\o/

genuinely, ive had this experience multiple times working with high schoolers.

if this makes you say "wow, usamerican education is so bad, high schoolers don't even know multiplication?" the kids I work with are typically in remedial math courses, and/or don't speak English as their first language, and/or are recent immigrants and had spotty math education in their country of origin. I can't say for certain, but this is not your average usamerican high school student.

now for the students who speak spanish, of course I tutor them in spanish. the comic is the exact same. I say "cuatro por dos" "cuatro multiplicado por dos" and they still end up putting "cuatro más dos" in the calculator. now I cant say for sure, it could be I dont speak spanish well enough, or I use a different register than they do, but a lot of my students are surprised when I tell them spanish is my second language because they thought I was a native speaker, so I dont know.

while I believe everyone can learn all levels of math, and I believe fluency in adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing single digit numbers is an important life skill, the requirements of my job mean I simply dont have the time to work thru how to do this arithmetic. I mean I can show them four rows of two, I can explain to them that multiplication is repeated addition, but there just isn't enough time to practice this way of thinking for them to become comfortable with it. thats why I encourage my students to use the calculator, it is a tool so that they dont stress out over not knowing how to do this arithmetic.

because thats the other thing, a lot of the students I work with feel a type of way about math. they feel like theyre not math people, theyre just simply bad at math, they say things like "im so stupid". I always push back when they say mean things about themselves, because it's never true. these kids are not stupid, they are learning. a lot of what people may call "basic" arithmetic is not actually all that obvious! and especially if your education was interrupted, which literally all of my students education was interrupted when they were in 3rd, 4th grade-- like of course they would struggle. and they've internalized that struggle and blame themselves (thus decreasing motivation to learn at all-- if you don't believe you can, why even try?)

uh ohhh we've come to the technology portion of this rant lol. so a lot of the students I worked with used this AI platform where it would give you a math problem and you could chat with a chatbot if you were having trouble and like. it was very clear that this chatbot was not actually helping them to learn anything, and often students would not even attempt a problem and just go straight to the chatbot and ask "what do I do". generally, there seems to be a trend of people just not wanting to think (this is not exclusive to high schoolers).

there is a lot of possible finger pointing; kids these days are lazy, any teacher that asks their students to use this platform is a bad teacher, school administrators shouldn't purchase the rights to these AI platforms, etc etc. but I want to point the finger at the AI companies that produce and market these "tools". genuinely, it is AI technology companies and their products that have made the education landscape a nightmare. it has killed so much curiosity, critical thinking, imagination, and motivation to learn for so many people and it is not restricted to an age group. but, I will elaborate on how it has affected high school aged children, because that is the age group I see this trend the most with.

some students won't even read the problem before asking me (or the chatbot) what to do. I read the problem to them, and it just seems like whatever information is in the problem goes in through one ear and out the other. I try to get them to think critically, I ask them questions, and sometimes I see the lightbulb go off and they understand and they get excited, and other times they just say "I dont know". a lot of them don't believe they need to learn math in the first place-- they have chatgpt. the reason kids believe that is because of how these AI products have been marketed to them. adults get the same marketing too.

my job can be incredibly rewarding, but it can also be incredibly discouraging. I worry about these kids. they are missing out on the joy of learning, which includes struggling and making mistakes before eventually understanding. they are missing out on the beauty of math and numbers. I try to reignite their curiosity, but I am fighting all this AI propaganda and I dont know what to do about it.