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The US is COOKED
(hexbear.net)
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
The confluence of societal and governmental factors leading to these outcomes is an irredeemable tragedy. Nobody gives a fuck about education and the consequences are accelerating
no need to apologize, i have a math degree and i was of the mind that people were overreacting about the extent of calculator use since most of the arguments are reactionary before i started working in a school.
but lo and behold, no, for reasons entirely other than what most people would think, it's absolutely killing the kids.
It's absolutely true, you can give someone a basic arithmetic problem (addition, subtraction, simple multiplication) and the first reaction is to grab a calculator. I have to interrupt my learners, and be like, "no, you don't need a calculator to multiply this by ten, I promise you will waste more time pulling it out then just thinking about the answer".
I have had classes where I get my learners to look at their calculator history, and they realize how many really basic things they offloaded to their phones that they absolutely knew if they were just willing to consider it for a few seconds.
it's been really stunning to observe for me. a lot of the students i work with, when i've insisted on trying to do the arithmetic without a calculator, has been to simply fucking guess.
this is partly a problem i think of our local education system and how little effort they require from middle-school students (ages ~12-14) to simply pass them through, but it's still off-putting to observe.
I'm not in the US, but a very similar country, and I don't work with kids; I work with adult learners (the majority of whom have learning disabilities and/or external learning barriers). So my learners are all people who have been entirely failed by the education system. And from my experience it starts really early. Those first few years of educational development are completely cocked. Most parents can't (the majority) or won't (fewer, but still exists) take any of the early education on as a parental responsibility. So the very beginning of someone's educational journey doesn't start until like, five years old, where they are already behind their peers.
And then, and I will especially focus on math here, those early ages of number sense development are abysmal. Under-resourced and over-populated classrooms, a complete lack of necessary supports, and often just terrible pedagogical practices lead to kids falling behind immediately. But they're pushed through, though of course without the early number sense they can't understand the arithmetic. And this continues the entire time they're in school.
Essentially set up to fail from the start. And of course many of them develop math aversion because they never mastered the fundamentals so every subsequent step just grew farther out of their comprehension until they internalize that they're just not good at math, or aren't math people, without considering that math is a skill that can be learned like any other.
I'm very fortunate that my work lets me teach math in a very different way, from number sense to trig; I've seen people who have spent thirty, forty years thinking they would never do arithmetic grow comfortable and confident in algebra. For those working with kids and knowing that they are going to leave that school without having learned, for instance, basic financial skills...that's gotta be bleak as hell. Kids are getting majorly screwed over.
It's sad how institutional failures mount. The educational death by a thousand cuts.
that's really cool work, very much the same phenomenon at work here in large swathes of the u.s..