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.
That’s fair, on the second point, but I can only partially agree with the other.
There’s no “shortcut” to real learning (i.e. developing an intuition, understanding, etc) besides practice, the closest maybe being cleverly developing new ways to teach.
We definitely don’t need to teach those old mental math tricks anymore, but brains learn via practice (i.e. manual computation) to gain the fundamental understanding needed before using tools to skip those steps.
The only way I can imagine really not needing for normal life is if you can afford to pay someone you trust to understand it for you.
Again, beyond the elementary school level. So, how do all the poor people without higher level math skills survive?
You’re being very patronizing right now. Probably because you, personally, rely a lot of math skills that the vast majority of people somehow manage to do without.
I hope you can realize that.