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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)

#171

Post by tsimionescu »

ratww wrote: post #142
tsimionescu wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not an expert by any means, but I believe one of the main reasons is that there is a fixed national curriculum, that includes many different domains, with the same standards for everyone, usually withab a huge focus on knowledge accumulation and rote learning. The mentality is often centered around knowing and being able to repeat facts and formulae. The curriculum often goes into deep detail on relatively obscure subjects with no or very little context. Combined with poor teachers (both in terms of performance and financially), this leads to many, if not most, students being relatively left behind.

For an example of the top-level mentality, the compulsory school system used to include K-12 until a few years ago. In high-school, you used to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 10, and organic chemistry in grades 11 and 12. After the move to K-10, the curriculum was adjusted to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 11, and organic in 10 and 12, with the cited reasoning being that you can't have students graduating out of high-school without knowing the basics of organic chemistry, can you? This, again, in a country where a good third or more of those students can actually barely read - they've been lost since around grade 2-3.

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

#172

Post by FredPret »

spoonjim wrote: post #144
seer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or smarter wars?

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

#173

Post by zozbot234 »

credit_guy wrote: post #49
lucas_codes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is dumbing down science teaching the fault of extreme progressive left and not, say, reduced education funding, favouring religious teaching, or even more likely, nuanced policy difficulties that don't fit nicely into a left/right divide?

Take New York City (which I'm familiar with, but it's likely the story is similar in many other places): - each public school has the same budget per student. There is no "reduced education funding" for schools in district X vs district Y, or for any school, because the budget per student is equal. Each school's budget is public, and published on the web. - favoring religious teaching: at least at the school my kids…

> Here's a sample math question ...

This is supposed to be a "challenging" problem? It seems quite obvious to me: we simply cannot answer the question as given, because we aren't told how many in the Centerville population are classed as 'both male and female', or 'neither male nor female'.

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

#174

Post by DrBazza »

whimsicalism wrote: post #166
DrBazza wrote: post #159

Went to university in the UK, met a bunch of Russian post-docs whilst I was a researcher, and they were some of the best mathematicians I'd met. Not unrelated, but today in the UK is A-Level results (for 18 yr olds), and the UK press and exam boards, as usual are reporting it as the 'best results ever'. This happens year on year. There's a lot of argument about education standards getting lower in the UK. My "anecdat…

This does not jive with my encounters with people who went to school in the 50s/60s. Just from interacting with people of different ages, it seems to me there was a marked improvement in quality of schooling, maybe in the 90s?

It depends what metric you're using for education improvement. For science based subjects, the fundamentals don't change. My narrow world view is maths and physics, and my data point of one, is that my peer group in the 1980s were taught to a lower level in maths (and physics) than in the 1950s/60s/70s, based on the content of O-level exam papers that we sat as mock exams. The fact was that we couldn't answer a percentage of the exams because we just weren't taught it.

The reverse wasn't true - we were not taught extra things that weren't in the exam, we were simply taught less.

I can't find a link, but there was talk of "remedial maths" lessons being taught at many universities in the UK to bring students up to the standards required for degrees because they're simply not taught at the same level any more. Universities on the other hand, don't have their curriculums or qualifications manipulated by the sitting government so their standards/requirements change much more slowly.

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

#175

Post by bodge5000 »

spoonjim wrote: post #141
toomanybeersies wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think its the same case for much of the west. Here in the UK, I remember maths being not the greatest but certainly every kid got through with a passable level of competance.

Unless you have a very high budget, which usually only private (or public as they're called in the uk, but they're the same thing) schools have, you can't have it both ways where both the weakest students pass and the strongest students excel.

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

#176

Post by LeanderK »

carlmr wrote: post #123

I had the same experience going from a French elementary school to a German school. What we were taught in second grade only popped up again in 6th grade in Germany. Then I went on exchange to the US in 10th grade and I noticed they were lagging behind the German system by about 2 years. So US vs France must be a 6 year lag.

how would you compare the workload in the other subjects in Germany vs France? And how would you rate the german math education?

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

#177

Post by ptero »

maga wrote: post #97

I went through the Soviet/Russian school system with all the advanced topics being covered in high school as others described here. My moment of zen was on my third year in one of the top tech universities in Moscow. There were quite a few students coming from Novosibirsk University who were comfortably ahead of the curve when it came to math. When they showed their transcript ("zachetka"), they had ~3000 hours of Ca…

My personal experience is that it wasn't just hours. Those who liked math spent a lot of time on it after classes. Those who didn't, avoided extras and still did OK (they would not go to top universities, but the base would be OK, with some practice, if they decide to go to a mid-level school).

The biggest difference for me in school was a consistent, well thought out program (one for the whole country) and books. A topic would be studied once, well, and there would be enough time to master the material. Consistency across subjects, too -- if physics covered a topic in, say, the second half of the grade 7, the math needed would be covered in the math classes before then.

What I now see in the US is horrible: teachers at grade N do not know for sure what the students already know, so they repeat a lot of the background, then jump around to cover a lot of material, much of which is never mastered. Which is considered OK -- it will likely be repeated in the same haphazard fashion next year. Or not, depending on what the next teacher decides.

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

#178

Post by whimsicalism »

r7fufhrjrududu wrote: post #165
toomanybeersies wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this would be a more credible concern if American teachers were equally empowered to their counterparts. To a large extent what you see out of 'foreign' students is a product of teacher's having adequate power to manage their classrooms while teaching students to standards. Meanwhile in America teacher's are shackled by their things like No Child Left Behind and a union that tolerates faculty getting physical…

The classes where teachers are getting physically assaulted are not the same classrooms raising future IMO gold medalists. Nor are they one repeal of No Child Left behind from becoming so.

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

#179

Post by markus_zhang »

Chinese here. We followed the Russian/Soviet system of math education for quite a while. The Soviet textbooks were and are still considered superior comparing to our own (from middle school straight to university). They have a certain quality that Chinese textbooks fail to grasp.

Nowadays many schools turn to the American system (I don't know why) and the requirements for math has been dropping for a decade. The inequality of teaching resources is obvious when you compare a student from a privileged school with one from say a country-side school. The government tries to equalize things but it's very difficult to go against the top teachers and rich dads/moms.

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

#180

Post by thinkingemote »

boomskats wrote: post #161
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'm Serbian and moved to the UK when I was 10. A lot of this is a bit hazy now, but I really clearly recall my bewilderment during the first class-wide 'mental arithmetic' tests in year 5 where I thought the whole class was playing a prank on me. In Serbia I remembered doing quadratics and even touching on differentiation in the afterschool classes, but over here in the UK they were expecting me to take 20 seconds to…

As a Brit, I was never any good at mental math at school, I still cannot do that hardest one without a calculator.

But later on, I swam like a fish in water in geometry, trig, logic and loved algebra and moved from the last of my year to one of the top. I was doing integration etc a good two years before it was being taught in the higher classes. These skills are good for programming and computers.

There was a limit; basically theorems, multi dimensional stuff and unreal? math, primes, pure math etc were completely out of my scope. Strange I guess, perhaps these are connected with being good at mental arithmetic?

My point is that I also think it's bizarre on the British obsession with mental maths early on, when for many algebra might be better and easier.

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