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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)

#201

Post by petre »

whimsicalism wrote: post #151
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.

Absolutely this. People seem to ignore selection effects when taking with immigrants from other countries, especially students. These people typically come from the richest/most connected families in their home country* *If they don't come from the Americas

It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their home country because of economic reasons. This is the primary reason for immigration from Eastern Europe to the EU and the UK. If you're in the US, yes, the visa selection program requirements make your average immigrant come from richer or more connected families. For instance quite a number of people left my country to the US using connections in neo protestant church communities - that's what I've meant by connected.

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

#203

Post by whimsicalism »

petre wrote: post #201
whimsicalism wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this. People seem to ignore selection effects when taking with immigrants from other countries, especially students. These people typically come from the richest/most connected families in their home country* *If they don't come from the Americas

It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their home country because of economic reasons. This is the primary reason for immigration from Eastern Europe to the EU and the UK. If you're in the US, yes, the visa selection program requirements make your average immigrant come from richer or more connected families. For instance quite a number of people left my country to the US using connections in neo prote…

What country?

Even many of those who left for economic reasons come from richer families that are leaving because of new policies that are less friendly to the wealthy or previously privileged classes. See, for instance, white emigration from South Africa or Zimbabwe to the United States.

Also, to be clear, this is specifically an American perspective and even more specifically, about international students - labor migration from Eastern Europe to the EU is of a decidedly different character and more analogous to the comments I was making about people from the Americas in the US.

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

#204

Post by whimsicalism »

r7fufhrjrududu wrote: post #197
whimsicalism wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The classrooms where teachers are getting assaulted can't raise gold medalists because the teachers can't create an environment condusive to any real amount of learning.

The problems start much earlier (in early childhood).

I say that as someone who has experienced both sorts of classrooms in my lifetime, which I think is a rarer experience.

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

#205

Post by lordnacho »

exporectomy wrote: post #195
lordnacho wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems unlikely that there's just a smart/dumb setting inside of each kid. Material conditions being equal don't mean that everything is equal. Some people have parents who value certain things and push their kids. Other people have some anxieties to get over before they can perform. Some people like being ahead of the class and put in effort to stay there.

But mainly, some kids are born smarter and some "dumber" and there's nothing you can do to change the dumb ones to smart.

It's a deep conversation but I reckon it's more like weightlifting.

Some people are naturally stronger and some are weaker. But if you train, you will be stronger than you were, regardless.

You might not become world champion with weak genes, but you'll be stronger than everyone who doesn't train.

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

#206

Post by locallost »

I am also from Eastern Europe, but did my Bachelor in the west. For a lot of people there things like limits, series etc. were almost like greek. Speaking of greek, we did some group study and there was a person there who kept saying E this E that. I was perplexed until I saw he meant Sigma as in sum.

But those who didn't know learned it and that was that. I'm not sure it's really that beneficial to force a lot on kids before they are ready to use it or know what it's for. I remember 10th/11th grade sitting and eventually realizing all this stuff we do... I will eventually need to do it to make sure e.g. a building does not crash. And that scared me to death, I did not feel prepared at all. When things are thrown at you before you're ready and can really understand it, it's sort of like you lack a connection to what is essential and what you might be able to do with it on your own. You do your little examples and tasks and solve them, but outside of that context you don't really understand it. I don't think any educational system has figured that out for the majority of kids.

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

#207

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

Wildgoose wrote: post #193
paganel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romanian here, the "I learned this when I was 9" might have been a slight exaggeration so that your friend could make a point, but as an another anecdata I can say that I distinctly remember one of my first calculus classes while I was in 9th grade (I think I was 15 years old at the time) and our maths teacher trying to explain to us how real numbers are defined and, more importantly, what that definition really mean…

UK citizen here. More specifically, English - the 4 "home" UK nations have different Education systems. I learned Calculus at 14, but I am now 56. We still used log tables when I was at school, calculators were only just being introduced. From what I have seen from my children, our maths education has been seriously dumbed down.

>our maths education has been seriously dumbed down.

I hear this complaint form nearly every country. It seems like the system has found this "hack" where if you dumb things down enough, then scores go up across the board, giving the impression that the children are performing better, so the people in charge can meet or exceed their KPIs, and everybody's a "winner".

For example, in Romania it was very difficult to get top grades at schools a few decades ago so those grades were used as entry criterias in universities, but nowadays everyone can get top grades without a sweat by carefully rigging the system, so universities have introduced their own entry exams since when everyone has top grades then they are all worthless.

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

#208

Post by javajosh »

thinkingemote wrote: post #180
boomskats wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

I felt the same way, but I noticed professors I admired often doing arithmetic in their head, clearly because they enjoyed doing it. So since then I make an effort to mentally calculate. And you know what? It's a more interesting hobby than you'd think. Whatever technique you adopt (or grow, in my case), it's a good, concrete, occasionally useful exercise in breaking down a problem into smaller parts, and then combining those simple results into something else.

Or maybe it's vanity. But I will say it's depressing to see all the cashiers (in the US) that can't seem to do any kind of math in their head, not even to minimize change (which seems totally ubiquitous in many other parts of the world; in fact, some cultures are aggressive about optimizing your change - China comes to mind).

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

#209

Post by seer »

rrss wrote: post #8
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…

Out of curiosity, do you recall which ap physics course you took?

Not op, but I remember what got me into sciences was the “kids soviet encyclopedia”. Specifically the physics section.

We had “big soviet encyclopedia” and “kid” one on our bookshelf (A point of pride for my grandparents). Nobody told me that by “kids” the authors meant “teens”, so around 13yo I devoured those books whole.

Taught me structure of the atom, chemistry and lots of fascinating physical phenomena. And made most of the physics material easy to grasp up till last HS grade.

It had little maths, concentrating more on the understanding rather than the rigorous descriptions, which made the maths to describe them quite obvious, when I had to learn them in school.

Not sure if the current state of wikipedia is better or worse for that purpose- it was much better structured and paced for sure.

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

#210

Post by sega_sai »

It's a weird article. I think this idea of 'Russian math' is very nebulous, and is probably used as marketing tool nowadays by some schools abroad. I have graduated from one of the top physics/maths high schools in Russia, and yes we had great math education there, but that was an outlier. Outside a handful of schools the math education is pretty dismal. And even in the good math schools there are different ways of teaching maths. I.e. there is a famous system of 'sheets' where the actual teaching of formal theory is very limited, while most of learning is done by solving problems (given to you on a sheet) and then presenting solutions to the teacher. But it wasn't used in our school for example.

What definitely exists in Russia (or at least some big cities) is a system of free after-school classes, where you can go and learn how to solve olympiad-type math problems and become more interested in maths. That is definitely extremely useful to identify a few people who are talented in maths.

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