Black Texas teacher weeps when revealing senior high schoolers can't read or write

A Texas high school teacher was moved to tears and said that he broke down in front of his class because he is teaching seniors in high school, where many of them cannot read or even write one sentence.

Darius Williams, who teaches at Wheatley High School within Houston ISD, shared a video on Instagram where he described struggling to hold it together. Recording during his lunch break on Tuesday, he explained that he'd just wrapped a three-hour class and had gotten emotional partway through it.

"I just finished a three-hour class, and I literally broke down in the middle of class,” Williams said in the video that has gone viral online.

Williams, who works in the district's New Education System Career and Technical Education program, said he'd given his senior class two short reading passages along with a sentence that was almost entirely filled in for them, leaving them just four words to complete, but they could not bring themselves to write them.

He noted these were students aged 17 and 18 who couldn't write "four words."

“I basically completed the sentence for them. These are 17- and 18-year-old kids, and they couldn’t fill in four words. Four words!” Williams exclaimed.

"I gave them the scenario, we annotated together. I gave them the answers before we even had the problem and they couldn’t do it. I don’t know, I simply don’t know where the problem is,” he added.

“This is only day two, and I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write. They cannot write,” Williams said as he cried.

Backlash ensued against Williams after he posted video, with some calling his qualifications into question.

The teacher, who also has a cooking influencer social media page, showed his degree from Berklee College of Music and said he was enrolled in a master’s program at the American College of Education.

“I have all of my certifications lined up,” Williams shared in a follow-up video.

“For those of you who may have an issue or problem with me teaching young adults, take the charge, you do it. You get certified walk into these high schools, you get a classroom, you stand in front of 22 kids each period and let me see how well you do,” he said.