Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; 'people were in freefall.' Teaching was becoming impossible. 'With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x ' 2 = 5,' Stankova said. Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. 'I realized that for students to follow me,' she told me, 'I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.' The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to 'the meaning of equals in an equation.' Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to...
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