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Rice Paddies And Math Tests

gladwell.com

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Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#21

Post by eru »

epoweripi wrote: post #14
adi92 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most schools in urban india and a large number of the rest are 'english-medium'.. which means i learnt math in math class (in english) and learnt to count in hindi in hindi class.. but never had to solve a math problem in hindi i am currently learning japanese and can agree about the numbers being syllablically small.. but this language has it own complexities - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counters which re…

I agree with the comment above. But there is a large rural population in India that 'thinks numbers' in the native language. May be the article is true only for numbers in the CJK (Chinese-Japense-Korean) languages. Atleast in the 3 Indian languages I know, numbers are bad in all of them - as bad as it is in English.

Turkish is good in this respect. They even have have regular numbers from 11 to 19.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#22

Post by ken »

I thought he had a good point, but then I realized his intro test was rigged: twice he said "say them out loud", so I tried to memorize the sound of the numbers.

But then I thought about how I remember passwords, PINs, and phone numbers, and I don't memorize any of these by the sound of their digits (perhaps because it would be so inefficient in English!).

I remember sequences of digits (or chars) by visualizing how I use them, i.e., spatially. In this case, I pretended the 7 digits made up a phone number and mentally placed them on a phone. Now I can't seem to forget 485-3976.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#23

Post by light3 »

tomsaffell wrote: post #6

Interesting article overall, but I found the following a little spurious: >For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It's differentiating the denominator and the numerator. It's not obvious to me that one is better than the other, and he's not providing data to support such a claim. Is it just me, or is he just pl…

I agree - Gladwell has the facts right, but his theories on the reason for the facts are quite off from reality, imo.

Even if it is hard to count numbers in english, it is still easy to see the pattern in numerical symbols. Either way it is certainly not a momentous task for a 4 year old to form relations words to numerical symbols, with their abundance of ability in memory. This is why Gladwell's theory falls apart - a much more likely theory is that math ability is more readily determined by HARD work or innate genius.

And concerning his rice farming theory, I wouldn't know whether to laugh or take it as an insult, because to me it is that ridiculous. His claiming effectively, that farmers in China work the hardest, because they farmed rice. On how many levels does this seem inconsistent?

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#24

Post by DaniFong »

xiaoma wrote: post #20
mechanical_fish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not reading the hypothesis correctly: Asian children, by contrast, don't face nearly that same sense of bafflement... maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle. The argument is not that the clarity of the Chine…

Pinyin.info is largely devoted to an anti-character crusade that doesn't represent mainstream academic thought. Mark, if you're reading this, I don't mean any disrespect to the work you've put into making the resource it is. I've sent many people there for the rules on pinyin punctuation and spacing. DeFrancis was the undisputed pre-eminent sinologist of his time, however many of the literacy claims are unfounded. Th…

Taiwan is also mostly urban, whereas the literacy rate in China is reduced by those from rural, far flung provinces.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#25

Post by noonespecial »

ced wrote: post #11
noonespecial wrote: post #8

Sounds fishy to me. In german, numbers are logical but excruciatingly long to say in words. There's no huge lag in german math skills because it takes a little longer to say the numbers than in english.

123 Eins zwei drei Hundert drei und zvanzig Logical? (hope I didn't make a mistake there...)

Sorry. I meant logical about equal to english. Just takes longer to say in german.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#27

Post by blader »

walterk wrote: post #18
blader wrote: post #17

According to this logic, shouldn't kids from Kansas or Iowa do way better in math? I'm Chinese myself, and I think there might be a simpler reason. Our schools public schools are way tougher. I'm talking 7 am to 5 pm, non stop learning hard. We're talking about doing trig in the sixth grade and calculus in middle school. Those are the kinds of schools our parents went to and those are the kinds of schools they send t…

> From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than from genetics. This is actually his point: the chapter from which this excerpt is taken is from the second half of the book, which is all about how our behavior (and thus our performance) is profoundly influenced by our cultural heritage. There's a great chapter, for instance, on how cultural differences regarding deference to authority resul…

Guess I should have read the OP - you caught me - tl;dr

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#28

Post by kajecounterhack »

blader wrote: post #17

According to this logic, shouldn't kids from Kansas or Iowa do way better in math? I'm Chinese myself, and I think there might be a simpler reason. Our schools public schools are way tougher. I'm talking 7 am to 5 pm, non stop learning hard. We're talking about doing trig in the sixth grade and calculus in middle school. Those are the kinds of schools our parents went to and those are the kinds of schools they send t…

Actually, we tend to suck at sports because we're shorter in stature and we're slower at building certain muscles. I would know. We have like what, 50 guys on my school's cross country team. 40 are Asian, but 5/10 of the caucasian guys to the best out of the 50. They get injured less, even if they aren't as good early on for some strange reason. They also improve faster.

Though you have to admit, with all that video game playing, it's no small wonder that asians are pretty decent at baseball.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#29

Post by ghshephard »

mlLK wrote: post #26

If you passed, post here; I've been doing math all night so I kinda cheated. ;)

If you think 4 8 5 3 9 7 6 (Which I think was the string) is hard to remember at a glance, Try:

  FDC2:D343:5602:32:213:50FF:FE01:3842
I'd love to know what the cognitive impact of IPv6 has been on our ability to remember long strings of numbers.

Re: Rice Paddies And Math Tests

#30

Post by interestedparty »

cellis wrote: post #5
speek wrote: post #4

This is why we need to teach numbers and concepts, not names. I admit that the English number system is flawed, but that's what digits are for, right? 37 = 3(10s)7. Its just a shortcut, we can express 37 to be 3*10 + 7, but its just not worth saying every time

You still have to say "thirty seven", or mentally say "three times ten plus seven", before you do the calculation.

I think his point, however, was that even an exclusive English speaker can communicate (in writing) arithmetic calculations without involving English. You don't have to 'mentally say' anything in English, so the inefficiency is mitigated.
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