Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wbur.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 558 posts

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

#401

Post by flavius29663 »

failuser wrote: post #323
flavius29663 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view math is not so much about you needing it. It's about developing abstract thinking, reasoning, logic. It's in the same boat as sports. You will never need to run 100 yards with a ball in your hand, except for the sport itself. Yet we still do sports to train and stay in shape.

It does, but again, those skills are not valued that much in USA. I don’t like it, this is reality. Sports classes provide nowhere enough physical activity to stay in shape though. Ideally a country ruled by citizens require a high level of knowledge and reasoning ability. In reality people vote for aristocratic cliques in a way often determined by their birth.

So what are you suggesting? Because math is not the perfect answer, do less critical thinking? I think it's very good for the brain, necessary even. Math is not sufficient, but it's necessary. It's a pity the US schools put less and less into math, nowadays they dumb down math for equity reasons even.

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

#402

Post by dan-robertson »

gambiting wrote: post #230
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…

I went to a British university, CS course, at the age of 19, having completed my education in Poland. I had a very similar experience(except no one cared whether you wrote x or .) - basically at university it was like going back 5-10 years in terms of maths level. We were already doing advanced calculus in Poland in my last year at school(and being constantly told that we have to know it well or no one at university…

This surely depends on the university and the course. At mine (admittedly for a maths degree) the start of the course involved quickly running through the contents of the A-level FP3 maths module (which the degree did not technically require) in about two lectures as well as jumping straight into topics that weren’t very relevant to school maths (group theory and a first “set theory/welcome to proofs” course which both quickly became hard).

Students doing physics seemed to get reasonable physics maths (e.g. vector calculus things like surface integrals and Green’s theorem) without spending lots of time revising school maths.

I don’t know what the computer scientists got but I got the impression that the university preferred applicants who were good at maths to those who were good at programming. Though maybe they needed help with asymptotics: U.K. school maths doesn’t cover limits and it is hard to define big O if you don’t know the definition of a limit.

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

#403

Post by starkd »

dougSF70 wrote: post #363
donny2018 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am witnessing public schools take math out of the curriculum at elementary, middle and high schools. Is that for real? If true, this is ridiculous. Do American authorities want to introduce some kind of education for plebs? How is such low standard for basic education is even acceptable in the modern world? It’s not only about “beauty of math” but at least basic math is required to help develop some specific cogn…

Yes it's TRUE. In SF the schools district removed Algebra from the middle school curriculum. You should read The Dictators Handbook, it details why dismantling education piece by piece is a great way to stay in power. You'd expect it in a dictatorship but not in SF.

Happening in Oregon too https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2021/08/gov-kate-brown-s...

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

#404

Post by tradertef »

Anectodal: I signed my daughter to Russian math and due to pandemic she had one semester online. The teacher was horrible and made lots of mistakes. On the other hand, some of our friends were impressed about their teachers. So, I guess it depends on the teacher a lot.

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

#405

Post by rejectedandsad »

bllguo wrote: post #56
rejectedandsad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is bound to hurt poorer but smart kids, that can't afford private tutoring and have to rely only on public schools Why should I care about them? The internet exists. Let them learn on their own if they’re so interested. Why am I being forced to subsidize people that will just grow to resent me as a leech on society due to my “inferior mathematical ability” as you surely do? Poverty is a far bigger problem than s…

> Why should I care about them? We should obviously care about improving education, for the good of society as a whole, for innovation, for pushing the economy forward, etc. It's dumbfounding that this would even be asked, I'm not sure anyone outside of America (i.e. no pervasive anti-intellectual culture) could conceive of a question like this > Why am I being forced to subsidize people that will just grow to resent…

> You'd rather damn an entire state to stagnation than risk being looked down upon by some hypothetical elitist?

Also, for the record - it's not hypothetical, you're literally an example of this hypothetical elitist as an Ivy grad (top schools only exist in order to enforce segregation against lesser people like me). I'm sure you took calculus in 8th grade while I took it in senior year but I'm not subhuman because of it.

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

#406

Post by hamilyon2 »

bovine3dom wrote: post #146
hyperman1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of these textbooks available? Preferably not in Russian, I can read English, French, German and Dutch.

https://archive.org/details/mir-titles has a vast selection. The books by Irodov are generally well regarded in particular.

Books by Irodov are a legend

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

#407

Post by nicoburns »

cabalamat wrote: post #391
BoxOfRain wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My British state education really did feel like "memorise just enough to jump through these arbitrary hoops which keep the government off our backs" sometimes. It's very exam-driven rather than learning for its own sake and apparently it's got even worse since schools started transitioning to academies and Gove's reforms took effect.

One fix for this is to have exam questions such that you cannot pass them unless you have true understanding rather than rote memorisation.

That's one part of the equation, but it only works if you have teachers and a curriculum that are capable of imparting that understanding.

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

#410

Post by zsmi »

avidphantasm wrote: post #362
horsawlarway wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an american who went through US-based curriculum in the 90s, this sounds FUCKING WONDERFUL . Basically - it seems like the approach above treats math as a conceptual playground, where you should develop intuition and understanding. Instead we seem to be going down the rote memorization route for most of our classes, where the goal was to apply an equation to some numbers and get the right answer, with little to no…

I have always liked math, but have never been great or very good at it. I graduated from a US public school gifted program, and a top 30 US university. The biggest problem I always had with math education is they didn’t teach the “why” nearly enough. I was lousy at memorizing formulas/methods (esp. in calculus), so I often found myself dead in the water during exams.

I used to suffer from the lack of "why" too until one day it dawned on me that there really isn't a why, or maybe, the why is always the same: for engineers doing classical physics solving problems by hand, it's convenient to define it that way. No more, no less.

When I was a math tutor in school, everyone would complain about lack of why. This was my approach to address the issue. I would describe a problem relevant to the class, say something like find the angle between two vectors, and ask them to think of a general way to do it. Usually this require some help from me but the solution was always "theirs". Then we would play with their solution: find corner cases, figure out which operations broke, develop a couple of theorems with it. Then I would show them the dot product, and a couple of its tricks (a.k.a. theorems), and they would get a good appreciation for why the dot product works the ways it does. And that's the why and the reason it stuck. It's useful way to solve a common problem. There is no magic or deep philosophical truth.

The problem is this teaching style works with a dialog to a few number of students. I am not sure how well it would work in a lecture setting. It was also not so easy on me as I would be the person who had to spot the problems in their definition, basically on the spot, and lead them to it on their own without revealing the answer. With basic things like a dot product it's pretty easy to know where to look (i.e. is their definition commutative, pretty much never) and finding issues and nudging them too it wasn't too hard. But it's likely hard to scale things like this on many metrics.

Post reply on HN