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Math from Three to Seven

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Re: Math from Three to Seven

#111

Post by 0xEF »

082349872349872 wrote: post #102
tempfile wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School is where you kid spends the majority of the time. If they find it boring, and the school is unable/unwilling to provide enrichment, then it is an uphill battle to resist that. The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves. There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to unde…

Being a product of the US school system, the most important lesson it taught me is that teachers as well as students are caught up in a system that's bigger than they are, so in order to educate oneself, one need merely (a) organise one's own time effectively, but (b) avoid doing so indiscreetly, such that it could force other pawns to call one's lack of genuine participation to the attention of the Man. 90% of succe…

I agree, but would like to add that the US public school system also has a bad habit of teaching to the test, namely standardized testing like the ACT or SAT. As it turns out, my time would have been better spent learning how to budget long term or navigating the US healthcare system as opposed to learning maths rarely seen in the wild or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. The information imparted to me during the entire four years of high school has largely been forgotten, "replaced" by more practical knowledge that I wish I'd had even a tiny bit of upon entering adulthood.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#112

Post by 082349872349872 »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #6
lovegrenoble wrote: post #4

The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world. Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.

Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.

I bet a lot of scientific talent was inspired (on either side* of the Iron Curtain) by the genre of fiction this dude is reading: https://barykin-pin-up.ru/#/i/kniga-luchshaya-podruga

* Lem (Cyberiad, etc.) was all I could get of theirs, on mine.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#113

Post by wizzwizz4 »

eru wrote: post #93
noemit wrote: post #81

USSR was feminist in some regards. Women had women-only spaces to learn math and science. There is a lot more equality of performance in STEM in former soviet populations.

As mentioned in the article, that might be completely explained by their comparative poverty.

> This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.

This isn't a complete explanation: we can see this by looking at other STEM fields. The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. You don't get such a dramatic demographic shift because of innate tendencies, but this was contemporaneous with a shift from programming being considered low-status to high-status work. Is this perhaps social, rather than directly economic?

To take an example from elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072): I can see the “you must use this method” prescription hitting girls harder than boys, since girls tend to drift towards copying / collaborative play, and boys tend to drift towards competitive play. This prescription might make mathematics seem less like play, to girls – which would be ironic, since real mathematics is an incredibly collaborative endeavour.

(Which raises the question: do girls inherently prefer copying play, and boys inherently prefer competition play? Who knows? I suspect not, but I think it'll be a long time before we find out.)

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#114

Post by 082349872349872 »

cyberax wrote: post #41
Onavo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely. Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women fr…

Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker. I'm not joking. But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor. This was very much a cultural thing, pushed by the government (engineers are useful!). Another thing, there was a huge societal pressure to excel at school. It was common for parents to check their children's marks every day. There's a very famous picture about it…

in case anyone else were interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NlnJsCEzSM "The country of undone homework"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpygndkMSWA "Vovka in a Faraway Kingdom"

(I was already shocked that one of the leading roles in the romcom Три плюс два was a physicist, but then again Young Sheldon might provide evidence that pop culture in the Old Country is more STEM-accepting now than it had been in my day?)

EDIT: I love how the exclamation point cries out "Halt!" and the question mark demands "Where [do you think you're going]?" (and the doodle of Kyzya)

EDIT2: Vovka needs much more russian-specific cultural background than Homework. I recognise the golden fish (Только ты — рыба моей мечты), but not any of the other tales. I'll probably eventually run across filmstrips explaining each/each family of tales, but if anyone would care to give pointers to specific ones, I wouldn't mind any spoilers!

Is the "sam" of the samovar the same as the "sam" of "sdelai sam"?

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#115

Post by d--b »

082349872349872 wrote: post #110
d--b wrote: post #89

The main cultural difference is that Americans don’t value maths and physics as much as they value law and business. Harvard Law school is still the thing you aim for when you’re a smart kid. MIT is what you aim when you’re good AND you’re really into it. In France, the top thing to do is go to Polytechnique, which is an engineer school created by Napoleon. So culturally French people push their kids towards learning…

the provenance is unclear, but somehow Napoleon wound up with both a construction problem and a theorem to his name (if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?)

> if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?

Usually business school, HEC is the second highest viewed thing. ENA is something you may do later, either after political science studies, or after polytechnique, or business school.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#116

Post by f1shy »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #103
082349872349872 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two? > " Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back " —PH

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opp…

I still have to make to that point, but answer from what I remember from my time there:

Abstract math, or "math per se" was utterly uninteresting for me. My drive was to solve actual problems I had or wanted to solve. For example, making something out of wood with complex shapes, or drawing with the computer. I would say you have to find an area of interest with which the kids get passionate, and needs math to solve the problems.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#117

Post by Muromec »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #60
cyberax wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker. I'm not joking. But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor. This was very much a cultural thing, pushed by the government (engineers are useful!). Another thing, there was a huge societal pressure to excel at school. It was common for parents to check their children's marks every day. There's a very famous picture about it…

> Hah. In the USSR an average engineer earned less money than an average worker. But in the USSR, your ability to buy something was generally not limited by the amount of money you had. It was limited by whether you'd be allowed to buy the thing for other reasons. > But STEM was seen as far more prestigious than manual labor. Sounds like an engineer's money may have been worth much more than a laborer's?

That depends on what you are buying. Some things worked like health insurance in US, some others weren't. Housing you don't buy at all, a car you need to know a secret way to jump the queue or be in a right position. Fancy stuff -- you need to have friends who can sail and bring it to you.

But there was plenty of stuff you just buy, from air plane tickets to beer and meat.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#118

Post by dan-robertson »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #80

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping…

I think the amount of approachable math content online is incredible. Some comments mention 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, which is good but can go on a bit and maybe be a bit advanced. I think Numberphile is great for having a lot of videos, each of which is pretty short, and which still show some small proof of some problem. There are also books of interesting mathematical tidbits or puzzles, eg the Martin Gardener or Ian Stewart books. I guess one other thing to say is that it probably helps for you to appear to be interested in the math things instead of you being interested in your kid doing what you want (ie looking at the math things)

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#120

Post by boilerupnc »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #103
082349872349872 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried TFA's tack of, instead of throwing him on the mercy of the school exercises, presenting a problem or two? > " Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back " —PH

In a small way, yes, and throughout "three to seven", actually up until she was nine, we had a lot of fun with what I think I can call problems (especially while home-schooling during the pandemic, where we had time to keep going back to these from different angles). But I'm not able drum up much interest these days, so I was wondering if people here had any insights on what if anything has worked with tweens, as opp…

For me it was Math Magic Tricks and Math Puzzles. [0] [1]

[0] https://matthewfurman.com/math-magic-tricks/

[1] https://solveordie.com/math-riddles/for-teens/

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