I'm currently volunteering as a student assistant at my school, and today I've gotten the same question 20x. What question do you ask: "Why doesn't ^ return the power of the 2 numbers?"

It turns out that last week they've had a Math class from a new teacher (no programming experience) who said that if you want the power of 2 numbers you have to use the ^ operator...

If you don't know how to program, please don't teach it!