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)

#481

Post by Wintereise » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:47 PM UTC

babuskov wrote: post #456

michaelt wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN high school students. Can anyone comment on how this translates into results in adulthood, in the current age? Do we see more discoveries in fundamental science, more inventions, better medical care, or better-run businesses? As I don't speak Russian or Chinese, I don't really have a fair view and it would be easy for me to mistakenly under-estimate…

> fundamental science, more inventions, better medical care, or better-run businesses? University education fixes these problems. People who only finish high-school rarely do science later in life.

There's also something else. The best and brightest from these countries are rarely (if ever) retained in their homelands and end up migrating to one of the western nations.

Ultimately, regardless of how the high school education level might be, these countries win out.

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

#482

Post by EGreg » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:47 PM 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…

I always had the impression that Russians are more serious. Also Americans have developed tons of expressions for every nuance of greasing the wheels for business and relationships. Russians are more straightforward.

So it is with the kids. I don’t think there was a lot of “participation trophies” and idea that “you’re a winner just for trying”. It was realistic. Women in Russia are told to look beautiful by their mothers, for example, and they are expected wear makeup and heels just going out to the store or to work. Imagine a US mother saying that.

STEM in Russia and China’s schools is wayyy more advanced than USA.

Not just in Moscow but every city center in every former Soviet republic. It’s one of the things the Communists really instilled early on after taking over backwaters (at the time) like Uzbekistan (along with equal rights for women, 95% literacy and electricity). Compare that to pre-revolutionary Cuba or Hawaii, for instance, that USA took over.

I think right around Sputnik time and the cold war, the US had a major STEM crisis and started trying to teach math more. But really, most of our brightest students are just imported - and they’re happy to come.

Gonna drop this one in there, from Dr Kaku, on a panel discussing this exact question:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NK0Y9j_CGgM

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

#483

Post by chopin » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

iateanapple wrote: post #370

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…

> Doing well at your subjects in AU got you labelled as a nerd. As a Chinese student who studied in Australia for a few years I think you just misunderstand the culture. Most of the popular kids got good grades and were not labelled as nerds. And the nerd kids didn’t really get good grades either. I think Australians are very practical focused (maybe this is what you mean by anti-intellectual?). For example the frien…

Not being profound at statistics should be a strict no-go for anyone practicing medicine.

Many great discoveries come from linking different disciplines. I hope there is more to live than just a career. I am very grateful for the broad spectrum I've been given.

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

#484

Post by Fnoord » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

roveo wrote: post #359

golergka wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

What does this number, and the other one, refer to?

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

#485

Post by klmadfejno » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

nervousvarun wrote: post #462

paganel wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the major factors is this weird anti-intellectualism culture that just doesn't exist in Russia. It was the same thing in Romania, at least in the '90s, when I went to school/high-school. It was always strange to me seeing all those American movies of the "nerds"/geeks getting persecuted by the "cool" kids, it certainly didn't happen to kids in my school and I'm pretty sure it generally didn't happen to kids…

It's not that way anymore. That's even "propagated" to movies (see the scene in 21 Jump Street where they go back to high school and unsuccessfully try to persecute smart kids). But as an American someone in their mid-40s...can anecdotally say it was definitely true in the 80s-90s. It's a senseless/strange phenomenon that definitely existed but seems to have naturally died off. Guessing it's related to the increasing…

Idk. I graduated in the past decade. My school had a pretty expansive program of advanced classes and not advanced classes, which resulted in basically isolating the smart kids from the not so smart kids. Because of this, it was fine to be nerdy and smart. Yet in senior year there was an unexpected sort of social war when the not so smart kids wanted to control things like prom, and were unhappy when the rest of the school, who were never seen in their social circles, also had a voice. Got quite nasty. My area was relatively wealthy, and people probably had generally good lives. I think it would have been very unpleasant if it were a poor area with no separation of classes and more frequent trouble at home situations.

At the end of the day, if kids are struggling, they're going to feel frustrated. And they're going to take it out on the physically weakest kids and the ones who are most making them look bad by being good at school if they're not separated, protected, or somehow made mutually engaged (all of which are expensive things to implement). I don't think it has anything to do with anti intellectualism personally.

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

#486

Post by lxnn » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 12:58 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #405

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…

> 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 yo…

Also, the way mathematics is taught at high school might not prepare you well for the way you use it at university.

Maths in high school focuses more on applying methods (taking a derivative etc.); maths at university (even on a CS course) is more about constructing mathematical models and arguments.

It can almost feel like a completely different subject.

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

#487

Post by ajuc » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 1:05 PM 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…

I appreciate general knowledge and wide interest Polish shools can give you, especially after I worked with people from UK, and I noticed I knew more about their history than they did, despite graduating computer science :).

But one effect the Polish education system has is rampant cheating. It was expected (if officialy discouraged) that kids good at "hard sciences" will cheat on "humanities". Kids who were good at biology and wanted to become doctors were supposed to care about math and language less, etc. But they still had to have good average grades, so they were cheating on everything that wasn't on the entrance exams for medical schools (nowadays there's final exam at school instead of entrance exams at universities, but it changes nothing - there's still a few subjects you have to be good at and everything else you just have to have good grades in).

In effect adults are saying "this you should really know if you want to be X, and everything else you should somehow have good grades in, I don't care how".

So kids cheated on the subjects they weren't considering important for their future. I had wide interests and treated most subjects seriously but still I cheated on some geography tests because they were absurd - teacher expected us to remember top 5 exporters and importers of each of like 30 different resources and foods. And to remember how many tons of X each produced...

It was literally remembering tables of hundreds of numbers for 1 test and then forgetting them immediately. And that test was the same every year (data was from like 10 years ago :) ), and we had the test and the answers from the previous year. I'm sure the teacher knew it, but making a new one was too much hassle. It was basically an exerise in cheating the system and showing kids how absurd it is and how dumb you have to be to follow the rules.

And then there were subjects that were unimportant for everybody (no entrance exams depended on them), so even teachers teaching them expected everybody to cheat. And that was like 30% of all the subjects in high school - stuff like economy, plastic art, music, philosophy, religion, ethics, defense training, politics and society knowledge, even computer science (because computer science entrance exams were all about math, and computer science in high school was mostly microsoft office tutorial and playing games while teacher pretends to teach).

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

#488

Post by jojobas » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #399

jojobas wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a state standard in England and Wales (and another standard in Scotland). It's called the National Curriculum, although I'm not sure if it has a different name for A-levels. There are multiple implementations of that standard, in the form of exams that meet the standards. The government checks the exams satisfy their standards. For example, an exam on history might by on the 20th century Britain, and a diffe…

Again, the Russian standard doesn't give you choices. Everyone has to know logarithms, derivatives and certain chapters of history.

The advanced maths selective school will hammer you with more complicated geometry problems, and some contents of the first few uni courses.

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

#489

Post by ausbah » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #420

I have a feeling that TV/media really did play a huge role in the decline of intellectualism in the western world. The USA loves its TV, hollywood and celebrities. It's been reinforced throughout the culture and it makes a lot of people very very wealthy. The more time you spend watching tv the more money they make. Though here's the crux for them, educated people think more and do more so they don't make good custom…

Even if media is to blame for helping fueling anti-intellectual sentiments in the US, it's more likely an unintended byproduct than a massive conspiracy by media companies to purposely dumb down their consumers to buy more of their product.

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

#490

Post by ajuc » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

dreen wrote: post #372

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…

I also moved from the Polish to British system and I do agree with your first point, but not really with the second one. I really welcomed the ability to focus more (but not only) on things I was more into. A major difference for me was the approach to grading. In Poland, you might attempt to pass an exam until you do pass it. In Britain, you take an exam and you either pass or not. You can even pass the year if you…

One thing Polish education teaches is how to remember 100 random facts in 2 days and forget them immediately after the exam. This really trains short-term memory, but I don't think it's worth training it for 8+4+5=17 years so much :)

Also it teaches you that if you don't cheat the system on the subjects that doesn't matter to you - you will have worse grades than people who have the common sense to focus on a few subjects and cheat on everything else.

I guess it instills some healthy scepticism and antisystem attitude, but it can't be good for society if everybody first instinct is "is that rule for real, or bullshit like most of them?"