Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
My high school didn’t need a pandemic to fuck over kids in math. We were in some kind of pilot program for a new math curriculum that was complete dog shit and design for people who weren’t planning to go to college or have to do any higher level math.
The physic teacher quit over it, because the kids would come to physics classes, which needed math, and they couldn’t do the math. When he tried to have them do actual math the parents went after him.
When I was a senior I was sitting next to a kid who was in National Math Honors Society and watching him put 1-1 in his calculator to solve a problem. He was not trying to be funny or ironic, this was the dependence the school created on calculators.
It’s been 20 years and I’m still pissed off about it. Math was my best subject until that horse shit basically stopped teaching me math.
I took the SAT the first year they had calculators and no one told me, but I was still able to do enough in my head and on paper to get an okay score. I probably would have gotten a higher score if I could have checked my work with a calculator, but I doubt kids today would even be able to do what I did.
When I went in to take a chemistry placement test for college all the kids had their calculators out. Then the people giving the test said it was 45 questions in 45 minutes, no calculators. The groans and sound of 200-300 people putting their calculators away is something I’ll never forget.
After about 2 questions I realized I’d never finish in time. I completely stopped doing math and simply picked the answer with the correct number of significant figures. I never saw the actual grading of the test, but I placed into the higher level chem class as a result.