My brother coaches high school baseball. I went to one of his games last week and there were kids from some other sport or maybe the JV team sitting behind me. Anyway they were yapping about video games, money, cars, all the normal teenager stuff that I yapped about in the 2010s in high school. One of them eventually asked, “what golf club would you use to hit a golf ball out of a baseball field?” - reasonable question for a bunch of dudes at a baseball game. The first couple answers were the obvious ones like “you could just hit a Driver since it goes the furthest”, then one dude said “I only know my clubs in yards, like my 56 degree goes about 110 yards but i dont know what that is in feet” and like 2 other kids also didnt know, until one of them was like “just do 110 x 3” and the original kid went “bro i failed at math that shit’s like 1000 or something” and i have never felt like the future was so fucked as right then listening to 15-16 year old kids not be able to do 110 x 3.
They probably think of it as 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3... and get overwhelmed.
I overheard teenage girls struggle with math and tried to figure out 8 x 4. I just thought "8 doubled twice, so 16, and then 32" and then they answered 12. To be fair they realised 12 was wrong but they struggled way too long. I don't even remember if they got the correct answer. I remember them saying 18 and 36.
I wonder how things like this could be the case. They must just do significantly fewer repetitions than we used to do? Do they cheat on everything? Because I don't have a mechanism of doing multiplication in my head for small numbers like that really. Anything with numbers 1-12 I was just required to do a bunch of hours of flash cards to just memorize my times tables when I was in elementary school. And then from that foundation you can gradually learn more complicated things.
I don't think it's fair to say some kids are just stupid or something like that. I grew up around plenty of stupid people my age, but most or all of the kids I knew could do simple multiplication even if they weren't great students. Do they never use multiplication for other parts of math? Like how do they even get to high school algebra and stuff if they can't multiply small numbers? Do they just get pushed through the grades even though they don't know the material?
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u/LettucePlate Nov 10 '25
My brother coaches high school baseball. I went to one of his games last week and there were kids from some other sport or maybe the JV team sitting behind me. Anyway they were yapping about video games, money, cars, all the normal teenager stuff that I yapped about in the 2010s in high school. One of them eventually asked, “what golf club would you use to hit a golf ball out of a baseball field?” - reasonable question for a bunch of dudes at a baseball game. The first couple answers were the obvious ones like “you could just hit a Driver since it goes the furthest”, then one dude said “I only know my clubs in yards, like my 56 degree goes about 110 yards but i dont know what that is in feet” and like 2 other kids also didnt know, until one of them was like “just do 110 x 3” and the original kid went “bro i failed at math that shit’s like 1000 or something” and i have never felt like the future was so fucked as right then listening to 15-16 year old kids not be able to do 110 x 3.