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Math from Three to Seven

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Re: Math from Three to Seven

#121

Post by dan-robertson »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #107
LarsDu88 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is, the Soviet bloc consistently made lower quality stuff or had much poorer training. There's are a persistent set of myths that both the Soviets and the western arms manufacturers like to perpetuate. The t-34 tank was the greatest tank ever (sometimes had 10:1 losses offset by 14:1 manufacturing) The ak-47 is the best due to is reliability (poor tolerances made it both reliable and astoundingly inaccurate…

Even Napoleon's weapons were vastly superior to the Russian ones at the time... oh, wait :)

I don’t think the napoleonic wars are a very good comparison as they happened 100 years before the Russian revolution. You do see some parallels to later wars – the Russians being technologically inferior, or getting Poland after a war, for example. If you look at overall deaths, the French side suffered half as many as their opposition, and more Russians died than people from any other country opposing Napoleon. This still ended up being much less extreme than in WWII where I guess the one sentence summary is that, in Europe, most belligerents were spending enormous amounts of money on weapons and technology whereas the Soviet Union suffered enormous military and civilian casualties to achieve victory.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#122

Post by voidUpdate »

dan-robertson wrote: post #118
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…

There are a good amount of entertaining maths communicators on the internet. I'd like to recommend standupmaths/matt parker, as well as looking at the SoME playlists which contains some interesting content too

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#123

Post by spydum »

lain98 wrote: post #88

I have been trying to join/create a circle as an adult. I asked some of my online friends but no interest so far.

It's interesting to me, as if you read Benjamin Franklins biography, he mentions creating a literary circle being super important. I suspect many of our important thoughts leaders through history created small social circles where they hyperfocused on their domain with friends in a more social way

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#125

Post by defrost »

amykyta wrote: post #124

Curious (not) how Soviets just became ‘russian’. This is soft propaganda once again.

Cast your mind back 33 years . . .

    The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#126

Post by 082349872349872 »

komali2 wrote: post #32
myth_drannon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people had a lot of time for hobbies. Reading, writing poems, electronics. Sometimes I watch old interviews of people on the streets and compare with the interviews they do on the streets now. It's night and day. Even people, like working class, drunk in a bar in the end of 80's collapse were more well spoken and intelligent then the people now. Either it's Putin, emigration or capitalism or whatever but there i…

I've noticed this aspect in general of revolutionary societies. What I'm personally quite selfishly interested in is whether this is unique to leftist revolutionary societies - were Germans or Italians in 1936 having spirited debates about fascism and how best to serve the Fatherland? I have no idea, from what I've read so far it sounds like no. Meanwhile, for example in Spain in the same time period, there was a rem…

Fascism was explicitly and proudly anti-intellectual, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Starace#:~:text=On%20o...

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#127

Post by 082349872349872 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #22
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.

Yes, people had a lot of time for hobbies. Reading, writing poems, electronics. Sometimes I watch old interviews of people on the streets and compare with the interviews they do on the streets now. It's night and day. Even people, like working class, drunk in a bar in the end of 80's collapse were more well spoken and intelligent then the people now. Either it's Putin, emigration or capitalism or whatever but there i…

According to Zoya, Birkins, boob jobs, and Jaguars are the current topics of conversation? (that said, museums did see an uptick of entries when they offered reduced rates for patrons wearing Louboutins)

I blame Катя Кузнецова (1986); she wanted the red sports car with the radio and the little dog, after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvdlAgreRug&t=4574s

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdP5U28jHc

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#128

Post by chongli »

tempfile wrote: post #101
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…

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…

The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves.

One thing I haven’t seen brought up in this discussion yet: technology. Seriously, what hope does a teacher have for getting students to engage when they’re competing against all the might of Silicon Valley? The industry is spending billions every year to discover and implement the best techniques for stealing teenagers’ attention and focus away from everything else in their lives.

There’s a growing chorus of people who want to get phones out of classrooms. That’s a strong first step but students’ struggles don’t end when they go home for the night. I volunteer as a tutor with high school students at an after-school homework club. We aren’t allowed to take their phones away! You can imagine how much of a Herculean struggle it is for these kids to put away their phone and actually get some work done.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#129

Post by usgroup »

It ends like this, largely cancelling out the rest of the article:

>In the second iteration of the circle, all of his notes are completely useless, and all of his initial attempts to teach anything fail, because these are different kids with different aptitudes and different interests. Zvonkin, raised in a communist society and a believer in the absolute malleability of human nature, is fairly bowled over by this, especially by how young all these differences are manifesting. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got quite lucky with his first set of children, and that the second group were much more challenging to teach.8 The most eloquent testimony to this is that after about a year he gives up, and the journal ends abruptly.

Re: Math from Three to Seven

#130

Post by red_admiral »

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…

For the "exercises are important and also build conceptual understanding", see "BASIC SKILLS VERSUS CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING, A Bogus Dichotomy in Mathematics education" by H. Wu.

The big challenge in teaching is not to make the exercises seem lame.

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