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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)

#141

Post by spoonjim »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #106
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.

Not just privileged extraction, but likely high IQ. The Russian brain teasers are to get smart students excelling. The American system is set up to get the weak student stumbling to the finish line. The American school system isn’t designed to produce high achievers which is why the high achievers are produced by the parents and not by the schools.

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

#142

Post by ratww »

tsimionescu wrote: post #91
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…

While this is partly true, and a point of national pride (I'm Romanian), it's also important to realize that this is the positive end of a very unequal system. If you have the good luck of having a good teacher, and enough material conditions to focus on learning, school will leave you with quite a good array of knowledge, especially in Maths and sciences. However, the majority of people don't have this luck, and the…

Oh wow, thanks for the post, this is really insightful.

Do you know why students have to resort to cheat and corruption for passing tests and going trough the K-10 system? Is it some external factor for the students, is it just lack of good teachers, or a combination? Thanks.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

codetrotter wrote: post #134
skzv wrote: post #121

When I started high school in Canada, my math grades were pretty bad. Probably in the 60%s (a C letter grade). I remember staring at a quadratic equation, struggling to understand why those 3 terms drew a curve. I had no intuition for it. The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th gr…

> I can pull up some photos if anyone is interested. Yes please!

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by spoonjim »

seer wrote: post #99
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?

I have a feeling it was more about the quality of the teachers than anything else. I moved from “Deep” Russia itself to the periphery of the USSR (Bulgaria) when I was in first grade, and my parents had the foresight to make me repeat that grade so as to help me with learning a new language. The quality difference was astounding. In 1992 Russia by first grade I was learning english with flash cards technique, drawing…

Respect for teachers is a huge part of it. People want status as much as they want money. If culturally America venerated teachers the way it venerates soldiers we’d have fewer wars and smarter people.

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

#145

Post by inter_netuser »

lordnacho wrote: post #128
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? They do just fine because they aren't selected to do jobs where they need those kinds of skills, because they tend not to have them. If they were taught the stuff at least they would have the choice. I'm not in favour of brut…

I don't think it brutalizes anyone. Capable kids must be challenged, or they get bored. Kids that coulndt keep up went to a different track.

at the very minimum, pressure during oral exams taught to work against the clock, develop conviction and do your best to defend your position.

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

#146

Post by bovine3dom »

hyperman1 wrote: post #131
skzv wrote: post #121

When I started high school in Canada, my math grades were pretty bad. Probably in the 60%s (a C letter grade). I remember staring at a quadratic equation, struggling to understand why those 3 terms drew a curve. I had no intuition for it. The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th gr…

Are any of these textbooks available? Preferably not in Russian, I can read English, French, German and Dutch.

https://archive.org/details/mir-titles has a vast selection. The books by Irodov are generally well regarded in particular.

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

#147

Post by huhtenberg »

andi999 wrote: post #100
credit_guy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample problem for K-1 [1]: "Jane fills a bag with three types of chips. There are 3-point, 4-point and 7- point chips. Jane picks 3 chips worth 15 points. Which chips did she pick?" Sample problem for grades 5-6 [2]: "Pinocchio drank half a cup of black coffee. He then filled the cup back up with milk and drank one third of the mixture. Again he filled the cup to the top with milk, drank one sixth of the mixture and…

I don't like the second question. Probably the kid is supposed to see the 'trick' :he drank a full cup of coffee since he didn't refill coffee and drank all. He added 1/2, 1/3 and 1/6 of a cup of milk and drank it all, so (3+2+1)/6=1. He drank the same amount of coffee and milk. I think it is ok as a brain teaser, but there will probably be one kid in the class to see it and all the other kids feel dumb or whatever.…

#2 relies on understanding how numbers "work", i.e. on having spent time on playing with them.

#5a is a factorization exercise.

In general, Russian approach to the math includes exposing kids to the toolset as well as the theory. This particular case is solved this way, that is solved that way, etc. Keep on it for a while and it tends to develop an intuition for knowing right away which problem is solved with which approach. So, yeah, if there are shortcuts, you use them. If there aren't any, you brute-force it.

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

#149

Post by Dah00n »

b112 wrote: post #137
skzv wrote: post #121

When I started high school in Canada, my math grades were pretty bad. Probably in the 60%s (a C letter grade). I remember staring at a quadratic equation, struggling to understand why those 3 terms drew a curve. I had no intuition for it. The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th gr…

What's happened in Canada, is that curriculum is designed to teach to the weakest student in a subject. This is thought of as being fair, of helping, for of course everyone is intellectually equal. Thus, those who can accel, are denied their future, for those which will leave high school, and never touch (for example) advanced math again. Equality comes from recognising our differences, and enabling best outcomes for…

Yes, exactly this. The amount of children who lost interest in a topic because of systems like this must be high. I clearly remember how I thought maths was way too easy and eventually I lost interest. Sadly I was lazy so I didn't do anything to use my skills (though one could argue it isn't the job of the child) and ended up not doing all my homework and just making up the answer on the spot when called to the blackboard, so today I'm very average which I guess is a success in the eyes of the system.

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

#150

Post by nicolas_t »

gnat wrote: post #36
ardit33 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it was a communist country, everyone had the same conditions (crappy), and everyone had the same fricking clothes (only two clothing factories on the whole country), and same teachers (and no private schooling allowed), and we had the same books, and no calculators. And it is clear, if all conditions are equal, still people are not born equal. Some kids are just smarter than others, and some are just dummies, o…

Do you have data or anecdata on the effect of repeating an entire year? In many modern Western schools that'd be frowned upon as punitive and as likely to provoke a "well screw YOU!" response or ingrain "I must really be stupid" mindset.

Anecdotal but both my parents repeated a year (that was in the sixties in France), they went on to become a teacher teaching primary school teachers how to educate children for one and a headmistress at a relatively large primary school for the other.

Both of them looking back thought that repeating a year was a good thing for them, they went from being struggling average/below average students to top of their class and regained their confidence.

I think it really depends, in a place and time where repeating classes is more common, it maybe doesn't really destroy confidence as much whereas in areas where it's rare, then the psychological impact is much worse.

Also, one thing to note, both of them, in their experience with education, saw much better results when children were separated by level than when classes were mixed together for exactly the reason the OP mentioned. A top student can help bring an average student up but when there are both top students and very below average students, the teacher has to make the choice to either focus on the below average student or the top students and neither of those choices are good.

In France, we've had a push toward lowering the overall level and removing any elitism at schools. This has increased the amount of kids who graduate from high school with the Baccalauréat which is needed for university but has lowered the level of kids actually going to university (especially at engineering schools and elite institutions) and reduced the value of a university degree. It's a bit similar to what's happening in the US in STEM and I think it's a bad calculation for the long term competitiveness of the country.

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