By Audrey Denise B. Cachuela
Some students move through school so smoothly that nobody notices when they stop being challenged. Kimberley Langen, founder and CEO of Spirit of Math, says she sees that happen more often than many parents realize, especially with students who continue bringing home strong grades year after year.
From the outside, those students rarely raise concerns because in many classrooms, they are considered the easy students. They are organized, capable, and require very little intervention, and that is partly why the issue can go unnoticed for so long.
Over the past few years, most education conversations have focused on learning loss, declining test scores, and students struggling to keep up academically. U.S. math scores for both fourth and eighth-grade students saw their steepest decline in decades in 2022. (Source: The Nation’s Report Card, 2022) Ontario schools have faced similar challenges, with just 51% of Grade 6 students meeting the provincial math standard in EQAO results released in 2025. (Source: EQAO Math Achievement Results, 2025)
Most conversations around declining math scores focus on students who are falling behind and how schools can help them catch up. What gets discussed far less often are the students who are already doing well on paper but have quietly stopped feeling challenged by school altogether.
That dynamic can be difficult to spot because strong students often continue producing strong results. Over time, though, some students become highly efficient at meeting expectations without needing to engage very deeply with the material anymore.
What Challenge Actually Looks Like
Programs like Spirit of Math emerged in response to growing concerns about how little academic challenge many high-performing students receive in traditional classrooms. While people often compare it to tutoring companies, the model is fundamentally different. Traditional tutoring is usually designed to help students improve grades or revisit material they are struggling with. Spirit of Math instead operates as a structured after-school school with its own curriculum, focused on advanced reasoning, collaborative learning, and long-term mathematical thinking. Most students entering the program are already performing well in school, and admission generally requires at least a B+ average along with an assessment or interview.
Students are often expected to explain how they arrived at answers, defend their reasoning, and work through unfamiliar questions collaboratively with classmates. Discussions focus less on speed and memorization and more on how students think through difficult ideas in the first place. For students used to moving quickly through material, that shift can feel uncomfortable at first.
Langen often draws a distinction between “doing math” and “thinking mathematically,” emphasizing the importance of analyzing information carefully rather than relying entirely on memorized methods or repeated patterns.
Collaborative discussion and reasoning-based instruction have been shown to improve both conceptual understanding and long-term retention in mathematics education. (Source: Frontiers in Education, 2023) This matters because math is often treated as solitary work in traditional classrooms. In discussion-based environments, students are pushed to hear competing approaches, explain their reasoning clearly, and rethink assumptions in real time, which creates a very different kind of academic pressure than simply completing worksheets and arriving at the correct answer quickly.
The Growing Concern Around AI and Independent Thinking
The rise of AI tools has added another layer to these conversations around learning and academic challenge. More educators are starting to question what happens when students can generate polished answers instantly without fully understanding the reasoning behind them. The concern is not really about students using technology at all. It is whether constant access to quick answers slowly reduces the need to sit with difficult ideas, or think critically enough to recognize when something does not actually make sense.
If students are already becoming used to highly procedural learning environments, AI can make it even easier to move through school without engaging very deeply with the material itself. A polished explanation can appear instantly, and a problem can be solved in seconds without a student fully understanding the reasoning underneath it. That has created a complicated situation for schools, which are still trying to figure out where these tools belong in classrooms while making sure students continue building foundational thinking skills independently.
Concerns about what learning actually looks like when explanations and step-by-step solutions are available instantly have started coming up much more often. If students no longer need to memorize facts in the same way, the focus naturally shifts toward other skills, including reasoning, communication, adaptability, and the ability to evaluate whether information is actually correct.
That is part of why educators like Langen continue emphasizing the importance of intellectual struggle, particularly for students who are already performing well academically. Some level of confusion and trial-and-error is still necessary for deeper learning to happen. Students need opportunities to sit with difficult ideas long enough to work through them independently rather than immediately turning to technology for the fastest possible answer.
The Bigger Question Behind Strong Report Cards
A lot of the public conversation around education still centers on measurable outcomes like test scores, averages, rankings, and benchmarks because they are easy to track and compare. What those numbers do not always show, though, is whether students are still being challenged in meaningful ways once they learn how to succeed within the system.
A student can continue performing well academically while slowly becoming less comfortable with intellectual struggle. Over time, some learn how to maintain strong grades by relying on speed and familiar patterns rather than developing the ability to think through more difficult or unfamiliar situations. That is really the core of Kimberly’s argument: students who are capable of handling challenging work usually still need to be challenged in order to keep growing.
As conversations around declining math performance, educational standards, and AI continue evolving, more parents are beginning to look beyond report cards alone and ask a different question: Is my child still being challenged enough to grow?
For families asking that question, Spirit of Math has built its entire model around students who want more than repetition and routine classroom work. The program focuses heavily on mathematical reasoning, problem solving, and collaborative learning, with the goal of helping students stay intellectually engaged long after they learn how to “do well” in school.
