I've talked about the Potato-ification of kids these days for years now. It's not something only I've noticed. Literacy is dropping alongside kids' ability to, well, exist - without some form of help from parents or teachers.

This includes being potty trained at school age, being unable to use books, a third of which attempt to swipe them instead according to Sky News, and can't even eat or drink independently.

But, I'm a music teacher in high school, and although I am stunned almost every day at these teenagers' general inabilities to this day to be able to, say, put on the tie that they've been required to wear for years, it's the strange potato-ification of their musical abilities that fascinates me the most.

We all know here in Asia, kids are taught to study through cram culture, pure force-feeding of rote memorisation without any need to understand anything they're being thrown.

No better an example can be described as a kid in my band class. He's one of the pianists, and he can certainly rip into virtuosic tunes far beyond my capacity to do so. His fingers zoom around that keyboard like there's no tomorrow.

And yet, he just spent weeks struggling in vain to play the synth riff in Michael Jackson's Billy Jean.

I don't remember anything virtuosic on keys in that song, what are you talking about?

I hear you. I'm not referring to anything virtuosic. I'm referring to this:

Yeah. A couple of simple, basic chords in ONE hand - the left hand riff left to the bassist.

He could not figure it out. I taught him ways of thinking, counting, he practiced and practiced alone and with bandmates on the drums counting him in, hitting the piano when he should play.

He would jolt and squirm in confusion, his body prohibiting the action of these simple chords.

He then had to change to a pre-chorus which also had a similar rhythm and just flopped on both the transition and the rhythm itself.

This was not the only time. A previous song they did was in a different time signature, a different feel. This was disastrous for him.

What the hell is going on?

The thing is, this kid was clearly trained in the Asian way, but also playing traditional piano pieces which are quite rhythmically safe and predictable; downbeats where downbeats should land.

This Billy Jean rhythm is syncopated - the second and fourth chord in the above picture arrive on an upbeat.

To be clear, this is not difficult in any capacity. It means you play on counts 1 and 4.

I can't recall in my musical journey ever having any such issues. I grew up learning by putting on a tape or CD and just grinding my way through rock/metal songs where such rhythms are par for the course. There's barely a pop song that exists today that lacks syncopation of some kind. I only really had trouble with performing to a clean enough standard for Uni. But all the snobs there could march through on what I find difficult to even call music if you learn it without putting any soul or feel into it.

I'm sure there would have been syncopation in the music this kid has learnt over the years too. But that's not what he learnt. He has no understanding of chord symbols or any other theory-based information. He doesn't know any musical concepts. All he knows is how to arrange his fingers on the keys and in what order as done repeatedly thousands of times until a piece of music is complete.

It's a truly bizarre and mind-boggling experience to see it happen, and from my experience is exclusively an issue among pianists - and not just in Asia.

In University - yes, UNIVERSITY - a master's degree pianist doing concerts on stage with audiences and such, couldn't do me a favour in a studio recording and play this BASIC ASS rhythm in Porcupine Tree's 'Halo', to the extent of which I had to ask somebody else, who also largely failed, and I - not a pianist - had to do it myself by pressing record in one room, dashing out and around the corner to enter the recording booth, play it to a metronome (I don't need the music), then rush back and shift it in place. At 3:40 in the video:

(Thank god I didn't need them for 2:27... I could play it but certainly couldn't count it!)

That same master's degree pianist (she was in her 40's I think) let me down on another occasion when I asked her to simply improvise over the blues... 'ok fine, maybe just the pentatonic'. This is the most basic scale all beginners learn before anything else, pretty much.

She was incapable of improvising anything, and told me if I had it written down then maybe she could help. Wtf.

I'm sure I've moaned about that before here though so I won't beat a dead horse any more than I need to.

Anyway. The problem is clearly more pronounced over here than in the West where Jazz and pop is a more natural part of learning music, I guess. But still. It's clearly a global phenomenon and getting worse.

(To be fair, another student in the same class has no such issues on Piano and can just play whatever gets put in front of her, but the Rise of the Potatoes on average is hard to ignore)