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Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

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Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#241

Post by neuronic »

de_watcher wrote: post #218
Endlessly wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, what do you and your peers that were feed into a well defined path so early make of it now understanding that is not how all children reach advanced skills in mathematics?

Most of the children don't want, don't care or just plain stupid to be able to grasp the subjects. It makes sense to isolate together those who can. The special schools don't do anything special, they just cut down the distractions, shift 0.5-2 university years into the school and spice things up with some competitive math/physics/programming/chemistry/biology/geography/etc.

Yep, school is moving at the pace of the slowest common denominator.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#242

Post by mschuster91 »

rimliu wrote: post #220
rb808 wrote: post #69

The real question should be is why are US textbooks so hard when most people never need HS math after finishing school, and lack so many other skills that are never taught.

Unless you count thinking as an important skill. It alway baffles me when I see "why don't they teach how to do taxes?". Well they do teach you how to read and hiw to do maths? How hard it is the to put 2 and 2 together?

Taxes and maths are two very different things. The math part of taxes usually is easy, what's complex are the countless rules around it, e.g. what can be counted as a deductible expense and what not - additionally, most rules don't even make logical sense as they were written for political reasons (i.e. to appease one or another voter/corporate interest group).

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#243

Post by Symbiote »

saagarjha wrote: post #189
sdan wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in elementary school probably a decade ago we all had to take a math placement test (not the standardized test, a different one) to determine what math class we'd be in middle school. Tons of privilege-this and that (this is normal in the bay area, pretty sure a lot more schools have similar systems) but at the end of the day kids (like me) studied extremely hard for these placement tests.

I'm honestly surprised that people have begun studying for that test; when I took it was fairly low-stress…

At my school in England, once or twice a year the best/worst students in each class were swapped with the class above/below, based on the teachers' decisions. I had this for maths and French.

I completely messed up a French test on purpose, so the teacher had an excuse to put me in the class below. We really didn't like each other, and I did much better being in the top 25% of the middle class, rather than the bottom 25% of the top class.

British teachers call splitting up a year by ability for all subjects "streaming", and just for some classes "setting", and searching with both terms shows there's plenty of debate on the merits of each (or neither) method at all ages. Since I left the UK, it looks like politicians have been trying to get involved.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#244

Post by ac29 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #205
nostromo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just happened in Seattle. The program for gifted students was canceled after being found to be inequitable.

Wow. By that argument, one could just as easily label top universities with high scholastic admissions requirements to be “inequitable”, and thus unacceptable. 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.

> [O]ne could just as easily label top universities with high scholastic admissions requirements to be “inequitable”, and thus unacceptable.

The opposite was recently litigated - that top universities were inequitable because they didnt sufficiently consider scholastic achievement:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/us/politics/yale-asian-am...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/01/harvard-ruli...

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#245

Post by Symbiote »

winter_blue wrote: post #213
c-smile wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First 3 years all students of all Sciences (Math included) and all Engineering specialties were getting the same (mandatory) set of courses. Only rest 2 or 3 years were variable. As of Canadian Universities. UBC in particular. Anecdotical evidence, but still. Friend of mine, owner of small factory here in Vancouver, asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people. On question…

> asked me once to assemble him software department specifically from Eastern Europe people I hope your friend realizes that this is clear-cut racial/ethnicity-based discrimination . It's a violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/rights-w...

A generous interpretation is they were outsourcing the work, and the business wanted it to be outsourced to a company in Eastern Europe.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#246

Post by usgroup »

I feel lots of people have made the point that over time the emphasis on maths has been reduced such that education would be more useful to more people. I.e structuring the maths syllabus such that it would select for the maths super stars does a poor job of giving the run of the mill student much value from their maths education.

I do grad level maths every day but I’ve never stopped being a reluctant mathematician. Sometimes the maths of the problem is insightful and interesting but most of the time what I’m doing is battling to express/validate an intuition in a formal language.

I think that emphasis on maths as a language for the exact representation of your thoughts is maybe what the modern curriculum is up to, as opposed to the emphasis of maths as the language of your thoughts. Just the same way that you might write code to express designs; I think it’d be weird to think in code although certainly some (maybe even the best) do think about software in something closer to code than box diagrams.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#247

Post by droopyEyelids »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #229
burtness wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By CRT are you referring to Critical Race Theory? I'm sceptical that its both that influential, or that any good faith reading of CRT supports sacrificing accelerated programs. In particular CRT in education if anything pushes against reliance on standardized testing scores.

Yes, that’s what I meant (and I for intersectionality). Agreed that CRT/I would oppose standardized tests, but that’s only because CRT/I at its core opposes anything objective. And the philosophy of CRT/I has already made significant inroads in American culture. Witness all the accelerated programs that have been shut down, the many recent attacks on objective standards—all in the name of “equity” (which does not mea…

Yeah please share the examples!

What you write sounds plausible, but it also mirrors a lot of what we hear from the right that is at times overstated.

I'd love to hear a set of sober examples- I don't have any connection to early education anymore and I'm really curious.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#248

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Endlessly wrote: post #82
c-smile wrote: post #67

I was comparing my math books (from Soviet university, Physics and Applied Math) and my son's from Canadian university (CS). Huge difference to be honest. Canadian ones (same as in US I think) were more like belletristic texts written with the goal to give basics without too much thought needed by the reader. In contrast you cannot approach Soviet text math book without serious thinking effort. You need to overcome s…

Read, then reread, and still do not understand your point. Are you saying that in Russia, since the education was free that the goal of the textbooks was to make it hard to want to stay in school, if so, to me, seems like it’s unlikely, but possible. Putting aside non-Russian textbooks, what are you saying the intended reasoning of the textbook form was as it relates to Russian culture?

No. Because education was free, they could make the books harder. They didn't depend on students pumping money into schools. Didn't have to pretend to be "nice".

(I grew up and went to college in the Eastern Bloc.)

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#249

Post by anilakar »

Jugurtha wrote: post #118

I stand by my answer[0] to that question. [0]: https://qr.ae/pNrgmY

Heck, that was common knowledge some fifteen years ago during my freshman year. I personally never bought those American coursebooks. For the price of one brick, I could pretty much buy all the required self-study material printed form. After my sophomore year, they did away with the university press anyway and told the professors to just make their materials available in electronic form.

Besides, when you're in uni, you're learning to study, not learning to be hand-held.

Re: Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

#250

Post by TeMPOraL »

Bayart wrote: post #115
c-smile wrote: post #67

I was comparing my math books (from Soviet university, Physics and Applied Math) and my son's from Canadian university (CS). Huge difference to be honest. Canadian ones (same as in US I think) were more like belletristic texts written with the goal to give basics without too much thought needed by the reader. In contrast you cannot approach Soviet text math book without serious thinking effort. You need to overcome s…

>University on the West gets its money directly from students so they motivated to attract and keep as many students as possible - so books are entry level to do not scare students. Barrier here is established from "paying user" side. I guess Western Europe isn't part of the West anymore.

Depends. It seems to me that in general, post-USSR, school textbooks went through a nosedive in quality. I was educated in the 90s and 2000s in Poland, and experienced the modern, "capitalist" textbooks. At the same time, my grandfather showed me books from 60s-80s period. World of a difference.

What I remember the most was the contrast between the English language textbooks from ~80s vs. the ones I had in school. The modern ones basically exist for both publishers and schools to milk parents. They come in three or four pieces - a book and an exercise book for students, and then an exercise book with answers and some compendium for teachers. That's four books, structured in a way that necessitates attending (and paying for) classes. Meanwhile, the 60s-80s era English books were structured for self-learning. You could work through them with the help of a teacher, or you could do it alone.

(Note that while being self-contained, they've also managed to be smaller. That's because they were free of space fillers. Being set on something one step up from a typewriter limited the amount of bullshit designers could include to zero.)

By the time I was finishing high school in 2007, the regular public school's textbooks for subjects like Polish, math and physics have suffered from the same disease English language books did - they've been split into several pieces, refreshed yearly (ensuring there's almost no second-hand market for them), and structured in such a way you couldn't learn on your own.

I have a few of my grandfather's English books in my basement somewhere; I decided to keep them for my children, so that they have a quality textbook to learn from.

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