201–210 of 684 posts
US textbooks, on the other hand, are targeted towards more general audience--the average student. That doesn't make them bad, just different.
One random shout-out: I think if more of us learned math from folks like 3 Blue 1 Brown we would love it enough to explore it more. I don't know if I'm smart enough to have become a master mathematician but I find myself falling in love with math with every video he puts out.
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Anecdotal I know but I went to an entire school for “gifted” students in Texas in the 80’s.
40 years ago is 1980, so that seems consistent with his comment. Also consistent is that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, which has been ranked #1 and is generally in the top ten US high schools, was founded in 1985.
And, per Wikipedia, many of the faculty came from Stuyvesant, founded 1904 (which has itself had 4 nobel prize winners). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School
The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education system to favor theoretical training. I wonder if there's a trade-off to this. On one hand you produce some really elite theoretical minds (Pontryagin, Lyapunov, Kolmogorov, etc.). But the counterfactual is that it excludes those with high IQ but are more practi…
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That's the opposite of what I've seen in California. There used to be a big focus on tracking, gifted programs and "accelerated math", but it is now perceived as inequitable. Gifted programs were cancelled, tracks eliminated, and accelerated math discouraged (you can skip a year if you study outside school, but it is discouraged). The focus is getting everyone to some minimal level, and no attention on the high perfo…
This just happened in Seattle. The program for gifted students was canceled after being found to be inequitable.
Equal opportunity does not imply equal outcome—even for a perfectly fair school. Quite the opposite! In fact, I’m glad I got rejected from several schools... their high bar helped guide me to something that worked better for me anyway.
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That's the opposite of what I've seen in California. There used to be a big focus on tracking, gifted programs and "accelerated math", but it is now perceived as inequitable. Gifted programs were cancelled, tracks eliminated, and accelerated math discouraged (you can skip a year if you study outside school, but it is discouraged). The focus is getting everyone to some minimal level, and no attention on the high perfo…
I don’t see the issue. The internet exists now and you can access a world of content in seconds. I didn’t get any of this, ever in my mediocre education - I don’t see why so much focus should be placed on these elites at the expense of everyone else.
Because the big breakthroughs and innovations in math and science are achieved by the elites and not by the mediocre masses.
This doesn't mean that we should neglect the mediocre masses (I'm one of them, by the way), they do good, important work. But they're are not sufficient.
This heavily resonated with me. Early in my career (late 90's - early 00's), I had to develop the skill of dry running (basically running a given block of code with given inputs in my head and predicting the outcomes) because of scarcity.
I was in a domain where I had to build 100,000+ lines of C++ into a single executable, manually deploy to a remote Solaris machine and wait for up to 5 minutes for system re-initialization before I could run a simple test.
Needless to say, we learned to predict what our code does as we wrote it. The idea of unit tests re-running automatically as you write new code in the IDE would have been dismissed as an unattainable heaven (or maybe even considered downright satanic).
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That's the opposite of what I've seen in California. There used to be a big focus on tracking, gifted programs and "accelerated math", but it is now perceived as inequitable. Gifted programs were cancelled, tracks eliminated, and accelerated math discouraged (you can skip a year if you study outside school, but it is discouraged). The focus is getting everyone to some minimal level, and no attention on the high perfo…
These programs exist, but are generally separated from the ordinary high school system. For example, right here in the Bay area there's Proof School, a private school founded precisely "for kids who love math", AoPS Academy, for extracurricular challenging math classes, and powerhouse public schools like Lynbrook, where gigantic student-run clubs aimed at competitions provide exactly this kind of education.
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In Soviet Union, quadratic equations were introduced in 7th grade, not 4th [1], so if you did in fact study them in 4th grade your experience is not typical. And while American 7th grade program does not cover quadratic equations, it includes intro to probability and statistics, which is far more useful in real world, and which was not covered in Soviet math classes until much later (if at all). [1] http://fremus.nar…
But how can they teach probability and stats without any calculus or real analysis? Are they just teaching a few cookbook formulas and leaving it at that?