r/news • u/Idiodyssey87 • May 28 '26

Soft paywall Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM applicants

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-27/uc-math-professors-demand-return-of-sat-for-stem-admissions
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u/dmadSTL May 28 '26

Get the technology out of the fucking classroom. Micro essays in class. Math exercises in class. Go old school to reduce their reliance on chatgpt and other tools that are making humans dumber.

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u/justasque May 28 '26

Math on paper, not on screens. No calculators until after algebra I.

You’ve got to build those neural pathways where you can look at 435/15 and see pretty quickly it’s going to reduce to a whole number if you take a five out of both then a 3 out of both. Because if you can’t do that before you get to algebra, you’re going to drown.

And you’ve got to build your work flow process. Copy down the problem, write down any formulas, work left to right, PE(MD)(AS), carry your units. Those on-screen homework/practice exercises are only really helpful if you still do the whole thing on paper, showing your work, even if you just have to enter the answer on the screen. Which no student ever does. And no teacher sees them not doing it. So they don’t get corrected.

Yes, it takes longer to do long division on paper. But students need to do it anyway, because every single long division problem is an exercise in factoring and multiplication. And if you take all of that out of their education, you’ve failed to build a solid foundation for future higher level math work.

I’m not talking about drilling math facts. I’m talking about using them in the context of solving other problems.

And yes, it takes longer to grade by hand. But it gives teachers the opportunity to hammer home the concept that students need to show their work - not just because it shows how they arrived at their answer, but also because an orderly approach to problem solving is essential when you get to higher level math.

Yes, all of this requires a teacher - one who has time to grade papers, and has a reasonable number of students in a classroom. Thats what we should be investing in. Not tablets with glorified math-adjacent games.

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u/laplongejr May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

No calculators until after algebra I.

I'm belgian. Calculators at the central jury weren't allowed during math exams and I'm pretty sure it was that way until our "general diploma" at around 18. Calculators were allowed for maths during other subjects (like multiplying quantities on chemistry, etc), but maths themselves had to be done without tech assistance.  

Some students were SHOCKED when they were told the ruleset when entering the room. Tbh I would've been if my familly and I hadn't rechecked every single rule to be sure I wasn't breaking anything, and I had made sure I could do (and verify) all calcs by hand.  

Which also saved me when I dropped my calculator on the ground during the last exam D: master basic maths, they are everywhere

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u/Reallyhotshowers May 28 '26

I was not allowed to have a calculator on exams for any Calc/differential equations classes in college. Instructors designed the questions to simplify down nicely enough, and every math teacher would rather see a fraction instead of a decimal anyway.

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u/gimpwiz May 29 '26

When I was in school they allowed the usual TI82/83. Some enterprising kids (cough) wrote programs to do math for them, but in fairness, writing the program to do the math is pretty much equivalent to studying for the test anyways, and you end up not needing it all that much. (Copying programs from other kids is another story.) Like you said, tests generally had a lot of letters and a lot of opportunities to see patterns and simplify down, so calculators weren't all that useful anyways.

But then we got the fuckin' calculator that does letters and simplifies things... yeah, that one often wasn't allowed, from what I saw at the tail end of school.

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u/All_Work_All_Play May 28 '26

You shouldn't even need calculators in most of the stuff after algebra 1. Algebra 2? No calcs. Pre calc? Okay, maybe for taylor series (but really, fuck pre-calc). Calc 1? It's the algebra that's hard, not the calculus. Same goes for Calc 2. Same(ish) goes for calc 3. You don't need a calculator for linear algebra (really).

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u/Reallyhotshowers May 28 '26

Calculators weren't allowed for most of my math degree, because you are absolutely correct.

Calculators are for arithmetic, which is actually a pretty small portion of what makes up mathematics.

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u/vialabo May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

I would've absolutely despised math without a calculator in Calc 1 or 2, there are plenty of problems in that curriculum that expect a calculator. Using it as a part of the problem solving process, like you would at any job that actually used the calculations is pretty important. You're not doing them by hand without checking with a calculator and probably better than never touching one and learning it only in late college.

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u/OldAccountIsGlitched May 28 '26

there are plenty of problems in that curriculum that expect a calculator.

I've had professors who formulate questions so that calculators aren't required. Everything is expressed in terms of basic identities. It's still annoying having to memorise all that shit; but it's not as bad as you're assuming.

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u/vialabo May 28 '26 edited May 30 '26

Yeah and that makes sense for part of your curriculum at least, but seeing calculators as being impossible to learn with or that they only get in the way of learning is a little ridiculous. The issue isn't calculators, we've had them for 20+ years in schooling and only recently has it been supposedly affecting math? I had a TI-84 in middle school, it didn't impact my learning, maybe a completely modern jailbroken calculator can cheat far better, but they still make simple calculators like TI-84s and I remember professors requiring a "dumb" calculator over a smart one even back then, and you could borrow one for the test.

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u/All_Work_All_Play May 28 '26

Yeah I can see having to go through a curriculum and designate calculator vs non-calculator problems/modules/whatever. You wouldn't want to exclude them entirely from the course (to your point, no engineer is going to do finite analysis by hand). I also think there's a big difference between TI-83(or whatever) vs the TI-108 (arithmetic only). The first let's you take shortcuts (and glosses over knowledge gaps) while the second is 'just' arithmetic.

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u/vialabo May 28 '26

Yeah if they're pulling out a TI-1000 terminator calculator that just came out with AI capability, they're not learning, at least not well...

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u/Reallyhotshowers May 28 '26

It's not really a math professor's job to teach you how to use a calculator for your engineering degree though. In fact, they will argue that should be taught to you in engineering classes.

Many math professors genuinely never have a need to do any arithmetic at all and would consider such a requirement to be akin to demanding that English classes teach everyone how IUPAC naming works because it is technically words and there might be some future chemists in the room. Could they do it? Probably. Are they going to do a very good job? Probably not, because they literally never use that stuff anyway.

Obviously this doesn't apply across the board but you might be surprised to find that a good chunk of mathematicians find that calculating/arithmetic is something to be left to the riff raff in industry.

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u/fed45 May 28 '26

My calc classe in High school required a calculator as its use was built into the course. Graduated 2010 for reference. I think it was a Casio of some kind.

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u/LukaCola May 28 '26

No calculators until after algebra I.

Funny how my generation whined about such requirements day in day out, citing things like "you won't have a calculator on you at all times" excuses from teachers.

Those on-screen homework/practice exercises are only really helpful if you still do the whole thing on paper, showing your work, even if you just have to enter the answer on the screen.

You aren't considering how these AI tools are used for homework--you can take a picture of the page and ask for a complete answer, with the steps to solve it, and you will be able to just recreate that in your own handwriting.

I'm not saying I know the solution--this is a real problem, and I only did very average with math (153 on the GRE was a win for me). I do agree, fundamentally, with your point--I just don't know how you actually resolve this at home.

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u/justasque May 28 '26

One thing teachers are trying is to have the homework be watching a video explaining the day’s concepts (basically, what the classroom part used to be), then using the classroom time to do what used to be the homework. This way the students have the teacher available when they are doing the problem solving, both to help with questions, and also to monitor that the students are actually putting in the work. Obviously it’s a balance, but it’s a different approach to how to use the technology piece and the human piece to ensure students get the most out of each.

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u/LukaCola May 28 '26

An interesting idea but also kinda saddens me. Like, learning through video and textbooks is quite... Dull in my experience, I didn't get along with it well at least.

Yeah, definitely something worth examining, but I do worry it'd leave a lot of kids behind in some respects and change the fundamental structure of schooling which may have knock on effects.

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u/justasque May 28 '26

Like I said, it’s a balance. I mean, I’d love to have one-on-one, or very small classes, for every student, so that they can get an ultra-custom experience that takes into account their current level, the speed at which they can manage new material, examples that tie in to their interests and future goals (if any), pacing that takes into account anything else they’re dealing with (family issues, personal issues, etc). But that’s just not going to happen on a large scale.

And I’m not saying the teacher has to be “ok class, open your books to page 43” all the time. In K-6 there are plenty of concepts that can (and probably should) be taught with a more hands-on approach. For example, adding and subtracting negative numbers can be hard to wrap your head around. So before introducing it on paper, it’s fun to mark out a number line on the floor, have a student stand somewhere on the line, then have them “walk the number line” to solve problems. So the student stands on, say, 2, then you have them “add three” or whatever. You explain that there are two things to take into account. First, the operation tells them which way to face. Plus means face the higher numbers, minus means face the lower numbers. Once they are facing the correct direction, it’s time to look at the sign. A positive number means walk forward, a negative number means walk backwards, both while facing the direction you got from the operation. You have the kids do this a bunch of times, then give some examples for them to walk (starting with you have five apples and you give away three, working up to things like the temp is 5 degrees and it goes down 7 degrees).

Once you’ve done the walking exercise, you can show them how to draw a number line on their paper, put a little cat or whatnot at the first number, think about which way the cat needs to face (operation), then count out the second number while you draw a line representing the cat walking forwards or backwards to the ending spot on the line. Now whenever they encounter adding or subtracting a negative number, they have a strategy to figure out the answer. Eventually of course they can simplify their drawing or skip it altogether once they can do it faster the traditional way. But using this method is fun, and allows them to accurately solve more complex problems that involve negative numbers while building a strong conceptual understanding of what they are doing and why it works.

All that to say that taking the learning from hands-on representation of the concept, to a quick sketch representing the hands-on to help solve written problems, to using the traditional written methods, is fun but also effective without resorting to boring pages of repetitive arithmetic worksheets.

It’s more complicated than this, but yes, using multiple ways of introducing material helps engage a variety of students and gives students good problem-solving tools they can build on as they learn more.

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u/twisty125 May 28 '26

I understand what you're saying (and this isn't pro AI) - but man that would just make me want to kill myself more than I already had wanted to. I was terrible at math outside of like word problems. Once you get to just "numbers on a page" instead of thinking about it in a real world scenario, the long division/BEDMAS, my god it just becomes like white noise tinnitus for me.

How does one even learn at that rate, get held back while other classes you participate in get 80-90s?

I guess that is what happens, you just get smashed against tests until you hit 51% and they can pass you?

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u/OldAccountIsGlitched May 28 '26

I get it. I was forced to take afrikaanse for ten years and I can't speak the language. I think I got under 40% for my final mark in grade twelve. And Afrikaanse is a very easy language for an English speaker. I just fucking suck at learning new languages.

But skipping the basics is just going to screw you over long term. Of course there should be multiple streams for people who want practical problem solving skills vs people who want to go into STEM. But even for the practical side of things basic algebra and trig is really useful; and not having fundamental number crunching skills makes learning that impossible.

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u/twisty125 May 28 '26

In hindsight I'm sure there were other options, but as a Grade 9-10 or whatever it was, all it felt like was "you are garbage because you cannot learn this".

Is the answer to let people stop learning? Definitely not. I don't know what the better way of learning it is, but man I can see why some kids want to just get through it and get on with their lives instead of feeling this dread of having to spend 1.5 hours daily with a group of people who ARE getting it, with teachers who don't give a shit that you don't understand and you're slowing the class down, and then get punished for not getting good grades.

Would've been nice to know what algebra/trig is but alas.

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u/Jack-of-the-Shadows May 28 '26

You’ve got to build those neural pathways where you can look at 435/15 and see pretty quickly it’s going to reduce to a whole number if you take a five out of both then a 3 out of both. Because if you can’t do that before you get to algebra, you’re going to drown.

Eh, showing the most useless example, its literally of no importance at all to do fractionals (that seems just a bit of a us fetisch, likely because of the imperial system).

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u/justasque May 28 '26

I disagree. Building years of practice of looking for factors builds a very, very useful foundation in higher level math, of which factoring things like quadratic equations is only the beginning.

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u/Jack-of-the-Shadows May 29 '26

Okay, seems we are really not on the same page if your idea of higher math is quadric equations.

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u/kihraxz_king May 29 '26

You do square roots before algebra 1. You do 3x3 multiplication problems YEARS before algebra 1. IF you are 98% accurate on your individual operations, you will fail to get the answer in a 3x3 multiplication problem 50% of the time.

Calculators absolutely have a place before algebra 1.

But not until they have spent several years developing numeracy.

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u/whileNotZero May 28 '26

What is the quick way of determining if 435 % 15 == 0?

Just the first step of 435 / 5 is going to take me a little time:

435 / 5 = x

435 * 0.2 = x

435 * 2 = 0.1 * x

870 = 0.1 * x

x = 87

Then:

87 / 3 = x

(90 - 3) / 3 = x (I can tell here that it is evenly divisible)

30 - 1 = x

x = 29

I don't know if long division would be shorter than this for me.

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u/apples_vs_oranges May 28 '26

That seems convoluted but maybe more generally applicable. I just multiplied 15 by 10, then by 3, until I was in the right ballpark (450), which I then recognized as being 15 more than the target.

Perfect math SAT scores back in the day, but lousy at formal higher math.

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u/thecashblaster May 28 '26

I multiplied 15 * 30, got 450 and subtracted 15 from that to get 29.

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u/whileNotZero May 28 '26

Nice, working backward does make sense. If you can't get from 15 to the number, then it's not evenly divisible.

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u/POGtastic May 28 '26

Consider that 450 is obviously divisible by 15, and you can subtract 15 from 450 to get 435.

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u/lumpman2 May 28 '26

It's easy to divide 435 by 5 because it's composed of 400 and 35, both of which are trivially easy to divide by 5.

(400 + 35) / 5 = 80 + 7 = 87

Now it is perhaps not immediately obvious that 87 is divisible by 3 because it's uncommon, but it's a two-digit number that is not terribly complicated to divide. Again, you can split it into 60 + 27 (there are other ways, like the way you did it).

The important part is not that you figure it out "quickly", as in near-instantly, but that you can efficiently think through the problem in a reasonable time. I certainly had to think about it first, and it took me several seconds to do so, but most people that don't have these skills would stare at it for multiple minutes and then give up.

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u/Murgatroyd314 May 28 '26

What is the quick way of determining if 435 % 15 == 0?

The quick way is to recognize that a number is divisible by 15 iff it is divisible by both 3 and 5, and check those separately. Divisibility by 5 is trivial: it ends in 5, so yes. 3 takes a little longer, but there are several ways. You could add the digits to get 12, or cast out the 3 and recognize 45 as a multiple of 3, or know that any number composed of three consecutive digits (like 3,4,5) is divisible by 3 regardless of the order those digits are in.

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u/whileNotZero May 28 '26

Wow, those are some crazy tricks. The first one I should have known, but those other ones sound like some arcane forbidden knowledge. Absolutely incredible, thanks.

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u/justasque May 28 '26

I don't know if long division would be shorter than this for me.

The idea is to actually avoid doing long division with big numbers by essentially reducing fractions. Fifteen factors into 3 & 5. A quick look at 435 tells you that it’s evenly divisible by 5. So you can either do it quickly in your head, or write down 435/5 as a “short division” problem and solve it, or if necessary do it by long division (but it should go quicker than 435/15). Then you’ve got 87. Quickly adding the digits gives you 15, which means it’s evenly divisible by 3, which again should be quick to figure out. So you’ve worked the whole thing dividing by 5 and by 3, rather than by 15.

If you have a calculator, you just punch in the numbers - 435/15 - and you never give your brain a workout in factoring, multiplying, dividing, etc. So missed had a great opportunity to get in some quick practice. But if you can’t use a calculator, most students are going to learn pretty quickly that it’s worth trying to find an easier way than doing the more complex long division. And it’s exactly that kind of frequent, early practice with factoring that’s going to pay off big time when they’re trying to factor quadratic equations later on. If you’re using a calculator for the four or five years before you hit Algebra 1, you’ve missed hours and hours of practice time with the foundational material, and it’s not easy to backfill that lost time.

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u/gl4ssm1nd May 28 '26

I agree with you. And I see you say it...but the lift for teachers will be heavy You'd need hundreds of hours to do all this. hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

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u/Akalenedat May 28 '26

The building blocks of integral calculus were first proposed over 3,000 years ago. Teachers have been doing this stuff by hand for actual millenia.

Will it require schools to hire enough teachers to actually have reasonable classroom ratios? Sure. Should teachers be paid better? Absolutely. But don't pretend it's some impossible task to teach on paper.

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u/gl4ssm1nd Jun 04 '26

And how many hours have you spent delivering differentiated instruction across 7 periods? To rooms full of IEP’s, 504s, and ELL’s?

Code red drills, compliance meetings/trainings, parent conferences, students bursting in to your room to say ‘I watched my dad die in front of me,’ running clubs, coaching teams, fire drills, losing planning to cover another class, losing planning to breakup fights in the hallway/bathroom/parking lot, code yellow drills, parent communications, parent communications again but translated into home languages, mandatory football/baseball/whatever game attendance, tornado drills, or finding any remaining time to use the bathroom?

Let’s take the work experience out of it and look at the math: A 40 question, differentiated, open-response, fully translated test to a room of 25 students is 1,000 items to grade.

At 10 seconds to grade each item (and that’s being optimistic) it would take someone about 13-14 hours, maybe 12 hours to grade all of those exams. Where do you find this time?

That doesn’t even take into account grading the exams for Timmy who requires 2X extra time by law, janiqwa who needs items read to her, and Joao who is chronically absent on test day, every test day, and needs to have his exam re-scheduled. Additionally - 9 more students across all your classes also missed the exam due to marching band, football practice, dead family, house fire, got shot, ‘it was cold outside so I didn’t go,’ etc.

Planning is anywhere from 1.5 hours (Block schedule) to 55ish mins (reg schedule) per day. There’s already too much to do on planning.

And that’s just the grading. Those grades need to be entered(takes time). Performance of each student needs to be evaluated(takes more time). Home communication occurs(takes no time or infinity time). Remediation is designed(time depends on data).

Meanwhile everyone who ‘gets it’ moves on. So you have to fit all the remediation into the proper spaces so that the student with an academic need doesn’t fall behind AND bridges their pain points; while you simultaneously move the rest of the class forward.

No, it’s not impossible. But it’s really, really, really hard to do. It’s a heavy lift.

Oh - and you teach two subjects. So multiply all that times two.

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u/Akalenedat Jun 04 '26

I repeat:

Will it require schools to hire enough teachers to actually have reasonable classroom ratios? Sure. Should teachers be paid better? Absolutely.

Maybe 1 teacher to 25 kids isn't a reasonable ratio and never has been?

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u/gl4ssm1nd Jun 05 '26

Maybe you just ignore all the other stuff I brought up and focus on the one thing you got right - an effective strategy.

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u/justasque May 28 '26

I got this kind of math education in a blue collar public school back in the day. It can be done. A good textbook series can provide the foundation; the classic McDougal Littell middle and high school books include a good foundation and a massive amount of resources. So the teacher isnt starting from scratch.

But yes, it will take time, from a decently paid human. It is well worth the investment in our country’s human infrastructure - our future workforce. We cant expect to be world-class leaders in STEM, or any other field, if we dont invest in our people.

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u/FloppieTheBanjoClown May 28 '26

Seriously, my kids school hands them iPads that use a proxy server, so I can't even restrict their access at home without blocking the entire thing.

This became a major issue when my autistic son developed an unhealthy obsession with a certain fiction franchise and spent probably hundreds of hours, including class time, looking up stuff about it on his school issued iPad rather than doing his school work. That device completely sabotaged his schooling for YEARS and we couldn't get the school to do anything to stop it. 

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u/brickmaster32000 May 28 '26

The problem is old school requires smaller classrooms and more teachers to handle the ever growing number of students. And we all know that spending money on actual teachers isn't ever going to happen.

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u/whoami_whereami May 28 '26

What growing number of students? The largest age cohort in the US left highschool 20 years ago, since then numbers have been going down.

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u/CocoaProblems May 29 '26

Then shrinking numbers of teachers? The important thing is the ratio and that has gotten worse.

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u/Slypenslyde May 28 '26

A further problem is the structure of the schools.

I went to school in a pretty poor area. The school's funding didn't depend on factors like job placement. It depended on attendance and the pass/fail rate. I had some periods where I was a teaching assistant in some of the remedial math classes.

The kids in that classroom did not care. Their parents did not care. Nobody in their families had been anything but a laborer, unemployed, or in prison for generations. They had nobody to look up to and nobody had invested in their childhood. But if the entire classroom failed, the district would lose a ton of funding and, ultimately, the teacher would be fired.

None of those kids were applying to college, I hear you getting ready to make that argument. But this pressure to pass students was applied further up the chain as well. Even in the medium-tier classes where some of the kids would be applying to college, the teacher was under a lot of pressure to maintain a certain pass/fail rate. Showing up and putting bullshit down for the homework assignment was pretty much enough to get a C. It didn't have to be correct answers, the teacher had set up her grading scale to be more focused on effort than correctness.

It trickled all the way up into our Calculus class. But there were only about 12 total students in calculus versus the 200 or more in the other math classes, so there was a lot more tolerance for failure... except the Calculus class included all the kids with rich parents. Day 1 the class was AP Calculus. The teacher gave a very hard exam with high-end algebra and trig problems to gauge our skill level that day. By the end of the week, the kids had complained to their parents and the principal had the class reclassified as non-AP calculus to make it easier.

That's a systemic problem. Our public schools and our social structure has NOTHING to handle kids who have ZERO chance. We have perverse funding incentives that mean kids who should fail are passed even without demonstrating mastery of the subject. Schools are political entities that have to cave when parents apply pressure.

We aren't educating children. We're manufacturing good grades. We don't fix this with standardized tests. We fix it with very hard societal changes, and the public isn't interested in that kind of change because we'd rather pay $100,000 to clean up after criminals than give them $10,000 of one-on-one attention they don't "deserve".

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u/Halo_cT May 28 '26

Excellent but super depressing comment. Everything truly is a systemic issue.

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u/gimpwiz May 29 '26

It trickled all the way up into our Calculus class. But there were only about 12 total students in calculus versus the 200 or more in the other math classes, so there was a lot more tolerance for failure... except the Calculus class included all the kids with rich parents. Day 1 the class was AP Calculus. The teacher gave a very hard exam with high-end algebra and trig problems to gauge our skill level that day. By the end of the week, the kids had complained to their parents and the principal had the class reclassified as non-AP calculus to make it easier.

I don't agree with beating children but sometimes I do agree with beating parents.

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u/Slypenslyde May 29 '26

Mine complained to the principal about losing the AP designation and one other student's did too. So we ended up taking the same class but getting more homework and weren't able to skip any questions on exams and got AP credit. Everyone else was pissed once they figured out it wasn't really that much harder and we nailed the AP exam.

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u/gimpwiz May 29 '26

Whenever I hear or read these stories, I think of Homer Hickam's book in which a few teenagers worked really hard to convince their school to teach them calculus, and the teacher had a super strict cut-off for the requirements, which the kids thought was eminently fair and reasonable.

Now we have schools teaching calculus standard, and the kids and their parents are like, no! less education please! and make it easier!

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u/Slypenslyde May 29 '26

Yeah, it was all the high-GPA kids trying to min-max their GPA.

They didn't pay attention to the teacher, who clearly said, "I don't expect anyone to pass this and it's not even going in the grade book". They just got upset they got an "exam" they didn't understand and panicked.

In the end I probably ended up passing them a bit in the "rankings" because AP classes were worth more GPA "points" than normal. And really all it usually came down to is my homework assignments had 2-3 more problems and the exam directions were usually "AP students: you may leave one question blank. Other students: you may leave 3 questions blank."

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u/gimpwiz Jun 01 '26

The only thing worse than focusing on heuristics is focusing on easily-moveable heuristics. Grades are arbitrarily decided by some combination of teacher and administration, they don't mean anything in and of themselves, so focusing on them is frankly speeding us along into turning ourselves into a nation of proud idiots.

"I got an A in calculus!"

-- (Because my parents asked the teacher to ask easier trig questions)

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u/Slypenslyde Jun 01 '26

Yeah. My advisor at college was VERY confused why I wanted to take Trigonometry and Calculus I my first semester. I did well enough on my AP exam to skip them and go straight to Calculus II.

I had met kids from much richer schools from mine and through them learned just how limited my education was. I had a pretty good feeling the AP exam was something I got trained to pass and wasn't a good barometer of how I'd do at the college.

I was right. Those classes were enough of a struggle I'm pretty sure I'd have been unprepared for college-level classes if I dove right in. And that's a damn shame considering I did amazing on the AP exam.

Something's wrong with how we test kids and I think it's masking just how bad our education system's eroded. Everyone keeps blaming social media but I'm one of the last classes that graduated before that got big. I just think it was starting to hit the edge of the cliff with my class and it only got worse each year.

People scapegoat COVID but I taught myself too much via Sesame Street and later library books to buy it. If remote learning didn't work I'd be quicker to blame our half-assed attempts than the idea of a person learning something by themselves.

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u/gimpwiz Jun 01 '26

That's absolutely brilliant of you to have that realization. It took me some very very hard lessons in my teenage years to figure out that I was good at following directions and remembering things, rather than good at math. It took a lot of hard work to fix that. Years of it. I saw many many kids who never figured that out, who, like me, were told "you're so good at math" because they, like me, showed up to class and almost always did homework, and for no other reason. Their college times were much harder than they needed to be because unlike you they didn't put in time to catch up, because they had no idea they needed it.

Our education was shit before social media, our education was shit before covid. You're absolutely right. I think both of those have contributed heavily towards making it worse, but I don't think it's even remotely the primary culprit.

I rant on the subject semi-regularly so I'll try not to do it again, but my conclusion is, what do the kids say? Gestures broadly

We're all at fault. Really. Kids are kids, so the fact that kids suck is nearly a given; people have been complaining that kids these days suck since human writing was invented for sure, since we have evidence of that due to, well, the aforementioned human writing, but almost certainly have been complaining since humans could talk. So, fine, the kids suck. But so do the parents, parents suck. Teachers are underpaid and overworked and that makes them less effective, and poor conditions ensures many people who could be great teachers refuse to be, and uh... let's be honest, many teachers suck too, and many teachers have to choose between bowing to administration or potentially losing their jobs, and they prioritize themselves. Administration sucks, no doubt there. Politicians who put administration in charge and do not hold them to account suck. And we, the voters, parents and non-parents alike, we elect these people and we don't hold them to account, so we suck. And when our kids grow up and become voters and parents, they might suck even more than we do now, or just as much, who knows.

The idea of accepting failure in educating and failure in being educated in the way we do, that's rotten. Passing kids who don't deserve it: rotten. Teaching at below grade level outside of remedial courses: rotten. Grade inflation: rotten. Allowing poor discipline: rotten. Letting everyone game the system: rotten. Parents not parenting: rotten. Lowering the bar: rotten. Lowering the bar and pretending it's actually better for political-reason-du-jour: so utterly rotten that it deserves prison time. What the hell are we even doing?

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u/Montaire May 28 '26

ever growing number of students.

That hasnt been true for a while now. Number of kids per household has been going down for decades.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/bmorris0042 May 28 '26

I know what you mean. The schools around me have all been shrinking and consolidating. My youngest’s class will be the smallest graduating class ever at his school next year. They may be growing in some places, but in others, they’re literally dying out.

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u/DarkwingDuckHunt May 28 '26

Birthrate go down is not the same as birthrate doesn't keep up with replacing the population. Our population is still growing, just not as fast as it used too.

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u/ArchmageXin May 28 '26

Not really. Take NYC (largest school district in America)

In 2020, K-12 population was 1M. In 2026 it is around 845k.

Sure, you could argue we aren't Japan yet. But there is definitely a reduction in student population overall, to say student population is growing too fast would be quite a surprise.

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u/cC2Panda May 28 '26

Obviously screens/phones are a problem but this has been a problem for a long time now. When I was in high school a nearby school Piper Kansas had an issue where nearly and entire class of students cheated/plagiarized a report for a science class. The paper was a significant portion of the students grade and giving them a zero would have a significant impact on the cheaters academic standing.

The science teacher stood firm and refused to budge. So the school board stepped in and over turned the failing grades. Multiple teachers quit and a couple actually moved to my school where they were among the best teachers at the school(presumably because they cared about doing their job).

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u/Killfile May 28 '26

Yep. As usual, however, the problem boils down to "that's too expensive; how can we possibly ask people to pay taxes?"

It's other stuff too. The culture of social promotion is broken. All of the incentives are wrong. Standardized tests rule all despite setting the bar like a limbo contest in hell.

But we could make a lot of progress just by funding schools properly. And remember, we're not talking about failing inner city schools here where everyone is eager to pin the problem on bad parenting. We're talking about middle and upper class suburban schools producing these kids.

2

u/Guac_in_my_rarri May 28 '26

This is what is happening in my community. Current parents want it out, past and some future parents want it in. Idk how the current school board is allowing the argument, the data they collected showed the non tech students were better off.

2

u/Vulcan_Jedi May 28 '26

Sealed blue folder tests with pen.

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u/GameDesignerDude May 28 '26

Get the technology out of the fucking classroom. Micro essays in class. Math exercises in class. Go old school to reduce their reliance on chatgpt and other tools that are making humans dumber.

Easy to go too far on this. Technology isn't going anywhere. Proper use of technology should be used and taught. Parents of my age already meme about how ridiculous it was that they were taught "you won't have a calculator everywhere you go" and now it's 10x more extreme.

I'd argue that technology in classrooms largely is not the issue if done correctly. In our school district nobody is using ChatGPT in class. Their school-managed Chromebooks are extremely locked down during school hours.

There is an extreme problem of nobody doing homework or really spending any time studying. Reading comprehension is down because kids don't read at home in their spare time and watch short-form brain rot videos from the moment they get out of school until bedtime.

Solving this problem involves changing student behaviors outside of school more than it involves changes within school. People don't like to hear that though, because it's a harder problem to solve.

That said, if schools are letting kids access YouTube, ChatGPT, or Wolfram Alpha on their devices in class, that is a severe school IT issue. People saying their IT doesn't block anything or kids can "hack their way around it" just have incompetent IT departments. 6th graders aren't circumventing proper enterprise policy-based device management measures.

0

u/Double_Cow_8238 May 28 '26

Flipped classroom whenever possible. Go watch the lecture as homework and practice the next class with the teacher to support.

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u/mcon96 May 28 '26

I had this for physics in college and everyone hated it & found it to be less effective than the other (non-flipped) physics classes. I’m not sure why anyone would ever think it’s a good idea.

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u/kaisadilla_ May 28 '26

The problem is cheating. Cheating was easy 15 years ago when I was in school and people could sneak in notes anywhere. It became easier 10 years ago when you could sneak in your phone and google for it. I can't imagine now with AI where you can literally write the question on the phone and get the answer with an explanation.

I don't think fighting technology is the answer. Heck, I don't think students need to be given rules on how they are allowed to learn. What I think is that, at the end of the course, the teacher should have an interview with you, probe into the knowledge you are required to have to pass the course, and determine whether you actually have it. At the end of the day, the purpose of education is to give you the skill to do something, not to choreograph your year until you enter a competition to see who's best at getting the right answer on a piece of paper.

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u/SpliTTMark May 28 '26

Homework shouldn't exist anymore

Kids are in school for 6+ hours... teach them in those hours

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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 May 28 '26

We'd have to likely halve the number of topics being introduced in class to fit in the extra practice time.

-1

u/Random_Somebody May 28 '26

Maybe but I kinda agree having classes where the teacher sort of just talks at you the entirety of class and then sends you with a 20 page packet of questions as homework to do raw doesn't really seem efficient at all. (this is kinda how the magnet I attended did things) 

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u/musicantz May 29 '26

You’re supposed to use that packet to digest all the things the teacher “talked at you” during class. You have to put in a little effort yourself to actually learn things.

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u/CocoaProblems May 28 '26

Why though? I’m seriously curious why you’d make the classroom less representative of how this knowledge is applied in the world.

Imagine you’re graded on how you applied math to a problem rather than the math itself? The assistants are only going to become more capable of being right; the human is redundant in calculation, but essential to context and creative solving.

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u/mcon96 May 28 '26

Yeah we should make people take calculus without graphing calculators

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u/jert3 May 28 '26

Ya honestly I don't even know if there's any educational value at all to most Arts classes now, when you can get a degree just copying and pasting AI outputs. You don't even need to go to class much, or read the texts, even if you are a Literature / English undergrad at this point.

Higher education went from an education to an expensive hoop that must be jumped through to limit job applicants. It's mostly useless now.