Mathematics, reading skills in unprecedented decline in teenagers

[Matt504]

I wonder which group of children this will disproportionately impact.

I know it's en vogue to blame social media but let's not ignore the "and where schools reported teacher shortages" part. We also see sharp fall offs right at the beginning of the pandemic.

 

[inndaskKy]

The culture of Anti-Intellectualism needs to be talked about more

Make the thread.













In JBO.

 

[Double Burger With Cheese]

I see a variation of this thread about once a month. If all the kids dumb, then maybe the teachers are too dumb to teach them.

 

[bnew]

Great article by Terence Tao:

Embracing change and resetting expectations

Read our Story, Embracing change and resetting expectations on Microsoft Unlocked

unlocked.microsoft.com

great read

Spoiler: snippet:

Humans have been trained over the last few decades to expect certain things from information technology. To list a few:

• Hardware and software will improve (in such metrics as performance, user experience, and reliability) at a Moore’s-law type of pace, before transitioning to more incremental improvement.
• Individual software tools can reliably produce high-quality outputs, but the input data must be of the highest quality, carefully formatted in the specific way that the tool demands.
• The more advanced the tool, the more complex the specifications and edge cases, making interoperability between tools (particularly between different providers) a significant technical challenge unless well-designed standards are in place.
• The humans will make all the key executive decisions; the software tool influences the decision-making process through its success or failure in executing human-directed orders.

All of these expectations will need to be recalibrated, if not abandoned entirely, with the advent of generative AI tools such as GPT-4. These tools perform extremely well with vaguely phrased (and slightly erroneous) natural language prompts, or with noisy data scraped from a web page or PDF. I could feed GPT-4 the first few PDF pages of a recent math preprint and get it to generate a half-dozen intelligent questions that an expert attending a talk on the preprint could ask. I plan to use variants of such prompts to prepare my future presentations or to begin reading a technically complex paper. Initially, I labored to make the prompts as precise as possible, based on experience with programming or scripting languages. Eventually the best results came when I unlearned that caution and simply threw lots of raw text at the AI. This level of robustness may enable AI tools to integrate with traditional software tools—or with each other, or with personal data and preferences. It will disrupt workflows everywhere in a way that the current AI tools, used in isolation, merely hint at doing.

https://archive.is/4NEOT

 

[chineebai]

Math and English in general of all population is pretty shyt. The amount of idiots I deal with who can’t work with simple math is astounding.

 

[FTBS]

I know this might sound wild but let me cook...

Could reading and writing and othet basic skills go the way of hunting, farming, building etc? People used to have to kill/raise their own food or they would die. Now most folks cant do that shyt and wouldnt want to. Used to have to build your own shelter...now you dont even have to find it on your own. Could we one day live in a world where you dont have to read or do equations due to technology? We got audiobooks and calculators are everywhere now. Imagine what we will have in 50 years.

Now I am not necessarily saying this is a good thing

 

[Obreh Winfrey]

MFs done raised 2 generations worth of crayon eaters

 

[African Peasant]

I know this might sound wild but let me cook...

Could reading and writing and othet basic skills go the way of hunting, farming, building etc? People used to have to kill/raise their own food or they would die. Now most folks cant do that shyt and wouldnt want to. Used to have to build your own shelter...now you dont even have to find it on your own. Could we one day live in a world where you dont have to read or do equations due to technology? We got audiobooks and calculators are everywhere now. Imagine what we will have in 50 years.

Now I am not necessarily saying this is a good thing

What about memory?

Orientation? Cats can't even fond the street behind them without google MAP.

IT'S OVER

 

[Swirv]

My generation (and older) are the parents of these stupid kids.

And so we bear a lot of responsibility for not holding these kids accountable. And for allowing these technology companies to target kids to spend more time and have more engagement with these mind wasters.

Should’ve never bought these kids smartphones and tablets and let them raise the kids.

 

[Paper Boi]

they all want to get rich quick by scamming, gambling, crypto, or being some type of social media influencer/content creator.

no need for that school shyt.

 

[AyBrehHam Linkin]

these the same kids gonna be complaining about AI


No one wants to hire yall young stupid asses man.

 

[Buddy]

Breh what in the entire fukk is wrong with yall. They literally started the article citing the pandemic and yall are in here talking bout "kids are idiots, bad parents", etc.


How you gon judge them when YOU didn't even take the time to read?!

 

[bnew]

 

[Buckeye Fever]

We got grown ppl out here pronouncing "faux" as "fox"


But I guess reading is culturally biased will be the lame excuse for this one

 

[Saint1]

I see a variation of this thread about once a month. If all the kids dumb, then maybe the teachers are too dumb to teach them.

That's part of it.
Teaching doesn't pay well and teachers are getting wrecked in class everyday. So the smart ones leave.
a smart individual wouldn't stay in a shytty position without proper compensation

My favorite teacher quit a long time ago and started installing solar panels. He happier than a mug