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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)

#661

Post by a-saleh »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #603
TeMPOraL wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My university did it, but because the entrance exams can't evaluate students well, while a semester is quite a more precise and prolonged test.

Yes, I agree it can work out fairly well :-)

On the other hand, I have seen a prof. literaly say something along the lines "Dear students, my purpose here is not to teach you anything, just weed out 50% of you"

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

#662

Post by agumonkey »

Koshkin wrote: post #608
realbarack wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paraphrased anecdote I heard about French math education: "In America, they start by teaching you how to add two numbers, then once you've mastered that you learn to subtract, then once you've got that down you learn to multiply and divide and so forth. In France they tell you: this is an arithmetic object. The operations on it are add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It's simple! It's a good way of cranking out a…

To the question "what is 2 + 3" a French primary school pupil replied: "3 + 2, since addition is commutative". He did not know what the sum was equal to and could not even understand what he was asked about! https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html

To be honest, what he's criticizing is also what is lacking in post-primary school math education. The mechanical reduction (3 + 2 -> 5) leads to a road block when you start thinking into solving equations.. because there's no single path of reduction. You need to see the formulas as material you can transform in your mind.

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

#663

Post by wutbrodo »

knownastron wrote: post #591
wutbrodo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely it. I have a math-heavy job and play/write music, and the same phenomenon plays out in both situations: when reading sheet music or thinking in music theory is in your muscle memory, your entire conscious mind can focus on the actual, creative task at hand. This should be obvious from any number of examples, from driving a car to typing as a programmer. Reducing the friction between your brain and y…

This might be controversial but this is why I like Python a lot. It just allows me to think about the problem without wrangling with syntax.

I really dislike dealing with large engineering systems in Python, but I fully agree when I just need to solve a self-contained problem and don't need to worry as much about it being maintainable or readable (or more accurately, don't need to worry about interacting with Python code that other people have written). I currently work a lot with both Python and C++, and I find myself occasionally trying to write C++ Pythonically and it's a huge headache (eg map/filter or list comprehensions are infinitely more readable than stuff like std::transform).

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

#664

Post by azernik »

CalChris wrote: post #653
azernik wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

61A was easy in terms of math, but hard in terms of everything else. Every student I met who had never programmed before taking 61A found it intellectually quite challenging, both before and after the switch to Python; even without math, thinking in terms of computation and execution is not natural. Given that second-hand experience, I found the excision of all of SICP's math from the curriculum to be quite a good ch…

(As you know) most of the lower div EECS courses inherit slide decks and the coverage is set by the department. CS70 has a wonderful set of notes which should be a book. I regularly go through the CS61C, CS152 and CS252 decks; those are great Berkeley classes. CS162 has a good set and then Kubi has his which even better. Hilfinger's CS61A notes were quite good. The deck the EE40 prof used was based on a previous seme…

Don't know if the workload was all that hard compared to, say, the experience of my MIT friends, but the level of intellectual rigor and methodical thought was high.

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

#665

Post by mygo »

saagarjha wrote: post #198
mygo wrote: post #180

Is following along and learning / practicing math directly from a textbook still the most effective way to learn math? Now that we have devices in our pockets and on our desktops with more and more capabilities that have educational use cases such as interactivity and AR, how would a calculus lesson be made in 2020? Could we just go down the street, aim our devices at cars passing by, or cars speeding up from a stop…

I think that's a great way to get an intuitive understanding of the concepts, as an introduction to the subject, but at some point you really do have to sit down with numbers and equations and learn the theory behind it all and apply it to examples that aren't constrained by the reality you can physically experience in a classroom.

You would certainly have to sit down with numbers and equations, but that still doesn’t automatically imply that a textbook is the best way. You can derive numbers and equations via an app for example.

My question is this: if you always had the textbook’s author, who is an expert instructor with decades of teaching experience instantly available, in person, whenever you want a lesson or to be reminded of an equation or want to learn more about a subject, at no harm to him and his well-being: under which situations would you opt for the textbook?

To me it feels like a textbook is one way to store and transfer and spread knowledge, but is it automatically the best way to ever do so? Or is the textbook simply one technology, and we are still searching for the best way to teach as many people as possible with the resources and technologies at our disposal?

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

#666

Post by mav3rick »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #623
sergiotapia wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet you use to access content in seconds was created by those elites.

Sounds like hagiography to me. There were lots of ordinary, non-prodigies that built ARPANet, TCP/IP, the Unix/Windows network stack and HTTP. Plenty work at companies that build the network planes, like Cisco and AWS and Microsoft.

Policies can't be decided based on your insecurities. You don't want anyone to be better perceived than you even when they may be objectively better. All your elitism comments say the same thing.

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

#667

Post by [deleted] »

graynk wrote: post #660
missosoup wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's shown in 180 countries worldwide and very popular internationally (Including Russia) If you pick 10 random people in Russia and ask them about this show, all 10 will either not have heard of it or react with disdain. I have no idea where you get the notion that it's popular in Russia. > It's easy to say we aren't popular because we are smarter than everyone else I was popular in Russia. Then I had difficulty f…

> If you pick 10 random people in Russia and ask them about this show, all 10 will either not have heard of it or react with disdain. I have no idea where you get the notion that it's popular in Russia. And that's why it has 8.6 on Kinopoisk? I don't like it either, but imaginary statistic is not a statistic and your social circle is not the whole country. > I learned to act like an idiot and not reveal my 'nerdy' (a…

[deleted]

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

#668

Post by nickik »

What all of this shows is that education and economy are really not very related. This book makes the case:

> The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

What happens is that companies just hire people who have proven that they are not dumb enough to drop out of school and just did what they had to to move on with their lives.

In the end the Western countries are richer, not because the students are great, but because they have great opportunity and learn what they need to, so they can get that opportunity.

The Soviet Union really was great at showing this, lots of super smart people, good schools, lots of government investment in high tech, more effective intellectual property theft then China now, cheap natural resources, cheap oil and so on. Jet they couldn't really make a competitive economy.

Teach people the basics as efficiently as possible, show them where they can learn more if they want to, give them some resources to do so if they want to and let them find their way in a market economy.

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

#669

Post by nickik »

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…

CRT is postmodernism, witch is basically what depressed Communists came up with to continue to hope they get communism. The amount of inroads stuff like this has made, specially in universities is beyond sad.

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

#670

Post by nickik »

DeathArrow wrote: post #360
red_admiral wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That assumes that universities matter for the economy. And that is not really all that clear.

Soviet Union had great schools, doesn't mean their economy was doing well.

The US is still doing well even when its school system and even university system have not really been that great overall.

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