Kids say the darnedest things

I spent another night grading algebra midterms. The sole joy (and pain) of doing that is look at many of the responses. One of the response that brought lots of guffaws was this.

Solve:
2 ln(x)=ln(4x+21)
2 ln(x)=4x ln + 21 ln
2 x ln = 21 ln
ln = 21- 2x

Another kid correctly transformed 2 ln (x) to ln (x²) then converted things to a quadratic and finally solved and wrote 3=ln=6. I kid you not. This is after 2 weeks of spending time on problems very much like this.