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American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

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Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#101

Post by leto_ii »

inter_netuser wrote: post #89
leto_ii wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience in my home country of Romania was similar to yours, however my conclusions couldn't be more different. > American schools are too soft on science in general. [...]The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science How on earth is brutality in teaching a good idea? What was the effect of this approach on the average Albanian or Romanian student? Sure it worked fine for a few of us, but overall the result…

PISA ranking? China and Singapore are at the very top. If you think what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger moms push their children. I've also went through what could be considered a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term. We had ~40 problem sets to solve every evening for homework, hours of work. I don't think anyone ever got an A+ in anything. If…

> China and Singapore are at the very top. If you think what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger moms push their children.

There are a bunch of different approaches that can lead to top scores in that ranking. notably Finland does well with a non-brutal approach.

> a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term.

the term was used by the parent, not by me. We just happened to assess its value differently.

> they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder sets added to their homework.

It depends on what you think the purpose of school should be. If you want people to understand the world they live in, understand the "why" of things, think critically and creatively etc. then problem sets and ritualistic humiliation during oral exams won't take you very far.

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#102

Post by seer »

petre wrote: post #72
leto_ii wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience in my home country of Romania was similar to yours, however my conclusions couldn't be more different. > American schools are too soft on science in general. [...]The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science How on earth is brutality in teaching a good idea? What was the effect of this approach on the average Albanian or Romanian student? Sure it worked fine for a few of us, but overall the result…

> Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on in life? Most people will do just fine with basic math training because it's what you normally need later on in life. Most of my math training in the Eastern European school system has probably gone to waste. I only saw the point of a…

I think its not that it has to, its just more challenging and rewarding. I’ve read a lot about bulling and social problems in USA schools, but so almost none of that myself i Eastern Europe.

I think the subjects where so hard that it forced kids to cooperate, smart kids where considered a resource that potential bullies didn’t like to harm, as they would help them in the future. Additionally there was this sense of … maybe “esprit de corps” as we all were going through the same tough training.

I think that those hard problems were actually very rewarding and I saw very little of the “teenage problems” that are so prominently displayed in American media.

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#103

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

s5300 wrote: post #75
ardit33 wrote: post #7

My sister sent my niece to one, as even her 'private' middle school in Newton, MA, was just not strong enough. She did sign up my niece in every summer class she could, without overloading her. It was always my nieces' choice, and half the time she choose arts and half science. Now, my niece is able to do college entry level data science classes (she is about to become a Junior in HighSchool), and she actually likes…

>Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and progress in this country, There is literally a major political party in the US that parrots science to be fake & that religion/faith in god is all that matters. Also, that "progress" (in a technological/scientific sense) is a bad thing Last I checked, it was not the progressives that identify with this line of thinking. Come on.

How about they both are idiots?

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#104

Post by jjgreen »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #92
farmerstan wrote: post #47

This is the video by the daughter of the founder of the Russian School of Math. We sent our son there over the summer, he enjoyed it and all the kids were pretty advanced in the class. California seems to want to hold everyone back in the name of equity. But that will force more people into the private school system, which is exactly what we did. I don’t trust the California government to have my children’s best inte…

Oregon governor Kate Brown has signed a law that allows students to graduate without proving they can read, write or do math. The law had overwhelming Democrat support & is justified on the basis that it will benefit non-white students. https://thepostmillennial.com/oregon-governor-signs-new-law-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_Millennial

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#105

Post by dkn775 »

eps wrote: post #98
xmprt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are pretty challenging problems and they also require a bit of working out. How many of these problems are students expected to solve in, say, and hour long test?

These represent classes of problems and the test checks which classes students have covered in their studies and which they slacked on. These two are straight-forward problems, both will be allocated some basic nominal time. You either know how to solve them or you don't. Sometimes there'd be problems that are more puzzling, because they'd combine several problem classes and will take time to unfold (this is typical…

From the examples I guess it is the ability to intuitively manipulate fractions? Like “oh that’s kind of like .8 of this other thing so it’s close to X” ?

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#106

Post by toomanybeersies »

nostrademons wrote: post #14

My college had a decent-sized contingent of Bulgarian & Romanian international students. The difference in their math abilities upon entry was striking. While most of my American-born classmates struggled in discrete math, linear algebra, and vector calc, my Bulgarian friend was like "I learned this when I was 9." They were frequently tapped as TAs by the professors, because they understood the material on a level th…

I'd be wary of forming an opinion on foreign education systems from international students, as they're generally of more privileged extraction compared to the unwashed masses who can't afford to study overseas.

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#107

Post by tester34 »

ardit33 wrote: post #21
picture wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also out of curiosity, from where do you draw the connection that the lackluster schooling is caused by "extreme progressive liberals"? Maybe I'm just not well versed enough in politics but it appears to jump straight to that conclusion following your personal experience.

Recent trend to dumb down math and calling 'racist'. Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that will suffer the most. Most immigrants are poor, and don't have the connections and money to go to private tutoring route and rely heavily on public education. Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan https://forums.somd.com/threads/virginia-dumbi…

> Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that will suffer the most.

How?

You have advantage of being aware

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#108

Post by seer »

vanviegen wrote: post #26
inglor_cz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"reduced education funding" But Albania can finance rigorous teaching of science ... ? USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient solutions. For a less politically charged example: compare expenses of the Falcon rocket family to those of the Space Launch System.

Teaching might be (or might have been) a prestigious and relatively well-paying job in Albania. I wouldn't know - would you?

Don’t know about Albania, but in Bulgaria the teachers had very low pay, (so were / are nurses btw). I think the difference was that they were very respected.

When I managed to attend teacher parent meetings I could see the deference people had for their children’s teachers. And children also deeply respected them for the most part.

The scenes from the beginning of Breaking Bad for example are rather alien to me - I can understand them, but I’ve never encountered such things when I was a kid.

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#109

Post by marco_craveiro »

As a Portuguese citizen, I was not exposed to Russian mathematics during my entire academic career until I entered university. Whilst slightly better than the UK, our educational system was also not brilliant when it came to maths, and we only started to do calculus close to Year 12 (the last year before university). Anyways, my one and only brush with Russian mathematics was as follows - I flunked Integral and Differential calculus on Year 1 at uni, and was getting really worried it would take me a while to do this subject. In Portugal you need to repeat a subject until you get a pass grade. Then a cousin told me I had to "do Piskunov".

In those days you didn't buy books, you'd photocopy them, so he gave me a very large photocopied manuscript of Piskunov [1] in Spanish. I had never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a game; it had very little instructions, and it started with absolutely trivial exercises, but continued on and on, relentlessly. And somehow, it got you hooked. I read the entire set of books compulsively, just to see what the next exercise would throw at me. I finished my exam really quickly and got 95% (in my rush, I made one mistake in the exam). My teacher even asked me about some of the ways in which I solved some of the exercises.

[1] https://mirtitles.org/2012/03/06/integeral-and-differential-...

Re: American parents are sending their kids to 'Russian math' (2017)

#110

Post by thundergolfer »

mjevans wrote: post #4

By about 1/4th of the way through I wanted to just know what 'russian math' looked like. By Halfway it was pretty clear they weren't going to tell me. I skimmed the last half, nothing stood out. What does "Russian Math" look like?

Check out 'Word Problems in Russia and America' by Andrei Toom. Toom contrasts the poor state of the American math curriculum with his experiences with the Russian style, particularly its centering of 'word problems'.
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