> I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible I went to high school in Russia and then moved to Australia. The difference was immense. It felt like i just dropped 2 year levels. Even the accelerated programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in Russia. AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN high school studen…
Does Russia have celebrity culture a la Kardashians or stuff like that? (I assume they have some, how does it compare?)
Yes we have, but it's smaller and not as popular. Also more frowned upon from what I gather.
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.
I don't believe there is anything as too stupid child. Not even a stupid child. They become stupid adults, often because of school and people there treating them as stupid children when in fact it's a problem with the socioeconomical/family situation.
When you're in such a school you can really feel what's up, especially in Soviet/post-Soviet case: the socioeconomical situation is exactly the same (because communism), and you usually know the families of other pupils. Then you see the ones who try hard but still can't get it, you also see the lazy smarts.
Not the same, but I went from the Polish education system to a British university, and it also felt like it was a massive downgrade. What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything". It basically meant that on a CS course, they teach you basic level maths, basic programming skills, you spend the entire 1st year of university learning what we learnt in…
> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything". My experience was that even if all of the students prior to university studied maths A-Levels, we all studied different topics. Before those two year A-Levels, we all studied different topics in GCSEs. There is so much time wasted giving everyone the same knowledge because of how our system is set up…
You don't get to choose different maths A-levels in Russia. There is one state standard that every school and every student has to stick to. You can have accelerated or deeper "special schools" but you can't evade the state standard on maths or you won't get you high school diploma.
Well I went to IIT and our education system is more like Soviet Style education, heck we used the same books for competition prep. I aced every class always stood first in my class till class 10th and after that my performance dropped till I realized that "I am not supposed to care about understanding a concept in its entirety and solve problem based on only things I've learned however limiting it was". It was first…
I'm not sure this is specific to any particular school of mathematical education. There is bound to come a point at which you cannot understand everything and have to start winging it. If you can cope with that, that's good, you are prepared psychologically for research mathematics. And just having learned the patterns will hold you in good stead. But if (as I did) you find the whole thing an insult to your pride then you are only preparing yourself for failure.
> I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible I went to high school in Russia and then moved to Australia. The difference was immense. It felt like i just dropped 2 year levels. Even the accelerated programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in Russia. AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN high school studen…
Can agree with similar comparison - when studying at the end of 90s on high school, one student from our central/eastern european class spent 1 year in US. After he came back, he'd tell us how in math they were several years behind for same age group (ie we were running derivations and integrals and they were more on end-of-secondary school level). He was average back home, stellar math student there. Of course, case…
My (slightly more recent) US high school experience had nearly all students cover the calculus you described by the end of high school, and about 1/5 of the students got fast-tracked to the point that they studied linear algebra and multivariable calc by the end of high school.
I talked to a couple of friends about this, and about 1/2 had similar course offerings.
> I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible I went to high school in Russia and then moved to Australia. The difference was immense. It felt like i just dropped 2 year levels. Even the accelerated programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in Russia. AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN high school studen…
Not the same, but I went from the Polish education system to a British university, and it also felt like it was a massive downgrade. What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything". It basically meant that on a CS course, they teach you basic level maths, basic programming skills, you spend the entire 1st year of university learning what we learnt in…
If a person is horrified by the idea that some children are superior learners due to genetics and yet this person sees their attempts to develop inferior learners fail, their only option to achieve equality is then to socially engineer the superior learners downwards to match their political viewpoint. And it's also great business in a deindustrialised nation to milk gullible students for tens of thousands of pounds every year to generate revenue for universities, landlords, drinking establishments, etc, in exchange for a not particularly useful piece of paper at the end.
Comparing the Bay to the American education system as a whole is unfair. In the more rural part of California I grew up we had no options available to us at all. There was the high school, and the more trade-focused high school that only existed as somewhere to put kids who had been expelled from the normal high school.
People do that with Soviet system too. In the 1980s, a disproportionate number of top scientific cadre were born and raised in Moscow and went through the few focused schools there. Born gifted in Govneevka, Kirov obl., pop. 20,000? Good luck.
Something about this (emphasis more on problems for people with Jewish ancestry in the Soviet Union) can be found here:
My maths teacher made me prove that, my first proof by induction. Try it. You know you want to procrastinate with a nice proof by induction now.
Induction seems like an odd way to prove this. Do you need to preform induction over all the numbers that are not multiples of three? The converse claim (every multiple of 3 has a digit sum that is a multiple of 3) is a more natural one for induction, though that's not the most standard proof there either.
Odd if you're looking for the simplest way to prove that. Less odd, perhaps, if you're looking for something that can be proved simply using induction, in order to make students do their first proof by induction.
I don't remember precisely what it was we were asked to prove. It may have been the converse.
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?
Went to #548 from elementary to middle, tried to transfer to #57 but failed interviews (I think I went up to round 8), spent one year at #1523 and then successfully got into #57 the next year. I think that I was very lucky to get in and it was the most valuable part of my overall education. It taught me many things. That there are other people who are much smarter than me and it's OK (and may be I'm not smart enough…
Ha-ha, the #57 mafia is freakin everywhere, now I even meet you guys in HN comments :)
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…
The thing is, if you accept the basic "liberal arts" idea of education that it's about creating a common culture, then a lot of the ideas coming from the social justice side of things actually make some sense. From the "liberal" point of view, one of the purposes of English lit class and education in general is to create a common background that people in professional settings can use in conversation - I can use my f…
SJ/CRT movement is devouring itself. The more and more it will affect sciences, technology and other critical economic areas, the more US economy will suffer. That will mean US will be less capable on exporting those ideologies into other countries.
Meanwhile, countries which no such handicap will rise economically and be able to export more of their own ideologies.