a pack of ketchup?” He crosses his arms, leans against the counter, and says it flat out: “School makes us dumber.”
The tater tots are starting to smoke a little because I forgot to set the timer, and normally I’d brush this off. I’d roll my eyes a little, remind him that biology is required for the end-of-course test, that this is just how high school works, that he needs to suck it up to get into college. But I’d seen the purple circles under his eyes that morning, knew he’d stayed up until 11 finishing a history project that just required memorizing 32 Supreme Court case dates, so I shut the oven door and sat down on the counter next to him instead of fighting.
He kept going. This week alone, he’d had two unit tests, a lab report due, and the school guidance counselor was out for three days straight. When he’d asked to talk to someone after a kid from 11th grade moved away suddenly following a family crisis, the office told him he’d have to wait two more weeks. No teacher had checked in on the class, no one had paused lessons for five minutes to ask how anyone was feeling. They just kept handing out more worksheets, more deadlines, more stuff to memorize. “All we do is cram it in for the test then forget it 10 minutes later,” he said. “How is that making me smarter?”
I’ve heard this exact line from three other parents of teens in the last month, and I’ve started to realize it’s not just lazy teen complaining. When Javi says school makes him dumber, he doesn’t mean he’s not picking up facts. He means the system prioritizes checking boxes and grading easy rote memorization over actual thinking, and it’s squeezed out almost all space for the messy, human work of caring about how kids feel. It’s not that he doesn’t want to learn. It’s that learning has become so tied to stress and useless hoops that it doesn’t even feel like learning anymore.
The first thing I changed that actually made a difference is I stopped arguing with the silly-sounding questions. Instead of saying “you need this for the test,” I just say, “That’s a really fair question. Why do you have to know this anyway?” It’s a tiny phrase, but it takes away the defensiveness right away. When we talked about the mitochondria question that day, we pulled it up on my phone right there. We found dozens of threads from teachers admitting that the “powerhouse of the cell” fact is just a default, easy-to-test mnemonic that no one has ever questioned the usefulness of. We ended up talking for 20 minutes about how cells work, and how if he was learning about cell function to understand his grandma’s Type 2 diabetes, that would feel different – that matters to our family. But memorizing a nickname to check a box on a test? It’s just wasted time.
I also added a 15-minute “no-grade learning” window to our daily routine after dinner. No tests, no requirements, no assignments – Javi picks whatever he wants to talk about or figure out. Some days it’s how to adjust the brakes on the old BMX he’s restoring. Some days it’s why his favorite TikTok creator switched platforms. Some days it’s just scrolling through photos of rescue dogs. It doesn’t sound like much, but it reminds him that learning isn’t all stress and deadlines. It’s just figuring out stuff you care about.
For teachers who read this, I heard from a 9th grade biology teacher friend that she made a tiny change a few years ago that shifted how her class feels: she swaps one rote memorization question on every test for an open-ended one. It adds maybe five minutes of extra grading per test, and it asks kids to connect the material to their own lives. Instead of “what is the powerhouse of the cell,” it’s “name one part of the cell and explain how it relates to something you do outside of class.” It’s low effort, low friction, and it makes the material feel actually relevant.
It’s not all perfect. I asked the admin team at Javi’s school last month to spread midterms over two weeks instead of cramming them all into five straight days, and they said the schedule was set months in advance and couldn’t be changed. I didn’t fight a big battle. I just told Javi he could skip his second period study hall – which was just silent reading for kids who’d already finished their work – to walk around the park across the street and get a soda when he felt overwhelmed. When the system won’t change, you make small changes for your kid.
Last Saturday, Javi biked to the corner store to pick up ketchup and hot dogs for our grill. He sent me a selfie from the checkout line, holding up the bottle, with the text: “Still didn’t need the mitochondria fact for this.” I texted back “Point taken.” He still hates most school days, he still says it makes him dumber more often than not. We haven’t fixed the system, and we probably won’t any time soon. But we’re learning how to carve out space for his mental health, and for the curiosity that school has a way of squeezing out. Some days that’s enough.
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