11–20 of 257 posts
I wish in hindsight that instead of taking endless years of calculus there was a high school version of real analysis, and exercise problems rooted in real-life to motivate the learning.
I think you have to contextualize mathematical in the broader problem with american public schools: they're awful, awful places for many students including me. I ended up studying higher mathematics in college and still study on my own for my own pleasure (and I get to apply some really high powered ideas to programming once in a while which grants a satisfaction that lingers). I think my math education could have been advanced 5 or even 10 years if public school weren't such a soul-crushing stultifying nightmare of procedure and compliance.
Looking at my kids maths lessons, especially in late Junior, so much effort was spent to actually hide the maths that I wonder they learnt anything!
It's an interesting question when you consider that in at least two university mathematics department rankings[1][2], the US holds 7 of the top 10 global spots. One could argue that for whatever reason, many of the professors, researchers and postdocs at those schools learned math in other countries, but, if these lists are to be believed, the US does have the richest mathematics knowledge in the world. So two questi…
There are a lot of reasons why the US does well in Universities and poorer up until then relative to the rest of the world:
1 - In much of the world, the school you get into matters more than what you did there. (The lowest University of Tokyo graduate is considered higher than the top grad of any other school - so getting in there is the hard part)
2 - In the US we invest more in higher ed than K-12 relative to the rest of the world on a per-pupil basis - especially at the top schools. (Look at the Harvard or Yale endowment on a per-student basis)
3 - In the US, college professors are at the top of their peer group academically. It's a mixed bad in K-12.
I think it is related to our refusal to embrace the metric system, kids at a young age get thrown off by our archaic system of measurement.
Everyone believes they are bad at maths, so they are. It applies just as much to the UK. My youngest believes this strongly, yet when we were quizzing, or helping with homework, she didn't seem to find it too hard, just believed it so. She certainly didn't get those beliefs from home! Looking at my kids maths lessons, especially in late Junior, so much effort was spent to actually hide the maths that I wonder they le…
I think it is related to our refusal to embrace the metric system, kids at a young age get thrown off by our archaic system of measurement.
I've wondered about that. The imperial system is positively awkward. What about other countries that also use the imperial system instead of metric? Are they also behind?
Especially word problems -- most of them felt like they were written for students wearing intellectual blinders... if you had any modicum of relevant knowledge outside of the lesson oftentimes word problems were impossible to solve
I think it is related to our refusal to embrace the metric system, kids at a young age get thrown off by our archaic system of measurement.
I've wondered about that. The imperial system is positively awkward. What about other countries that also use the imperial system instead of metric? Are they also behind?
If they would teach kids to play with math (or any form of knowledge, for that matter), and not just run through 10,000 rote problems, maybe we'd rank better. Especially word problems -- most of them felt like they were written for students wearing intellectual blinders... if you had any modicum of relevant knowledge outside of the lesson oftentimes word problems were impossible to solve
Don't the countries that rank better use the rote method even more?