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My first inclination was to blame the COVID-era shutdown of schools. It fits the timeframe of the sharp decline well; the great down leveling of schools, although terrible, has been going on for decades and doesn't explain the cliff.
UCSD isn't just finding inability to perform high school math, though; it's had to start teaching remedial classes in middle school and even elementary school level math.
Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math when they started high school; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.
We should have empathy for the kids, though: they've experienced actual harm, as opposed to the imagined abstract harm of disparate impact. Does give me an increased feeling of job security.
My wife and I were discussing something related yesterday: the question of the day was have we become Boomers, those most maligned of people.
Her little sister, a teacher, has made a series of bad decisions, and now wants to embrace a "tradwife" lifestyle. The issue is her boyfriend has no job. He's currently "studying" social media late into the hours of the night (as daytimes are reserved for chilling at the beach) so that he can become an influencer; he has no money and relies on her for housing, transportation, and food. They want to have kids ASAP and travel the world. And they are both in their early 30s.
We are not fans of this. But, are we just yelling at kids like old people now, not understanding all their challenges?
I don't know whether this is new or not, and whether it'd make me feel better or worse if it was new or not. All I know is that the kids are not all right.
You know what surprises me? I don't think I've seen a woodworking video where the woodworker does their own math. I understand mathing fractional inches takes a little bit more effort than decimal cm, but it's all still powers of two. And yet, almost everybody I watch whips out a cell phone, relies on CAD software, or avoids mathing entirely by marking their workpieces against the actual dimensions of the partially completed project.
Apparently that last method is actually the best as compounding errors/imprecision always throw off your calculations. But I feel like my point remains.
Did none of these people ever learn how to do fractions? Even 10-20 years ago when our education system supposedly functioned? I doubt it. I doubt it's just students that are being cognitively mutilated.
If you want to see lots of math and geometry, look at the folks doing (manual) machine shop stuff. Things like "the drawing gives this weird dimension relative to another face over there: I need to include adjustments for tolerance over the separate steps to make all the intermediate features". Lots of concerns about reference faces, accumulating error, cutter geometry, and a fair amount of trigonometry.
Only professional cabinetry woodworkers are going to care about repeatability: for everyone else, a single piece of furniture only needs to fit together by itself, not have interchangable parts.
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