[HN Gopher] American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian ...
___________________________________________________________________
American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)
Author : b8
Score : 429 points
Date : 2021-08-09 04:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wbur.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wbur.org)
| gfaure wrote:
| If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this,
| known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my
| own experiences with it as a kid, it was very much about rote
| memorisation and doing the same sheet of arithmetic as quickly as
| possible. One of the exercises Kumon made kids do at the age of 5
| is to simply place shuffled magnets with the numbers 1 to 100 in
| order on a 10x10 board.
|
| I can't say that this approach really turned me onto maths: quite
| the opposite. Past a certain level, the Kumon teachers were
| essentially just marking from an answer book, without any
| understanding of the content themselves. They had zero interest
| (or perhaps ability) in conveying the beauty or applications of
| maths to the students.
|
| The approach that made me love maths was one where I understood
| the intuition and purpose behind the methods, ideally enough to
| develop them from the bare minimum myself.
| platz wrote:
| So you're saying you're in the cohort that was kumon-schooled
| and ended up loving math.
| [deleted]
| gfaure wrote:
| Correct, but it was despite Kumon, not because of it.
| sideflare wrote:
| You're pretty lucky. Years of forced kumon led me away from
| math.
| platz wrote:
| so you say. if you were in a study done by researchers,
| they wouldnt care what you thought the cause was and would
| only report the correlation.
| vardhanw wrote:
| I am from India. The school I went to (70-80s) wasn't the best,
| but I had an innate aptitude for math (perhaps genetic). I was
| lucky to get introduced to some Russian math texts [1][2] from my
| 3rd/4th standards which helped me (alongwith some local texts) to
| get good scholarships and rankings in Maths and science
| competitions (including a national level Math olympiad) and a
| later admission to a top level engg college in IIT (again thanks
| to accessing good libraries for foreign authored books). I see
| the Russian books as having provided me with a good foundation by
| being fun and interesting, informative, affordable, immersive and
| engaging and it really fuelled my interest in math and science.
| Given the resurgence of the Russian school of math in the US I
| wish I could be there to educate my children in that tradition.
| But not being there (out of choice and circumstance, I studied in
| Boston for a while) I really wish something like this was
| available in India.
|
| So my question is - is there some sort of a curriculum and
| associated training material (books, texts) available based on
| the Russian way of teaching, on which to develop a training plan
| locally in a country like India? Given the plethora of online
| school education options available today I do not know what exact
| training methods are used there, but platforms exist to have a
| broader reach for teachers to find interested students. I presume
| it would not be too difficult to setup a curriculum and training
| outside the normal school one with the explicit intention of
| developing strong math skills based on a Russian math education
| base if one wants to teach.
|
| [1] Mainly by Mir publishers, some of which are thankfully still
| available online @mirtitles.org
|
| [2] the ones I got were at throwaway prices, titles such as Yakov
| Perelman's Fun with Math, some Little Mathematics Library books
| physics, chemistry, cybernetics etc.
| lvl100 wrote:
| This notion that "American" math and sciences lag behind the
| world is one of the greatest lies ever told in my lifetime. And
| for the record, there is no "Russian" math or "Chinese" math.
| Mathematics is mathematics. Where the US approach differs is that
| they are not requiring high level of math on general public.
| However, if you are gifted and/or motivated, you have access to
| unparalleled resources.
| doovd wrote:
| Everyone understands that Russian math means Russian approach
| to math. And American approach does not result in general
| population knowing enough math. And this is why American math
| is lagging behind.
| caddemon wrote:
| The US has resources available if you know where to look, but
| children obviously don't, so it comes down to luck with parents
| (or in rarer cases a very good teacher). Perhaps the top
| Olympiad level types get "recruited". But speaking from
| experience, kids that are in the high 90 percentiles who enjoy
| math at a young age frequently end up bored in a typical
| classroom and eventually disillusioned with the subject - not
| provided additional resources.
|
| By high school one can start seeking out their own resources,
| but motivation to do math specifically is harder to find when
| you've considered it a boring subject for 5+ years. And there
| is definitely an advantage to being introduced certain concepts
| at an elementary school age.
|
| So the US approach absolutely differs in how it handles early
| math education for the vast majority of students, not just for
| the average student. I wish I learned math in the Russian style
| as a child, and moreover I think US math has this problem
| moreso than even other subjects here. Humanities classes
| generally have less mindless repetition and early childhood
| teachers could easily recommend advanced books in a way they
| really couldn't for math.
|
| In many schools the same teacher will teach every subject until
| you hit middle school! So it is no surprise they don't have
| resources to give to advanced students, as a lot of them dread
| math themselves.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| It is hard to believe any American feels the need to supplement
| the existing in-school lessons with after-school paid programs
| like Russian math or Kumon.
|
| In the last 10 years nearly every school has adopted the Common
| Core curriculum, which is the product of the latest findings in
| educational methodology research, developed by Ed.D. luminaries
| like Dr. Jill Biden, and promoted by successful industrialists
| like Bill Gates.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| If you count Khan Academy and MIT's OCW, sure the Anglo-sphere
| has unparalleled resources. But a minor point of the article is
| how the way Americans are taught in conventional public school
| is just to do the basic work. Math is treated as a hurdle to
| clear rather than the lifelong mental sport.
|
| But here's a point I would have liked examined further in the
| article: where does one find material or instruction that would
| give you a competitive structural thinking needed to grapple
| Olympiad or Putnam-level content beyond enrichment courses? In
| China, the best students are scouted early by teachers and
| prepared by the Chinese government through special camps and
| their own difficult examinations. I'd assume the same thing
| happened/happens in Russia. In the United States, by default
| (and probably by design), its difficult to know on what level a
| student can stand in regards to everyone else until the very
| end. At least in a public school.
|
| Parents and students can use proxies like how early AP subjects
| are offered, USA today rankings, or the success of past alumni.
| But, unless you're in a well-endowed private schools,
| magnet/exam schools, or private enrichment program like AoPS
| (Art of Problem solving) or Talent Identification Programs
| (many of which are now shutting down) there are few ways to
| know how well the instruction one receives as a precocious and
| motivated high school compare to those of the best among the
| nation or the world.
|
| One could argue if you have to wait until high school to
| understand where you stand, it's too late. But that's my point,
| many students may have resources and talent but the lack the
| expertise to deciding where to and how begin in those crucial
| first years. Few states have strong "gifted" programs and the
| one's that do aren't really any better than "normal"
| instruction in China or Japan.
| lvl100 wrote:
| Ok. And what did those programs actually achieve for Russia
| and China? Is that why they send their best to the US/UK to
| study? Interesting.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Those programs produced Nobel prize-winning scientists,
| Field prize-winning mathematicians, computational whiz
| kids, and CEOs of billion dollar companies, etc. I'm sure
| you've heard of Perelman.
|
| But even the non-Perelmans - the "regular" students - who
| didn't rise to the peaks of intellectual rigor still have a
| stronger background in today's knowledge economy then most
| of their contemporaries stateside.
|
| As far as their children are concerned, the Russians and
| Chinese send their best 18 year-olds to Ivies, Ivy-likes,
| and Oxbridge just as they send their best 18 year-olds to
| Moscow State and Peking. Many of them prefer an American
| degree for the business opportunities, better income, and
| the prestige of working for an American firm. A more
| relevant question to ask is how many would send their best
| 14 year-olds to the average public high school in the US,
| or the average comprehensive school in the UK, as full-time
| students for at least 3 years?
| ardit33 wrote:
| My sister sent my niece to one, as even her 'private' middle
| school in Newton, MA, was just not strong enough. She did sign up
| my niece in every summer class she could, without overloading
| her. It was always my nieces' choice, and half the time she
| choose arts and half science. Now, my niece is able to do college
| entry level data science classes (she is about to become a Junior
| in HighSchool), and she actually likes it a lot.
|
| American schools are too soft on science in general. I did grades
| 1-11 in Albania and my senior year of HighSchool in the US. Some
| of my schooling in Albania was done under communism, and some
| after communism fell in the 90s.
|
| The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science. Biology
| started at 5th grade, pre-Algebra at 5, and full blown Algebra at
| 6, physics at 6, and Chemistry at 7. Then in highschool you did
| the same, but more advanced. There was no choice at all, you had
| to do them all. The only choice in HS was a second foreign
| language. The whole idea was that you have to know all the basics
| of ALL sciences, so in college you know what to choose and
| pursue. If you never tried, you will have no clue if you liked
| something or not. (also basic music knowledge, sheet reading, and
| arts was a requirement as well).
|
| When I came to the US, I was flabergasted how behind most of the
| kids were in science. I took AP physics, and it became boring as
| it was things I had done in 8th grade. I got 800./800 on the SAT
| 2, physics.
|
| The math part, I took AP calc, and it was advanced enough,
| especially the part B to challenge me. But this was clearly an
| elective that only about 30 students took it, while back home it
| was a requirement for all.
|
| Unfortunately, the current movement on dumbing down math and
| science in the name of 'equity' is a step behind and very
| dispiriting. It is bound to hurt poorer but smart kids, that
| can't afford private tutoring and have to rely only on public
| schools. Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and
| progress in this country, and are becoming actually regressive
| and backwards.
|
| P.s. The only advantage of American teaching on science was that
| it relies more on experiments to teach concepts, while the
| Albanian one had no equipment, or lacked the basics of it. Heck,
| in the 90s we didn't even have glass on the windows and had to
| freeze all winter. Also basic electricity was lacking half of the
| winter.
|
| Ps2. Most Americans have it good (condition wise), they just
| don't know it
|
| Ps3. This is a good video how schooling was back then (in 88).
| Notice how the kids are wearing jackets inside, as there was no
| heating https://youtu.be/yZD1jaKbz2g?t=251
| rrss wrote:
| Out of curiosity, do you recall which ap physics course you
| took?
| ardit33 wrote:
| I don't remember exactly, but it was the most advanced they
| offered. This was in Virginia, in 98-99. My teacher (Mr.
| Norris) was excellent, but it was clear that the overall
| course was something that I had done years before back in
| Albania. Since I knew a lot of things already, I was probably
| a bit annoying at class (having always the response), but I
| made some good friends in that class.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This is interesting. I studied physics at Harvard with many
| of the best of the best, there were a few from Romania.
|
| I would be surprised if those people could be solving AP
| Physics C problems by 8th grade. 1 & 2, easily of course,
| but C is quite different.
|
| If you found calculus BC hard-ish and physics easy in
| comparison, I think you were taking 1 & 2 as C was much
| harder. SAT II physics is a joke.
|
| Virginia probably has some of the best STEM education in
| the entire country, at least the northern bit. Certainly
| better than what you can get at most schools outside of
| some in California, the boarding schools, and NYC magnets.
| seer wrote:
| Not op, but I remember what got me into sciences was the
| "kids soviet encyclopedia". Specifically the physics section.
|
| We had "big soviet encyclopedia" and "kid" one on our
| bookshelf (A point of pride for my grandparents). Nobody told
| me that by "kids" the authors meant "teens", so around 13yo I
| devoured those books whole.
|
| Taught me structure of the atom, chemistry and lots of
| fascinating physical phenomena. And made most of the physics
| material easy to grasp up till last HS grade.
|
| It had little maths, concentrating more on the understanding
| rather than the rigorous descriptions, which made the maths
| to describe them quite obvious, when I had to learn them in
| school.
|
| Not sure if the current state of wikipedia is better or worse
| for that purpose- it was much better structured and paced for
| sure.
| lucas_codes wrote:
| Why is dumbing down science teaching the fault of extreme
| progressive left and not, say, reduced education funding,
| favouring religious teaching, or even more likely, nuanced
| policy difficulties that don't fit nicely into a left/right
| divide?
| credit_guy wrote:
| Take New York City (which I'm familiar with, but it's likely
| the story is similar in many other places):
|
| - each public school has the same budget per student. There
| is no "reduced education funding" for schools in district X
| vs district Y, or for any school, because the budget per
| student is equal. Each school's budget is public, and
| published on the web.
|
| - favoring religious teaching: at least at the school my kids
| go to there's absolutely no religious teaching. I suspect
| this is the case for all the public schools in NYC
|
| - nuanced policy difficulties? Not sure what you mean by this
|
| Ok, now to answer your original question: why the fault of
| progressive left. As you see I skipped the word "extreme", as
| this is a loaded word; people who vote that way certainly do
| not perceive themselves as extreme.
|
| At the recent mayoral primaries, the top candidates were the
| moderates Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia (1st and 2nd place),
| and the progressive Maya Wiley (3rd place). As far as the
| education was concerned, the hot topic was the selective
| "specialized high schools" [1], where the admission is test-
| based, according to a state law passed about 50 years ago.
| The current mayor (Bill de Blasio, progressive) has worked
| tirelessly for the last 4 years or so to lobby the State
| legislature to get the law repealed. The progressive
| candidate, Maya Wiley, promised to work towards the same
| goal. Here's the relevant extract from her platform [2]
|
| >> To remove barriers that separate and label children, we
| will: [...] Eliminate discriminatory admissions "screens."
|
| In other words, kill the specialized high schools program.
|
| Eric Adams (the winner, moderate) promised to keep the
| program as it currently is.
|
| In case you wonder what the admission entrance exam is like,
| it's just two separate tests, one for ELA and one for math.
| Both tests are fairly challenging. The progressives think
| that these tests (and especially the math one) are
| discriminatory in nature.
|
| Here's a sample math question [3, p.78] "In Centerville, 45%
| of the population is female, and 60% of the population
| commutes to work daily. Of the total Centerville population,
| 21% are females who commute to work daily. What percentage of
| the total Centerville population are males who do not commute
| to work daily?"
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in
| _Ne...
|
| [2] https://www.mayawileyformayor.com/maya-wileys-plan-for-
| creat...
|
| [3] https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-
| sour...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's funny how they lead with the useless info in that
| question.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Here's a sample math question ...
|
| This is supposed to be a "challenging" problem? It seems
| quite obvious to me: we simply cannot answer the question
| as given, because we aren't told how many in the
| Centerville population are classed as 'both male and
| female', or 'neither male nor female'.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Hahahaha. Thanks for the lough.
| lucas_codes wrote:
| Thank you for such a detailed comment. Maybe then I'm just
| missing the American context. Having lived in the UK and
| Australia (which have their own lion's share of education
| issues), to me it's obvious that students struggling should
| get support, and students who excel should be able to go
| further, and I don't think anyone imagines a system where
| everyone is always in one classroom with 100% the same
| learning.
|
| I'm very against the idea that struggling students should
| just be "sacrificed" for the advanced student, however,
| which some of the other comments seem to be implying.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "reduced education funding"
|
| But _Albania_ can finance rigorous teaching of science ... ?
|
| USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern
| Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient
| solutions.
|
| For a less politically charged example: compare expenses of
| the Falcon rocket family to those of the Space Launch System.
| disk0 wrote:
| > But Albania can finance rigorous teaching of science
|
| > USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former
| Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on
| inefficient solutions.
|
| You're not wrong. Financialization of education continuing
| down from secondar to primary education, commodification of
| students--I think those are a bit better descriptions of
| the issue beyond "funding cuts" personally. Its incredibly
| easy to make things inefficient (or efficient at something
| else [0]) when quality/efficiency slowly fades from the
| conciousness of those in charge.
|
| I'd say the more important thing is that there are large
| failures here, they were building before "Extreme
| progressive Liberals" (which depending on how I read that I
| can agree with, from the left even). Saying this as someone
| who was a STEM kid in high school, took AP Calc at 15, etc.
| --I'm more mixed on the more static curriculum as described
| earlier, its not as important here tho
|
| [0] Like cranking out Amazon employees
|
| <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-
| communit...>
|
| """
|
| _Writer Erika Hayasaki visited Cajon High. Here's what she
| found:_
|
| _A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an
| air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate
| the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon's
| giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The
| words "CUSTOMER OBSESSION" and "DELIVER RESULTS" were
| painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a
| whiteboard, a teacher had written the words "Logistics
| Final Project," and the lesson of the day was on Amazon's
| "14 Leadership Principles." Each teenager wore a company
| golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo._
|
| _..._
|
| _A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an
| Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on
| their clothing as they memorize Amazon's leadership
| principles (which, it is worth noting, also include
| "Ownership" and "Think Big," injunctions that hold merit
| for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might
| solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a
| relationship between the company and public goods like a
| high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as
| "the major working-class space of suburban and exurban
| socialization."_
|
| """
| vanviegen wrote:
| Teaching might be (or might have been) a prestigious and
| relatively well-paying job in Albania. I wouldn't know -
| would you?
| seer wrote:
| Don't know about Albania, but in Bulgaria the teachers
| had very low pay, (so were / are nurses btw). I think the
| difference was that they were very respected.
|
| When I managed to attend teacher parent meetings I could
| see the deference people had for their children's
| teachers. And children also deeply respected them for the
| most part.
|
| The scenes from the beginning of Breaking Bad for example
| are rather alien to me - I can understand them, but I've
| never encountered such things when I was a kid.
| Natsu wrote:
| ardit33 would know and having said "A doctor and a nurse
| probably lived in the same apartment, and had similar
| wages." I question both the idea that teachers were
| highly paid and that there was much status to be had in
| general in Albania.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I don't think there's a single country that spends more on
| education than the US and yet here we are.
|
| IMO the prosperity of the US has made people entitled and
| it's easier to complain than to put in the work.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.noodle.com/articles/let-s-get-rid-
| of-special-edu...
|
| Inclusive classrooms raise scores of the lower performing
| students. That's probably true.
|
| It glosses over what it does to people on the other end of
| the spectrum.
|
| As someone _from_ the other end of the spectrum, growing up
| never having to put any effort, having few or no peers close
| to my level, and being constantly encouraged by the people
| around me to do poorly for curves etc... I can say I
| developed life long development /psychological problems as a
| result, and the idea that I or anyone in the future like me
| should be slowed down so everyone is more equal is deeply
| offensive.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The evidence does not suggest measurable harm for those on
| the other side of the spectrum from inclusive classrooms.
| Maybe there is some harm, but if so we haven't been able to
| devise a test or experiment that can find it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I'm downvoted, but you can go look at the literature.
| Jump discontinuity studies for placement, testing
| comparison, etc. - none of them show the effect that most
| people on HN want them to show.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Why isn't it deeply offensive for you to want to slow them
| down if the reverse is true?
| vkazanov wrote:
| What's more important: make everybody average? or make it
| possible for some people to reach outstanding levels?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Because in kindergarten I was regularly asked to go hang
| out by myself as literally every other student in the
| room learned to read. When they gave me the tests they
| use to measure themselves I got 99th percentile scores so
| literally neglecting me got them the metric as doing
| anything for me.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, I get the general idea. I, like most HN readers
| likely were, was in a similar situation.
|
| And as a certified smart guy I now ask myself and others
| questions like: Why is it deeply offensive to hold you
| back when you are literally suggesting to hold them back
| instead?
| vkazanov wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I started in an average class in my year. Don't remember
| doing anything extra at home, or much at all, but still had
| an equivalent of all A's. At some point my parents realised
| something was wrong and moved me to the strongest class...
| Only then I started doing something. This is when I
| realised that some kids were already impossibly far ahead
| (we had world-level olympiad goers there).
|
| Can't say I become world-class at anything but this helped
| to concentrate and _work_ through the rest of school and
| uni without any problems.
| nofinator wrote:
| I am sorry you had that experience. Mine was similar
| (around 1990s).
|
| But these days, integrated classrooms (as mentioned in your
| article) tend to be staffed with two teachers: one with a
| general education background and one with special
| education. They work as a team and can provide
| differentiated learning paths. The lower teacher/student
| ratio can help both the gen ed and special ed students.
| nostromo wrote:
| In some places in the US it may be a funding issue, but in
| most places it's not.
|
| Take Baltimore for example. The public schools are very well-
| funded by any standard. And yet they have several high
| schools that didn't produce a single student proficient in
| math.
|
| https://www.k12dive.com/news/several-baltimore-schools-
| repor...
| parsecs wrote:
| Also out of curiosity, from where do you draw the connection
| that the lackluster schooling is caused by "extreme progressive
| liberals"? Maybe I'm just not well versed enough in politics
| but it appears to jump straight to that conclusion following
| your personal experience.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Recent trend to dumb down math and calling 'racist'.
| Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that will
| suffer the most. Most immigrants are poor, and don't have the
| connections and money to go to private tutoring route and
| rely heavily on public education.
|
| Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses
| before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan
| https://forums.somd.com/threads/virginia-dumbing-down-
| educat...
|
| Educational malpractice in the name of 'equity' By Post
| Editorial BoardApril 30, 2021 | 6:14pm | Updated
|
| https://nypost.com/2021/04/30/educational-malpractice-in-
| the...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| At least you can homeschool your kids. It takes a lot of
| effort but I don't think money is a big issue here unless
| of course you are struggling with basic income then it's
| best to focus on income first.
| tester34 wrote:
| > Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that
| will suffer the most.
|
| How?
|
| You have advantage of being aware
| bnjms wrote:
| Can you share what did you do with the students that could not
| do algebra physics and chemistry in junior high?
|
| I've always thought yours was the right way. There are some
| students which will do the minimal but will manage if
| challenged. Seems the equitable way leaves them behind.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Since it was a communist country, everyone had the same
| conditions (crappy), and everyone had the same fricking
| clothes (only two clothing factories on the whole country),
| and same teachers (and no private schooling allowed), and we
| had the same books, and no calculators.
|
| And it is clear, if all conditions are equal, still people
| are not born equal. Some kids are just smarter than others,
| and some are just dummies, or don't care about school. Since
| everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame 'systematic
| x'. It was all equal. A doctor and a nurse probably lived in
| the same apartment, and had similar wages. (think Cuba, or
| North Korea today. Albania was like the North Korea of
| Europe).
|
| Grades/marks were 2 - 10, 2-4 was failing, 5 was passing, 10
| was excellent (and hard to get).
|
| Grades were given in the basis of
|
| 1. homework,
|
| 2. blackboard interrogation (you had to solve and explain
| everything in front of the class, similar to a whiteboard
| coding interview),
|
| 3. Exams, flash quizzes or pre-announced.
|
| You had three types of students:
|
| 1. Great students, and are aiming for the 10s (and usually
| get a 9 or a 10).
|
| 2. People that struggle to do the basic, and just want to
| pass the class and are aiming for a 5 or a 6.
|
| 3. Everybody else that got a 7-8.
|
| Every exam or homework, was done with this in mind. You
| usually had 3 type of questions:
|
| 1. Super basic, <- If you were in class, you could do it
|
| 2. Medium, <- Some thinking is required
|
| 3. Advanced <- Usually only the really good students got
| these
|
| The teachers knew, that some students would struggle, and
| they will let them pass if they just did the basic effort. If
| a student failed even that, they would have to go to 'summer
| class' and take additional classes and exams to pass. If you
| failed a class, you failed the whole year and had to repeat
| every other class as well.
|
| Also, the school over time divided the students by grades.
| Each cohort-year, might have 4-5 classes (of 30 students).
| Your class was the people that you studied with, and did
| everything. The top students usually were placed together,
| and spread in the class A, and B. The rest were put on the
| other classes.
|
| So, the top classes had only excellent students, or average
| students, but not of the failing one. The idea was that
| failing students will just drag down all the top students and
| not let them excel. A top student can make an average student
| better, but there was little chance to do anything with a
| failing one. If you were initially a failing student but
| started doing better, you could move up to the better
| classes. This is similar to the soccer relegation techniques
| of most soccer leagues in Europe. But: Every class, had the
| same subjects, and the same load. Even the failing students
| had to do pre-calc. But the teachers would just be much more
| lenient on them. Eg. do the very basic, and they will let you
| pass. But if you wanted a good grade, 8 or higher, you had to
| work your butt off.
|
| This is totally politically incorrect in today's environment,
| but even communist Albania knew better. Some people are just
| not smart at all, and it is better to let them just do the
| bare minimum and pass, meanwhile let the smarter kids do more
| advanced work.
| a-saleh wrote:
| T.b.h. as somebody from ost-block country, I did hate the
| cast-system based on the performance. In my school we had a
| class that selected for the worst students, and surprise,
| it created a class where so many people failed.
|
| I was in class that had an even mix, some really smart
| kids, some not so much, and some comparable to the worst of
| the D-class. Like third of the of my classmates went for
| the sports-focused high-school, because they were decent at
| basketball and bad at almost everything else. But nobody
| was failing.
|
| Like, A-class should have been the top students, B and C
| middling, and D poor. In reality, A was ordinary, B and C
| contained the best and the average and D was a failure.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How did the A class become ordinary while B&C had a
| mixture of top and average? Was it that the ordinarily
| smart students were motivated by the sorting exams than
| the top smartest students?
| akomtu wrote:
| Eh, I remember I was put in a D class. Math classes there
| were like "today we are going to study addition, who
| wants to ask this student to add two numbers?" so I
| volunteered and asked the guy to add 5 to 7 - I
| understood that the class somehow struggled with two
| digit numbers and wanted to see this in action. The
| teacher, though, realized what my plan was and said we
| can't do this level of complexity right now. That day I
| learnt something important though: that the crowd follows
| "the rules" without questioning them and that being a
| smartass isn't rewarded. We were 6-7 year olds then.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Since everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame
| 'systematic x'. It was all equal.
|
| This is certainly an advantage that Albania had over
| Alabama. There are still people alive who remember the
| school system having to be desegregated under armed guard.
| The struggle continues:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
| mix/wp/2018/08/1...
| ardit33 wrote:
| yeah, but you are missing the point completely. I gave
| you a real life example: Even if everyone is equal, and
| has the same conditions, some people are just born
| smarter than others, and will put more effort and do
| better.
|
| Equality of conditions is a good thing to ask for,
| equality of outcome is stupid, as even in a murderous
| communist regime, was impossible to achieve as it goes
| against basic human nature.
|
| That's why event though I am liberal/democrat, I don't
| like the today's 'progressives', as they seem completely
| ignorant of human nature, and have no knowledge of the
| history of countries that went through
| socialism/communism, and yet want to repeat the same
| destructive mistakes by trying to achieve 'equality of
| outcome', which is impossible.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It seems unlikely that there's just a smart/dumb setting
| inside of each kid.
|
| Material conditions being equal don't mean that
| everything is equal. Some people have parents who value
| certain things and push their kids. Other people have
| some anxieties to get over before they can perform. Some
| people like being ahead of the class and put in effort to
| stay there.
| robbiep wrote:
| Is your argument that everyone has the same capability?
| exporectomy wrote:
| But mainly, some kids are born smarter and some "dumber"
| and there's nothing you can do to change the dumb ones to
| smart.
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's a deep conversation but I reckon it's more like
| weightlifting.
|
| Some people are naturally stronger and some are weaker.
| But if you train, you will be stronger than you were,
| regardless.
|
| You might not become world champion with weak genes, but
| you'll be stronger than everyone who doesn't train.
| FredPret wrote:
| > It seems unlikely that there's just a smart/dumb
| setting inside of each kid.
|
| DNA
| gnat wrote:
| Do you have data or anecdata on the effect of repeating an
| entire year? In many modern Western schools that'd be
| frowned upon as punitive and as likely to provoke a "well
| screw YOU!" response or ingrain "I must really be stupid"
| mindset.
| extropy wrote:
| As a parent (in Switzerland of all places) I actually
| consider this a very good option for kids struggling. And
| took the opportunity for one of our kids and it worked
| out great.
|
| Edit: Switzerland has a different approach where children
| are segregated by their ability starting from 7th school
| year. So you go to Gymnasium, A level, B level, C level.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I skipped a class (went from 3rd standard to 5th) because
| I could clear the entrance exam during changing schools
| (I also topped the exam, mainly because my tutor made me
| work hard). In college I failed a paper because I was
| lazy and didn't work hard. The first incident made me
| happy but didn't make me think that I was very smart and
| the latter didn't make me think I was dumb. I knew the
| reasons exactly. We under-estimate how much we know
| ourselves.
| ardit33 wrote:
| You have to fail two classes in order to repeat the whole
| year. If you fail only one, you'd still could pass (but
| had to go to additional schooling). But if you had failed
| two, then there was something wrong going on with with
| the whole year, and it had repeated.
|
| Usually it was kids that had some discipline problems.
| Perhaps ADHD, etc... but at the time, no-one cared about
| those aspects as school psychologist were not a thing at
| all.
|
| If you failed more than one year in a row, then the
| teachers will just give up on you and let you just slide
| the next year as long as you just showed up.
| nlclimber wrote:
| In the Netherlands, repeating a year is common. I
| estimate about a quarter of kids in my year had to repeat
| a year. If it happened twice, you had to leave school and
| go to a less exacting school.
| a-saleh wrote:
| I have seen less than 0.1% in my school fail like this.
| But yeah, it was punitive and usually did provoke a "well
| screw YOU!" response or ingrain "I must really be stupid"
| mindset.
| saberdancer wrote:
| My father repeated a year, bounced back from it and
| became a teacher later in life.
|
| But usually it did not happen that often. When it did
| happen, it usually meant someone will change schools to a
| less demanding one (if in high school). So for example
| you may leave a gymnasium and go to a school for
| mechanics.
|
| In elementary school it did not happen except for serious
| disciplinary problems. People with mental problems were
| able to have special programmes that tailored to their
| needs, so this did not result in repeating a year.
|
| Teachers did not really like the idea of having someone
| repeat a year, so if you had a decent attitude you could
| get a passing grade but you had to put in the effort.
| This "effort" part is what is in my opinion biggest
| different, Eastern Europe schooling required you to put
| in a lot of work, if you were talented you didn't need to
| use so much time, but if you weren't natural at math, you
| had to put in plenty of hours to get decent grades.
| Problems usually were not of the sort that can't be
| learned through "brute force".
|
| I've done some teaching on the side and when I was
| teaching a guy in a "US" school for children of
| diplomats, difference was that their problems were
| usually much more freeform and required deeper
| understanding but once understood, used primitive math or
| physics methods. Our normal schooling was different, it
| used advanced math or physics but the problems were often
| times many variants of the same problem (which allowed
| for brute force learning). Honestly I think that it would
| be the best to have both, as many of my fellow students
| did not really understand the material we studied but
| they could brute force it.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| In the ex-Soviet country I am from repeating a year was a
| shame and admission of idiocy.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Anecdotal but both my parents repeated a year (that was
| in the sixties in France), they went on to become a
| teacher teaching primary school teachers how to educate
| children for one and a headmistress at a relatively large
| primary school for the other.
|
| Both of them looking back thought that repeating a year
| was a good thing for them, they went from being
| struggling average/below average students to top of their
| class and regained their confidence.
|
| I think it really depends, in a place and time where
| repeating classes is more common, it maybe doesn't really
| destroy confidence as much whereas in areas where it's
| rare, then the psychological impact is much worse.
|
| Also, one thing to note, both of them, in their
| experience with education, saw much better results when
| children were separated by level than when classes were
| mixed together for exactly the reason the OP mentioned. A
| top student can help bring an average student up but when
| there are both top students and very below average
| students, the teacher has to make the choice to either
| focus on the below average student or the top students
| and neither of those choices are good.
|
| In France, we've had a push toward lowering the overall
| level and removing any elitism at schools. This has
| increased the amount of kids who graduate from high
| school with the Baccalaureat which is needed for
| university but has lowered the level of kids actually
| going to university (especially at engineering schools
| and elite institutions) and reduced the value of a
| university degree. It's a bit similar to what's happening
| in the US in STEM and I think it's a bad calculation for
| the long term competitiveness of the country.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > but has lowered the level of kids actually going to
| university (especially at engineering schools and elite
| institutions)
|
| Come on, of course it hasn't. Entry requierements haven't
| changed.
|
| The highschools providing the largest contingents of
| students to these elite institutions respect neither the
| national curriculum nor the ban of sorting students by
| ability without any consequences. Unsurprisingly the two
| most famous of these highschools are also exempt from the
| French purely geographical students draft and the places
| most politician children attend. As usual in France, the
| rule for all is not the rule for the elite.
|
| In effect, the dumbing down of the national curriculum
| has just made a system which was already one of the most
| unequal in Europe even more unequal. But everything is
| fine. The French system only uses entrance exams and
| entrance exams are always fair, aren't they?
| s5300 wrote:
| >Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and progress
| in this country,
|
| There is _literally_ a major political party in the US that
| parrots science to be fake & that religion/faith in god is all
| that matters. Also, that "progress" (in a
| technological/scientific sense) is a _bad_ thing
|
| Last I checked, it was _not_ the progressives that identify
| with this line of thinking.
|
| Come on.
| iammisc wrote:
| The mainstream republican party does not say any of those
| things. You are taking fringe positions and making them
| emblematic of the party.
|
| On the other hand, the democratic party openly and literally
| claims there is no distinction between male and female.
|
| There are dumb policy positions all over the board. No one
| denies science as a whole. Everyone picks and chooses.
|
| Consider my state of Oregon... they're literally removing the
| ability to do math and read as graduation requirements and
| the GOP minority is left asking 'why'? How can you honestly
| make the claim the democratic party is uniquely the party of
| science
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| How about they both are idiots?
| lqet wrote:
| Extreme political views tend to produce similar results,
| regardless of their justification.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science. Biology
| started at 5th grade, pre-Algebra at 5, and full blown Algebra
| at 6, physics at 6, and Chemistry at 7. Then in highschool you
| did the same, but more advanced. There was no choice at all,
| you had to do them all. The only choice in HS was a second
| foreign language. The whole idea was that you have to know all
| the basics of ALL sciences, so in college you know what to
| choose and pursue. If you never tried, you will have no clue if
| you liked something or not. (also basic music knowledge, sheet
| reading, and arts was a requirement as well).
|
| I've went through similar curriculum in Croatia and I hated it
| - the literature they forced on us was politically correct
| bullshit some figurehead decided should be common culture. As a
| result 30% of the class read it and the rest just cheated and
| studied for test.
|
| It was like this in every class - I hated cheating and studying
| for the test - I was lazy and it was pointless - as a result I
| got barely passing grades based on slightly paying attention in
| class. But in casual conversation I could relate way more of
| the basics than my peers. And I lost interest in many subjects
| simply because of how they were taught (study random facts
| because it will be on the test - no context or application). I
| had to relearn algebra after highschool because of how badly it
| was taught - and I was interested in it since I was trying to
| learn 3d programming and I was going to math competitions in
| elementary school - teachers couldn't relate any questions I
| asked to stuff I was interested in.
|
| I hope my kid gets way less material to study and more
| opportunity to figure out what he wants to learn.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| > It is bound to hurt poorer but smart kids, that can't afford
| private tutoring and have to rely only on public schools
|
| Why should I care about them? The internet exists. Let them
| learn on their own if they're so interested. Why am I being
| forced to subsidize people that will just grow to resent me as
| a leech on society due to my "inferior mathematical ability" as
| you surely do?
|
| Poverty is a far bigger problem than some Virginia schools not
| teaching Geometry in 8th grade (for the record - I took Algebra
| in 8th grade and most people in my tiny high school took it in
| 9th).
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Imagine not wanting to live in a country of smarter people in
| the future just because it costs more taxes now
| bllguo wrote:
| > Why should I care about them?
|
| We should obviously care about improving education, for the
| good of society as a whole, for innovation, for pushing the
| economy forward, etc. It's dumbfounding that this would even
| be asked, I'm not sure anyone outside of America (i.e. no
| pervasive anti-intellectual culture) could conceive of a
| question like this
|
| > Why am I being forced to subsidize people that will just
| grow to resent me as a leech on society due to my "inferior
| mathematical ability" as you surely do?
|
| Why is American society so centered around appearances and
| perceived judgment? You'd rather damn an entire state to
| stagnation than risk being looked down upon by some
| hypothetical elitist? And math is only one of many, many
| subjects.. I firmly believe everyone is good at something.
|
| > Poverty is a far bigger problem than some Virginia schools
| not teaching Geometry in 8th grade
|
| And how is terrible education supposed to help with poverty?
| Education is a great way, arguably the primary way, that
| people lift themselves up.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Because taking geometry in 8th vs 9th vs 10th grade doesn't
| really matter.
|
| And given we are otherwise doing just fine, I think
| stagnation is far more likely to come from somewhere else.
| akho wrote:
| I'm sorry, could you give some context to non-Americans?
| What does "taking geometry" mean? My school had geometry
| as a subject in grades 7-11 (with 11 being the final
| year), were you expected to pack it all in one? How does
| that work?
| kingaillas wrote:
| I'd interpret the phrase "taking geometry" in this
| context to refer to the quality and depth of math
| education available, and to a lesser degree how wealthy
| the school district is.
|
| Given typical HS math curriculum (algebra/geometry up to
| calculus) being able to offer geometry early gives enough
| time to offer calculus; otherwise a school could teach it
| late and it won't matter because math education stops
| early anyway.
|
| Also connotes to a degree college-track vs non college-
| track students, again due to the highest math a HS
| offers. It is extremely desirable to take calculus in HS
| to prepare for college, but if most students don't go to
| college, no need to take/offer calculus, no need to start
| the math sequence early, etc.
|
| I went to HS in the US and I remember a split in the math
| curriculum starting in 10th grade (I didn't go to my HS
| in 9th grade so I can't say). The vast majority of kids
| planning on college took a combined algebra
| 2/trigonometry class in 10th grade; the other kids took
| either algebra 1, geometry, or algebra 2 (without the
| trig) depending on previous courses.
|
| So the comment "taking geometry in 8th vs 9th vs 10th
| grade" would mean something like comparing schools for
| numbers of college-track students and funding (8th grade
| great - implies a HS with a large body of students going
| to college, well funded in order to offer variety of
| classes; 10th grade not good - implies a HS with a small
| body of students going to college; not well funded, math
| stops before calculus, etc.)
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| > You'd rather damn an entire state to stagnation than risk
| being looked down upon by some hypothetical elitist?
|
| Also, for the record - it's not hypothetical, you're
| literally an example of this hypothetical elitist as an Ivy
| grad (top schools only exist in order to enforce
| segregation against lesser people like me). I'm sure you
| took calculus in 8th grade while I took it in senior year
| but I'm not subhuman because of it.
| FFUUCCKK wrote:
| * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
| * * / \ \ / \ *
| *| | \ | | * *|
| `. | | : * *` |
| | \| | * * \ | / / \\\
| ____ \\ : * * \ \/ ___~~
| ~____| \ | * * \ \__~
| ~__\ | * * \_ \ _.______
| .______\| | * * \ \______// _ ___ _
| (_(__> \ | * * \ . C ___) ______
| (_(____> | / * * /\ | C ____)/ \
| (_____> |_/ * * / /\| C_____) |
| (___> / \ * * | ( _C_____)\______/ //
| _/ / \ * * | \ |__ \\_________// (__/
| | * * | \ \____) `____ ___' |
| * * | \_ ___\ /_ _/ | *
| * | / | | \ | * *
| | | / \ \ | * * |
| / / | | \ |* * | / /
| \__/\___/ | |* * | / |
| | | |* * | | | |
| | |* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
| * * * * *
| google234123 wrote:
| Very funny, no one will resent you as a "leech on society due
| to" your "inferior mathematical ability." However, if you
| actually choose to literally leech on society (e.g. choose to
| be unemployed and uneducated) then people will. Anyway,
| education exists to educate. If you care about social
| welfare, talk to the social welfare programs.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| They absolutely do - they most likely consider people like
| me to be subhuman entities. It's not like I have the mental
| ability to get into the fancy schools or fancy companies
| they got into.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Hold on a second. I want my kids to be good at math. I
| pay taxes too. Why do you think you are subsidizing me,
| or my kids?
| leto_ii wrote:
| My experience in my home country of Romania was similar to
| yours, however my conclusions couldn't be more different.
|
| > American schools are too soft on science in general. [...]The
| Albanian school was brutal in teaching science
|
| How on earth is brutality in teaching a good idea? What was the
| effect of this approach on the average Albanian or Romanian
| student? Sure it worked fine for a few of us, but overall the
| results are disastrous, just take a look at the PISA rankings.
|
| Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid"
| Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in
| highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on
| in life?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I don't think it's really "brutal" but "challenging". So if
| the kid has no interest in Math he/she would regard that as
| brutal and for others who do have interest it's just
| challenging and maybe even fun. Just like people who like to
| crack Leetcode problems, those are challenging and fun.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > I don't think it's really "brutal" but "challenging".
|
| Brutal was the term used by the parent, I just picked it up
| from there.
|
| > if the kid has no interest in Math he/she would regard
| that as brutal and for others who do have interest it's
| just challenging and maybe even fun
|
| Throughout my education I was in both camps at different
| times. The more "brutal" things got (dry, formal
| curriculum, tough teachers) the more it put me off. On the
| other hand patient and engaging teachers could get me to
| spend countless hours after school working on math
| problems.
|
| Interests are things that develop based on intrinsic
| attributes but also based on environmental feedback. I
| suspect the latter is fast more important.
| petre wrote:
| > Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same
| "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group
| theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university
| and later on in life?
|
| Most people will do just fine with basic math training
| because it's what you normally need later on in life.
|
| Most of my math training in the Eastern European school
| system has probably gone to waste. I only saw the point of
| advanced maths, calculus later on in technial university when
| I had to apply it in science. During my engineering career I
| only used the math I learned up to maybe ninth or tenth
| grade. No calculus. For materials science we also had to use
| maths up to tenth grade because of non linear properties of
| materials. However, calculus and advanced math was required
| to understand the physical phenomena. What went away was
| solving tricky integrals and series for which you had to
| think of an obscure substitution - the type of grinding math
| excercises we had to solve in high school. Last month I had
| to solve some RSA and ECC cryptography problems at work that
| could not be easily solved with existing crypto libraries.
| For example RSA signing checks were reimplemented using a big
| numbers library. That also did not require advanced maths,
| but rather a lot of grinding research done by reading crypto
| standards and technical guides.
| leto_ii wrote:
| My point was that a lot of advanced math can be taught
| later on. If it's forced down people's throats without them
| understanding why things are the way they are, all you're
| gonna get is ignorance and resentment.
|
| In Romania I attended one of the "elite" maths/cs
| highschools. Except a hand full of people who would win
| medals in the imo etc. the rest of us were mostly clever,
| overworked automatons who learned problem solving tricks
| that we regurgitated on the page come exam time.
| seer wrote:
| I think its not that it has to, its just more challenging
| and rewarding. I've read a lot about bulling and social
| problems in USA schools, but so almost none of that myself
| i Eastern Europe.
|
| I think the subjects where so hard that it forced kids to
| cooperate, smart kids where considered a resource that
| potential bullies didn't like to harm, as they would help
| them in the future. Additionally there was this sense of
| ... maybe "esprit de corps" as we all were going through
| the same tough training.
|
| I think that those hard problems were actually very
| rewarding and I saw very little of the "teenage problems"
| that are so prominently displayed in American media.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > I've read a lot about bulling and social problems in
| USA schools, but so almost none of that myself i Eastern
| Europe.
|
| There was some bullying back when I was in school, but
| possibly less than in the US. However, I think this
| doesn't have much to do with the curriculum, but with
| social conditions.
|
| In my case I was bullied in secondary school (by kids in
| my class) even though school was tough and I was easily
| part of what you would consider "valuable resources".
|
| The result was that the bullies would copy their homework
| off of the kids that copied their homework from me and I
| still got into fights daily.
|
| In highschool bullying disappeared completely, but that's
| because I went to a selective school (the equivalent of a
| US magnet hs) where everybody was academically oriented
| and also came from more stable social environments.
|
| In less academically strong highschools there are a lot
| of nasty things taking place - students abusing
| eachother, teachers abusing students, students beating up
| teachers etc.
| petre wrote:
| > bulling and social problems in USA schools, but so
| almost none of that myself i Eastern Europe
|
| This has changed for the worse with capitalism and social
| inequality. We had some bullying back when I was a
| primary school student but it was physical bullying by
| higher graders towards younger students and it was mostly
| done outside the school. We had none of the psychological
| bullying that you see in the US and to a greater extent
| in Korea or Japan. We had roma and very poor students in
| our class. There was also almost no bullying during high
| school. The more _odd_ kids were usually ignored and had
| friends of their own.
|
| > I think that those hard problems were actually very
| rewarding
|
| Well, maybe rewarding for some. I didn't like them and
| would rather go outside and play or ride my bike in the
| neighbourhood. Math for math's sake was never my thing. I
| only started to really like math in university when I saw
| its potential to solve real world problems.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Bullying is very hammed up in American media, but I think
| in reality very non obvious to people who weren't the
| target.
|
| I went to American public schools my whole life and never
| saw any evidence of bullying.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > This has changed for the worse with capitalism and
| social inequality.
|
| An interesting perspective which I feel might be the
| actual core of the problem. I grew up after the
| Revolution, so I can't make a before/after comparison,
| but (as I mentioned in a different comment) I see a tight
| connection between how aggressive other students were and
| how bad their family situation was.
|
| > Math for math's sake was never my thing. I only started
| to really like math in university when I saw its
| potential to solve real world problems.
|
| Perfectly legitimate. Pushing hard math early on can
| actually put you off the subject forever. Some of us
| started liking it in university, but a lot of capable
| students decide it's just not for them. With a different
| approach many might have ended up understanding and maybe
| even loving it.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| PISA ranking? China and Singapore are at the very top. If you
| think what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger
| moms push their children.
|
| I've also went through what could be considered a "brutal"
| system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't
| use that specific term.
|
| We had ~40 problem sets to solve every evening for homework,
| hours of work. I don't think anyone ever got an A+ in
| anything. If the student was better/stronger at something -
| they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them
| during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder
| sets added to their homework.
|
| As for the "stupid" Americans? STEM classes are full of
| foreign kids in top US schools.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > China and Singapore are at the very top. If you think
| what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger moms
| push their children.
|
| There are a bunch of different approaches that can lead to
| top scores in that ranking. notably Finland does well with
| a non-brutal approach.
|
| > a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described,
| although i wouldn't use that specific term.
|
| the term was used by the parent, not by me. We just
| happened to assess its value differently.
|
| > they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at
| them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and
| harder sets added to their homework.
|
| It depends on what you think the purpose of school should
| be. If you want people to understand the world they live
| in, understand the "why" of things, think critically and
| creatively etc. then problem sets and ritualistic
| humiliation during oral exams won't take you very far.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| > Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same
| "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group
| theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university
| and later on in life?
|
| They do just fine because they aren't selected to do jobs
| where they need those kinds of skills, because they tend not
| to have them.
|
| If they were taught the stuff at least they would have the
| choice.
|
| I'm not in favour of brutalizing the kids though, I think
| that ruins the experience for them. But a lot of kids are
| more capable than we think and ought to be shown advanced
| subjects.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| I don't think it brutalizes anyone. Capable kids must be
| challenged, or they get bored. Kids that coulndt keep up
| went to a different track.
|
| at the very minimum, pressure during oral exams taught to
| work against the clock, develop conviction and do your best
| to defend your position.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > pressure during oral exams taught to work against the
| clock, develop conviction and do your best to defend your
| position.
|
| In some students. In others it just engendered the
| feeling that they're morons and that math is just "not
| for them". Math and science are for absolutely everybody.
| Not everybody will make a career out of them, but
| everybody can enjoy them.
| andagainagain wrote:
| "Russian Math" seems to just be "More Math".
|
| The basic education concepts at ploy here are well known, just
| not widely deployed.
|
| Why? IMO it's because of what I think is the sole problem with
| american education - parents themselves not caring if their kids
| actually know anything. It's actually common, extremely common,
| for american parents to think that the point of education is to
| get a piece of paper (degree) or to get a job. And a large number
| of the parents that think the point is actually knowing things
| also put no pressure on the school systems to actually provide
| that.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| Is there evidence that knowing how to do math is actually
| beneficial to most people?
|
| I think it's easy to criticize when ignoring the possibility
| that much of what is taught in American schools is actually
| just useless and very little of it is retained after schooling
| ends.
| andagainagain wrote:
| What I said applies to all topics. Including ones that you
| personally value.
|
| As for whether math is useful or not... I'll just say I
| REALLY wish more of my coworkers knew their math. I work in a
| factory, and it's useful WAY more often than you may think.
| farmerstan wrote:
| This is the video by the daughter of the founder of the Russian
| School of Math. We sent our son there over the summer, he enjoyed
| it and all the kids were pretty advanced in the class. California
| seems to want to hold everyone back in the name of equity. But
| that will force more people into the private school system, which
| is exactly what we did. I don't trust the California government
| to have my children's best interest at heart, I think they want
| to hamstring them in the name of equity.
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/masha_gershman_how_math_can_prepar...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Essentially large part of education falls onto the shoulder of
| parents, which is natural. I'm even preparing to sharpen up my
| Math/Physics/Electronics skills for the future. Time to re-
| learn those things that I mostly forgot!
| damagednoob wrote:
| > Essentially large part of education falls onto the shoulder
| of parents, which is natural.
|
| Have to disagree. A parent can't be simultaneously up to
| speed on Math, English, a 2nd language, Biology, Science,
| History or any of the other subjects that a child will learn
| in school
|
| School is meant to teach, parents are meant to socialise.
| Unfortunately that seems to have been swapped around
| somewhere along the line.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You need to be up on them to the level of a grade school
| student. That isn't a high level.
| handrous wrote:
| They typical standard for a teacher to be certified in a
| subject at a given grade level, in the US, is to be
| proficient at least _one level higher_ than that grade
| level. That ensures you _really_ know the level you 're
| teaching very well, and also have a good understanding of
| where things are going, so you can offer enrichment to
| students who need it, and explain motivation behind or
| direction of certain topics, when asked.
| [deleted]
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In the UK, by law (Education Act), parents are responsible
| for educating their children - this has slipped
| considerably, I wish it were still a central ideal : under
| such a regime schools _should_ be a service that parents
| can use to educate their children. I 'd like to, for
| example, use school for some things, other groups for
| others, and home schooling for other things (essentially
| Flexischooling). This is in theory an option in the UK, but
| it's left to individual headteachers to dictate their
| ideals to parents (regardless of the Edu.Act) so you have
| to be lucky to get a headteacher who supports your chosen
| pedagogy.
| iammisc wrote:
| They absolutely can. Most adults should be able to
| immediately recall the learnings from elementary to high
| school. This is not rocket science or highly specialized
| knowledge.
|
| The fact that an arbitrary american adult educated in this
| country cannot easily differentiate and name some works of
| shakespeare and provide some quotes, etc, should be o
| source of national shame.
| damagednoob wrote:
| You're assuming your child will take the same subjects
| that you did. How do you recall a subject you've never
| taken?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I mean it's impossible to master everything but to find
| something that motivates the kid and keep him focused is
| largely parent's work. It's really difficult to ask too
| much from the public education system nowadays :(
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Oregon governor Kate Brown has signed a law that allows
| students to graduate without proving they can read, write or do
| math. The law had overwhelming Democrat support & is justified
| on the basis that it will benefit non-white students.
|
| https://thepostmillennial.com/oregon-governor-signs-new-law-...
| nickloewen wrote:
| The Post Millennial story on this is quite light on details.
|
| Here's another article with more:
| https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-legislature-passes-
| bill-t...
|
| And here's the text of the bill (PDF): https://olis.oregonleg
| islature.gov/liz/2021R1/Downloads/Meas...
|
| And here's the Department of Education's page on the
| Essential Skills Graduation Requirement:
| https://www.oregon.gov/ode/educator-
| resources/essentialskill...
|
| Key points from my quick read:
|
| This is about suspending mandatory testing prior to
| graduation. They did that last year due to virtual learning,
| and are extending the suspension longer while things get back
| to normal, and while they assess whether the approach to
| testing they have is suitable (and in line with what other
| states are doing). It is not (yet) gone forever, just for a
| couple years. And you still have to pass courses in all of
| those subject orders in order to graduate.
| iammisc wrote:
| How is your interpretation any better than the
| editorialized 'brown drops education requirements'. The
| pandemic is no excuse to lower standards. It short changes
| these kids. If anything, public schooling should be
| extended as an option for those above 18 to freely learn
| what they missed. This is an immense loss for these
| children. The last two years of High school are extremelyy
| important.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Not sure how exactly the lack of these skills could benefit
| anyone.
|
| I understand that the lack of a school diploma is a huge drag
| in life and that can primarily affect people from
| disadvantaged backgrounds, but shouldn't they focus on
| improving the way they teach kids instead?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| As Sir Humphrey said, education policies are not for
| children and parents, but for teachers.
| snicker7 wrote:
| > Not sure how exactly the lack of these skills could
| benefit anyone.
|
| Lower the standards across all levels -- high school
| graduation, college admissions, job placements. Eventually
| we end up with surgeons and lawyers that are illiterate.
| But at least it is equitable!
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| That would require skilled politicians that knew what they
| were doing.
| jjgreen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Millennial
| kwere wrote:
| this is an ad hominem argument
| jjgreen wrote:
| It is not an argument, it is a link to a Wikipedia page.
| fsn4dN69ey wrote:
| Why did you post it?
| voldacar wrote:
| the genetic fallacy actually, to be pedantic
| iammisc wrote:
| Meanwhile, Oregon has dropped its requirement that high school
| graduates be able to do arithmetic, read, or write.
|
| It's a race to mediocrity in the United States
| aaronleather wrote:
| May be due to Russian Technoloy advancement American people are
| very much interested in it. I have to search about this as well.
| graycat wrote:
| Yes, in math, in the US, maybe anywhere in the world, there is
| the good and the bad in programs, teachers, books, exercises,
| etc. So, let's see how to get around the bad:
|
| I liked math, a lot. The SAT Math test said I had a lot of talent
| in math. I concentrated on math in US grades 9-12, college, and
| graduate school, did some math research, that later I published,
| got a Ph.D. in pure/applied math, and am now using some advanced
| and some original math as advantages in my startup.
|
| So, I struggled through the good and bad but eventually decided
| that there were a lot of good math books; it was not very
| difficult to identify the relatively good authors and books; and
| the keys to learning math well were a stack of blank paper on a
| clipboard, a sharp pencil, a big, soft eraser, one or a few good
| math books in the subject being studied, a lot of good exercises,
| a comfortable chair, a good light, and a quiet room. That's how I
| learned nearly all the math I did learn; still if I want to learn
| some math, that is what I use.
|
| This technique of a _quiet room_ worked for me many times, but
| once was a nice surprise: The college I went to for my freshman
| year was selected because I could walk to it and it was cheap.
| The most advanced math course they would let me in was beneath
| what I 'd already done in high school -- the high school was
| relatively good (MIT came recruiting; 97% of the students went on
| to college; one year three students went to Princeton). In my
| class, in 1-2-3 on the SAT Math, I was #2 and #3 went to MIT. So,
| I didn't want to fall behind in math so got their calculus book
| and started studying in a _quiet room_. This effort worried Mom
| who would find excuses for me to get up and do something else,
| but I still did well. For my second year of college, I went to a
| college with an unusually good math department and started on
| their second year of calculus using the same text Harvard was
| using. To let me start on that second year, a prof gave me a
| little impromptu freshman calculus oral exam. So, with the _quiet
| room_ technique, I never took freshman calculus -- later taught
| it, applied it, etc. but never took a course in it!
|
| In math written as theorems and proofs, for a big source of good
| exercises, guess the next theorem. Check your guess. Given the
| theorem, close the book and prove the theorem. Doing this let me
| get the solution to a somewhat challenging Ph.D. qualifying exam
| question -- I did the best in the class on the qualifying exam.
| This approach to _exercises_ is good, but it is too difficult,
| that is, too slow, to use for all the math need to learn.
|
| Beyond that _quiet room_ approach to learning, I found that to do
| well in graduate school, e.g., get respect from the professors,
| the key was, as soon as possible, do some publishable research.
| E.g., maybe have been pushed into an advanced course. Okay: Find
| some places the course and /or texts are not very clear, good,
| precise, complete, whatever, pick one of those, do some research
| to improve the situation, and publish the research. Remember: For
| good results, good initial problem selection can help a lot.
|
| For _calculus_ , yes, work through a good text and then, for a
| nice advantage, learn measure theory then, in particular, learn
| probability based on measure theory. Then in, e.g., statistics,
| you will have a gun while nearly everyone else has at most a
| knife.
|
| But just calculus from a respected text can be powerful stuff.
| E.g., at
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ8G4VKoSpQ
|
| can see Einstein's special relativity done, apparently fully
| correctly, and where the only math used is ordinary calculus.
| Some 12 year old students can learn calculus plenty well enough
| for a lot in applications, including more advanced math.
|
| Here is a special strategy that can work in the US: In US
| research universities, the math departments typically are in the
| school of Arts and Sciences. But such universities commonly also
| have engineering schools! Some of the people who give the big
| money like engineering more than arts and sciences! And there is
| the outside world! So, from contact with the outside world, maybe
| a job, full or part time, pick a problem where a good solution
| looks promising for some old/new math. Solve the problem, and
| publish it in a journal with a title like _Journal of Theory and
| Applications in ...._ Some journals also like to promise
| candidate readers that they publish not just theory but actual
| applications!
|
| So, the usual criteria for publication are that the material be
| new, correct, and significant. Well, easily enough the solution
| to the new real problem can be new. Since the solution is mostly
| math, can pass _correct_. Get _significant_ from the real problem
| being significant. If the math saves $10 million a month in jet
| fuel cost for an airline, call that _significant_!
|
| For the remark, essentially, need to think before writing, I go
| along with that for research and challenging exercises.
|
| Note: For challenging exercises, I found that some good research
| is no more difficult than some such exercises -- the exercises
| are good preparation for research, etc.
|
| Generally in applying some math, will likely find some places
| where the old math needs some improvement, at least for the
| application; so, make some such improvements, and get the
| _significance_ from that of the problem. That is, for picking a
| research problem, the Riemann hypothesis is not the only option!
|
| For an example, I picked a problem with the Kuhn-Tucker
| conditions and found a solution and published it. Later I found
| that the famous paper in mathematical economics by Arrow,
| Hurwicz, and Uzawa encountered a similar problem and had no
| solution. My work also solves their problem. I found this
| research problem just from some careful, quite careful, study of
| the Kuhn-Tucker conditions.
|
| So that is a way around the bad in programs, teachers, books,
| exercises, etc.
| madengr wrote:
| Now in the USA, the accelerated math classes in high school are
| banned, because they are racist.
| maga wrote:
| I went through the Soviet/Russian school system with all the
| advanced topics being covered in high school as others described
| here. My moment of zen was on my third year in one of the top
| tech universities in Moscow. There were quite a few students
| coming from Novosibirsk University who were comfortably ahead of
| the curve when it came to math. When they showed their transcript
| ("zachetka"), they had ~3000 hours of Calculus in the first few
| years against our ~120... As they described it, each day after
| the usual roster of lectures and seminars, they would spend 4
| hours in class in the evening solving math problems with a
| teacher. While we might have spent a few hours doing homework
| every now and then, it was nowhere near this. Not to mention
| doing it in class with a teacher who would likely also give them
| more challenging problems and valuable feedback. The sheer amount
| of time and mental effort was staggering.
| omginternets wrote:
| My wife went through the French "classe preparatoire" system
| and describes a similar degree of raw effort that was put into
| her studies (and in particular, mathematics). She talks about
| spending 10-12 hours a day either in class or studying at home,
| and I have to admit the amount of knowledge in that woman's
| head is absolutely astounding. Her education is elite in the
| same way that a sports team or military unit can be elite.
|
| There are obviously issues with pushing young adults this hard,
| but my overall feeling is that American schools need more of
| this.
| tamcap wrote:
| As an immigrant in the US from Central Europe, I am blown
| away by how much time American children spend on
| extracurriculars vs academics (at least based on what I see
| around me). My extracurriculars in high school were maaaybe 5
| hours a week. Some kids in the US spend 5 hours a day, every
| day. And don't get me started on varsity sports - that starts
| to resemble a job!
| omginternets wrote:
| In hindsight, after spending nearly a decade in France
| (initially for graduate school), it seems very strange to
| me as well.
|
| I've come away from this with the impression that American
| schools are the best-funded in the world, and survive by
| importing the best-educated from elsewhere. This is
| obviously a bit of a caricature, but I think it's mostly
| correct.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Extracurricular activities are a way for US students to
| stand out in terms of college admissions. When I was in
| high school our college advisors told us that
| Universities look to fill niches in each class year. Good
| students are relatively interchangeable, but if the
| University wants a Lacrosse team, an Equestrian team,
| some Oboe players, and stagehands for its drama
| department it will look for applicants that have those
| backgrounds already. So, if you happen to have decent
| grades but a background in some niche thing, you are much
| more likely to be selected. So in that sense, going from
| a B+ to an A- in terms of overall GPA isn't going to help
| as much as having some in-demand skill.
| omginternets wrote:
| >Extracurricular activities are a way for US students to
| stand out in terms of college admissions.
|
| You are of course correct, but I think the parent comment
| is implying that this is a rather unfortunate situation.
| I agree with him to a large extent.
|
| My experience with the French system has left me with the
| sense that American schooling has to some extent cheated
| me out of an education. On the other hand, I look at my
| wife (and other "prepa" students as well) and conclude
| that they suffer from a certain lack of imagination and
| intrinsic motivation, both of which have personally
| benefitted me greatly, and which I attribute to something
| in American culture.
|
| As my wife puts it (I'm paraphrasing, obviously): "We
| were never asked what we enjoyed doing; if you were a
| good student, you were put on the good-student-track,
| which was a math/science-heavy curriculum. To this day, I
| don't really know what I _want_ to do; I just know what I
| _can_ do, and I feel an obligation to excel at it. "
| She's an absolute brute at math, but she doesn't _like_
| it, and I think she would have been much happier studying
| something like literature.
|
| So my feeling on the matter the French educational system
| is one of ambivalence, overall. Nevertheless, I am
| convinced the US has strayed much too far in the other
| direction.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My 10-year old nephew plays on 6 different baseball teams.
| He literally plays more baseball games than my uncle did
| when he was a AA player :)
| maga wrote:
| A bit tangential here, but our calculus/math analysis
| professor actually told us that the Russian and later Soviet
| math school drew a lot from the French, although, he might
| have been biased due to his apparent partiality towards
| Bourbaki. According to him, the university level math was
| taught exclusively in French during the Tsarist times, and
| they had some troubles coming up with Russian terminology
| when Soviets ordered all teaching to be done in Russian.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| The language of the tsarist elite was french. They even
| didn't need to know russian, except for speaking to their
| servants
| [deleted]
| ip26 wrote:
| I can't help but wonder what value students see for studying
| calculus 8 hours a day every day for more than a year.
|
| Maybe I'm actually just subconsciously jealous, but unless you
| major in math, what do you even do with that? Not to mention
| there's little time left to study anything else.
| ptero wrote:
| My personal experience is that it wasn't just hours. Those who
| liked math spent a lot of time on it after classes. Those who
| didn't, avoided extras and still did OK (they would not go to
| top universities, but the base would be OK, with some practice,
| if they decide to go to a mid-level school).
|
| The biggest difference for me in school was a consistent, well
| thought out program (one for the whole country) and books. A
| topic would be studied once, well, and there would be enough
| time to master the material. Consistency across subjects, too
| -- if physics covered a topic in, say, the second half of the
| grade 7, the math needed would be covered in the math classes
| before then.
|
| What I now see in the US is horrible: teachers at grade N do
| not know for sure what the students already know, so they
| repeat a lot of the background, then jump around to cover a lot
| of material, much of which is never mastered. Which is
| considered OK -- it will likely be repeated in the same
| haphazard fashion next year. Or not, depending on what the next
| teacher decides.
| thechao wrote:
| You're describing an idea adjacent to "mastery" schooling;
| it's the natural method people tend to use when self-taught;
| it's also how some online schools, like Khan Academy, use to
| teach. Both of my kids earn "allowance" (extra screen time;
| robux; etc.) by doing Khan Academy courses. Watching how
| unevenly they pick up topics -- there's no rhyme-or-reason to
| the speed they pick up even "close" skills -- makes me think
| there's malice aforethought in the steady pace learning I had
| as a child.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Both of my kids earn "allowance" (extra screen time;
| robux; etc.) by doing Khan Academy courses
|
| Highlighting this because I love the idea and can't wait to
| try it out :-)
| jrumbut wrote:
| The only thing mastery schooling taught me was empathy for
| people whose learning style doesn't fit the style used in a
| classroom.
|
| It's hard to understand the the connections between and
| motivations for concepts when you are learning everything
| about a topic before moving on. I prefer the style
| described above, of learning the basics then moving on and
| circling back when more advanced aspects are needed.
|
| Clearly different styles work better for different people.
| omginternets wrote:
| >teachers at grade N do not know for sure what the students
| already know, so they repeat a lot of the background, then
| jump around to cover a lot of material, much of which is
| never mastered.
|
| I spent my freshman year of high school in France, and went
| to a French school (this is 3eme, for my fellow Frenchmen).
|
| I recall being stunned -- in the best way possible -- when
| our biology teacher started his class on the first day with:
| "So. You've seen X last year. Now we're going to talk about
| related-thing-Y".
|
| That had never happened in my US curriculum. Never.
| maga wrote:
| That is indeed terrifying.
|
| Not to take away from the importance of a well-thought-out
| program, learning materials, or competent teachers, I was
| drawing attention to the immense time and effort that some
| students would invest often with an institutionalized help.
|
| In our case, the programs were standardized, the textbooks
| were virtually the same throughout the union. Barred special
| schools and eccentric teachers, all kids were studying the
| same things at the same time. What differentiated the
| bespoken Siberians from us was that order of magnitude
| difference in the time put in. It challenged my sense of
| normalcy in many ways: people being this good at math without
| being apparent geniuses, universities teaching math extra 4
| hours a day, realization that there is enough undergrad
| calculus to last 3K hours.
| [deleted]
| wanderingmind wrote:
| Can someone take the time to list the English translated Russian
| books that kids especially in elementary and middle school can
| use.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Does anyone know where to find translated Russian math textbooks?
| kristjank wrote:
| Probably best to start with the Bronshtein - Semendyayev:
| Handbook of Mathematics. It's still widely used in a lot of
| slavic speaking countries. Google it, there's a pdf available.
| wyclif wrote:
| You can find some on Amazon.
|
| Gelfand's Algebra: https://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-
| Gelfand/dp/081763677...
|
| Gelfand's Geometry: https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Israel-M-
| Gelfand/dp/10716029...
|
| Gelfand's Trigonometry: https://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-
| Gelfand-Mathematical-Sem...
| pb060 wrote:
| Kolmogorov - Fomin: Introductory Real Analysis. Not for school
| kids though.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I'll echo many of the other comments here -- seems like the
| Eastern Bloc's math education really out-shone the West's.
|
| I came to Canada mid-way through high school, and breezed through
| with little to no effort until my 2nd year of university.
|
| I remember math class in elementary school, how everything was
| explained, and if you were clever enough you could see where the
| teacher was going with the rest of the story, because everything
| inherently made sense.
|
| This type of learning instilled in me a deep comfort with math -
| knowing that you can always break down a problem into a set of
| familiar problems, that proofs are kind of like nested Russian
| dolls, and that you can synthesize a solution out of first
| principles if you're persistent enough.
| nostrademons wrote:
| My college had a decent-sized contingent of Bulgarian & Romanian
| international students. The difference in their math abilities
| upon entry was striking. While most of my American-born
| classmates struggled in discrete math, linear algebra, and vector
| calc, my Bulgarian friend was like "I learned this when I was 9."
| They were frequently tapped as TAs by the professors, because
| they _understood_ the material on a level that Americans didn 't.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I am Bulgarian. I moved to the UK when I was 12. I had to join
| primary school halfway through Year 6 (the last year of primary
| school).
|
| The level of mathematics shocked me. They were still learning
| factorisation, something I had learned years ago. It was a
| breeze.
|
| Of course, in secondary school (ages 12-18) the content
| eventually caught up with me. Part of me wishes I could have
| somehow kept studying the Bulgarian way.
|
| What is surprising even still is that school in Bulgaria was
| from 07:00 to 13:00. In the UK it's 07:00 to 15:00. You had
| more time to do homework in Bulgaria and more time to be a
| child.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| UK maths teaching is fairly terrible. Not only do they start
| later, it's almost never taught meaningfully, instead relying
| on memorising rote formulae. I grew up hating maths, it
| wasn't until YouTube came along and the sheer amount of
| _good_ maths content on there that I started to 'get' the
| bits I just never understood as a teenager. Most of my
| friends will still say things like 'I just don't get algebra
| / I don't do maths', and I put this down to how it is taught,
| which isn't very well.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Has it changed since the 1960s? Maths where I grew
| (Swindon, Wilts., ) up was pretty good and from first form
| (age 11, 1966) on used the SMP course where there really
| wasn't any memorization of rote formulae:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Mathematics_Project
| rcxdude wrote:
| The main issue is the curriculum and exams emphasize this
| kind of rote learning (across the board, not just in maths:
| one stupid reason for this is many of the markers for the
| exams don't actually have any qualifications in the subject
| they're marking and need to be able to just pattern-match
| off a mark sheet). And because teachers and schools are
| judged so heavily on exam results, they are not just
| incentivised but basically forced to 'teach the test' as
| opposed to trying to get the students to actually learn
| anything, even when they are otherwise motivated and
| capable of doing so.
|
| I went to a quite high-performing school, and it wasn't
| unusual to have a year be 60% 'getting through the
| curriculum', 20% 'teaching interesting things about the
| subject', 20% 'exam prep', and that 20% in the middle only
| existed because of the extreme priviledge of both students
| and teachers good enough to keep up with that pace and a
| level of enthusiasm for the subject which allowed for
| teaching stuff 'not on the test'.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Ah that is lame that you had to go through that. I
| remember in my calc class the teacher said we would spend
| no time learning for the government standardized test. If
| you can't already pass it you have no business being in
| the class.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That was the side benefits of the advanced track of
| courses in my high school: the teachers openly mocked the
| test prep requirements.
| lordnacho wrote:
| What are the relevant channels? My kid is very interested
| in it but the 3B1B type stuff is a bit too far ahead. He
| wants to learn algebra next.
| beojan wrote:
| Try the Murderous Maths books.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Mostly it came from Khan Academy,
| https://www.youtube.com/c/khanacademy/playlists
| dubya wrote:
| Not sure about youtube, but for the right age kid, maybe
| late-elementary to early high school, there's a weekly
| "Joyful math jamboree" online. The web page for it is not
| updated very often, but the registration form still
| works.
|
| There's also the Julia Robinson Math Festival that's
| supposed to be good but I don't have first-hand
| experience.
|
| Ideally, a Math Circle would could be good for some kids
| if your area supports one.
| zeku wrote:
| I graduated high school in the USA in the past decade. I was
| never taught Calculus. I wasn't even very good at algebra.
|
| Eventually I went on to get a math minor in college to go
| with my computer science degree, but I didn't even learn the
| first thing about Calculus until I was 21.
|
| Math and Science education in the USA is really really
| abyssal until college, and then it's sink or swim.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > In the UK it's 07:00 to 15:00
|
| All the schools I know of here in the London area start
| around 0830 to 0900. Some operate a club for busy parents to
| drop off their kids early but classes don't start until the
| rest of the kids show up.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I couldn't actually remember what time we started in the UK
| (it was either 7 or 8) so I gave it the benefit of the
| doubt. It was probably closer to 8.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| I'd be wary of forming an opinion on foreign education systems
| from international students, as they're generally of more
| privileged extraction compared to the unwashed masses who can't
| afford to study overseas.
| r7fufhrjrududu wrote:
| I think this would be a more credible concern if American
| teachers were equally empowered to their counterparts. To a
| large extent what you see out of 'foreign' students is a
| product of teacher's having adequate power to manage their
| classrooms while teaching students to standards. Meanwhile in
| America teacher's are shackled by their things like No Child
| Left Behind and a union that tolerates faculty getting
| physically assaulted. You don't see these things being
| corrected because standards and discipline have been branded
| as racist.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The classes where teachers are getting physically assaulted
| are not the same classrooms raising future IMO gold
| medalists. Nor are they one repeal of No Child Left behind
| from becoming so.
| r7fufhrjrududu wrote:
| The classrooms where teachers are getting assaulted can't
| raise gold medalists because the teachers can't create an
| environment condusive to any real amount of learning.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The problems start much earlier (in early childhood).
|
| I say that as someone who has experienced both sorts of
| classrooms in my lifetime, which I think is a rarer
| experience.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Not just privileged extraction, but likely high IQ. The
| Russian brain teasers are to get smart students excelling.
| The American system is set up to get the weak student
| stumbling to the finish line. The American school system
| isn't designed to produce high achievers which is why the
| high achievers are produced by the parents and not by the
| schools.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Absolutely this. My father was an immigrant from an eastern
| block country. Just a regular family, his father was a
| salesman, his mother a secretary. Father was valedictorian
| of his high school, speaks 6 languages, ect. Scraped
| together enough money to study at a British grad school,
| finished in 1 year as valedictorian. Then he immigrated to
| America. So someone looking at his math achievements might
| think wow, they really teach those soviet immigrants math
| well! But it was more like the best of the best immigrate
| while someone more average like me would be stuck in the
| old country.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I think its the same case for much of the west. Here in the
| UK, I remember maths being not the greatest but certainly
| every kid got through with a passable level of competance.
|
| Unless you have a very high budget, which usually only
| private (or public as they're called in the uk, but they're
| the same thing) schools have, you can't have it both ways
| where both the weakest students pass and the strongest
| students excel.
| adventured wrote:
| What you're describing isn't the US system of education.
|
| The US system is as bifurcated as the various European
| nations mentioned in this thread. The elite families in the
| US do not send their kids to the same (frequently)
| underperforming schools as the middle class or poor, just
| as those types of families don't do that in Russia or
| Romania.
|
| > The American school system isn't designed to produce high
| achievers
|
| Which system are you talking about? There is no unified
| American school system. Nothing remotely close to that
| concept exists in the US. It's not possible to generalize
| so broadly. There are many different education systems in
| the US, varying based on where you live (varying
| dramatically from one state or city to the next even) and
| or what your economic capabilities are. Your description,
| if we were to attempt to utilize it, applies primarily to
| bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of society, not the top 1/3.
|
| An obvious example would be elite private schools in and
| around Washington DC. The Washington DC region
| simultaneously has many of the richest zip codes in the US,
| and vast tracts of poverty and many horrible public
| schools. Washington DC, broadly, presents one of the
| starker examples of the US bifurcation in nearly all things
| socioeconomic.
| handrous wrote:
| > The US system is as bifurcated as the various European
| nations mentioned in this thread. The elite families in
| the US do not send their kids to the same (frequently)
| underperforming schools as the middle class or poor, just
| as those types of families don't do that in Russia or
| Romania.
|
| To illustrate the point: the only Presidential candidate
| from one of the two major parties, since and including
| the 2000 election, _not_ to have attended a private prep
| school, was Hillary Clinton.
| foobarian wrote:
| Any idea how to figure out which camp a particular school
| is? There are wealthy zip codes with excellent public
| schools, but there are also crappy private schools so the
| public/private distinction is not always telling. Scores
| also don't work because they test dumb rote learning and
| have become gamed. I would love to find a school where
| teachers are the kind who know math/other subject
| "intuition" behind the knowledge like they had in some
| Soviet schools.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Absolutely this. People seem to ignore selection effects when
| taking with immigrants from other countries, especially
| students. These people typically come from the richest/most
| connected families in their home country*
|
| *If they don't come from the Americas
| nostrademons wrote:
| Normally I'd be very wary of this, but I went to the #1
| liberal arts college in the U.S. My American-born
| classmates included people like John Glenn's grandson, the
| heir to the Mead trapper-keeper company, the son of the guy
| who founded Kohl's department stores, the nephew of the
| famous Hollywood madame, etc. With the exception of the
| Mead guy, most of these people were functionally innumerate
| and never took a math course in college.
|
| So I might be comparing the best & brightest of Bulgaria,
| but in theory at least I'm comparing them against the best
| & brightest of America (though in practice I suspect it's
| more like the richest).
| petre wrote:
| It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their
| home country because of economic reasons. This is the
| primary reason for immigration from Eastern Europe to the
| EU and the UK. If you're in the US, yes, the visa selection
| program requirements make your average immigrant come from
| richer or more connected families. For instance quite a
| number of people left my country to the US using
| connections in neo protestant church communities - that's
| what I've meant by _connected_.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _> > people typically come from the richest/most
| connected families in their home country_
|
| _> It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left
| their home country because of economic reasons._
|
| Another common reason for leaving is discrimination.
| Those people who leave because of discrimination are very
| rarely well connected or wealthy, or they usually
| wouldn't have to leave.
|
| Then there are the outright asylum seekers and
| undocumented immigrants, who are also usually very poor
| and lack connections.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It seems like everyone replying has ignored my caveats.
|
| Most international students are not there because of
| discrimination they faced. Most people who are seeking
| asylum or undocumented in the US are from the Americas.
|
| For international students not from the Americas, most
| are wealthy or well connected by the standards of their
| home country, although often not by American standards.
| It's not uncommon to hear about the banker who became a
| taxi driver in the US, but what you hear less of is the
| farmer's kid - because they never even get a chance to
| come.
| petre wrote:
| I think you are generalising and exagerating a bit. As it
| happens, I had a colleague and an acquaitance who both
| worked as a taxi drivers in Chicago and knew each other.
| They weren't bankers, nor farmers' kids. Their parents
| were middle class teachers and accountants. Reality is
| more boring and mundane than you might imagine.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| What country?
|
| Even many of those who left for economic reasons come
| from richer families that are leaving because of new
| policies that are less friendly to the wealthy or
| previously privileged classes. See, for instance, white
| emigration from South Africa or Zimbabwe to the United
| States.
|
| Also, to be clear, this is specifically an American
| perspective and even more specifically, about
| international students - labor migration from Eastern
| Europe to the EU is of a decidedly different character
| and more analogous to the comments I was making about
| people from the Americas in the US.
| boomskats wrote:
| I'm Serbian and moved to the UK when I was 10. A lot of this is
| a bit hazy now, but I really clearly recall my bewilderment
| during the first class-wide 'mental arithmetic' tests in year 5
| where I thought the whole class was playing a prank on me. In
| Serbia I remembered doing quadratics and even touching on
| differentiation in the afterschool classes, but over here in
| the UK they were expecting me to take 20 seconds to do simple
| mental maths (I remember 8x3+17 being the 'hardest one').
|
| The other kids were pretty fascinated with my slightly
| different long division methods, but the teachers were just
| obsessed with making me write an `x` instead of a `*` when
| writing out my multiplication, and trying to make me change the
| methods I'd learned previously.
|
| I stopped finding maths interesting at that point (age 11) and
| it breaks my heart to this day. What I knew was enough to get
| me a couple of 'best-in-school + gold' medals in that Year 8
| maths challenge, but it was all Bs and Cs at a-level. I did
| rediscover a genuine interest in mathematics again at uni as
| part of the foundations of AI course (CS degree), but that was
| short-lived and frustrating, as I knew I should have been
| better.
| noobsaibot wrote:
| i remember me coming to germany with 11/12 and having to tell
| odd from even numbers in a test; after trigonometry and
| beginning of integrals in russia.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| As a Brit, I was never any good at mental math at school, I
| still cannot do that hardest one without a calculator.
|
| But later on, I swam like a fish in water in geometry, trig,
| logic and loved algebra and moved from the last of my year to
| one of the top. I was doing integration etc a good two years
| before it was being taught in the higher classes. These
| skills are good for programming and computers.
|
| There was a limit; basically theorems, multi dimensional
| stuff and unreal? math, primes, pure math etc were completely
| out of my scope. Strange I guess, perhaps these are connected
| with being good at mental arithmetic?
|
| My point is that I also think it's bizarre on the British
| obsession with mental maths early on, when for many algebra
| might be better and easier.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I think mental arithmetic is one of those things that
| simply requires vast amounts of practise. I'm quite slow at
| it, but when I'm forced to do a lot of it, say for keeping
| score. I quickly get faster.
|
| I too was much better at applied maths and stats. It was
| fairly easy for me. But my brain just shuts down doing pure
| math.
| mkl95 wrote:
| In my country (and I'd say this happens in some other EU
| countries), you do a ton of basic algebra as a kid, then
| take some rushed calculus and linear algebra 1-2 years
| before uni.
|
| Once you pretend you have mastered the basics, there is a
| sudden, strange focus on advanced Calculus heuristics and
| obscure linear algebra techniques, effectively making most
| people hate these subjects. The way you are taught the
| stuff is basically a crime against Mathematics since it
| drives talented people away from STEM careers.
| pulkitsh1234 wrote:
| I still have a hard time in mental arithmetics. During my
| school days, this is one of the things which had instilled
| the "math phobia" in me. I never really took an interest in
| math, until I started doing competitive programming in
| college. I had to literally build a new understanding of
| division, multiplication, modulus, etc., it's difficult to
| explain. But I feel really ashamed in admitting that I
| still suck at math, probably because I just hated it during
| school days and no one was there to guide me. I don't
| really like blaming things on others, but I am not sure
| what else I could've done to learn math.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| I'm in exactly the same position at the age of 40. I've
| attempted to memorise the times table to no avail. It seems
| to me one of those things that you need to know cold. And
| then from there you can look at other things.
|
| To me mathematics is a thing of beauty I just find I havent
| found the right handle to grasp it with.
|
| I ask myself what would be the order in which one could
| most easily absorb the material. Does it really start with
| rote learning?
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| > I ask myself what would be the order in which one could
| most easily absorb the material. Does it really start
| with rote learning?
|
| What are you trying to learn and why?
|
| Math starts with axioms, which are some statements that
| everything else is built from. Axioms, as far as I
| understand, can't be derived. These are the most basic
| building blocks. Then through logic and deductions other
| machinery is built up. There is a certain amount that
| does need to be internalized or memorized, but that is
| the same for learning the alphabet.
|
| In math classes, at least at the university level in
| Canada, knowing the statement of definitions and theorems
| covered exactly is somewhat important. If it's a proof
| based course this is more important, but the theorem will
| tell you where it's applicable, so knowing that helps.
|
| Math builds. It took me until a third year complex
| analysis course to build up enough courage to ask a prof
| how he solves problems. Basically he said he has a
| hierarchy of theorems in a given field. When he sees a
| problem he will go through each of them starting with the
| easiest to apply and check the assumptions. If it
| applies, then he will use it and get the result. If not,
| move on to the next one. He goes and looks up the exact
| statements and how to go through with the calculations
| and checks. If you forget something, look it up.
|
| Eventually after solving enough problems you'll build up
| some intuition and muscle memory for the problems.
|
| As to how to progress, I am not sure. Some mathematicians
| say you kind of just pick things up and then connect the
| threads later on. It's not always possible to march
| through in a linear manner because there isn't an
| absolute ordering in what to learn.
|
| There should be an appendix in the back of a textbook
| that reviews or outlines what's required for the book.
| There will be a few questions that rely on outside
| knowledge, but one can still learn the majority of the
| concepts without going to far afield for review.
|
| Start with what you want and fill in the rest of the gaps
| by working backwards.
|
| I wouldn't worry about memorizing the times tables
| (unless maybe you're interested in number theory?) if
| you're trying to learn math. Know algebra, functions, and
| graphing as a minimum, then start to learn what you
| want... I would just use a calculator or pencil and paper
| to multiply things out on homework. If this is for
| personal benefit, then don't hesitate to get some
| numerical methods involved to help learning the material.
| javajosh wrote:
| I felt the same way, but I noticed professors I admired
| often doing arithmetic in their head, clearly because they
| enjoyed doing it. So since then I make an effort to
| mentally calculate. And you know what? It's a more
| interesting hobby than you'd think. Whatever technique you
| adopt (or grow, in my case), it's a good, concrete,
| occasionally useful exercise in breaking down a problem
| into smaller parts, and then combining those simple results
| into something else.
|
| Or maybe it's vanity. But I will say it's depressing to see
| all the cashiers (in the US) that can't seem to do any kind
| of math in their head, not even to minimize change (which
| seems totally ubiquitous in many other parts of the world;
| in fact, some cultures are aggressive about optimizing your
| change - China comes to mind).
| confidantlake wrote:
| I feel that in the US any cashier that could do mental
| math would soon move on to a better paying job.
| gambiting wrote:
| I went to a British university, CS course, at the age of 19,
| having completed my education in Poland. I had a very similar
| experience(except no one cared whether you wrote x or .) -
| basically at university it was like going back 5-10 years in
| terms of maths level. We were already doing advanced calculus
| in Poland in my last year at school(and being constantly told
| that we have to know it well or no one at university will
| explain it to us), and then at the UK university I went to we
| spent the first year just going through extremely simple
| algebra. It honestly felt like I was doing something wrong.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| This surely depends on the university and the course. At
| mine (admittedly for a maths degree) the start of the
| course involved quickly running through the contents of the
| A-level FP3 maths module (which the degree did not
| technically require) in about two lectures as well as
| jumping straight into topics that weren't very relevant to
| school maths (group theory and a first "set theory/welcome
| to proofs" course which both quickly became hard).
|
| Students doing physics seemed to get reasonable physics
| maths (e.g. vector calculus things like surface integrals
| and Green's theorem) without spending lots of time revising
| school maths.
|
| I don't know what the computer scientists got but I got the
| impression that the university preferred applicants who
| were good at maths to those who were good at programming.
| Though maybe they needed help with asymptotics: U.K. school
| maths doesn't cover limits and it is hard to define big O
| if you don't know the definition of a limit.
| sjg007 wrote:
| >British university, CS course
|
| Hmm.. In my experience this would have been discrete math
| at best which is normal in CS classes. You'd have to have
| taken an engineering elective or math elective to get
| linear algebra.
|
| Today, with AI being so hot, I'd bet that the programs
| include math for engineers e.g. matrices and linear
| algebra. Maybe an intro course in stats and probability.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| At my university in the U.K. we called the kind of linear
| algebra that computer scientists do "vectors and
| matrices." It involved grids of numbers and maybe things
| like decompositions and eigenvalues/vectors. Computer
| scientists might get to go into topics like numerical
| stability or decomposition that are useful for
| computation. These have lots of practical uses and are
| relevant to topics like graph theory or Markov chains.
|
| The thing we called "linear algebra" involved linear maps
| and vector spaces and bases and dual spaces and no grids
| of numbers.
| arethuza wrote:
| That wasn't my experience in doing a CS degree in the
| 1980s - we basically did the same maths as the engineers
| for two years and then diverged into more discrete maths
| in 3rd year of a 4 year course. And this isn't even
| counting the pure CS mathematical components such as
| lambda calculus etc.
| paganel wrote:
| Romanian here, the "I learned this when I was 9" might have
| been a slight exaggeration so that your friend could make a
| point, but as an another anecdata I can say that I distinctly
| remember one of my first calculus classes while I was in 9th
| grade (I think I was 15 years old at the time) and our maths
| teacher trying to explain to us how real numbers are defined
| and, more importantly, what that definition really means. That
| class/hour stood with me ever since, even though 25 years have
| passed.
|
| But truth be told it very highly depended on the quality of the
| math teachers. I was lucky enough to get into one of the best
| high-schools in my town so that we got a really good maths
| teacher, but the teacher "quality" was not that uniformly
| distributed across different schools.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| UK citizen here. More specifically, English - the 4 "home" UK
| nations have different Education systems.
|
| I learned Calculus at 14, but I am now 56. We still used log
| tables when I was at school, calculators were only just being
| introduced. From what I have seen from my children, our maths
| education has been seriously dumbed down.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> our maths education has been seriously dumbed down._
|
| I hear this complaint form nearly every country. It seems
| like the system has found this "hack" where if you dumb
| things down enough, then scores go up across the board,
| giving the impression that the children are performing
| better, so the people in charge can meet or exceed their
| KPIs, and everybody's a "winner".
|
| For example, in Romania it was very difficult to get top
| grades at schools a few decades ago so those grades were
| used as entry criterias in universities, but nowadays
| everyone can get top grades without a sweat by carefully
| rigging the system, so universities have introduced their
| own entry exams since when everyone has top grades then
| they are all worthless.
| chucksmash wrote:
| Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it
| ceases to be a good measure.
| gnat wrote:
| Do the students bring any motivation to the classroom? Like,
| is there a culture of "study hard and pay attention in maths
| and sciences, because that's how we escape poverty" or
| something like that? Here in New Zealand, middle class
| parents put a high premium on being happy and fulfilled, and
| most (that I've seen across several schools) don't really
| prime their kids for academic success by saying "this is
| important, we value it, and you should too". It may be
| different for lower-class or upper-class kids here (I haven't
| spent a lot of time in those schools). Keen to know what it
| was like in Romania.
| visarga wrote:
| Depends very much on the parents. Some families put a lot
| of importance on studies, and others don't. Usually those
| from countryside or without higher education would not
| care.
| holoduke wrote:
| The most important thing is to shape your kids in such a
| way that they can make choices themselves. Worst thing is
| when parents are pushing their children to go for the
| highest (their eyes) education. A child who likes what
| he/she is doing, even when it is 'just' wood making
| becomes a much happier child. Northern Europe is good in
| this. The US so so. But China and India are the worst
| examples. So many talented people doing things not in
| line with their real desires.
| rob74 wrote:
| I grew up in Romania too (finished school in 1992), and at
| least during the communist regime I can't really remember a
| culture of studying hard to escape poverty, because that
| simply wasn't how you escaped poverty - it was more a mix
| of "choosing the right parents", the people you knew, a bit
| of luck, a bit of corruption and maybe some shrewdness, but
| Romania definitely wasn't a meritocracy at that time (that
| may however have changed since, at least to some degree).
| However, kids that studied hard and were very good in
| school weren't looked down upon and disrespected as they
| sometimes are in the West.
|
| At University (after the regime changed), studying hard did
| become more common, but it was directed at scoring a job in
| Canada/USA/wherever, not at escaping poverty in Romania
| itself...
| paganel wrote:
| I finished highschool in 1999, grew up in a mono-
| industrial city which had just seen its only, well,
| industrial place in town close down and sold for scraps,
| in my case (and in the case of many of my colleagues)
| learning maths and getting into university with free
| admission was really one of the few escapes available
| from said town and, hence, from poverty.
|
| I think those 7 years (1992 vs 1999) made a hell of a
| difference because of the economic "reforms" that were
| implemented in that time-interval and which actually saw
| many towns like the ones I grew up in become destitute in
| a matter of just a few years. Unfortunately that decade
| (the '90s) is not that well-studied yet in our history
| classes (maybe because it is too recent?), fact is I've
| only started to realise its true importance and its true,
| horrible economic and life-changing effects on our
| parents' generation (people who are now in the 60s and
| 70s) only recently. I think the same happened over almost
| all of the former Soviet Bloc, and imo it greatly
| explains some of the political tendencies we see today.
| But that is turning into OT, sorry for that.
| selestify wrote:
| > imo it greatly explains some of the political
| tendencies we see today
|
| That's very interesting, could you please expound on
| that?
| rogalact wrote:
| In Romania, from what i recall, it was usually the
| beatings. Didnt like math? The teacher would simply use the
| pointing stick to smash your hands. I was fortunate enough
| to have liked math but some weren't. And so there were the
| beatings.
|
| Those attending "olympiads" were brainwashed into thinking
| that somehow they were superior and at some point we had to
| look down upon those whom, god forbid, chose something else
| but maths. Some indeed went on to have high paying office
| jobs in western countries, many of whom are now turning
| back. Apparently being trained to win olympiads doesn't
| yield an entrepreneurial spirit nor does it lead to riches,
| and after a life wasted they now just want to live a bit.
| tw20212021 wrote:
| You are exaggerating, I've never seen a beating in school
| (from a teacher to a pupil). Was in school in Bucharest
| from the 90's to 00's, had loads of maths and other stem
| classes. If you didn't keep up you'd get a bad grade, if
| you didn't pass the year you'd have a chance to correct
| it during summer school, and worst you'd repeat the year.
| Nothing uncommon here. And I don't share your hate
| against the ones competing in the olympics, I knew lots
| of them, later on they went into research, got jobs at
| Google, did PHDs at Harvard and Princeton and the likes
| and are now professors at top universities. And some of
| them are good entrepreneurs now, you'd be surprised.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| He's not exaggerating at all.
|
| I was in school in roughly the same period as you and
| although beatings from teachers to pupils were very rare,
| they did exist and happend if the pupil was very unruly
| and caused trouble in class (I had one classmate who
| nearly assaulted a teacher during class because he didn't
| like the bad grade he got), but usually the teacher had
| the "blessing" from the pupil's parents to perform such
| "corrections".
|
| Beatings were much more common in the poorer parts of the
| cities/country with poor performing schools and broken
| families (alcoholism, domestic abuse, poverty). At top
| schools in big cities like the one you probably went to
| with alumni that go to Harvard and Google, beatings were
| not common at all because usually the children came from
| mid/upper-class families. But that's very small
| percentage of the pupils in Romania that are in such a
| performant environment.
|
| When my dad was in school in the 60's, from what he told
| me, receiving beatings in school from teachers was very
| common all around even for stupid reasons as some
| teachers would go on aggressive power trips if you
| stepped on their nerves.
| petre wrote:
| Depends on the teacher I guess, but we never got corporal
| punishment unless there were grave discipline issues like
| beating girls with snowballs or weaved scarves. Math? No.
| You just got a bad grade.
|
| Most of our olympics are currenty researchers abroad or
| tech leads in the country. Entrepreneurs not so much,
| maybe the networking types.
|
| The hardest math problems we encountered were from the
| USSR olympics. There was a magazine with math problems
| which collected such gems.
| rogalact wrote:
| I wish i was exaggerating.
|
| In primary school the older brother of a classmate has
| broken into a newsstand and has stolen a few porn
| magazines. My teacher beat him every day for a week as to
| serve as an example to everyone (yes he beat the little
| brother). He hit him around his temples so as to not
| leave marks and would lift him from the floor pulling by
| the hair. To this day i wont forget this.
|
| Also as recently as few years ago there has been an
| uproar in romania as to how many parents beat their
| children for various reasons including poor school
| performance. You know, "bataia e rupta din cer".
|
| This happens in poor areas of romania such south or east
| provinces as much as in the north west.
|
| "got jobs at X" - exactly. Excellence in romania's
| education system means obedience. At the top it produces
| great workers. Not that working at google is not cool or
| getting a phd is not useful but romania needs more than
| that.
|
| And while a small sample praises romania's education
| system, and great maths, Romania suffers from roughly 50%
| functionally illiterate pupils. Just because a small
| sample gets good results in olympiads, frankly contests
| that mainly poor countries compete in, it doesnt mean the
| system is great. Quite the opposite.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| And there is your answer "from 90's to 00's". Beating was
| done in communist era, not after the fall of Iron
| Curtain.
|
| I personally received beatings from my math teacher
| during middle school (5th to 8th grade), which was before
| '89. He would make me have the fingers up and together
| (think of like Italians argue) and then would hit my 5
| thumbs altogether at once with a wooden stick.
| rogalact wrote:
| I graduated around 2005, and yes, beatings were common.
| As were bribes and sexual abuse. The sexual abuse was so
| much in the open that some thought it was cool to see a
| student girl dating a professor.
|
| It is more pronounced in universities - ask medical or
| economics students and you'll uncover quite a few
| stories.
| Jach wrote:
| I used to know online a Romanian who had moved to Canada
| sometime during high school, she made similar points about
| the slowness of the North American curriculum. I told her
| about my 11th grade AP Physics C material (which uses
| calculus) in America and she indicated that in Romania they
| forced her to learn all that stuff years ago. However she
| wasn't exactly helpful when I later asked if she could help
| me with something, she'd forgotten too much and anyway didn't
| have an interest to keep up or go further. I'm still left
| unconvinced in the superiority of other countries teaching
| their kids so much more so much earlier when it seems to be
| forgotten not long after, and of course there are the long-
| standing "where are the results?" counter-arguments. It's
| hard not to be skeptical of prolonged compulsory education of
| any quality.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm also not convinced about the superiority of any
| teaching system (especially now, after I've learned about
| and read some Ivan Illich), I was just trying to confirm
| OP's point that the education systems around this part of
| the world were indeed pushing harder when it came to some
| maths-related stuff earlier in a kid's "educational cycle",
| so to speak.
|
| I'm also highly "skeptical of prolonged compulsory
| education of any quality" but, again, I think that maybe
| that will steer the discussion into OT territory.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think we do see results in domains where math & science
| is particularly important. Eastern Europeans are
| consistently among the best algorithmic programmers I've
| worked with. My employer was co-founded by a Russian
| immigrant, son of a math professor. Russia beat us to
| space, and given the backwardness of the general eastern
| bloc economy they're remarkably strong in science and
| technology.
|
| On the flip side, the American capitalist economy does a
| remarkably good job of making productive use of people who
| are _not_ academically strong (this is a notable strength
| vs. the Chinese, as well). And American culture &
| education stresses team-playing, communication skills, and
| trust, all of which are weaknesses of many of the Eastern-
| bloc programmers I've worked with.
|
| The thing is, I don't believe that the strengths of
| American culture are mutually exclusive with Russian and
| other Eastern European strengths in mathematics and science
| education. In other words, we could have _both_. What 's
| stopping us from ripping out just the dumbed-down math
| curriculum from schools and replacing it with Russian-style
| instruction? I guess that's what the article is about, and
| some families are doing just that with private enrichment
| classes.
| Jach wrote:
| It's a nice dream, to have a populace educated to a much
| more advanced level in math, but I don't think it's
| doable with America as it is, i.e. we can't have both. We
| could at least stop sliding further down, perhaps, and
| I'd be glad to hear about many sorts of changes in state-
| and nation-wide curriculum, while we're to have such
| things, for what I believe to be marginal improvements.
| At the smaller margins we have individual parents doing
| what they can with things like these Russian Math
| programs, as they have done for a long time, and I think
| is probably sufficient to ensure the prodigies aren't
| snuffed out.
|
| What's stopping us? For starters, over a hundred years of
| battling desires:
| https://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html Not any of
| the sides entirely without some merit. And that is closer
| to America's strength, in that try as we might to enforce
| Universalism in some domain, we're pretty bad at it
| against ourselves. This is a good thing, since while the
| surface of possibilities does suck and we can dream it
| was much better, it is not entirely uniform and solid,
| there are yet still many cracks for the precious few
| (many of whom being immigrants who found their own crack
| just to get here) to slip through, drag some along with
| them, and come out to do great things.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| It could be because you noticed only elite foreign students,
| while US education is accessible to a much wider range of
| American students.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| While this is partly true, and a point of national pride (I'm
| Romanian), it's also important to realize that this is the
| positive end of a very unequal system. If you have the good
| luck of having a good teacher, and enough material conditions
| to focus on learning, school will leave you with quite a good
| array of knowledge, especially in Maths and sciences.
|
| However, the majority of people don't have this luck, and they
| get seriously left behind. I don't know as much about Bulgaria,
| but Romania has the largest percentage of functional illiteracy
| in the EU - almost half of Romanian high-school children can
| only theoretically read (they recognize the letter symbols, but
| can't actually read a text and understand what it meant, at the
| most basic level). A good percentage of people go through the
| mandatory K-10 education system through cheating, corruption,
| and basic knowledge.
|
| Romania is very focused on national exams, one obligatory one
| in 8th grade and another one in 12th grade. There was a push
| about 10 years ago to implement some stringent anti cheating
| controls (cameras in each exam room, nothing fancier or more
| oppressive), and the pass rate plummeted from over 95% to 50%
| in that one year. There were entire high schools that had had
| straight As (10s) the year before and where no one passed the
| year after. This was the level of cheating and corruption.
|
| I will also note that the stuff about having luck with your
| teachers is also not an exaggeration. I attended the second
| best high school in the country by admission grade (there is a
| national exam in 8th grade, and students choose their preferred
| high-school in a ranked vote style, and then every student is
| assigned to a high-school in order of exam grade + preference).
| This is also a high-school in the capital, and a wealthy area.
| I had some really good teachers in a few things, and a few
| really abysmal teachers in others. Even in CS, which was the
| high-school's specialty, I had teachers who seemed to barely
| know the basics (but also others who were pretty decent).
|
| It's also important to note that there is widespread,
| normalized abuse in the teaching system, especially towards
| children with poor grades, or who are just poor. Things like
| yelling, demeaning, even spanking and hair cutting (for male
| students with longer hair, especially) are relatively common,
| and still considered normal in some areas (though, thankfully,
| fewer and fewer).
| ratww wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for the post, this is really insightful.
|
| Do you know why students have to resort to cheat and
| corruption for passing tests and going trough the K-10
| system? Is it some external factor for the students, is it
| just lack of good teachers, or a combination? Thanks.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I am not an expert by any means, but I believe one of the
| main reasons is that there is a fixed national curriculum,
| that includes many different domains, with the same
| standards for everyone, usually withab a huge focus on
| knowledge accumulation and rote learning. The mentality is
| often centered around knowing and being able to repeat
| facts and formulae. The curriculum often goes into deep
| detail on relatively obscure subjects with no or very
| little context. Combined with poor teachers (both in terms
| of performance and financially), this leads to many, if not
| most, students being relatively left behind.
|
| For an example of the top-level mentality, the compulsory
| school system used to include K-12 until a few years ago.
| In high-school, you used to have anorganic chemistry in
| grades 9 and 10, and organic chemistry in grades 11 and 12.
| After the move to K-10, the curriculum was adjusted to have
| anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 11, and organic in 10
| and 12, with the cited reasoning being that you can't have
| students graduating out of high-school without knowing the
| basics of organic chemistry, can you? This, again, in a
| country where a good third or more of those students can
| actually barely read - they've been lost since around grade
| 2-3.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| >It's also important to note that there is widespread,
| normalized abuse in the teaching system, especially towards
| children with poor grades, or who are just poor. Things like
| yelling, demeaning, even spanking and hair cutting (for male
| students with longer hair, especially)
|
| Americans will be appalled, without realizing that these are
| common hazards for poor, and especially black, students to
| face. In many cases, these tactics aren't even used for
| punishment, but as preemptive control measures (especially
| the hair-cutting).
|
| It continues to surprise me how many parallels there are
| between the Eastern European and Inner City American
| experiences.
| bullshitt wrote:
| Lmao where in the USA are teachers spanking and hair
| cutting blacks in the inner city.
| [deleted]
| 1-6 wrote:
| After school programs have been a profitable enterprise in South
| Korea and China. I think they're still in the growth-phase in the
| United States with companies like Kumon, Eye Level, and Russian
| School of Mathematics. Competition to get kids to accel in school
| is high but it's also increasing the stress of these kids.
| Parents in South Korea, for example, have stated in numerous
| survey responses that they would delay having kids (among many
| things) because of the cost of after-school tuition.
|
| It's a shame because education is viewed as that one normalizer
| which allows a child from a poor family to make it up to the top
| through hard work. Wealthy parents are simply gaming the system
| by putting kids through cram-schools and SAT programs which train
| you how to read between the lines and fill out Scantrons
| effectively.
|
| Private tutoring is nothing new but now you're seeing tutoring
| becoming like a Subway's or a McDonalds franchise.
| ijustwanttovote wrote:
| I believe China are starting to ban for-profit tutoring firms.
| https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-parents-fret-aft...
| bitwize wrote:
| Before that it was Singapore math.
|
| Basically any country that doesn't view your kid's math class as
| a lab to experiment with new unproven teaching techniques is fair
| game. Which unfortunately excludes American math.
| [deleted]
| wyclif wrote:
| I'm not quite sure I understand the aversion to Russian teaching
| materials, other than a lingering negative reaction to communism.
| Gelfand's Algebra has become a real game-changing text for a lot
| of English-speaking students who struggle with the subject. His
| Trigonometry book is just as good, and helped me a lot when I
| needed a refresher when I became a land surveyor after being out
| of school for years.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Went to university in the UK, met a bunch of Russian post-docs
| whilst I was a researcher, and they were some of the best
| mathematicians I'd met.
|
| Not unrelated, but today in the UK is A-Level results (for 18 yr
| olds), and the UK press and exam boards, as usual are reporting
| it as the 'best results ever'. This happens year on year.
|
| There's a lot of argument about education standards getting lower
| in the UK. My "anecdata" is that I was the first year to sit GCSE
| maths exams at 16 yrs old, and we went through old O-level papers
| from the mid 1950s onwards (aimed at 16 year olds) to practice.
| Those O-level papers had advanced calculus that we didn't learn
| until our final year of A-levels. Those old papers were _much_
| harder.
|
| tl;dr in the 50s/60s 16 year old Brits were taught advanced
| calculus. They're not now.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This does not jive with my encounters with people who went to
| school in the 50s/60s.
|
| Just from interacting with people of different ages, it seems
| to me there was a marked improvement in quality of schooling,
| maybe in the 90s?
| DrBazza wrote:
| It depends what metric you're using for education
| improvement. For science based subjects, the fundamentals
| don't change. My narrow world view is maths and physics, and
| my data point of one, is that my peer group in the 1980s were
| taught to a lower level in maths (and physics) than in the
| 1950s/60s/70s, based on the content of O-level exam papers
| that we sat as mock exams. The fact was that we couldn't
| answer a percentage of the exams because we just weren't
| taught it.
|
| The reverse wasn't true - we were not taught extra things
| that weren't in the exam, we were simply taught _less_.
|
| I can't find a link, but there was talk of "remedial maths"
| lessons being taught at many universities in the UK to bring
| students up to the standards required for degrees because
| they're simply not taught at the same level any more.
| Universities on the other hand, don't have their curriculums
| or qualifications manipulated by the sitting government so
| their standards/requirements change much more slowly.
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| After "Do you like this story?..." popped up for the fifth time I
| stopped reading.
| [deleted]
| LeanderK wrote:
| I wonder what he older math-education in german schools is like,
| probably also more hard-core. After elementary school, germany
| has a three tracks Gymnasium, Realschule und Hauptschule. A
| Gymnasium prepares one for university and is still well regarded
| and its final tests, the Abitur, still carries a prestige.
| Looking back (I attended a Gymnasium), I think the quality of the
| education was quite high, especially in my english lessons and
| the social subjects. If the goal of the school was to produce
| good citizens capable of actively participating in a democracy
| and forming their own opinion, then it did it very well.
| Especially later, we had quite a few interesting, adult
| discussions with engaged teachers about various topics in
| history, society, art etc. So I think that the quality of my
| gymnasium was quite high and it really showed in subjects where
| capable teachers alone can make quite the difference.
|
| But the gymnasiums should also prepare those capable for
| university, be more rigorous, and I think there's the problem.
| The division doesn't work anymore. Everybody wants their children
| to go to the gymnasium, because everybody has to study at the
| university. Even when they have no interest whatsoever in science
| and just want to work as a coder. Also, attending a Gymnasium
| can't be prestigious if everybody is doing it. I remember quite a
| few children struggling but getting pushed through by their
| parents because a Realschule is simply not an option. I was also
| struggling, but more because I just didn't care and there weren't
| really any consequences. I still passed each class. But a more
| rigorous math education would, I think, result in a lot of the
| children failing the gymnasium and a lot of angry parents who see
| the future of their children and their parental success in
| turmoil. So the Gymnasium really turned into a one-size-fits-all
| kind of education and I strongly suspect that especially in math
| (or physics) that leads to the lowest common denominator. So now
| I wonder what the math education was like when only few could
| attend the gymnasium, i suspect way more rigorous.
|
| Is it similar in other countries?
|
| By the way, it's totally different at the university level. The
| german university doesn't feel responsible for your personal
| success, you have to earn it. If you fail, you fail and the
| standard can be quite high. I also don't really see a lowering of
| standards in the "core" degrees, for the first big math exams I
| prepared myself by practicing with old ones going back into the
| 80s/90s. They were as difficult as the new ones. A lot of
| students failing out of the subjects they have chosen (can be as
| much as 2/3rds) just choose easier majors, for example a
| business-computer science combination because they have less math
| classes. A lot of the students that started studying with me
| ended up switching majors because of the more rigorous computer-
| science and math-classes (I think roughly 50%).
| a-saleh wrote:
| Damn, need to reread Malushki i matematika.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| The core theory, that abstract reasoning and deeper understanding
| should be introduced as early as possible is marvelous.
|
| But I'm over the idea of hammering kids with homework... This is
| in addition to their school workload.
| univalent wrote:
| My kids 8 and 7 go to the Russian math after school program in
| Cupertino. So far, there's nothing 'Russian' about it. Its just
| regular math.
| marco_craveiro wrote:
| As a Portuguese citizen, I was not exposed to Russian mathematics
| during my entire academic career until I entered university.
| Whilst slightly better than the UK, our educational system was
| also not brilliant when it came to maths, and we only started to
| do calculus close to Year 12 (the last year before university).
| Anyways, my one and only brush with Russian mathematics was as
| follows - I flunked Integral and Differential calculus on Year 1
| at uni, and was getting really worried it would take me a while
| to do this subject. In Portugal you need to repeat a subject
| until you get a pass grade. Then a cousin told me I had to "do
| Piskunov".
|
| In those days you didn't buy books, you'd photocopy them, so he
| gave me a very large photocopied manuscript of Piskunov [1] in
| Spanish. I had never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a
| game; it had very little instructions, and it started with
| absolutely trivial exercises, but continued on and on,
| relentlessly. And somehow, it got you hooked. I read the entire
| set of books compulsively, just to see what the next exercise
| would throw at me. I finished my exam really quickly and got 95%
| (in my rush, I made one mistake in the exam). My teacher even
| asked me about some of the ways in which I solved some of the
| exercises.
|
| [1] https://mirtitles.org/2012/03/06/integeral-and-
| differential-...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Portugal has still made a lot of progress. My father, who grew
| up in the Acores in the 50/60s, says that back then school
| stopped at 4th grade.
| anthk wrote:
| Where can I get these books in Spanish?
| euler2100 wrote:
| right here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-0oGwb4N6jRcUF1b
| 3laOExLeVU/...
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| I'm Russian and one thing I liked when I was a kid was the
| monthly physics & math magazine "Quantum" (Russian: "Kvant",
| "Kvant") that was aimed at schoolchildren. Are there any such
| magazines in United States?
| g9yuayon wrote:
| This got me thinking about the recent school policies for equity.
| Schools reduce difficulty of courses, lower standards for
| graduation, and cancel gift programs, all in the name of equity.
| I think in the long term such policy changes will hurt
| disadvantaged families. Family with means will simply send their
| kids to good tutoring schools, and the education gap among
| different groups of people will enlarge. It is the kids in the
| middle, the future backbone of our society, who will suffer most
| because they need strong guidance and skillful push to truly
| learn, yet they won't get such education because of the watered-
| down standards.
| geomark wrote:
| People may find this interesting
| http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf (PDF)
|
| It is written by a mathematician who has taught in Russia, the US
| and Brazil. They have a lot to say about how math is taught in
| the US. The paper also has a lot of sample problems.
| MysteriousJane wrote:
| I was glad to experience both methods and i can definitely
| conclude, that Russian/Soviet Math approach is much better! It
| gave me the boost to be ahead my Us and EU classmates, helped to
| adapt to my statistical class during my Bachelor's degree. Highly
| recommended for every parent to include several methodologies to
| their child's extra program.
| jdlyga wrote:
| This reminds me of Kumon Math when I was a kid. It used a very
| Japanese method to teach math, and definitely helped me out early
| on.
| echopurity wrote:
| We're not taught mathematics because we're not meant to think,
| criticize, understand epistemology, etc. We're taught to compute
| to make us useful and compliant, even if the computations
| themselves are useless.
| tu7001 wrote:
| Isn't something like that been already tried and failed? Try of
| teaching maths in deep from the elementary school?
| tradertef wrote:
| Anectodal: I signed my daughter to Russian math and due to
| pandemic she had one semester online. The teacher was horrible
| and made lots of mistakes. On the other hand, some of our friends
| were impressed about their teachers. So, I guess it depends on
| the teacher a lot.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Somehow the American education system keeps getting worse while
| they poor more money into it.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| There's a limited amount you can do when everyone around you is
| destitute. I seriously doubt future coal miners were taught
| sophisticated math in high school in the USSR - they took
| tracking and specialization to an extreme, whereas this is
| culturally verboten in America (for good reason).
| [deleted]
| orthoxerox wrote:
| It's the Germans who are extreme specializers, with separate
| middle and high schools for vocational, professional and
| academic tracks.
|
| The Union had two optional years of high school, but everyone
| took the first eight with no tracks or optional classes.
| After that you could finish school or get three years of
| vocational education and join the workforce.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| Soviet schools weren't really specialized. They could have
| some classes with a heavier focus on specific subjects but
| all changes were minor.
|
| So yes, coal miners learned the same stuff. Only after grade
| 9 kids could apply to a professional school that would teach
| blue-collar professions and that's the first divergence
| point.
|
| P.S. In Soviet/Russian schools "class" is literally a group
| of kids who study all subjects together from grade 1 to 11,
| they are very rigid.
| udev wrote:
| Lots of comments asking what is "Soviet/Russian Math" actually
| like, and how is it different.
|
| I was lucky to get an education in three systems (Soviet Math,
| Romanian Math School (influenced by both French and Soviet Math
| school), and finally in a world top 40 university in North
| America.
|
| I would summarize the Soviet/Russian Math/Physics approach like
| this: - understanding of the mechanism/intuition
| behind the equations/methods is paramount - teachers are
| astute at spotting students who memorize blindly, and will
| intervene to correct that - while rigorous about notation,
| the mathematical representation always comes after understanding,
| not before - the progression of teaching (order how
| material is introduced) is very well thought out - the old
| soviet textbooks are generally less verbose than North American
| ones (less fancy), but high quality in their expression,
| typesetting, and ESPECIALLY (!!!) the quality of the exercises
| - the Soviet Math textbook exercises are something to behold:
| they have funny/memorable setting (like jokes), they are short
| and easy to express, the numbers are chosen in such a way that
| the result will be a nice whole number, or pi, etc. Basically as
| a kid you can read one of those problems, lay down, close your
| eyes, and work on it in your head.
|
| That being said, I did like some of the aspects from the so
| called "Western Math" (in my case Canadian university):
| - teachers are more approachable, more friendly - textbooks
| can be gorgeous (nice colorful plots, etc)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Meanwhile in California: https://equitablemath.org/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
| primitivesuave wrote:
| This is fascinating and I appreciate you linking it. I was
| mind-blown when I read page 8's claim that white supremacy
| manifests itself in mathematics education when "students are
| required to show their work in standardized, prescribed
| ways".
| dharmab wrote:
| For the curious:
|
| > The child of immigrants might have learned a different
| way to solve a problem because that's how their parents
| were taught where they grew up. If we just tell that
| student their way is the wrong way, we risk turning them
| off to math for life. If we take the opportunity to explore
| why there are different ways to approach the same problem,
| it can be a learning moment for the entire class.
|
| I certainly had this experience in school! I did many math
| problems mentally, using the method taught in schools today
| where a problem like 23 x 7 is split into ((10 * 7) * 2) +
| (3 * 7). As a result, showing my work was challenging,
| because the teachers of my time wanted us to write out the
| long multiplication and I didn't know writing the above
| expansion was an option.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Part of schooling is learning and showing you can follow
| a specific set of instructions. As long as one was taught
| how to do long multiplication, I do not see the purpose
| of taking into account what every kids' parents taught
| them if the purpose of the exercise is to learn a certain
| method and then show that you learned that certain method
| by doing it.
| dharmab wrote:
| Because in practice, that causes students to disengage
| from the learning process:
|
| > If we just tell that student their way is the wrong
| way, we risk turning them off to math for life.
|
| I certainly disengaged from some subjects in school due
| to frustration with "thou shalt" methods of teaching. I
| was even removed from an upper level English language
| class because I didn't draw the same conclusions as the
| teacher from the material.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I agree if they told you
|
| >23 x 7 is split into ((10 * 7) * 2) + (3 * 7)
|
| was the wrong way, then that is harmful. But if the
| purpose of the test was to see if you can do long
| multiplication, and you were not able to do it because
| you did not want to or like to do it that way, then that
| is a personal problem.
|
| The reality is that school (non university level
| schooling) is not purely about education or exploring the
| 18 million different ways something can be right or
| wrong. It is also an exercise in navigating one's way
| around other humans and their expectations and playing
| the game that you will have to for the rest of your life.
|
| There is also the constraint of limited budgets and
| schools having to make do with perhaps not the most
| qualified educators. And there is certainly lots of
| improvement to be made, but this "racist math" stuff
| seems to be counter productive.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Idiot.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Ah, yes. I was told to "show my work", but I didn't have
| any work to show. If they told me "For sake of
| illustration, show what the steps would be if you carried
| out the following algorithm", then perhaps I could have
| done that. But what they said was "show your work", and
| there was nothing to show.
|
| Luckily, I had learned several years of the curriculum in
| advance anyway, and had contempt for what the teachers
| were doing, so it didn't change my opinion of math, only
| my opinion of school.
| starkd wrote:
| I've heard from many Russian immigrant friends who insist that
| Soviet education was one of the few areas that was done well in
| USSR. Particularly, mathematics, which, other than the
| obligatory Marx/Lenin quotes at the top of papers, tended to
| avoid ideological corruption.
| smhost wrote:
| What's funny is that the differences in pedagogy is probably
| a result of that "ideological corruption". Going through the
| American education system, it's clear to both professors and
| students alike that the system was designed on the assumption
| that there should be winners and losers, and that meaningful
| education is an afterthought. My math professors complained
| that the way the system worked made it impossible for a
| student to have continuity in their learning experience, and
| if you measure the number of A-students in one course who get
| an A in immedate next course, it's random. They weren't
| talking about courses that have large conceptual leaps
| between them. They were talking about first semester calculus
| vs second semester calculus.
| culebron21 wrote:
| I studied in 1988-1999, and these stories may be true for
| Soviet elite education, but not for average Ivan. I
| personally studied at a school with advanced Physics and
| English (our teachers after graduating from uni went to
| Minneapolis for a year of practice). But maths had nothing
| close to what's described in the article or comments here. No
| witty simple problems, just boring theorems, then simple
| tasks to solve.
|
| I did see those witty nice problems in journals and special
| math tasks books, but that never appeared in our lessons.
| That was boring like hell. Well, ...at least it wasn't dumb,
| we did take logarithms, derivatives etc.
|
| But if you take an average Russian, they can't solve a simple
| proportion problem: say, income tax is 15%, you paid $450 of
| tax, how much net salary did you get? The answer is easy:
| 450/.15*.85 (then do it on calculator), but when I did this
| calculation with accountants from vocational college, they
| were stunned and didn't get how I did it. I'm not
| exaggerating a bit.
|
| So those people were either from elites, or nostalgic.
|
| On other courses in Soviet/Post-Soviet school.
|
| Russian language focused mostly on orthography, punctuation
| and participles. Like if British school focused on spelling
| "coloUr" or "emphasiSe". The examples of good style were only
| 19th century literature, especially Tolstoi's suffocating
| long sentences.
|
| Literature course is similar to what Paul Graham wrote about
| in his essays: old, boring and already unimportant
| literature, plus writing essays that must imitate literature
| critics. I think this was the most hated task at school, and
| it lasted all the way from 5th to 11th grade. Such essay
| writing is still obligatory till today in 2021, and I see
| consequences of it while teaching in a university: students
| write in unnatural high style, but have difficulties
| conveying their thoughts or selecting proper evidence (few
| can distinguish between facts and theories). And that's in a
| good university -- I'm scared to think what less smart people
| write. This is not a "degradation" of modern ages, it's
| almost unchanged since Soviet times.
|
| History course conveyed a Communist narrative, cherry picked
| facts and asked you not to analyze anything but to remember
| dates/years. E.g. a textbook on medieval history (6th grade),
| a paragraph on knights and their armor started with exactly
| this phrase: "It was not easy for peasants to fight even one
| feudal lord." (then it described the armor). The entire
| country of Grand Duchy of Lithuania (at the time it was also
| called Lithuanian Russia) was omitted, except for being shown
| on a map. Because it was embarassing to compare that country
| with Russia under Ivan the Terrible (who became an icon in
| Stalin's age).
|
| Geography was interesting to me, but when I got to Wikipedia
| in 2004 and started reading on languages and nations, I saw
| how much was missing from there.
|
| Biology was a simple and rather boring literature, and the
| home work was to read a paragraph and be ready to retell it.
| Most students would simply learn them.
|
| (Actually, with mediocre English teachers that was the case
| as well: read a text, called "topic" and retell -- and the
| teacher saw students telling the text learned by heard, but
| didn't care.)
|
| So, to conclude, math in Soviet elite education was good.
| Other courses were probably reasonably good, because those
| elite schools for talented also attracted good teachers. But
| the average school was of much lower quality.
| starkd wrote:
| Friend from Bulgaria was telling me about the annual
| recruits for the required conscription into the army. Most
| were illiterate peasants. There ancestors had been
| illiterate since time immemorial.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| As an american who went through US-based curriculum in the 90s,
| this sounds _FUCKING WONDERFUL_.
|
| Basically - it seems like the approach above treats math as a
| conceptual playground, where you should develop intuition and
| understanding.
|
| Instead we seem to be going down the rote memorization route
| for most of our classes, where the goal was to apply an
| equation to some numbers and get the right answer, with little
| to no thought, and an emphasis on easy grading.
|
| ----
|
| Our physics education seems quite similar, though - and I loved
| that.
| jnsie wrote:
| Same in Ireland :-(
| beamatronic wrote:
| I could do calculus, in high school and college, but I wasn't
| very happy about it. Until I took a physics class in college
| which happened to be intended for the physics majors. Did the
| professor ever just present an equation and ask us to learn
| it? No! Every Single Physics Equation was explained from
| first principles, using calculus - a lot of integrals.
| Finally we were seeing a practical application, where
| calculus was just a tool to get you where you needed to be.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| It was really helpful to me in highschool that the calculus
| teacher was also the physics teacher, and many students
| were enrolled in both classes simultaneously. You ended up
| learning both at the same time.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Teaching calculus through physics (and vice versa)
| actually makes a lot of sense.
|
| Similarly, basic Linear Algebra and 3D graphics have
| great synergy. I took LinAlg and Computer Graphics the
| same semester in undergrad, and the first half of LinAlg
| led perfectly into the second half of CG. (The first half
| of CG was all 2D stuff, which didn't need any special
| math.)
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I was a bit disappointed to see the differences between
| "algebra based physics" in high school and "Calc based
| physics" in college. It wasn't a whole lot more than "now
| rather than giving you formulas, do an integral to go from
| acceleration to speed, or speed to position".
|
| It did feel good to see a practical use for the calculus I
| had learned, much more so than determining how much the
| surface area changed after adding a layer of paint 0.01"
| thick to a tank.
| ponkon wrote:
| Also American, but was routed through, what was at the time,
| an experimental program called Integrated Math. Class was
| structured around word problems and the students were guided
| towards figuring out the formulas rather than rote
| memorization.
|
| There was a ton of group work, which worked out really well
| for me, but if you didn't want to learn it was pretty easy to
| coast and let the group leader do most of the work /
| learning.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I have always liked math, but have never been great or very
| good at it. I graduated from a US public school gifted
| program, and a top 30 US university. The biggest problem I
| always had with math education is they didn't teach the "why"
| nearly enough. I was lousy at memorizing formulas/methods
| (esp. in calculus), so I often found myself dead in the water
| during exams.
| hhlbf wrote:
| Maths do not have a why.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Yes they do. At minimum Mathematics have a why in that it
| is something that is arrived at logically, and provable.
| But when you learn mathematics, whether it be algebra or
| geometry and trigonometry or calculus or discrete, there
| is another why added, that of real life solutions. Why do
| we care about geometry? Well it ends up being useful in
| optics and physics. We like Trigonometry because it can
| help you build a building or bridge or shoot a cannon and
| take down said building or bridge. Calculus has
| innumerable uses in engineering and physics and finance
| and biology and everywhere.
| vangelis wrote:
| If maths don't have a why, then programming languages
| don't have a why. They're both abstractions.
| iammisc wrote:
| Programming languages do not have a why. The turing
| machine is an arbitrary model of computation, as is the
| lambda calculus, as is horn clauses. The 'why' is
| deciding which one is most convenient to solve a
| particular problem. Given that very good computer
| scientists come up with very different means of solving
| the same problem, it's clear there's no universal
| agreement upon which paradigm is better and that there's
| a lot of subjective reasoning as to why particular models
| are better.
| iammisc wrote:
| You are being downvoted but you're correct.
|
| Consider the natural numbers. There is no 'why' behind
| them. There are axioms behind them, and -- given those
| axioms -- there are statements about the natural numbers
| that can be logically reduced to the axioms, but the
| axioms have no why.
|
| Moreover, it is provable the axioms have no why, because
| they cannot have a why, because the axioms cannot be
| proven except in relation to themselves. If you're so
| convinced the axioms have a why, please prove me and
| Godel wrong.
|
| The 'why' behind natural numbers is a social one, and one
| of convenience. The natural numbers make it easy to solve
| and communicate about certain problems, but they are not
| the only way to solve those problem nor are they the only
| way to communicate about these problems.
|
| For example, another way to deal with basic arithmetic,
| is to talk about numbers as sets. Now you can define
| certain operations on them, and completely ignore the
| axioms of the natural numbers. This model is way better
| than others for certain problems. However, you now have a
| new set of axioms.. and oh yeah, actually the most
| obvious ones are completely self-contradictory, so you'll
| need to choose Zermelo-Frankel or something else.
|
| Or if you want to be even more general, you can simply
| talk about the lambda calculus, but good luck trying to
| 'prove' the lamba calculus theorems in itself, because
| you'll quickly hit the halting problem.
|
| Of course you can then say... well let's get rid of that
| and use the typed lambda calculus, but then oh yeah you
| can't do anything interesting. Why are these choices
| made? Can the choices be justified in the systems
| themselves? No of course not. The idea that you can use
| 'logic' to derive these systems is also ridiculous
| because formal logic is itself a system with axiom (and a
| very controversial system at that).
|
| But if you look at the lambda calculus, ZF set theory,
| and the natural numbers as simply models and systems that
| are sometimes useful, then it makes sense as to 'why'.
| But the 'why' exists independent of them and is not
| provable in them and is social and cultural in nature. It
| is certainly not mathematical as in order to 'do
| mathematics' (symbolic manipulations) you first need
| axioms.
|
| Mathematics education in this country has been replaced
| by rote dogmatism which is why many Americans cannot
| handle this ambiguity.
|
| What must be explained is that mathematics is a language
| and in order to communicate with other educated humans
| about these abstract concepts it behooves everyone to
| speak the same language. It is the same reason the word
| for 'dog' in English is taught as being spelled D-O-G.
| There is no why behind it. It's just the result of
| thousands of years of culture. Except mathematics is a
| more global language and more useful for different kinds
| of manipulations.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Again - correct but misguided in the general sense.
|
| > It is the same reason the word for 'dog' in English is
| taught as being spelled D-O-G. There is no why behind it.
|
| I agree with you completely, but I think you're guilty of
| speaking the wrong language in response to the question
| (and it would behoove you to consider it from the
| perspective of someone outside the field).
|
| The question "Why" in maths almost always gets asked by
| someone new to the field, and they are not asking from a
| mathematical perspective - They are _not_ asking you for
| a formal /provable "why", they're asking you what is the
| _utility_ of learning this thing.
|
| So lets go back to D-O-G. The utility is clear - I have
| this hairy, 4 legged animal that keeps licking me that
| I'd like to discuss with you. We can agree that D-O-G (or
| perro, or gae) refers to it.
|
| But with math, SO MANY PEOPLE (especially those
| established in the field) jump right into the "Here are
| the rules of this system of math" without ever taking the
| time to talk about why someone might give a flying fuck.
|
| It would be like me going and making up my own language
| and forcing you to learn it. No one else speaks it, it's
| got no books/literature/history, there are no works of
| art that reference it - it's literally the language this
| random person made up that serves _ZERO_ purpose except
| for talking to that person.
|
| No wonder so many kids don't like math!
|
| Instead you need to explicitly _start_ with the utility
| of math - ideally in ways that are entertaining and fun.
| Once a person has an application for some of the rules,
| they become SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING! Suddenly I care
| about why this rule might impact that rule over there, or
| why A and Z are related, or what sin /cos/tan mean.
|
| Basically - sell me on the value proposition of your
| fucked up whacky language - That's what "why" is asking.
| Once you know those rules do something useful, it becomes
| a much more engaging field of study.
| iammisc wrote:
| You are correct, but this explanation is cultural and
| sociological, not logical.
|
| We must _motivate_ math, absolutely. And to do so in my
| opinion starts with socratic questioning. You must
| convince the student that such an inquiry is even
| worthwhile.
|
| One thing I'll point out is that we're not just seeing
| this in math. We see it in every field. More and more
| kids every year are insisting ( and their teachers are
| agreeing) that we can do away with inquiries into the
| English language and the humanities as well. There is a
| small, but continuing, effort to remove the knowledge of
| English masters like shakespeare and classic philosophers
| and treatises from the curriculum.
|
| As a whole, American schooling fails to motivate learning
| of any kind. Math was the first victim, but the other
| subjects are also failing.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Sure, but we're in a thread talking about why some folks
| are choosing to send kids to "Russian" style maths
| teachers.
|
| The whole discussion is from the perspective of the
| cultural and sociological.
|
| ---
|
| As an aside, I generally agree with you about american
| schooling. I think it's less a concerted effort, and more
| a sad reality of the fact that modern schools have
| essentially become federally funded child care in the US.
| iammisc wrote:
| > federally funded child care in the US.
|
| Indeed... As my mother was told by her principal in her
| inner city school for poor minority kids... "We're just
| here to watch them until they go to prison".
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I find this answer to be true, but misguided. In
| particular, this type of answer was the exact thing that
| turned me off of math for _YEARS_.
|
| Maths _DO_ have a why - We needed way to describe and
| model the world around us, and math was a requirement to
| do that.
|
| Now - once the model and rules are put in place - Fine,
| you can bugger off and be as self-referential and
| contained as you'd like - "There is no why!"...
|
| But lets be clear - there _ABSOLUTELY_ is a why, and the
| second the world around you no longer matches the model
| of your maths, we start debating whether or not to throw
| the thing in the trash and make new rules (see set theory
| as the classic example...)
| zsmi wrote:
| I used to suffer from the lack of "why" too until one day
| it dawned on me that there really isn't a why, or maybe,
| the why is always the same: for engineers doing classical
| physics solving problems by hand, it's convenient to define
| it that way. No more, no less.
|
| When I was a math tutor in school, everyone would complain
| about lack of why. This was my approach to address the
| issue. I would describe a problem relevant to the class,
| say something like find the angle between two vectors, and
| ask them to think of a general way to do it. Usually this
| require some help from me but the solution was always
| "theirs". Then we would play with their solution: find
| corner cases, figure out which operations broke, develop a
| couple of theorems with it. Then I would show them the dot
| product, and a couple of its tricks (a.k.a. theorems), and
| they would get a good appreciation for why the dot product
| works the ways it does. And that's the why and the reason
| it stuck. It's useful way to solve a common problem. There
| is no magic or deep philosophical truth.
|
| The problem is this teaching style works with a dialog to a
| few number of students. I am not sure how well it would
| work in a lecture setting. It was also not so easy on me as
| I would be the person who had to spot the problems in their
| definition, basically on the spot, and lead them to it on
| their own without revealing the answer. With basic things
| like a dot product it's pretty easy to know where to look
| (i.e. is their definition commutative, pretty much never)
| and finding issues and nudging them too it wasn't too hard.
| But it's likely hard to scale things like this on many
| metrics.
| iammisc wrote:
| The problem with asking teachers to think on the spot is
| that teachers in America are especially dumb: https://www
| .forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2019/03/13/why-so...
|
| My mother was a public school teacher.
|
| She passed her test on the first try, which was extremely
| rare at her school. She was taught in India, and became
| an American teacher as an older woman. She was an
| outlier. She graduated from a major public teaching
| program in our state of California (CSU Fullerton).
|
| Most teachers fail their tests on the first try. This is
| not advanced calculus... this is elementary mathematics
| and reading.
|
| The issue is that accolades in the education department
| do not translate to results. The state creates a monopoly
| on teaching via its certification process, with means
| education departments are guaranteed funding regardless
| of their results, given that once you have the
| credential, you're considered 'equal' to other teachers.
|
| Despite my mother doing very well on her tests, she was
| fired and not granted tenure because she didn't follow
| her principal's teaching methodology. Even though her
| students were passing their own exams at higher rates and
| doing better (And of course my mother taught two boys who
| went on to make careers in science and mathematics), she
| was fired for not following the failing methodology.
|
| This is what is wrong with American schooling. It's a
| race to the bottom and the teachers have no idea what's
| actual achievement because they've never achieved basic
| elementary schooling, much less seen it in others.
|
| Here are example questions:
| https://www.mometrix.com/academy/praxis-math-practice-
| test/
|
| These are _not_ difficult, at all.
|
| EDIT: in some ways america is doomed by its own success,
| in that, for those who can actually do math, reading, and
| writing, there are significantly more lucrative fields
| than teaching. Unfortunately, since teachers can't teach
| those skills, it's really a new aristocracy formed by
| parents who do know those skills passing them on to
| children.
| avmich wrote:
| So the haves spend money on education of their kids, and
| have-nots can't do that, relying on public schools which
| don't perform, and the possibilities gap is widening.
| Structural problem.
| iammisc wrote:
| Absolutely! A major structural problem.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| My British state education really did feel like "memorise
| just enough to jump through these arbitrary hoops which keep
| the government off our backs" sometimes. It's _very_ exam-
| driven rather than learning for its own sake and apparently
| it 's got even worse since schools started transitioning to
| academies and Gove's reforms took effect.
| cabalamat wrote:
| One fix for this is to have exam questions such that you
| cannot pass them unless you have true understanding rather
| than rote memorisation.
| nicoburns wrote:
| That's one part of the equation, but it only works if you
| have teachers and a curriculum that are capable of
| imparting that understanding.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| Normally the curriculum was split between knowledge and
| understanding, and problem solving. You could memorize
| the first part and not the second part. The problem
| solving sorted out who got the grades
| ilikeatari wrote:
| I also had a similar experience both on the US and Polish side.
| The US math exercises that I experienced through my niece were
| really much more focused on reading comprehension, but almost
| hoping that the student trips up. Maybe its because I am not a
| native speaker, but this seemed to be not constructive to the
| task at hand.
| dartharva wrote:
| That sounds wonderful! As a product of Indian education (that
| prioritizes rote learning), I wish I had been subjected to such
| a school, maybe then I (and majority of other kids) wouldn't
| have fallen out of learning math like we did.
| bordercases wrote:
| What characterizes the French?
| janeroe wrote:
| I had a chance to compare the systems, too but my conclusions
| are completely different. Teachers at the physics/math lyceum I
| studied at were emotionally unstable psychopaths with mood
| swings. They could switch from calm "kids, if you don't
| understand something, please, don't hesitate to ask" to the
| screaming at the top of their lungs of "are you a stupid
| imbecile? what a moron you're to ask that" just a minute later.
|
| It was all about rote memorization. Rules, theorems, axioms.
| Not just the way to prove or principle behind, but the textual
| representation (to the teacher's liking) word-to-word. Of
| course, there was a division of students into multiple groups,
| and those with important parents had an easier time. Any of
| their bullshit was always graded as "A". But those actively
| disliked could get "F" for a perfect work. A dot at the end of
| the sentence is missing? "Go back to the kindergarten where you
| belong". Something is crossed? "What is it, a toilet paper? Go
| use it for wiping your ass" (they could tear it apart in front
| of you). So, the representation/look of the work always came
| first. A teacher was a lawyer, prosecutor, and a judge at the
| same time (just what some Americans wish to have as a state):
| you don't like something, go f___ yourself.
|
| The textbooks. If you compare the best Soviet ones with some
| average American, you can come to the conclusion that Soviet
| are so good ("exercises are something to behold", "high quality
| in their expression", etc). But the best American books
| wouldn't give a single chance to the Soviet ones. In fact, even
| some Russian Empire textbooks so much better than Soviet (not
| to mention Russian), they are getting popular among parents for
| homeschooling (schools can't use books unauthorized by the
| ministry of education). The best American and pre-Soviet
| textbooks are born out of lectures, author's personal
| experience with students. Soviet authors are disinterested
| observers who don't care. Textbooks, apparently, were the
| product of central planning like process (so they were getting
| worse and worse, the further they went from Russian Empire
| epoch).
|
| And finally, a thing that really deeply touched me at a western
| University. A teacher when asked a question once said "I don't
| know, I have to check it". Holly f... Someone who openly
| admitted they don't know something, no freaking way! Back at
| the lyceum it would be "Shut your mouth with your stupid
| question, we don't have time for that". Then she would find the
| answer and during the next class say something like "now when
| we have a few minutes, I'll do you a favor, here is the
| answer... What a moron you're not to be able to conceive this
| yourself".
| filoleg wrote:
| I was about to reply with something like this, so thank you
| for posting it. I don't know where the top level grandparent
| comment comes from, but your experience matches mine almost
| 1:1 (except I went to school in russia between 2001-2010, so
| hardly soviet anymore, and then finished up high
| school+college in the US). Something to keep in mind: my
| school in Russia wasn't just a random school, but a
| physics+math focused gymnasium, one of the best public
| schools in the city. I am shuddering to even think what it
| was like at less well off schools.
|
| Everything was about rote memorization, to the level i
| couldn't imagine in the US. Physics? Nope, memorize
| everything, you don't need to understand why or how formulas
| relate to each other or what they mean. Math? Nope, no need
| to understand logic behind anything, just memorize the
| formulas. Even with something like programming, we had to
| memorize bubble sort in TurboPascal, without the algorithm
| ever explained at a higher/pseudocode level (it was
| introduced in TurboPascal right off the bat and you had to
| memorize it line by line, I wish I was kidding; we were
| graded on how line-by-line it matched the given solution, not
| on whether the implementation actually worked/was valid). It
| was pain, I barely learned anything, and was convinced that I
| am destined to never do well in physics, thinking "this was
| just not for me, i am not smart enough to get it".
|
| Then we moved to the US, and I felt like my eyes were opened.
| Physics were explained from bottom up, from actual phenomena
| and how they worked, and formulas were just a glue connecting
| those phenomena and their interactions together. There was
| zero actual need to waste time memorizing those formulas,
| despite formula sheets not being allowed on the exams,
| because they actually explained the logic/reasoning behind it
| all, so it was no issue at all to simply derive those
| formulas on your own during the exam.
|
| Same happened with math and programming. I actually finally
| understood what I was doing, rather than robotically
| recalling appropriate strings to put on paper from memory.
|
| In the russian school I went to, logic didn't matter, only
| correct answers. For a specific example, in every single
| physics course I ever took in the Russia, if you got the
| calculation wrong for one small part of the problem (which
| propagated to the final answer being incorrect), but you got
| the rest of it right, you get 0% for that problem. While in
| the US high school/college, I could even omit a small part of
| the problem that I didn't know how to solve, put a
| placeholder number there, and then solve the rest of the
| problem correctly, and I will get points for the parts I got
| right. Which makes sense, because if I forgot how to solve
| one out of many subproblems, but know the rest perfectly, or
| if I miscalculated a single variable, i just lose points for
| that portion. It isn't "all or nothing, the only thing that
| matters is the final answer." I get part of the reason the
| "all or nothing" system was done in my russian school, it
| makes grading much easier. But it also introduces tons of
| both false positives and false negatives. You know how to
| solve everything, but screwed up one small calculation? No
| points for the problem. Oh, you got the right answer at the
| end and wrote a bunch of gibberish to "get" to that answer
| (because you just copied the answer from someone else without
| knowing how to solve it at all)? Well, you got the answer
| right, so we will give you almost all the points. Cheating
| was off the charts. And that is at one of the most
| "prestigious" and highly ranked specialized gymnasium
| schools.
|
| Of course, high school in the US still had plenty of
| memorization, but not even close to 100% like it was in
| Russia for me. And once US college hit me, it became even
| better.
|
| >A teacher when asked a question once said "I don't know, I
| have to check it". Holly f... Someone who openly admitted
| they don't know something, no freaking way!
|
| This, so much. Professors/teachers behaving like humans
| instead of "even if i was wrong, I am marking you down
| because you argued with the teacher, and the teacher is
| always right", that was incredible for me.
|
| P.S. sorry for the long rant, but it bottled up, especially
| after seeing comments proclaiming the exact opposite of what
| I, and every single person I know in real life who went to
| high school/university in Russia, have experienced. Oh, and
| no comment on "Russian schools in the US" (as I feel like
| they could indeed be great, but the "russian" part of them is
| imo just a marketing trick), as that's a very different beast
| that I have zero experience with. I was talking only about
| Russian schools in Russia.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Same impression from me, I studied in 1988-1999.
|
| Math was boring as hell. Worse was only literature with
| essays.
|
| Except that at lyceum we did have good teachers who could
| admit they didn't know, and the physics teacher did anti-
| test, where we could pose him a (correct) problem and if he
| couldn't find the answer, he added +1 to quarter mark, which
| was a great bonus.
| tjchear wrote:
| Any books you can recommend that are similar to the Soviet Math
| textbooks you talked about?
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| Do you happen to remember any specific textbook? I'd be
| interested to see an example, assuming that they're still
| available in some format.
| filoleg wrote:
| My take on your list of advantages of soviet math/physics
| approach is mixed.
|
| Fully agreed with you on the rigor regarding notation, really
| good progression of teaching (pacing and order in which the
| material is introduced), and soviet math textbook exercises
| being well thought-out and entertaining.
|
| Very much disagreed on the rest, as my main personal gripe with
| learning math+physics in Russia was that there was zero
| emphasis placed on understanding of principles and logic and
| 100% on memorization. I spent 3 years taking physics classes
| there, and I learned effectively nothing, having to relearn it
| from scratch in the US. And that was the moment where I truly
| felt I understood what was going on, instead of treating
| physics as just another memorization exercise for a variety of
| random unrelated formulas. Similar with math, but to a lesser
| degree, because with math I was personally invested and was
| trying to understand the material rather than memorize, despite
| it hurting my grades in Russia greatly.
| portpecos wrote:
| > - teachers are astute at spotting students who memorize
| blindly, and will intervene to correct that
|
| > 100% on memorization
|
| OP says it's not 100% memorization and you say it's 100%
| memorization. So which one is it?
| filoleg wrote:
| That's why I posted my previous reply, despite me being in
| strong opposition of the "argue anecdata with your own
| anecdata" approach in discussions. But I couldn't resist
| replying, because all of my 9 years of experience in
| Russian educational system were the opposite of what OP
| claims in terms of memorization, and so were those of every
| single person I know in real life who went through that
| system (in other schools in Russia, not just from mine,
| obviously). Coworkers of mine (who went to Soviet schools a
| decade or two before I was even born) echoed the same
| sentiment in discussions on the topic, with the halfway sad
| "some things never change there, huh" sentiment.
|
| Would have been less surprising if my school was doing
| poorly in rankings and such, but it was quite the opposite.
|
| Of course, all my claims here are anecdata, but it just
| feels like something is off when the fantastic utopian
| description of how "soviet math" education works just runs
| counter to every single lived experience I had, as well as
| that of everyone I know in real life. Especially given that
| experiences of some of those people in real life I mention
| were separated from mine by both decades and geography
| (some did school in Moscow, others in smaller towns, some
| in soviet ukraine, etc.).
| xvector wrote:
| > So which one is it?
|
| It's the grass being greener on the other side.
| mantas wrote:
| Being schooled in post-Soviet 90s/00s...
|
| Overall both class and teachers didn't like memorizers. On
| the other hand, it was possible to pass pretty well by
| memorizing. Sometimes teachers would put in random bits in
| tests to throw off memorizers. Sometimes it worked,
| sometimes it didn't. All in all, memorizing and actual
| learning lived side by side.
|
| The main difference from what West looks like, the Soviet-
| ish system was designed for failure. For me it looks very
| weird when lots and lots of people get best grades. I was
| raised that 10 (out of 10) is rare perfection. 9 is great.
| 7-8 is fine. Even 5-6 is ok if you ain't interested in a
| given subject. Not everybody is super smart, not everybody
| is passing school with perfect grades. And that's perfectly
| fine.
|
| Unfortunately a couple decades later our education system
| is westernized and everybody DESERVES best grades. And the
| system is bending over.
| filoleg wrote:
| >Overall both class and teachers didn't like memorizers.
| On the other hand, it was possible to pass pretty well by
| memorizing. Sometimes teachers would put in random bits
| in tests to throw off memorizers. Sometimes it worked,
| sometimes it didn't. All in all, memorizing and actual
| learning lived side by side.
|
| I find it hard to believe, given my personal experiences
| and the fact that having to memorize a poem or a short
| story and then having to get up in front of the class to
| recite it word for word for a grade was an extremely
| common recurring homework assignment in literature
| classes in my Russian school (from elementary to high
| school).
|
| Extra details about that type of a homework assignment
| for those curious: they cannot call up every student due
| to time constraints for each class period, so for every
| such assignment, only about half the students get called
| up (for some specific works that are "more important",
| they might call up everyone, but over 2 class periods;
| that was extremely rare though). But those assignments
| were so ubiquitous, you essentially got called up to the
| whiteboard to recite at least once every week or two.
| mantas wrote:
| We had those literature assignments as well. But in 12
| years that happened a couple times most. Now don't get me
| started on literature writing assignment that are
| strongly advised to start in certain ways and it's best
| to just memorise the beginning off examples and just
| change few words....
| filoleg wrote:
| Interesting to hear about an experience that's pretty
| much the same as mine, but rebalanced differently.
|
| For us, writing was the same way as yours ("strongly
| advised to start in certain ways and it's best to just
| memorise the beginning off examples and just change few
| words"), but it only happened a few times at most, and
| more towards the latter years, while reciting stuff in
| lit classes was the norm the entire time.
|
| And now I am starting to recall another type of
| assignments going until late middle school, where we had
| to write passages from textbooks in cursive in our
| "homework notebooks", mostly with small changes. Like
| "here is this 1000 word passage in the textbook written
| from the first perspective, rewrite it from the third
| perspective in pen". Made a typo? Well, restart, because
| while a couple of edits won't take much off your final
| score, any more than that makes a full restart a more
| worthy option (because it was required to use pen for
| those instead of a pencil; more diligent students who
| didn't wanna bet on getting it right on the first try,
| they did it first with a pencil and then traced it and
| erased the pencil). Another evening spent rewriting the
| same dull passage multiple times by hand in pen.
| mantas wrote:
| On the other hand, how do teach someone handwriting
| skills? Writing down a passage is better than random
| blabery IMO. I'll take the must dull passage any day over
| several pages of synthetic exercises.
|
| For the record - my handwriting sucks.
| filoleg wrote:
| >On the other hand, how do teach someone handwriting
| skills? Writing down a passage is better than random
| blabery IMO
|
| I agree, however, doing it way past elementary school
| seems like a solid way of wasting time. When you are
| trying to learn writing or you are in elementary school,
| sure. But spending hours upon hours rewriting long
| passages multiple times due to random non-editable typos
| in late middle school felt mind-numbing and downright
| awful.
|
| And of course, as you progressed in grades, less
| attention of graders was focused on the actual
| handwriting quality, with passages getting longer and
| more convoluted, so the handwriting tended to degrade the
| further you got in your elementary/middle/high school
| education. Not even mentioning what happened to it after
| high school, because by then (unless your handwriting was
| completely unreadable) no one cared.
|
| And no, it didn't help in the long-term with handwriting
| at all. None of the adults tend to have textbook-good
| handwriting, it would barely even get a passing score in
| the best scenario (and that would be an exception). And
| just like in western countries, let's not even mention
| doctors' handwriting (but that's completely irrelevant to
| my point).
| rudnevr wrote:
| I backup the original claim.
|
| I've been in several provincial schools in 1990s, good
| and bad, and we've always had strong anti-memorizing
| sentiment in math classes, despite in literature classes
| memorizing was mandatory.
|
| Both make perfect sense.
|
| Now I heard it's turning more to the Western model,
| though.
| bulka wrote:
| Anecdotal, but still: What you have described might have been
| the case in a handful of top schools, mostly at metropolitan
| areas. The key difference for the "rest of us" was a high
| school theacher who would pick top 1-2 pupils after couple of
| lessons and teach at their pace for the rest of the year. This
| is my case and the story that was confirmed by dozens of people
| in my university.
| sologoub wrote:
| That's very insightful - when I switched to US high school, the
| approach to math was baffling - everyone had programmable
| graphing calculators, whereas I wasn't allowed any calculator
| at all, and took a lot longer to solve the most basic problems.
| Most questions were answered by the teacher as "it's a formula,
| you follow it and memorize it" (which sounded ridiculous to me
| for the exact reasons above - I was taught to understand the
| basis first, then the applications).
| zeku wrote:
| Thankfully for me, my college Calculus professor(in USA)
| banned calculators for Calc 1 and 2(the two required Calc
| classes for a computer science degree at my public
| university).
|
| He was heavily avoided by many and "special" for doing so. I
| found it easier to forego the calculator as it allowed us to
| focus on methods and how/why over just moving large numbers
| around.
| starkd wrote:
| I never understood why graphing calculators were required for
| basic calculus or math courses. Always wondered if it was
| part of a marketing deal with the company that manufactured
| them. The course is said to require a particular make and
| model of graphing calculator.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| I believe it is more of a standardization of knowledge when
| picking the tool for mathematics. TI-83 calculator is
| common and easily to have all the students to use the same
| calculator and provides various approach of how to solve
| it. If one student is a outlier (like using HP calculator),
| then it could be an issue since the instructor only have
| the knowledge of using TI-83 (or its variants), the
| instructor couldn't help that student since HP and other
| graphic calculators have different inputs, layouts, etc.
|
| And not everyone is good at solving math alone without the
| aid of the calculator. Some people simply can't solve
| mathematics at all, maybe up to multiplication/division
| level is the best they can do. I am not good with
| mathematics myself and struggles with some advanced
| algebra. It is not the matter of trying to solve, it is
| matter of memorization of mathematics formula and equations
| that US Education drilled down so hard which is ironic when
| they said that calculators are forbidden to use during the
| exam while they are encouraging to use the calculators in
| class and homework... Their pedagogy is fucked and
| hypocritical.
| sologoub wrote:
| Sorry you had such an experience! There really is a lot
| to unpack here.
|
| As the article describes, memorization of "formulas"
| doesn't actually work for my students and leaves those
| that it "worked" disadvantaged in future learning.
|
| My personal guess is the "not being good at math"
| originates from this, at least in part. It's a confidence
| killer for sure that on one had you are being forced to
| do something unnatural (memorize weird looking formulas)
| and on the other give a somewhat easy, yet demeaning, way
| out by saying "it's ok, you are just not good at math".
|
| The calculator to study and no calculator for the test is
| even more ridiculous - students are put in a high
| pressure situation without the very tool/crutch they came
| to rely upon. If anything, the inverse might make more
| sense - homework you have a lot more time and less
| pressure, so try working it out on paper. Test is timed,
| so it's ok to use a calculator aid, so long as you show
| your work.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| > My personal guess is the "not being good at math"
| originates from this, at least in part. It's a confidence
| killer for sure that on one had you are being forced to
| do something unnatural (memorize weird looking formulas)
| and on the other give a somewhat easy, yet demeaning, way
| out by saying "it's ok, you are just not good at math".
|
| Honestly, it is more direct at the instructors instead of
| the mathematics itself. I am not good with math because
| of the instructors' pedagogy. Honestly, I do like math
| and enjoy doing it (Khan's Academy helps a lot!). It is
| their approach with mathematics is the issue. Their
| pedagogy are not standardized enough to have consistency
| with each level of mathematics. There are instructors who
| dismissed their student's previous instructor because
| their former instructor gave them the shortcut or a
| shorter method while the new instructor are doing the
| same thing. Now you have a student who have a jumbled
| information of mathematics and that is difficult for the
| student to be able to relearn a new information while
| they can't erase/forget the previous method.
|
| Also I am curious why it is difficult for instructor to
| explain HOW and WHY that solution is the correct answer?
| It is like they don't want to teach the concept of
| mathematics which is vital for critical thinking, IMO.
| When I asked the instructor of this question (this is in
| college), their answers is "It is the way I was taught in
| school" and I felt that is dismissive and hand-waving
| away the question.
|
| Instructors are not entirely at fault because they also
| received the similar education in the past as we do. The
| mathematics pedagogy and the curriculum need a massive
| restructuring and cohesive way to teach the students to
| ensure that the students can use the previous knowledge
| to the next level of mathematics for consistency without
| changing or influencing the students to forget
| everything.
| sologoub wrote:
| Like most things there probably is more than one cause,
| and I suspect a pretty big one is around compound effect
| of instructors having poor instruction themselves and
| then having to admit that they themselves don't really
| know the subject.
| pjlegato wrote:
| It is more or less exactly this. Texas Instruments invests
| in extensive marketing aimed at teachers, school districts,
| and university math departments. They get a lot of free
| teacher training and materials centered around TI
| calculators, to induce them to require all new students to
| buy a $100+ Texas Instruments graphing calculator every
| year.
|
| - https://gen.medium.com/big-calculator-how-texas-
| instruments-...
|
| - https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+instruments+marketi
| ng+...
| ksd482 wrote:
| As I was reading the summary, I was thinking "well, of course
| -- that makes sense. Any teaching curriculum has got to be like
| that so what is so special about Russian math curriculum?".
|
| Then I read in other comments about US math curriculum and I
| was shocked to learn that not only they were NOT doing this,
| but they didn't have a better alternative. This is mind
| boggling. It seems almost idiotic.
|
| My schooling was done in India. Our curriculum was quite well
| planned, but what is laid out here is the methodology of
| teaching in addition to the curriculum and textbooks. And that
| depended on teacher to teacher and school to school. But
| nonetheless, the textbooks were very well written so everyone
| got exposure to pretty much the same level of teaching styles,
| more or less.
|
| When I came to US in college, I was surprised to learn that
| people didn't know basic techniques and tricks for algebraic
| manipulations. Of course, we were taught the basics and whys
| behind every trick but emphasis was also given to internalizing
| these tricks for quick computation by hand. This, in my
| opinion, is important because these tricks also become your
| mental models when thinking about math. And quick tricks would
| lead to quick thinking, roughly speaking.
| lumost wrote:
| It wouldn't be an exaggeration to state that most Americans
| experience k-12 math as an exercise in memorization. Even
| relatively simple algebraic manipulation such as quadratic
| equations are drilled for factorization first.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Yep, it's like teaching someone how to cook by quizzing
| them on recipes. I didn't understand the purpose of
| calculus until grad school despite having "learned" it
| several times by that point.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If anyone wants a book focusing on the _purpose_ of
| calculus, check out
| http://www.math.smith.edu/~callahan/intromine.html
|
| This is significantly different style from Russian
| textbooks. If you want a nice one of those translated
| into English (albeit not the easiest to find a paper copy
| of), I like Piskunov's book.
| https://archive.org/details/n.-piskunov-differential-and-
| int...
| cabalamat wrote:
| The focus on _understanding_ rather than on rote memorization
| of methods, is paramount.
| darepublic wrote:
| In grade 8 my teacher basically said they don't do math, gave the
| students a speech about how you can succeed in life without math,
| and then declined to teach any math except for handing out a set
| of math puzzle magazines one time in the middle of the year.
| pattisapu wrote:
| Reminds me of stories I used to see about Japanese families
| sending their kids to "Indian" schools:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/business/worldbusiness/02...
| m23khan wrote:
| In my experience and opinion about studying till High school and
| then University here in Ontario, Canada:
|
| - Canada seems to be obsessed to maintain high-stats. when it
| comes to 'literacy rate' - that is why till Grade 12, education
| is intentionally dumbed-down to the point any kid could just do
| bare minimum and still pass. Even if the kid is dumb-as-bricks,
| they can choose to do watered down versions of maths, physics,
| chemistry and still complete their High School Diploma
| requirements.
|
| - However, as soon as you enroll into STEM program at University,
| it is on-par in terms of difficulty with their counterparts
| elsewhere. What was a easy-peasy style of mathematics taught in
| Canadian High School makes way to the old 'no-calculator and
| Professors don't help' style engineering calculus and maths.
|
| This is where I found students who had studied even in 3rd World
| countries like Pakistan and Eritrea (I kid you not) had advantage
| in math and science courses throughout their degree program.
| Heck, it took me few tries to get into the groove but in process
| wasted 1000s of dollars and couple years trying to retake the
| courses.
|
| The severe downside is that if your kid has above-average
| intelligence (as it was in my case) and if they join the Canadian
| education system at young age (in my case at age 13), by the time
| majority of these kids become adults, majority of them (as in my
| case) permanently loose their spark and thus get destined to
| think only inside the box.
|
| I don't want to rant but another thing I notice is the leniency
| showed by Canadian Education system when it comes to the whole
| 'culture' in K-12 years. It is hands down meant to destroy bright
| minds / make them outcasts. The whole toxic culture of labelling
| those who are intelligent and/or less fashionable as
| nerds/geeks/dorks and nonsensical encouragement for sports and
| arts activities ends up alienating majority of smart kids and
| many just intentionally dumb themselves down to blend in with
| their peers.
|
| Had the Canadian education system taken leaf from countries like
| Singapore/India/Pakistan/Iran/Russia/China and actually made
| efforts to academically grind their students and to promote
| discipline (with uniforms and academic competitions leading to
| glory) - Canada would be producing far more intelligent adults.
| The current status is: Canada manages to 'import' bright and
| gifted scientists / university students from all corners of the
| World and is happy to grant them passports and claim 'Canadians
| are damn smart' -- what really is smart if you can take army of
| Canadian children and ensure they are smart-as-heck when they
| become adults.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I was born in the USSR but was in New York for Jr Highschool and
| Highschool. Whenever my dad saw the math curriculum he assumed I
| was in some sort of "slow program" - he could not believe that
| the mainstream program is that un-challenging.
|
| I bet there's a lot of factors to why curriculum gets watered
| down but I do think recent focus on how kids feel about school,
| self-esteem, safe spaces, etc goes against hard-core curricula.
|
| When you learn for real (and this extends to adults as well) you
| are confronted with things you don't know how to do, and you have
| to bang against them for a while to solve them and learn. That
| feeling of "wait, maybe I can't do this / I don't get it" is a
| negative one. And it does create a situation where some
| percentage of kids can't hack it, so they are excluded/left
| behind.
|
| I think as a culture we've been making the choice to teach/do
| easy things that everyone can participate in, rather than do
| challenging things that will force some people to grow more while
| leaving some behind. It's not a choice I agree with but I guess I
| can follow the zeitgeist and logic of it for a certain extent.
| It's the same as NYC, SF and other cities getting rid of the
| specialized schools with entrance exams. Since some people can't
| hack it, it's an exclusionary approach and therefore getting rid
| of the exams on one hand equalizes access on the other hand
| waters down the standards.
|
| I do think there will be unintended but obvious consequences as
| we're seeing in this story: parents who know better, who want the
| best for their kids will invest in tutors, private schools, etc
| that challenge their kids when the mainstream schools do not. The
| effect will be that _within_ the school system, everyone is doing
| easy things that everyone can do, but in _outcome space_ there
| will be a larger gap between kids of parents who care /can afford
| something beyond public school and those who cannot. In the long
| run, this will cause greater inequality because there will be
| come percentage of kids whose parents can't give them a leg up
| that would have risen to the challenge in a tougher curriculum
| but now will not have a chance to do so.
|
| In my eye this is unfortunate both because we're creating a less
| educated populace and a less confident one. The idea of being
| brave and confident means you take on a challenge knowing you
| have a good shot of eventually overcoming it. This holds at
| school and it holds in the work place. I am not sure how many
| people who never had their ass kicked (for a while) by school
| work and then had the experience of "getting it" will then come
| into a work situation and be able to "stretch" by taking on work
| they don't quite know how to do _yet._ Not the path I am chasing
| for my kid.
| atemerev wrote:
| Here are the "Arnold's problems" -- which every Russian kid even
| slightly mathematically inclined have seen and worked on many
| times:
| https://www.imaginary.org/sites/default/files/taskbook_arnol....
| It is really good, in my opinion.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| I used to think that the K12 math education was really bad, but
| now I have a different perspective. Many public schools in China
| and Russia are essentially like magnet schools in the US because
| students need to compete for entrance. So, those schools can
| afford more challenging syllabus. In contrast, the US has few
| such magnet schools, and people of different academic capacity go
| into the same school. As a result, teachers can't really teach
| too advanced concepts or assign too hard homework. This may sound
| far-fetched, but you may be surprised that more than 50% of
| students may never be able to understand Euclidean geometry, let
| alone analytical geometry or set theory or probability or proof
| by induction, and etc. And more than 50% of STEM students in
| college may not truly understand calculus, let alone analysis.
| Case in point, roughly 50% of middle school students can't get
| into high school in China, even though the entrance exams are
| really not that hard as most of the questions are designed to
| examine a student's understanding of basic concepts. Therefore,
| we may look at the quality of the math class in the US and feel
| miserable, but that's only because the class is tailored to the
| lower 50%-ile. On the other hand, the clubs and gift programs in
| public schools are still of high quality -- all the more reason
| for not canceling such programs in the name of equity.
| Notanothertoo wrote:
| Maybe we should address the downgrade in education quality in
| the name equitable.
| failuser wrote:
| Also the number of people who need advanced math is so small in
| USA, so it's more of a hobby than education. And people who need
| advanced math need more probability theory and statistics than
| calculus. In China, on the other hand... I might be
| extrapolating.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > people who need advanced math need more probability theory
| and statistics than calculus
|
| Isn't calculus a pre-requisite for probability theory and
| statistics though?
| flavius29663 wrote:
| In my view math is not so much about you needing it. It's about
| developing abstract thinking, reasoning, logic.
|
| It's in the same boat as sports. You will never need to run 100
| yards with a ball in your hand, except for the sport itself.
| Yet we still do sports to train and stay in shape.
| failuser wrote:
| It does, but again, those skills are not valued that much in
| USA. I don't like it, this is reality. Sports classes provide
| nowhere enough physical activity to stay in shape though.
| Ideally a country ruled by citizens require a high level of
| knowledge and reasoning ability. In reality people vote for
| aristocratic cliques in a way often determined by their
| birth.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| So what are you suggesting? Because math is not the perfect
| answer, do less critical thinking? I think it's very good
| for the brain, necessary even. Math is not sufficient, but
| it's necessary. It's a pity the US schools put less and
| less into math, nowadays they dumb down math for equity
| reasons even.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd be very curious to see what a primary and secondary school
| math program that aggressively focused on the "what will I ever
| use this for?" question, for _most people_ , not just future
| physicists and math majors, and tailored its curriculum to that
| with mostly applications-based problem sets, looked like. I
| suspect it'd provide a lot more value to ~99% of students while
| never providing more than a "here's what these other branches
| of math you probably won't need are for, so you know what to
| look up or when to go learn them, on the off chance you ever do
| need them" survey for much of what's covered from ~8th-12th
| grade now, but maybe I'm wrong. I also doubt it would
| discourage many future math majors.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| I ask myself, is there a School of Russian Math but for adults? I
| don't mind starting with the basics at all.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Chinese here. We followed the Russian/Soviet system of math
| education for quite a while. The Soviet textbooks were and are
| still considered superior comparing to our own (from middle
| school straight to university). They have a certain quality that
| Chinese textbooks fail to grasp.
|
| Nowadays many schools turn to the American system (I don't know
| why) and the requirements for math has been dropping for a
| decade. The inequality of teaching resources is obvious when you
| compare a student from a privileged school with one from say a
| country-side school. The government tries to equalize things but
| it's very difficult to go against the top teachers and rich
| dads/moms.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| Some education systems put an emphasis on critical thinking, some
| on absorbing tons of information.
|
| Polish education is notable for memorization. One area where it
| doesn't seem to hurt is medicine. It appears Polish doctors and
| nurses are very much appreciated when they migrate. Perhaps
| critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?
|
| Once upon a time I was reading an article about Polish migrants
| in Norway. The Norwegians observe that Poles are reluctant to
| send kids to Norwegian schools for a few reasons: a) the language
| is very different, b) Poles fear children will become rebellious,
| because the schools emphasize critical thinking* c) Poles fear
| children will become... idiots. Because they won't know too many
| facts. It appears despite constant complaining about pointless
| facts and useless information, Poles take some sick pride in the
| suffering. Some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
|
| * this reminds me of a rumor circulating about personnel of
| mental hospitals. Patients are often sedated not because it's
| good for the patients, but because it's convenient for the
| personnel.
| nme01 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you're a Pole who emigrated as self-hatred is
| probably the most common thing for Poles.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| No, I'm considering it. I need to travel more and compare
| before I make up my mind. It's unsurprising many people
| migrate because they're fed up with their country. Financial
| incentives is just another side of it, because it's
| demoralizing to work long and hard hours and be paid little.
| However, plenty of Poles migrate that can reconcile their
| desire for high wages with uncritical admiration for their
| country.
|
| The country has taken an authoritarian turn. The aspects that
| annoy me personally is lack of critical thinking, lack of
| insight when it comes to history (it's a second state
| religion in practice which is two too many), low trust,
| bigotry, corruption, double standards, shallow XIX century
| understanding of patriotism. There's focus on "moral
| victories", heroic sacrifices and losing battles. Contempt is
| something very common in society - it's like everyone needs
| someone they can despise. Constructive criticism is very
| unwelcome and met with denial. Compromise is often called
| "rotten compromise".
| geomark wrote:
| "Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical
| practice?"
|
| I was having a discussion about this recently, recalling the
| vast majority of my experiences with medical doctors who
| obviously just follow a cook book approach to how they practice
| medicine. Worse than that is how many doctors cannot correctly
| explain test results. Seems like although they completed a lot
| of schooling they did not take enough math.
| yboris wrote:
| I'm from Russia, and in the US I attended GCPM - a
| "correspondence program" with math assignments sent to me by mail
| and later graded by a university professor. Was a great learning
| experience (the program had dedicated books and interesting math
| problems to explore).
|
| https://www.egcpm.com/ - Gelfand Correspondence Program In
| Mathematics
| 24fps wrote:
| This is a sore point for me.
|
| I graduated from a tony American private high school, and went on
| to graduate from an ivy league college.
|
| The last math I learned was basic trig in eleventh grade.
|
| Somehow I was allowed, encouraged even, to avoid math. I never
| had to say the word math in college or graduate school.
|
| As a result I do not actually know what calculus is, and while
| I'm sure you don't invoke it while calculating a tip, I often
| struggle with that exercise.
|
| Regrettably. I'm sure my predicament is not unique.
| mirker wrote:
| My favorite example is compound interest. Imagine having to
| solve a compound interest test to get a credit card. It seems
| like a basic precaution to me (like a driving license), but yet
| I'm not convinced all in the US can do it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| When I applied to colleges in early 2000s, you basically had to
| have taken Calculus AP or IB courses by 11th grade to get into
| the elite schools.
| option wrote:
| we are one of those parents (in Bay Area) who send our kid to RSM
| (Russian School of Math). We are very happy with it so far (6yo
| completed her first year) and, most importantly, our daughter is
| very happy with it too. It is not simple rule memorization and
| counting, even for 6yo the problems they come up with are
| interesting enough so that the kid wants to solve them.
| dbish wrote:
| What does the curriculum look like that differs significantly
| from standard school? Also, is your child bored in school at
| all? I got ahead in math early on and remember being very bored
| in math classes until AP classes came around.
| hazza_n_dazza wrote:
| In Australia we have a focus on STEM, but school teachers who
| don't understand the material. After 2 years of philosophical
| maths in primary school from a special teacher, high school
| really killed my interest. Big shame.
| omginternets wrote:
| Is there something like this for adults? I've been learning
| mathematics on my own for a few years, but my progress has been
| painstakingly slow and erratic.
|
| I would really welcome some kind of schooling aimed at people
| who, like me, are genuinely interested in the subject.
| AareyBaba wrote:
| And then there is Singapore math
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/education/01math.html
| ravenstine wrote:
| Strangely enough, I'm an American who was taught Singapore math
| in elementary school.
|
| Then my family moved to a nearby city where they taught
| standard American math and I wasn't allowed to solve math
| problems the Singapore way. Even though I got the correct
| answers, the teachers insisted I do math the "right" way, which
| I consistently messed up for the rest of my life.
|
| Singapore math not only has a more reasonable pace to learning,
| but as someone with inattentive ADHD I found its approach to
| arithmetic easier for me to keep track of in my head.
|
| Even if people have heard of Singapore math, they might not
| know that things like addition are done left-to-right rather
| than right-to-left.
|
| https://youtu.be/HS7BDq73pRE?t=44
|
| I don't know about anyone else, but that is more like how I do
| math in my head on a day to day basis since the first step gets
| you closer to the answer. Just doing more addition underneath
| is also more visually clean than carrying numbers by writing
| them above the original equation. Paper is plentiful, and now
| I'm sure it could all be done digitally, so there's no reason
| to use standard American math to save space.
| jedmeyers wrote:
| A very interesting bit of trivia: Soviet school math curriculum
| reform was conducted in the 60s under the leadership of Andrey
| Kolmogorov. Some of you may be familiar with his works,
| especially the Kolmogorov complexity.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| Good, let them study hard. The real deal gets VC capital and
| gives these chumps breadcrumps.
| op00to wrote:
| Why do people beat themselves up for not being "as good as they
| should be" at math? Who cares? Find out what you naturally excel
| at and concentrate on that.
| meshr wrote:
| It is not Russian but 'Soviets math'. Ironically, Russia
| introduced analogy of USA's standardized right after Itina
| emigrated from Russia and now Russian's math is also optimized
| for memorizing but not for 'emphasizing reasoning and deeper
| understanding'
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I graduated before USE, and my math classes were... mediocre.
| To graduate, you had to do 10 problems of average difficulty,
| so our textbooks didn't even have problems harder than that.
|
| I took a look at the entrance exam at the uni I wanted to apply
| to and was shocked. Thankfully, I had my dad and he went
| through Skanavi's exercise book with me.
|
| I look at the USE math exam every year and it's much better
| than my final exam (although I like gaokao more, it has more
| varied problems that make you combine different areas of math),
| but I don't know where the cutoff point for "I won't get into
| trouble for my students' low results" is.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I am so jealous of people who have parents who
| know/understand math.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Thank you. I guess I was lucky my dad is a MIPT alumnus.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| That's a common criticism that mostly relies on emotions and
| not facts.
|
| These standardized tests are changed little by little every
| year and are simply meant to a) ensure similar educational
| standards for smaller and remote cities b) enable kids to apply
| to any university in Russia.
|
| Although some specific parents and teachers in particular
| school might want to focus on repetition of the same problems
| and tasks it doesn't mean everyone will and it certainly didn't
| affect me that much. In fact, having some definitive rules on
| how they assess an essay in Russian helped me get 100% for it
| the first time, since it was objective.
| locallost wrote:
| I am also from Eastern Europe, but did my Bachelor in the west.
| For a lot of people there things like limits, series etc. were
| almost like greek. Speaking of greek, we did some group study and
| there was a person there who kept saying E this E that. I was
| perplexed until I saw he meant Sigma as in sum.
|
| But those who didn't know learned it and that was that. I'm not
| sure it's really that beneficial to force a lot on kids before
| they are ready to use it or know what it's for. I remember
| 10th/11th grade sitting and eventually realizing all this stuff
| we do... I will eventually need to do it to make sure e.g. a
| building does not crash. And that scared me to death, I did not
| feel prepared at all. When things are thrown at you before you're
| ready and can really understand it, it's sort of like you lack a
| connection to what is essential and what you might be able to do
| with it on your own. You do your little examples and tasks and
| solve them, but outside of that context you don't really
| understand it. I don't think any educational system has figured
| that out for the majority of kids.
| skzv wrote:
| When I started high school in Canada, my math grades were pretty
| bad. Probably in the 60%s (a C letter grade). I remember staring
| at a quadratic equation, struggling to understand why those 3
| terms drew a curve. I had no intuition for it.
|
| The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It
| was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few
| hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th grade Russian
| math textbooks - which was strange to me of course because I was
| about to start 11th grade. One important rule was that a
| calculator was not allowed.
|
| Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he had
| judiciously picked. Back in Ukraine he was a regional physics
| Olympiad winner, and a gold medal winner (in the Soviet Union,
| the top graduates from each high school were awarded a gold medal
| - goes to show how they valued academics I suppose). I can pull
| up some photos if anyone is interested.
|
| The questions were very clever and pedagogical. You developed
| intuition by solving them. And you couldn't solve them if you
| didn't understand the underlying principles. And of course,
| there's the word problems. I could barely read Russian at the
| time, so I had to take my time, but they bridge the gap between
| theory and application. And without a calculator, you are forced
| to develop techniques for manipulating equations and numbers. You
| get really good at it.
|
| I aced math and physics for the rest of high school (and later
| graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics).
|
| The western education system really fails us. My dad sitting me
| down with those elementary Russian math textbooks and enforcing a
| no calculator rule was one of the best things he could have ever
| done for me. The Soviet mathematic curriculum was designed by
| some brilliant mathematicians who understood the importance of
| developing intuition. That importance seems to be lost here.
| People think that quantitative intuition doesn't matter as long
| as you can plug your equation into Wolfram Alpha. But when you
| approach math that way, you don't develop an analytical and
| quantitative lens.
|
| Photos: [My father and my grandmother on the way to university in
| the 80s - https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tgv2gpy428rKs2GS8
|
| Gold medal - https://photos.app.goo.gl/KsisSEvb4fbNEE419
|
| Physics Olympiad diploma with translation -
| ]https://photos.app.goo.gl/b3hw6HXmQN25iXay9]
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Are any of these textbooks available? Preferably not in
| Russian, I can read English, French, German and Dutch.
| mettamage wrote:
| Even if they're in Russian I'd be interested, I'll use Google
| Translate. I bet that most of the time I could understand the
| problem well enough.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/mir-titles has a vast selection.
| The books by Irodov are generally well regarded in
| particular.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Books by Irodov are a legend
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| > and a gold medal winner (in the Soviet Union, the top
| graduates from each high school were awarded a gold medal -
| goes to show how they valued academics I suppose).
|
| I'm not sure where in Canada you moved to, but there are
| Governor General awards [1] to the top graduating students.
| It's bronze for top high school graduate, silver for
| bachelor's, and gold for higher degrees.
|
| [1] https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/governor-generals-
| awards/govern...
| rtpg wrote:
| I doubt the calculators were the problem. People going through
| the "AP class" route with calculators finish up all of the math
| (and more!) that gets covered in a french high school math
| class (from experience of moving to France in High School and
| learning zilch for 3 years).
|
| Totally on point about the "analyticial and quantitative
| lenses". Multiple-choice questions and lack of "real" questions
| really hobble a lot of math classes.
|
| I was lucky in middle school in particular to have classes that
| used textbooks with a much more indepth look at why we would do
| X/Y/Z than the average book (along with a system where you
| would work through exercises in groups of 3 or 4, so better
| people could help out people who were struggling more). But I
| had to do a hell of a lot more "work showing" in France.
| dubcanada wrote:
| > Why do you doubt calculators were the problem?
|
| The way I see it, learning to do basic math in your head is
| just as important if not more important then learning a
| procedure via a calculator. A calculator doesn't teach you
| anything, it just teaches you how to use a calculator.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Doing math in your head doesn't really teach you anything
| either though. Everyone has a calculator within hands reach
| these days. I don't think practicing mental math ever
| helped me understand principles, it just helped me memorize
| and learn tricks that are only helpful with doing mental
| arithmetic.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Calculators in calculus probably aren't a problem.
|
| But in the US, calculators are used at almost all grade
| levels. My son's school allowed them while he was in
| elementary school, while still learning basic algebra.
|
| As for math education in general (in the US), it's pretty
| terrible. The lack of practical applications of "advanced"
| maths is a big problem. Basic calculus didn't "click" for me
| until I started taking economics courses in college.
| skulk wrote:
| > The lack of practical applications of "advanced" maths is
| a big problem.
|
| I vividly remember self-studying calculus because I
| absolutely wanted to know how to find the area under a
| polynomial curve. I knew how to find areas of normal
| geometric shapes, but finding the area under the curve
| seemed like black magic that I _had_ to learn. If schools
| could somehow give this to students, there would be no need
| for "practical applications".
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I can pull up some photos if anyone is interested.
|
| Yes please!
| [deleted]
| bbarnett wrote:
| What's happened in Canada, is that curriculum is designed to
| teach to the weakest student in a subject.
|
| This is thought of as being fair, of helping, for of course
| everyone is intellectually equal.
|
| Thus, those who can accel, are denied their future, for those
| which will leave high school, and never touch (for example)
| advanced math again.
|
| Equality comes from recognising our differences, and enabling
| best outcomes for all. Not pretending we are all identical.
|
| Sadly, this seems lost on many.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Bam. That's why my kids (of very different academic prowess)
| are in (two very different) private schools.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is kinda ironic that the former Soviet Bloc, whose central
| ideology was built around equality, had a very streamed
| education system concentrated on recognizing talented
| individuals early, while the Anglosphere, usually renowned
| for its ceaseless competition, emphasizes equality at the
| cost of excellence now.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Well, it's only ironic because this is a bit of a
| simplification. Their ideology always recognized inequality
| of ability and comparative advantages of various
| individuals. The issue, at least on a theoretic level,
| receiving more value and power because you happened to own
| something (capital) instead of because you produced more or
| produced things that few people could produce. Which is why
| compensation was always unequal and often based on
| production.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Equality was non existent in the Soviet Union. Technically
| a talented researcher would earn just as much a factory
| worker but the researcher would have access to apparatus
| granted privileges like living in a better apartment,
| occasionally shopping in an non empty store, access to
| better hospitals, and so on
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Researchers and scientists were actually often simply
| paid more.
| II2II wrote:
| > What's happened in Canada, is that curriculum is designed
| to teach to the weakest student in a subject.
|
| No, the curriculum is not watered down to meet the needs of
| the weakest students. Canada tends to align its curriculum to
| that of other western nations. On the other hand, when you're
| talking about math there is a bit of an issue where the
| background of teachers is mixed at the elementary level and
| students are not guaranteed to have a true specialist teacher
| until grade 10. That isn't to say that specialist teachers
| are the best teachers, but it is a bit disconcerting when a
| teachers college offers classes for math-phobic elementary
| teacher candidates (particularly since those grade levels
| seem to be where many children develop their attitudes
| towards math). It is also worth noting that the quality of
| teachers varies based upon region and schools, largely
| because teachers have a lot of choice as to where they teach.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Maybe your province isn't too bad yet, but these things
| tend to spread:
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-
| sc...
|
| With no advanced/honours tract, you have two choices.
|
| Subjects too difficult for a large portion of the class, or
| everyone gets education tailored to the least capable
| students.
|
| Clearly, they aren't removing advanced classes, then
| suddenly failing 1/2 the class...
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| As someone thinking of raising kids in Vancouver I was
| really disappointed by the honours stream being removed
| from VSB curriculum. If the school board truly wanted
| equality for their students they should be looking at
| external factors of why kids are not performing: do they
| have a place at home to complete homework? Do their
| parents value education? Do they believe in themselves?
|
| I do believe that there is a natural difference in
| intelligence, but not enough to make the difference of a
| student getting into the honours stream or not. A lot of
| the kids say "I don't get math" or "I'm just dumb" or
| they don't have a stable household or family role models
| of success -- all of which hold them back. Naturally
| these external problems are much harder for school boards
| to tackle so they would rather chop the legs off of
| honours students than address the students who come from
| a disadvantaged background.
| II2II wrote:
| The article also mentions that AP (and, presumably, IB)
| are being maintained. These programs provide a recognized
| curriculum and the courses are typically taken by
| students who want advanced classes. I also took a quick
| glance at the BC mathematics curriculum, which is
| typically offered in different tiers, and it is offered
| in different tiers. Science appears to take the usual
| tact of a general course, with specialist courses for
| students who want to study biology, chemistry, or physics
| in more depth. In other words, regardless of whatever
| nonsense is being spewed by the board, differentiation
| between interest and ability is still available.
|
| It is also worth noting that there would be significant
| public push back if there was a true degradation in the
| curriculum. Ontario tried replacing calculus with pre-
| calculus about a decade ago, which the government had to
| reverse due to public pressure.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _It is also worth noting that there would be significant
| public push back if there was a true degradation in the
| curriculum._
|
| Not so sure on that one. I agree some would push back,
| certainly. I feel it is fewer every year, with parents
| not caring for anything but what a piece of paper says.
|
| But, perhaps I am a cynic, or am reading too many such
| stories.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| My second child is suffering this in a UK school - the maths
| is too easy, his primary school had an 'advanced' group
| (quotes because it wasn't really advanced, didn't go as far
| as I did at primary school in normal class) to push the most
| able kids a bit. Now high-school they're back to doing
| absolutely remedial basics of arithmetic.
|
| So much wasted time in school, he's frustrated not to make
| progress and bored with 'maths' (truly it's lack of maths,
| but to the young mind that gets confused with the subject and
| then you lose them).
| Dah00n wrote:
| Yes, exactly this. The amount of children who lost interest
| in a topic because of systems like this must be high. I
| clearly remember how I thought maths was way too easy and
| eventually I lost interest. Sadly I was lazy so I didn't do
| anything to use my skills (though one could argue it isn't
| the job of the child) and ended up not doing all my homework
| and just making up the answer on the spot when called to the
| blackboard, so today I'm very average which I guess is a
| success in the eyes of the system.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Fascinating to see the numbers you chose.
|
| I finished Grade 6 in Russia (in 1995) before emigrating to
| Canada.
|
| I didn't learn anything new in Math class until mid-Grade 11
| [1].
|
| [1] Except Trigonometry. But I could tell the way it was taught
| was completely different from the concepts I learned in the
| Soviet/Russian system.
|
| It was just rote memorization of sin/cos/tan - just clever
| formulas for deriving the angles and edge lengths of triangles
| that you solved by pressing the SIN/COS/TAN buttons on your
| calculator, rather than the "from first principle" explanation
| of what these concepts meant fundamentally.
| amrcnimgrnt wrote:
| McMaster grad?
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > ...Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he
| had judiciously picked.
|
| Your story is very touching, thank you for sharing it.
|
| It also emphasizes the importance of a motivated teacher. Also
| I believe that such parent's involvement makes the process and
| the subject of learning so much worthwhile.
|
| It's not a secret that as parents we want/need to outsource the
| kids into schools just to free ourselves up for what we
| want/need to do. Yet paradoxically we want the kids to know no
| less than we know ourselves.
|
| It's just a luck if kids come across a good teacher which would
| help the kids demonstrate to us parents that they are worth of
| our attention. Kind of backwards...
| [deleted]
| dan-robertson wrote:
| See here for an account of Russian-style 'math circles' for young
| children:
|
| https://www.msri.org/people/staff/levy/files/MCL/Zvonkin.pdf
| mjevans wrote:
| By about 1/4th of the way through I wanted to just know what
| 'russian math' looked like. By Halfway it was pretty clear they
| weren't going to tell me. I skimmed the last half, nothing stood
| out.
|
| What does "Russian Math" look like?
| frant-hartm wrote:
| > school's curriculum is based on Russian teaching traditions
| that emphasize reasoning and deeper understanding early on, not
| just memorization and practice drills. "The child should be
| brought to abstract level as soon as possible," she says,
| "meaning early introduction of algebra and geometry, not only
| arithmetic," and helping children figure out principles for
| themselves rather than spoon-feeding them.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I wish American teachers could teach the reasoning behind
| math.
|
| I don't think most math teachers know themselfs though---even
| at some colleges.
|
| I don't think I have even seen a math book that goes into
| depth on why a equation, or problem, is solved a certain way.
|
| I would like to see most memorization in math, and most
| subjects nixed for good.
|
| I have found, including myself, my early difficulties in math
| were due to just memorizing how to do a problem.
|
| It wasen't until I started over (I went to a CC early. I
| hated high school socially, and it affected my studies. Going
| to a CC was the best move I made.)
|
| I took basic math, and algebra, trig., at the community
| college.
|
| It made inorganic chemistry, and physics, so easy.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I went from terrible at timed tests of regurgitating basic
| arithmetic facts to one of the better math students in my
| school once the curriculum moved on to requiring some
| understanding of what was going on.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I buy into having a deeper understanding, and in both work
| and school, it's pretty clear who has a deeper understanding
| and who's going through the motions.
|
| That said, how is it that there's such range in pedagogy? So
| many people have studied teaching that you'd think we'd have
| a better idea of what works. Or maybe it's that goals are
| different.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The goals are different. The goal of the Russian school is
| to teach math. The goal of public schools is to dumb down
| the curriculum until everyone is equal.
| tsukikage wrote:
| That's an interesting take, since the Russian school's
| teaching methods originate in Soviet public schools.
|
| If that's the difference, why were the goals so different
| there, and how do we make US public school goals more
| like the Soviet ones?
| iammisc wrote:
| The soviets were nationalists who believed the utility of
| the citizenry was in their contribution to their country.
|
| You reinstill love of country, which really means love of
| society and others, which is another word for
| philanthropy, and you will quickly get this.
|
| In America, instead of education and work being for the
| greater purpose of your nation and people, education is
| for the individual.
|
| As usual, most people find more motivation when helping
| others than themselves, but the focus on ourselves in
| American education means it's easy to slack.
| ajuc wrote:
| I think a big part of this is society's expectations.
|
| For example while there was bullying in my primary school -
| there was no bullying because you were good at math. The
| opposite was true - if you were bad at math it meant you're
| "dumb" and kids will laugh at you.
|
| It wasn't all perfect - it was uncool to try hard (means
| you're dumb and have to work for it and that's boring) but
| it was very fashionable to instantly know every answer. So
| teachers had it much easier because kids had intrinsic
| motivation to learn math.
|
| Another part of it was probably that the unemployment was
| at 20% at that point and everybody realized you have to be
| well educated to have a chance of good job.
| Sponge5 wrote:
| Not goals - incentives. I'm from Czechia and for me math
| education changed dramatically for the last year of high-
| school. All of a sudden it was crunch time to get the best
| result at the standardized tests that are part of
| government's examination.
|
| Up until that point the math classes were very much Soviet-
| style understanding-first, daily hour-long homeworks that
| are described in the article.
|
| Final year was about technique memorization.
|
| Once you're gaming a system, education quality tanks.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The dilemma with tests is that we need them to measure
| competency, but once you introduce them, the specific
| form the test takes becomes a target, itself.
| [deleted]
| credit_guy wrote:
| Sample problem for K-1 [1]:
|
| "Jane fills a bag with three types of chips. There are 3-point,
| 4-point and 7- point chips. Jane picks 3 chips worth 15 points.
| Which chips did she pick?"
|
| Sample problem for grades 5-6 [2]:
|
| "Pinocchio drank half a cup of black coffee. He then filled the
| cup back up with milk and drank one third of the mixture. Again
| he filled the cup to the top with milk, drank one sixth of the
| mixture and filled it back to the top with milk one final time
| before he drank the whole cup. Did he drink more coffee or
| milk?"
|
| [1]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Element
| ...
|
| [2]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Middle_
| ...
| andi999 wrote:
| I don't like the second question. Probably the kid is
| supposed to see the 'trick' :he drank a full cup of coffee
| since he didn't refill coffee and drank all. He added 1/2,
| 1/3 and 1/6 of a cup of milk and drank it all, so
| (3+2+1)/6=1. He drank the same amount of coffee and milk.
|
| I think it is ok as a brain teaser, but there will probably
| be one kid in the class to see it and all the other kids feel
| dumb or whatever. But I don't think it teaches you anything
| (maybe it does, didn't study pedagogy, and while I was good
| at such fun questions I preferred the more structured
| approach in university mathematics)
|
| Edit: this might make the kids think you need some 'magical'
| insights to do math and if they don't see it they are not apt
| for it, while the opposite might be true.
|
| For the other questions: 2 also seems to rely on a trick, 3
| looks ok, 4 is ok, 5a looks dodgy (probably just trying out
| numbers), 6 looks ok
|
| About the K1 question:these are for 3 year olds? I only met
| one 3 year old in my life who could read, probably I am
| missing something here.
| Const-me wrote:
| > 2 also seems to rely on a trick
|
| Pretty sure students are supposed to switch( n % 3 ), and
| solve for all 3 possible values of the remainder.
|
| > probably just trying out numbers
|
| You can't solve a 4-degree polynomial equation by trying
| out numbers. It has up to 4 solutions, not guaranteed to be
| real, let alone rational or integer.
| dmurray wrote:
| > You can't solve a 4-degree polynomial equation by
| trying out numbers
|
| On the contrary, in practice you can't solve them any
| other way! Spot a simple factorization or guess a root is
| your best chance if you don't fancy working through the
| quartic formula [0], which will take you multiple pages
| just to write down the first step, and a numeric
| approximate solution is not acceptable.
|
| [0] https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1135224
| latte wrote:
| > Edit: this might make the kids think you need some
| 'magical' insights to do math and if they don't see it they
| are not apt for it, while the opposite might be true.
|
| That's a valid point. However, what's the opposite to
| having insights? Is that following routines and/or
| exhaustively exploring the entire problem space (which the
| first problem in the GP comment seems to teach)?
|
| Teaching those might have higher pedagogical value than
| conditioning children to find insights (as - at least at
| first sight - the increase in skill in those is more
| directly linked to the effort the child invests in
| learning) However, the von Neumann story in your sibling
| comment suggests that some people (and so, some children in
| the class) will perform routines faster than the other
| children no matter what. Seeing a "shortcut" solution gives
| a chance to those who are slower at routines to arrive at a
| solution fast, too.
|
| Moreover, a lot of real-world problems (in academia as well
| as in business - from my limited experience in both) are
| exercises in pattern matching and finding shortcuts rather
| than in an exhaustive exploration of the problem space -
| and helping children to collect an arsenal of tricks (and
| more importantly, teaching them to look for insights and
| patterns by giving them multiple trick-based problems over
| the years) prepares them to handle those real-world
| problems.
| jusssi wrote:
| > 5a looks dodgy (probably just trying out numbers)
|
| You can find the 4 zeros of the left side by eyeball, and
| use that to construct the rest of the equation group you
| need.
|
| It's expected you've seen and solved this type of problem
| before taking the test. Not that many kids can come up with
| a working solution strategy on the fly.
| dmurray wrote:
| "Trying out numbers" seems like the simpler approach to
| me. You have to multiply four consecutive numbers to get
| 1680. One of them must be 7 (since 7 divides 1680), one
| must be 5 or 10 for the same reason. That leaves only 3
| possibilities, and you only have to check the middle one
| (5 x 6 x 7 x 8) since if the result too big or too small,
| you'll know which of the other two it is.
|
| OK - you weren't guaranteed the solution was an integer
| or even real, but you should strongly suspect there's a
| simple answer because you didn't get generic fourth-
| degree polynomials in your class. Depending on the class,
| you might be expected to find one, two or all four
| solutions - but once you have the first one the rest are
| much easier.
| jusssi wrote:
| Following the procedure taught in class (and I'm quite
| sure they didn't teach "make a guess") is safer. When you
| show the correct procedure and fumble say, and addition,
| near the end, you'll still get almost full points.
|
| If you go off-road and get the wrong answer, it's up to
| how much the teacher likes you.
| dmurray wrote:
| This doesn't line up with all the other problems, which
| reward having some insight as well as the concrete
| algebra/arithmetic skills to finish it out.
|
| If anything, your approach sounds more like what's
| expected in American schools: either you have been taught
| a foolproof way to solve problems matching Pattern X, or
| you stare slack jawed at the question paper thinking "I
| must have been absent the day they covered this question
| pattern". Exactly the opposite of the kind of thinking
| described in the article.
|
| Besides, as in another comment of mine on this page,
| there is no generic method your teacher could have taught
| you here that always works. (If you think so, please set
| the right hand side to 1681 and solve that version...).
| The principal method I was taught for solving cubics was
| to make a guess. Numerical methods came later.
| andi999 wrote:
| Ok, only following procedure I also don't like..
| andi999 wrote:
| When you have the 4 zeros how do you construct solutions?
| jusssi wrote:
| You'd have to ask the kids who just took that class. I'm
| too old to remember ;-)
| andi999 wrote:
| I like your sense of humour
| huhtenberg wrote:
| #2 relies on understanding how numbers "work", i.e. on
| having spent time on playing with them.
|
| #5a is a factorization exercise.
|
| In general, Russian approach to the math includes exposing
| kids to the toolset as well as the theory. This particular
| case is solved this way, that is solved that way, etc. Keep
| on it for a while and it tends to develop an intuition for
| knowing right away which problem is solved with which
| approach. So, yeah, if there are shortcuts, you use them.
| If there aren't any, you brute-force it.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I think it is ok as a brain teaser, but there will
| probably be one kid in the class to see it and all the
| other kids feel dumb or whatever. But I don't think it
| teaches you anything
|
| These word problems are intended quite precisely as
| introduction to algebra. They show you the kinds of
| _questions_ that algebra can solve in a "structural" way,
| which makes it way easier to grok algebra later on since
| motivation for the subject has been provided in such depth.
|
| A good review article on the subject: Persson, Ulf and
| Toom, Andre: _Word Problems in Russian Mathematical
| Education_ , available at http://toomandre.com/my-
| articles/swedish/ULFENG.PDF
| andi999 wrote:
| Why do you think this is the starting point of a
| structured introduction?
| carlmr wrote:
| >I think it is ok as a brain teaser, but there will
| probably be one kid in the class to see it and all the
| other kids feel dumb or whatever.
|
| If you see the trick, you save some time on the
| calculation. If you don't you have to add some more
| numbers. It's not that difficult.
| andi999 wrote:
| Yes, but I am worried if a school uses question which can
| be solved with a trick that the whole instruction in
| class starts to revolve around tricks (which naturally
| will happen since the one kid who sees it will answer
| first).
|
| This trick discussion reminds me of the great anectode
| about von
| Neumann:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5950755
| dubcanada wrote:
| Tricks? It's not tricks it's word problems, which is just
| as important as any other problem. You need to relate
| math to the real world and having a equation doesn't
| help, having stuff like Susan is taking a train at 2:32
| for 50 kms going 60km/h what time did she get off helps
| people understand how to turn a real world problem into a
| math equation to solve it.
| deepsun wrote:
| Yes I definitely felt dumb in my Russian math classes when
| someone saw a clever trick and I did not. That made me try
| harder to look for tricks, it's a challenge in the end.
|
| I ended up with a Math degree very later on. So I don't see
| how feeling dumb harmed me.
|
| PS: the top level professional math is 90% tricks.
| credit_guy wrote:
| K-1 means Kindergarten and 1st grade, so 5 year olds and 6
| year olds. In the US earlier grades than that are called
| PK-3 (pre-Kindergarten and 3 year old) and PK-4. I don't
| think RSM has classes for these levels.
| arstarstarst wrote:
| Correct, they don't have pre-school classes. I attended
| RSM as a student, and even taught there.
| xmprt wrote:
| Those are pretty challenging problems and they also require a
| bit of working out. How many of these problems are students
| expected to solve in, say, and hour long test?
| eps wrote:
| These represent _classes_ of problems and the test checks
| which classes students have covered in their studies and
| which they slacked on.
|
| These two are straight-forward problems, both will be
| allocated some basic nominal time. You either know how to
| solve them or you don't. Sometimes there'd be problems that
| are more puzzling, because they'd combine several problem
| classes and will take time to unfold (this is typical in
| math olympics). These will be allocated more time as they
| require thinking and searching for a solution.
| dkn775 wrote:
| From the examples I guess it is the ability to
| intuitively manipulate fractions? Like "oh that's kind of
| like .8 of this other thing so it's close to X" ?
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Check out 'Word Problems in Russia and America' by Andrei Toom.
| Toom contrasts the poor state of the American math curriculum
| with his experiences with the Russian style, particularly its
| centering of 'word problems'.
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| I studied in a top school in Moldova which follows a curriculum
| whose foundation was defined during the Soviet union times, so
| could be pretty close to the Russian curriculum. Just as an
| idea, in grade 10-11 I was studying limits, complex numbers,
| derivatives, grade 12 was dedicated to integrals and solving
| problems with them. Math got progressively harder starting with
| grade 5. I remember I was filling about 2-3 notebooks of 48
| pages (little squares pattern) per semester with homework and
| in-class class problem solving. We always had homework to do,
| and often it would take me hours to come up with a solution to
| the more difficult problems that would give me a 10 (grade A+).
| My nephew who finished grade 4 has no homework (Canada), but I
| remember my grade 4 I had so much homework for each subject
| (math, French, Romanian, geography, arts, etc). Heck, in grades
| 1-4 we even had summer homework, which were books containing
| exercises for various subjects, and I remember that vividly
| because I hated to do homework in the summer. I'm quite sure
| that good Russian school are also quite intense..
| lentil_soup wrote:
| How old is grade 10-11? I always get confused with these as
| each country numbers grades differently
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Can't speak for Moldova but had what seems to be same level
| (specialized math school) in Russia and 10-11 was 15-17 yo
| (you could start at different age back then)
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| grade 12 is usually 18yo, grade 11 is 17yo, etc
| seer wrote:
| I have a feeling it was more about the quality of the teachers
| than anything else.
|
| I moved from "Deep" Russia itself to the periphery of the USSR
| (Bulgaria) when I was in first grade, and my parents had the
| foresight to make me repeat that grade so as to help me with
| learning a new language.
|
| The quality difference was astounding. In 1992 Russia by first
| grade I was learning english with flash cards technique,
| drawing human shapes, animation, perspective, and some pretty
| good maths. The knowledge I gained there allowed me to learn
| almost nothing but the language up until about 3rd grade. And
| it was a school in the middle of nowhere.
|
| I think the USSR trained some very good teachers and just sent
| them around everywhere, places they would not have gone
| themselves on their own volition kinda thing.
|
| Oh and I remember teachers where highly respected, a thing I
| saw slowly degrade while the country was going through the 90s
| reforms.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Respect for teachers is a huge part of it. People want status
| as much as they want money. If culturally America venerated
| teachers the way it venerates soldiers we'd have fewer wars
| and smarter people.
| FredPret wrote:
| Or smarter wars?
| kwere wrote:
| make the military teach!
| ajuc wrote:
| I don't know if it's that, but for me math "clicked" when in
| 2nd class of primary school in Poland we had a whole year of
| solving intuitive math problems. Basically linear equations of
| 1 or 2 variables, but that was without knowing what any algebra
| or even what a variable is - we started with only basic
| addition and multiplication.
|
| Teacher asked us (one by one) to describe how we would arrive
| at the answer to problems and why that way. Sometimes it would
| be a contest - who guesses the answer first and that person
| gets to explain the process and bask in the glory of being the
| smartest kid ;). And then we were shown how to write that
| solving process as equations and practiced changing from
| problems to equations and vice versa.
|
| At the end of the year most kids understood algebra.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Not sure about these after-class schools, but I can compare my
| ex-ussr school and uni education with math or CS undergrad
| textbooks I read a lot in English these day. Not sure about
| early education though.
|
| 1. Russian math books are straight to the point, superconcrete.
| Hard to read in a linear fashion but very useful when student
| is serious about going through it ("Problems in mathematical
| analysis" by Demidovich is a perfect example, Mark Vygodskiy's
| "Elementary Mathematics Reference").
|
| 2. In most textbooks I remember nobody tries to build a dumbed
| down explanation of things. This might lead to the book being
| harder to understand without teacher's help. I remember how
| some American undergrad-level introductory math analysis books
| were trying to skip proofs, avoid certain details, giving too
| many intuitive explanations ().
|
| 3. Mid and late school math is pretty advanced, especially when
| compared to US typical level.
|
| These days I live in UK. Kids go to school early here: 4-5
| years. My daugther is 6 and is comfortable with trivial math.
| I've read a few secondary school textbooks and they feel quite
| ok.
|
| So maybe this is a US problem.
|
| EDIT: a few example books added
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| I think the key difference is that it quickly moves from what's
| considered problems for kids (Ally had 3 apples, Booby had 2,
| etc) to abstract tasks and fundamental theorems in algebra,
| geometry and other areas.
|
| The way math was taught in USSR and is still largely taught in
| Russia is by going as quickly as possible to calculus. I
| definitely studied limits and derivatives in school (around
| grade 8 or 9 out of 11 as I recall) and we briefly touched
| integrals in the last grade. There are some areas they don't
| really include, although in my opinion they should have, like
| mathematical statistics, which could be even more useful, but
| still.
|
| That is a common approach recreated in some other subjects. For
| instances, teaching Russian includes not just basic syntax and
| phonetics but also just basic linguistic exercises like
| dissecting complex words and learning classifications, which
| you don't really need to talk it but they provide a deeper
| understanding.
| [deleted]
| carlmr wrote:
| I had the same experience going from a French elementary school
| to a German school.
|
| What we were taught in second grade only popped up again in 6th
| grade in Germany.
|
| Then I went on exchange to the US in 10th grade and I noticed
| they were lagging behind the German system by about 2 years.
|
| So US vs France must be a 6 year lag.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The US does not have a universal education track, so hard to
| compare.
|
| From my interactions with French students and Romanian students
| in college, the Romanians seemed further ahead and the french
| were just on par.
| LeanderK wrote:
| how would you compare the workload in the other subjects in
| Germany vs France? And how would you rate the german math
| education?
| carlmr wrote:
| I think German math education was ok, probably not stellar,
| but good enough to prepare you well for engineering classes.
|
| I went on another (short) exchange to France later in 9th
| grade and they were still far ahead of the German system in
| math at that point.
|
| However, and this may sound stereotypical, their language
| education was pretty bad. While they were studying similar
| English literature as us, they were almost completely unable
| to speak English. When visiting language classes it was
| evident why, in Germany languages are studied interactively,
| in France it was only the teacher talking.
|
| I don't know if this changed since then or it was only at
| this school, but it seemed like such an easy fix.
|
| In terms of workload, I think the total was pretty similar.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Growing up in the US we were fed a "mythology" about Russian and
| Chinese schooling that claimed it was all rote memorization
| without actual understanding. It's been clear for a long time
| that this was nothing more a form of American exceptionalist
| propaganda. I wonder if it was ever true? I suspect not.
|
| The tragic thing is it now appears that US STEM education (at
| least for non-elite schools) is closer to the rote-
| memorization/calculator-bot curriculums than every other school
| system.
| indianpianist wrote:
| What is "Russian math" like? And how does it differ from math
| curriculums taught in other areas of the world?
| Koshkin wrote:
| One notable example would be the undergraduate _Beginner's
| Course in Topology - Geometric Chapters_ by Rokhlin et al.
| (Some "beginner" one must be, to be able to read it.)
| xivzgrev wrote:
| This must be a hoax. In US, you solve math problems. In Russia,
| math problems solve themselves!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia
| sega_sai wrote:
| It's a weird article. I think this idea of 'Russian math' is very
| nebulous, and is probably used as marketing tool nowadays by some
| schools abroad. I have graduated from one of the top
| physics/maths high schools in Russia, and yes we had great math
| education there, but that was an outlier. Outside a handful of
| schools the math education is pretty dismal. And even in the good
| math schools there are different ways of teaching maths. I.e.
| there is a famous system of 'sheets' where the actual teaching of
| formal theory is very limited, while most of learning is done by
| solving problems (given to you on a sheet) and then presenting
| solutions to the teacher. But it wasn't used in our school for
| example.
|
| What definitely exists in Russia (or at least some big cities) is
| a system of free after-school classes, where you can go and learn
| how to solve olympiad-type math problems and become more
| interested in maths. That is definitely extremely useful to
| identify a few people who are talented in maths.
| vladgur wrote:
| Since we are piling anecdotes, I had an opposite experience --
| I came to US after i had 9 grades of Soviet education in a
| middle-of-the-run school in a large city in southern Ukraine.
|
| The mathematical and sciences background instilled in me in
| those 9 grades of Soviet school has allowed me to pretty much
| sail through High School(grades 10 through 12) and almost
| entire first year of college(as a CompSci Major at a University
| of California campus) without having to flex my math and
| science muscles.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It's a weird article. I think this idea of 'Russian math' is
| very nebulous
|
| It felt a bit like a promotional piece. They really want to
| drill the phrase "Russian Math" into your head, presumably to
| promote the schools teaching it. That doesn't invalidate the
| notion that they teach math better than US public schools, I'm
| just offering a plausible explanation for the feel of the
| article.
| guga42k wrote:
| >What definitely exists in Russia (or at least some big cities)
| is a system of free after-school classes, where you can go and
| learn how to solve olympiad-type math problems and become more
| interested in maths
|
| And for people outside of big cities there were schools-by-
| correspondence famously running by Moscow State University for
| math and MIPT for math/physics. The setup was you were mailed a
| small booklet every month. You had to study the material, solve
| problems and sent solutions back. The solutions were graded and
| sent back to you. It was great on so many levels. First and the
| most important aspect it taught discipline and time management.
| The material was amazing when you were given gradual increase
| in complexity instead of sheer volume of simple problems or a
| few olympiad-level problems which can't be solved if you are
| not there yet.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| I had that in Estonia as well, when I was in the gymnasium in
| 2002-03. I applied to the school for.. Exact sciences that
| was part of an university, for their informatics course. They
| sent me booklets with lessons and exercises and i sent my
| solutions, then received the next booklet with the results. I
| wasn't good at that, but it was interesting.
| golergka wrote:
| Wait, are you a fellow 57er? I thought there might be quite a
| lot of math school alumni on HN.
| sega_sai wrote:
| No, I'm from 'Vtoraia Shkola'. And I wouldn't be surprised at
| all if there is a bias towards russian math school alumni
| here.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| In China we used to have those after-hour classes too. Nowadays
| they charge a lot of money and the material declines in quality
| as well. Back then they hired some professors from the top
| universities to do the teaching of after-hour classes and
| nowadays who knows those guys are...
| wantsanagent wrote:
| Didn't they just ban for-profit tutoring like this? Do you
| think that will have beneficial outcomes?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah they just did that not long ago. I wrote a reply for
| that:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27945213
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Somehow American Math doesn't have the same connotations. I am
| witnessing public schools take math out of the curriculum at
| elementary, middle and high schools. It is a wasted opportunity
| for young people to learn the beauty of math.
| handrous wrote:
| Bizarre. Where I am math and English remain king and queen of
| getting-on-the-schedule. Being "tested subjects" from very
| early grades, is the main reason. They've all but eliminated
| recess in elementary, and have reduced hours for things like
| art & music, to make sure they have plenty of time for them,
| since school prestige and funding rely heavily on testing
| well _just_ in those two subjects.
| starkd wrote:
| That's a shame. Recess and play offer some of the best
| learning experiences. Our schools are beginning to resemble
| prisons. Heads down, sit up straight, stare at computer all
| day.
| civilized wrote:
| Maybe there's good reason for that? Reading and math are
| fundamental for a much broader range of occupations than
| art and music.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Once you reach the level of elite upper class most income
| is generated by trading art these days
| kube-system wrote:
| Was occupational training ever the primary goal of public
| schooling -- even back in the days when most people went
| directly to the workforce afterwards?
| HPsquared wrote:
| That, obedience training, and cultural induction.
| telotortium wrote:
| You'll have to decide what the "primary" goal is, but
| there was certainly the sense in the past that a U.S.
| high school graduate would be suitable for most jobs,
| either blue collar (shop class used to be quite popular),
| white collar (academic classes, particularly English), or
| indeed housewife (home economy). No matter what, though,
| a mastery of the 3 Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic)
| was considered essential to all of these (you have to
| know arithmetic to balance your checkbook, do taxes,
| measure for construction, etc.). High school wasn't
| necessarily a specialized occupational school, but there
| was an expectation you would be learning useful skills
| for your future.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's what I'm getting at -- life skills are much more
| broad than occupational skills. Art, PE, health, sports,
| civics, etc. are taught in schools because they produce
| people with more well-rounded life skills, not because it
| produces better bankers or factory workers.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| It's an open secret among educators that the brightest
| students learn to read at home. Early math is just
| practicing the same arithmetic over and over, because the
| logical skills for algebra just aren't present in a
| seven-year-old. Art, music, and gym are actually really
| important in early childhood development, because they
| develop motor skills. Gym gives gross motor skills and
| major muscular development, and art and music give fine
| motor control. Penmanship is also important for
| developing fine motor control. For young children who
| can't yet engage in much logical reasoning, developing
| motor skills is appropriate and important. We tend to
| think in adult terms about what is the right thing for
| kids to learn, but small children are not adults and need
| to develop skills that adults take for granted.
| civilized wrote:
| Thanks, that's very interesting! My son's fine motor
| skills are behind the rest of his development... maybe
| art and music would help round him out.
| handrous wrote:
| Additionally, it's now understood that insufficient
| exposure to very bright light (say, sunlight) during key
| years is the main risk factor for nearsightedness.
| Cutting time outdoors _during Winter_ , for lower-
| elementary kids (K-2), when school is monopolizing a good
| portion of daylight hours, is almost certain to increase
| rates of nearsightedness. Cutting recess in young grades
| _hurts kids ' eyes_, permanently.
| azmodeus wrote:
| I disagree with algebra being too difficult for a 7 year
| old. You can learn geometric algebra at 7 with plastic
| blocks. It's a common way to teach math in Eastern Europe
| to young children afaik.
|
| Excellent maths teachers can really bring a lot to the
| table with geometrical approach throughout the years.
| donny2018 wrote:
| > I am witnessing public schools take math out of the
| curriculum at elementary, middle and high schools.
|
| Is that for real? If true, this is ridiculous. Do American
| authorities want to introduce some kind of education for
| plebs?
|
| How is such low standard for basic education is even
| acceptable in the modern world? It's not only about "beauty
| of math" but at least basic math is required to help develop
| some specific cognitive and thinking skills. You can't leave
| that part of children's brain underdeveloped.
|
| And cutting out math from schools you are deleting the future
| for a huge number of kids. No more future engineers and
| scientists and programmers etc.
|
| I don't understand.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Funny you mention that, this was submitted earlier today:
| _Oregon students shouldn't have to prove they can write or
| do math to get diploma_
|
| https://www.salemreporter.com/posts/4419/oregon-students-
| sho...
| kube-system wrote:
| That headline sounds a bit of an editorialized
| interpretation of the situation. The debate doesn't seem
| to be whether or not they prove their skills, it is a
| debate over who they prove them to, and when a change
| should be implemented.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Yes it's TRUE. In SF the schools district removed Algebra
| from the middle school curriculum. You should read The
| Dictators Handbook, it details why dismantling education
| piece by piece is a great way to stay in power. You'd
| expect it in a dictatorship but not in SF.
| starkd wrote:
| Happening in Oregon too
| https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2021/08/gov-kate-
| brown-s...
| hexane360 wrote:
| It appears that that move has _increased_ enrollment in
| higher level math classes in high school:
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/education/article/SF-schools-
| mov...
|
| See also some of the motivation behind the change:
| https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-
| stop-...
|
| I would argue part of the problem with the American
| system is that trying to rush students through a rigid
| curriculum leaves the teachers no choice but to teach by
| rote memorization and cookie-cutter problems. Slowing
| down the curriculum is part (but not all) of the fix.
|
| Still, whether or not this policy is good, it takes a lot
| of spin to turn "San Fransisco is starting algebra a year
| later" into "witnessing public schools take math out of
| the curriculum at elementary, middle and high schools",
| which is what you claimed.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| Well, according to that article "Advanced Placement
| calculus courses has declined by nearly 13 percent over
| the past two years."
|
| Anyway, the policy was made with intention of forcing
| equality, not improving math education.
| filoleg wrote:
| You are both correct, but the comment you were replying
| to was definitely written in a way that feels misleading
| about "increased enrollment in higher level math classes
| in high school".
|
| TL;DR from someone who read the full article: that change
| caused an increase in Precalculus enrollment and a
| decrease in AP Calculus enrollment.
|
| Which I don't really feel good about. The quote closer to
| the end made me feel even worse:
|
| >"For so long, people have held up this idea that AP
| Calculus is the gold standard (for college admission),"
| Lizzy Hull Barnes said, a district math supervisor
|
| And those kids haven't entered college at the time of
| writing, and the article points out that they indeed
| don't know how this change will affect college admission
| prospects of those students. Time will tell, and
| hopefully my bad feeling about this change was misplaced.
| But given that this was written over 2 years ago (so most
| of those high school students have graduated by now), and
| we haven't had a follow-up "this change brought us some
| great benefits" article, I am afraid the results might
| have not shown any benefits of this approach.
| StellarTabi wrote:
| Wait, why I have been hearing non-stop astro-turfing about
| "CRT in schools" in the last 6 months and I've never heard
| once about math being taken out? This sounds really serious,
| is there more I can read about Math being removed from public
| schools?
| caffeine wrote:
| These are the same thing. The policy is to remove
| educational disparity. Naturally force flows along the path
| of least resistance - rather than raising everyone up,
| which is hard, we are simply removing anything difficult
| from the curriculum, which is much easier (at the expense
| of actually educating anyone, a goal that nobody cares
| about much any more).
|
| The easiest way to make equality is to multiply both sides
| by zero.
| starkd wrote:
| Many in teachers' unions don't want to be rated on how
| badly public schools are doing. It's not all the fault of
| teachers, granted, but incentives of the union here is
| not always aligned with the students. Many don't want to
| hear it, but it needs to be said as a factor.
|
| There are a lot of these initiatives - like Russian math
| - popping up serving as test cases for how to teach
| subjects. I think online programs are injecting some
| badly needed new energy.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > incentives of the union here is not always aligned with
| the students
|
| I don't know why this would surprise anyone.
|
| The union represents the teachers. It absolutely doesn't
| represent the students - none of them are members!
|
| As far as a rational teaching union is concerned, the
| government, the general public, schools, parents, and
| students, are all the enemy.
| starkd wrote:
| I hate to think that about a teachers, but it sure looks
| that way.
| lotusmars wrote:
| > What definitely exists in Russia (or at least some big
| cities) is a system of free after-school classe
|
| I've been studying in a "respected" Soviet / early post-Soviet
| school.
|
| These classes were super elitist and had a huge disconnect in
| their level from what you were taught in regular classes.
|
| I was a straight A student and was shut off very quickly. The
| problems were enormous in their difficulty and teachers had
| zero interest in helping or educating you.
|
| Those classes were either for 0,1% genius olympiadniks to be
| later recruited for Soviet science or defense, or for 0,1%
| elite (Soviet nomenclature) kids whose parents could afford
| private education.
|
| Along with other naive/poor kids I was quite quickly reminded
| that I'm not welcome in the circle.
|
| Just a reminder that Soviet system had very entrenched elites
| and huge discrepancy in access to education, medicine and
| goods.
| varjag wrote:
| Yeah same. Our town had a "smart kids" school and a dozen of
| ordinary ones. I once won the town's informatics Olympiad in
| my age cohort, so to prepare for the regional stage they
| dispatched me over to that school's auspices for training.
| The teacher literally ignored my presence; so in the next
| competition I had to use both IBM PC and Pascal for the first
| time in my life. Scored something like 12th out of 40, but
| the teacher gloated on the way back.
|
| I seriously think the "no child left behind" type education
| so derided here produces better general outcome. Holding up
| resources for a few select students is quite the opposite of
| meritocracy.
| please-reread wrote:
| sorry to hear you were not oplymiadniks material :(
| lotusmars wrote:
| I know you're trolling yet this approach turned off not
| only me but lots of talented kids from math and technology
| for years.
|
| We thought we were "bad at math" when in reality our
| parents couldn't afford to buy teachers' unofficial private
| time.
|
| Education (or diplomas and connections to be exact) was a
| huge status symbol in USSR.
| aj3 wrote:
| Eh, I've studied in a "respected" post-Soviet school as well
| and can't related to this at all. Teachers were awesome and
| passionate, had really thorough understanding of math (and
| physics, and chemistry), without any hint of elitism.
|
| It's almost as if there are good and bad math teachers (in
| all countries).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-10 23:02 UTC)