One of the advantages of this time of year for me as an educator is the ease in workload as the academic calendar makes the turn from first semester to second semester.  Exams are done; final grades calculated; coursework caught up; and for a brief window of time, there is nothing needing any kind of assessing (i.e. I’m done grading for a while!).  It means I can get caught up on news and research in the world of education that are not immediately critical to my specific everyday needs and to reflect on what insights this information might have for the larger mission of teaching and learning.

Two such items to catch my attention this time around involve math and AI.  The first, a report issued this past September, chronicles the severity of the academic decline in math skills of our youngest learners.  The latest research is indicating that the children who were pre-K or kindergarten during the most severe restrictions of the pandemic not only lost a critical learning window when it comes to math; they are, in fact, not catching up to pre-pandemic levels the way their older elementary age peers are.  Worse, many of them are actually falling further behind, and what makes this fact so highly problematic is that there is a limited window during brain development for mastering such skills effectively.  Hence, the long term impact of a failure to do so can have devastating economic consequences—for both the individual and our society—and that means that this “math gap” that a portion of an entire generation is facing is not inconsequential.

Moreover, that may be even more true for those of us entering the later stages of our lives.  As Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop report out, “in a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. [In addition,] employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.”  Hence, we already have individuals entering the workforce self-identifying as ill-prepared; just imagine what today’s second graders are going to be like as the long-term caretakers of late Boomers (such as myself) and every single Gen Xer and early Millennial! It is difficult not to shudder.

Nor is AI going to be the answer to this “math gap” problem.  The other report to catch my attention came from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who studied the impact of using AI as an aid to learning math.  1,000 high school students were divided into three groups:  a third had full access to ChatGPT while completing practice problems; a third had limited access to a tutorial version that would give hints but not divulge any answers; and a third did their work the traditional way.  The results were very clear:  while the first group solved 48% more practice problems correctly and the second group solved an incredible 127% more problems correctly, the first group earned 17% lower grades than the control on the final test and the tutorial group scored the same as the control.  In other words, good old-fashioned “grind it out” for the win.

Of course, when analyzing the data more deeply, the researchers found that part of what they were observing were flaws in the bot itself.  Its computations were sometimes wrong (8%) and “its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42% of the time.”  However:

the researchers believe the [biggest] problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

Again, score one for basic grit; something we’re going to need to aid our current 2^nd graders in learning if they are to bridge their “math gap” successfully.

What is more, this general capacity for doggedness is something we are all going to need to reacquire if we’re going to meet the massive challenges facing our world today.  While ruminating about these math and AI stories from September, the more recent world was also impinging on my awareness, and as often happens in those circumstances, a kind of Gestalt emerged with an insight I had glimpsed before but never fully fleshed out.  I was listening to Brittany Luse interview former Missouri congresswoman, Cori Bush, on the NPR show, “It’s Been a Minute,” and Ms. Luse kept trying to get Ms. Bush to address how a progressive political agenda could survive in the face of the recent election to which Ms. Bush kept responding that change takes time—an answer Ms. Luse just didn’t seem to want to hear—and as I listened to this repetitious back and forth, the proverbial “light bulb” went on:  change does take time, but that’s an answer nearly no one in today’s world can psychologically hear anymore.

It was like a syllogistic moment out of one of those scenes in The Queen’s Gambit where the main character manipulates the chess pieces in her mind while staring at the ceiling.  Premise 1: Digital technologies have all but destroyed any capacity for delayed gratification in enormous swathes of the human population; the creation of AI has simply been the pinnacle of these efforts, offering instant essays, instant math solutions…instant chimeras of any manner of complex thought.  Yet (premise 2) ALL real, authentic, lasting change is NEVER instantaneous, and so (conclusion) we find ourselves today living in a society in desperate need of change with almost no capacity for the patience to achieve it.  Instead, when the needed change doesn’t happen right away, too many of us now either give up and disengage in fatalistic disgust or succumb to the Siren’s song of fallible simplistic-ness (if I may coin a word).

And the outcome of the recent election is a classic example.  While a six-year study of the prices of 96 items at a Walmart in Georgia revealed that the overall price increase between 2024 and 2023 was a mere 0.7% inflation, that same study points out that the price increase between 2024 and 2019 was 25%.  Given, I’ll suggest, that five years to an adult memory is probably the equivalent of the 15 minutes in the famed Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and you had most of society declare in early November that they wanted their “one marshmallow” now! and be damned the “two marshmallows” they could receive from patience with a (documented!) growing economy.  Hence, the guy touting instant access to the single “marshmallow” won because it was the simplistic solution to a perceived “immediate” need.

Moreover, the fact that the solution offered was a materialistic one was key to the public’s response.  In a society obsessed with stuff, entire populations of this country were prepared to ignore all the other bellicose threats Trump promoted—no matter how potentially detrimental to their own immediate lives and communities—and such is the power of this collective obsession that today, we are willingly standing by as a nation as corporate leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg openly prepare to sacrifice truth itself to maintain their profits against any legal onslaughts from the incoming administration about fact-checking (and God help you if you have the temerity to try to call out this greed in a nation-wide publication!)

So where does all this leave me as an educator? First, I’ve got children who can’t do basic math.  Second, I’ve got AI that can’t solve the problem and actually threatens to exacerbate its difficulties.  Third, I’ve got a society too incapable of delayed gratification to deal with either of these first two problems (let alone the enormous ones such as climate change and environmental degradation), and I’ve got a simpleton to lead them getting sworn into the Oval Office.  Kind of a grim outlook for a grim winter.

However, there was one other story during this down time that came to my attention that reminded me that there is a solution to these problems (or any other), and that is: patient, steady, determined resolve.  Granted, the story itself is really kind of trivial, namely that my alma mater officially rebranded itself as “WashU.”  But you need to have the insider view of the story that underlies this story to know why it uplifted my spirits, and so please bear with me as I fill in some of the “behind-the-scenes.”

It starts in 1982 in the Public Relations Department of a university recognized regionally for its excellence, who has recently hired a new director who has made a small name for himself at some other midwestern schools for raising the profiles of those institutions.  Washington University in St. Louis wants to stop being known as “the Harvard of the Midwest” and start being said in the same breath as Harvard instead.  It wants to be “Washington.”  The only problem is that there are at least 20 other institutions in this country that have “Washington” in their name, and all the locals and students know this school by its folksy title, “WashU.”

Enter the new director, Fred Volkmann—who has as one of his employees, a sophomore work-study student, hired to run the mimeograph machine and mail out press releases to the local and regional media outlets.  Fred recognizes that there is authentic marketing power in the folksy, “WashU,” and he has a plan, a plan he generously shares the broad strokes of with his young work-study student (helping with the grunt work of the first rebranding campaign) who impudently wonders aloud why we can’t just make the switch immediately to “WashU?” Said student is given a quick but firm lesson in the intricacies of PR, and he goes back to mailing press releases.

By now, of course, any reader has filled in the blanks, and as an alum (and that former employee), I have watched Fred’s plan unfold from afar for over 40 years.  I have watched my alma mater achieve the national recognition it aspired to all those years ago.  I have watched its brand change from “Washington University in St. Louis” to “Washington University” to “Washington”—all stages in Fred’s original plan.  But when he retired about eight years ago, there was as yet no “WashU,” and I wondered if “Washington” might be the end of things.  That is until this past fall, when I learned through my alumni magazine that Fred’s grand dream from the early 1980s had finally come to fruition and that, henceforth, the official branding of my alma mater would be and is “WashU.”

Like I said, a rather trivial story—especially in a world where Palestinians are enduring threatened genocide and Los Angeles, California is basically burning to the ground.  Yet, I think it is also a story full of potency and import because it is the story of the fundamental power of patient, steady, determined resolve to change the world.  Like Fred, all any of us can do is plant seeds and quietly tend them, keeping faith that the crop will eventually bear fruit, and like Fred, there is a lot of anonymity to that task (most people reading this will never have heard of him).  Therefore, when I think back to my earlier question in this essay, “where does all this leave me an educator?” it leaves me as it always does (and always will!):  planting the seeds of knowledge, critical thinking, and wisdom in my students, doing so one day, one lesson, one moment at a time—something no AI or material “stuff” is ever going to be able to do. 

It is not an easy task. Nor is the patient, steady, determined resolve needed to accomplish it a comforting reality.  But it is the task at hand, and as I have oft quoted Luther, those of us committed to this profession “kann nicht anders.”  Our world and its future are literally depending on it.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Barshay, J. (Sept. 2, 2024) Kids Who Use ChatGPT as a Study Assistant Do Worse on Tests: Researchers Compare Math Progress of Almost 1,000 High School Students. The Hechinger Report.  https://hechingerreport.org/kids-chatgpt-worse-on-tests/.

Camera, L. (Sept. 20, 2024) In the Rush to COVID Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners? The 74.  https://www.the74million.org/article/in-the-rush-to-covid-recovery-did-we-forget-about-our-youngest-learners/?utm_source=The+74+Million+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dcaab7edb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_27_07_47_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_077b986842-6dcaab7edb-176301373.

Isaac, M. & Schleifer, T. (Jan. 9, 2025) Meta Says It Will End Its Fact-Checking Program on Social Media Posts.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/07/business/meta-fact-checking.

Luse, B., et al. (Jan. 8, 2025) Is The Squad Dead? Cori Bush on the Future of Progressive Politics.  NPR It’s Been a Minute.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/1263511078/future-of-progressive-politics.

Mischel, W. & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970) Attention in Delay of Gratification.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 16 (2), pp. 329–337.

Selyukh, A. & Adolphe, J. (Jan. 14, 2025) NPR Shopped for 96 Items at Walmart to Track How Prices are Really Changing.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5241014/walmart-prices-npr-shopping-cart-2024.