Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by aleksandrm » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:32 AM UTC

lsh123 wrote: post #80

Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separa…

I traveled a lot and studied in international schools, embassy sf schools and schools in USSR as well as US. I was born in USSR so I mainly studied there between my travels, and everything that I saw and experienced came no where close to the curriculum that I had in motherland. So I have to disagree with you.

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

#402

Post by Symbiote » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:34 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #385

toohuman wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "never took it as a subject". In the UK you study Biologly, Chemistry and Physics up to and including year 11 (16 years old). I don't believe you can opt out of those, along with English and Mathematics. I wouldn't be surprised, however, to hear that what we did learn in those years was behind a lot of Europe/USA.

Right,ok, I wasn't aware of that. I'm just basing this on the experience with my own sister, who went to a British school at the age of 15 and immediately picked only the few subjects that interested her and didn't have to do anything else. By age 18 when taking her A-levels the school actually limited her to only taking subjects where she had a high chance of getting a good grade as to not accidentally lower the ave…

Normally, people choose around 10 GCSEs (taken in the school year they turn 16, the school year starts on 1 September). They choose 3-5 subjects for A level.

For GCSE, "minor" subjects can be abandoned -- I stopped studying art, "technology" (design/engineering) and German (since I continued with French). At A level, the majority of students focus on closely related subjects (e.g. maths and science), which I think is the weakness of this system.

Harry Potter has essentially the same system (GCSEs = OWLs, A levels = NEWTs), this isn't something J K Rowling invented.

It's unfortunate your sister couldn't study more subjects. Parents who knew the system might have been able to push the school to allow her to study more, but I can't find anything online where parents/students are grumbling about this. (Again, Harry Potter has the same situation -- Prof. Snape says he only takes the best students into his NEWT class.)

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

#403

Post by b0rsuk » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #268

lsh123 wrote: post #80

Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separa…

> 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…

Haha, check out the post-apoc movie "The Road".

Papa! Papa!

...

Papa! Papa!

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

#404

Post by b0rsuk » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:38 AM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #268

lsh123 wrote: post #80

Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separa…

> 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…

US has American Football, jocks, and cheerleaders. This is something notably absent elsewhere. When you watch a hollywood high school move, this strange obsession jumps at you. In Poland the word "nerd" is difficult to translate. It has no direct equivalent.

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

#405

Post by GuB-42 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #313

missosoup wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything"...

I think it is a good thing. There is a big difference between doing well on a test and understanding the subject. You may think you know basic algebra because you can find the correct value for x, but chances are that you don't really know what you are doing. So having a refresher course telling you what you are actually doing when solving an equation, and how it fits in the big picture is valuable.

The thing is: when you relearn these basic subjects, you do it with a wider field of view. For example, when I first learned derivatives, I knew it had was about rate of change, and I knew the formulas, but I didn't quite get the relationship between slopes and derivatives. It came back later, as I was more familiar with things like linear interpolation and how to manipulate curves in general.

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

#406

Post by DeathArrow » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:42 AM UTC

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #301

kccqzy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got beat up, physically, by my peers This is a problem. Regardless of whether hyper-tracking is beneficial, no kid should have to suffer from this kind of bullying. I don't know why bullying in the U.S. is (or seems to be) so much worse than other countries.

Teachers in American schools are usually shit-scared of their students, which is the exact opposite of how things are in Russia, China, or even India. There are many reasons. Parents and students wield too much power in the American school system, and the idea of tying a school's funding to local property taxes makes this worse. In addition, America lacks the cultural norms of respect and deference for education and…

In most parts of Europe teachers and educated folks are respected.

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

#407

Post by Symbiote » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:43 AM UTC

agent008t wrote: post #389

gambiting wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my opinion, British universities focus less on technical skills/knowledge, but more on research skills. Initiative is encouraged. You come out knowing more useful things, with experience in independent work/research, and with more confidence in yourself. A Russian university would absolutely hammer you with technical knowledge (including in many irrelevant subjects), but when it comes to actually doing an independ…

> British universities bizarrely seem to often reward/celebrate athletics more than academic achievements.

I'm not sure how you get that impression.

American universities do this, but (with a couple of famous exceptions, like the traditional boat race between Oxford and Cambridge) British universities don't care about sport.

The social hierarchy was just separate, and had no bearing on anything academic. I didn't care for a second what the rugby team were doing (generally drinking themselves into a stupor), and they didn't care about me. That's just a reflection on British culture in general.

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

#408

Post by dan-robertson » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #313

missosoup wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This was not my experience with university education in the uk. I studied mathematics and we had perhaps two lectures of recap of the “further maths” A-level. One reason is that not all schools could provide all of this course so it wasn’t a hard requirement; another reason was to introduce consistent notation that would be used in the rest of the degree.

Similarly in the uk mathematics curriculum there are a bunch of “applied” modules and schools choose which to teach. Some students would have only done mechanics and some only statistics, for example, so the corresponding university courses would have to start at what might be already known for some students.

Probably this depends on the university, what they look for in students, and more generally the strength of the students they do get. There are a lot of university students in the uk but obviously some will be stronger than others and the distribution varies by university.

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

#409

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

a-saleh wrote: post #288

rvense wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Denmark, universities (and possibly high schools too, I don't know for sure) get paid by the government based on the number of students passing exams every semester. I think this is part of what's called "new public management" where you attempt to bring market-like incentives to the public sector.

Interesting, universities in Czech republic went through a simmilar scheme, but they'd get disproportionately more funds per head-count of first-year students (on-boarding, I guess?) Several universities switched from entrance exams to a system of "Everybody gets in, it is the first semester that will probably kill you" :-)

Same in Poland for more than a decade. It's an open secret here that universities admit many more students than they can handle in order to capture extra funding, and then get rid of the excess after the first year.

On my first year, the amount of students was 2x the actual capacity. The first semester was very math-heavy, and everyone knew we had the toughest and CS-unrelated subjects delivered up front in order to weed out half of the year.

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

#410

Post by new2628 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #382

AdrianB1 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Romania in high school (Sf. Sava) being good at math and physics made you automatically very popular, everyone wanted to sit near you whenever you had written exams :) In any case, smart people were appreciated, there were no "nerds".

A Sava person in the wild :) My significant other went to Lazar and I wasn't aware of the rivalry between the two high-schools until I met her, I personally grew up in a small-to-medium town where these school rivalries were pretty much absent. It's also sociologically interesting because Sava/Lazar/Vianu people (or, generally speaking, people who went to good Bucharest high-schools, it's probably the same for other…

> Like I said, we don't have that thing in small-ish cities.

It's definitely a thing even in smaller cities with good highschools. Reunions for 10,20,30,40 years are very common and attended by all, including teachers still alive, etc.