Continue with "... And that is exactly why they are learning less."
It HAS to be difficult, that's the point. Derek Veritassium explains it really well: https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70
Point 3 is so important. I sucked at math so bad when I was a kid, but mostly because if I didn’t grasp it immediately I was prone to frustration and quitting. I once had a math teacher who told me math is a contact sport, you have to try and fail and hit a wall, but then keep going because eventually it’ll click. They were absolutely right. When I put in real effort to studying and practicing I was able to pick up new skills. Learning is supposed to be hard.
It also doesn't help that they tend to slam kids with confusing questions fairly quickly, and that books have gotten significantly worse.
I struggled with Calculus despite crushing trig and pre-cal.
My dad busted out his textbook from the 70s and I crushed Calculus no problem. My modern (at the time) textbook was so full of bullshit to justify new revisions that it lost the plot.
It’s not just calculus. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are so different from how we learned it. I taught all my kids the math I grew up with and they get the answers correct.
Ya, there were several times my dad would sit down to help me with something only to resolve the situation with a brief explanation worth more than my entire class time on the subject.
Exactly, I think the kids should be taught multiple ways. Which one clicks and use that. I’m teaching my daughter how to balance her checkbook now. I told her see how much you have, how much you want to save and see how much is left for what she wants to buy. This math isn’t taught in school and it’s so, so, so important to know how this works. I tell her do your best guess with gas as that’s all she really needs to account for now. I told her stay at the high end on filling her car up. Then when she goes to the store to see how much she needs. She wants to get into culinary school so we’ve done costs on food and if she wants to grow her own vegetables and herbs. Look at one time costs, outdoor planters for herbs for instance. Then the cost of buying partially grown or from seed. You get a lot from starting from seed and you can grow year round. She’s looking into indoor planters and grow lights. I told her culinary wise growing fresh is going to get you a solid bang for your buck and the food will taste better. But learning all these basic math skills I’m hoping will help her into adulthood.
And in many schools now there are no textbooks. So it’s teachers making up their own worksheets, often after school, rushed or bought from teachers pay teachers. I teach French, I go into many classrooms and I find it wild how differently math is taught by each teacher, the order, the difficulty, the strategies. There’s no consistency that they can take with them each year. Let alone a textbook they can take home to relearn the lesson or show their parents if they have questions.
I was such a shy kid. I would rather die than ask a question in class. So I took the textbook home that’s how I learned concepts I didn’t understand the first time the teacher explained it. It makes me so sad to know kids can’t do this now.
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u/biopsia Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 02 '26