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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)

#191

Post by ZeroGravitas »

colechristensen wrote: post #83
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it deeply offensive for you to want to slow them down if the reverse is true?

Because in kindergarten I was regularly asked to go hang out by myself as literally every other student in the room learned to read. When they gave me the tests they use to measure themselves I got 99th percentile scores so literally neglecting me got them the metric as doing anything for me.

Yeah, I get the general idea. I, like most HN readers likely were, was in a similar situation.

And as a certified smart guy I now ask myself and others questions like: Why is it deeply offensive to hold you back when you are literally suggesting to hold them back instead?

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

#192

Post by dmurray »

Const-me wrote: post #132
andi999 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the second question. Probably the kid is supposed to see the 'trick' :he drank a full cup of coffee since he didn't refill coffee and drank all. He added 1/2, 1/3 and 1/6 of a cup of milk and drank it all, so (3+2+1)/6=1. He drank the same amount of coffee and milk. I think it is ok as a brain teaser, but there will probably be one kid in the class to see it and all the other kids feel dumb or whatever.…

> 2 also seems to rely on a trick Pretty sure students are supposed to switch( n % 3 ), and solve for all 3 possible values of the remainder. > probably just trying out numbers You can't solve a 4-degree polynomial equation by trying out numbers. It has up to 4 solutions, not guaranteed to be real, let alone rational or integer.

> You can't solve a 4-degree polynomial equation by trying out numbers

On the contrary, in practice you can't solve them any other way! Spot a simple factorization or guess a root is your best chance if you don't fancy working through the quartic formula [0], which will take you multiple pages just to write down the first step, and a numeric approximate solution is not acceptable.

[0] https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1135224

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

#193

Post by Wildgoose »

paganel wrote: post #23
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…

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.

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

#195

Post by exporectomy »

lordnacho wrote: post #136
ardit33 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, but you are missing the point completely. I gave you a real life example: Even if everyone is equal, and has the same conditions, some people are just born smarter than others, and will put more effort and do better. Equality of conditions is a good thing to ask for, equality of outcome is stupid, as even in a murderous communist regime, was impossible to achieve as it goes against basic human nature. That's wh…

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.

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

#196

Post by rcxdude »

laputan_machine wrote: post #114
petargyurov wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Bulgarian. I moved to the UK when I was 12. I had to join primary school halfway through Year 6 (the last year of primary school). The level of mathematics shocked me. They were still learning factorisation, something I had learned years ago. It was a breeze. Of course, in secondary school (ages 12-18) the content eventually caught up with me. Part of me wishes I could have somehow kept studying the Bulgarian wa…

UK maths teaching is fairly terrible. Not only do they start later, it's almost never taught meaningfully, instead relying on memorising rote formulae. I grew up hating maths, it wasn't until YouTube came along and the sheer amount of _good_ maths content on there that I started to 'get' the bits I just never understood as a teenager. Most of my friends will still say things like 'I just don't get algebra / I don't d…

The main issue is the curriculum and exams emphasize this kind of rote learning (across the board, not just in maths: one stupid reason for this is many of the markers for the exams don't actually have any qualifications in the subject they're marking and need to be able to just pattern-match off a mark sheet). And because teachers and schools are judged so heavily on exam results, they are not just incentivised but basically forced to 'teach the test' as opposed to trying to get the students to actually learn anything, even when they are otherwise motivated and capable of doing so.

I went to a quite high-performing school, and it wasn't unusual to have a year be 60% 'getting through the curriculum', 20% 'teaching interesting things about the subject', 20% 'exam prep', and that 20% in the middle only existed because of the extreme priviledge of both students and teachers good enough to keep up with that pace and a level of enthusiasm for the subject which allowed for teaching stuff 'not on the test'.

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

#197

Post by r7fufhrjrududu »

whimsicalism wrote: post #178
r7fufhrjrududu wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#198

Post by carlmr »

LeanderK wrote: post #176
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?

I think German math education was ok, probably not stellar, but good enough to prepare you well for engineering classes.

I went on another (short) exchange to France later in 9th grade and they were still far ahead of the German system in math at that point.

However, and this may sound stereotypical, their language education was pretty bad. While they were studying similar English literature as us, they were almost completely unable to speak English. When visiting language classes it was evident why, in Germany languages are studied interactively, in France it was only the teacher talking.

I don't know if this changed since then or it was only at this school, but it seemed like such an easy fix.

In terms of workload, I think the total was pretty similar.

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

#200

Post by noobsaibot »

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…

i remember me coming to germany with 11/12 and having to tell odd from even numbers in a test; after trigonometry and beginning of integrals in russia.
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