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

I believe China are starting to ban for-profit tutoring firms. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-parents-fret-aft...

I used to think that the K12 math education was really bad, but now I have a different perspective. Many public schools in China and Russia are essentially like magnet schools in the US because students need to compete for entrance. So, those schools can afford more challenging syllabus. In contrast, the US has few such magnet schools, and people of different academic capacity go into the same school. As a result, teachers can't really teach too advanced concepts or assign too hard homework. This may sound far-fetched, but you may be surprised that more than 50% of students may never be able to understand Euclidean geometry, let alone analytical geometry or set theory or probability or proof by induction, and etc. And more than 50% of STEM students in college may not truly understand calculus, let alone analysis. Case in point, roughly 50% of middle school students can't get into high school in China, even though the entrance exams are really not that hard as most of the questions are designed to examine a student's understanding of basic concepts. Therefore, we may look at the quality of the math class in the US and feel miserable, but that's only because the class is tailored to the lower 50%-ile. On the other hand, the clubs and gift programs in public schools are still of high quality -- all the more reason for not canceling such programs in the name of equity.

I studied in 1988-1999, and these stories may be true for Soviet elite education, but not for average Ivan. I personally studied at a school with advanced Physics and English (our teachers after graduating from uni went to Minneapolis for a year of practice). But maths had nothing close to what's described in the article or comments here. No witty simple problems, just boring theorems, then simple tasks to solve.

I did see those witty nice problems in journals and special math tasks books, but that never appeared in our lessons. That was boring like hell. Well, ...at least it wasn't dumb, we did take logarithms, derivatives etc.

But if you take an average Russian, they can't solve a simple proportion problem: say, income tax is 15%, you paid $450 of tax, how much net salary did you get? The answer is easy: 450/.15*.85 (then do it on calculator), but when I did this calculation with accountants from vocational college, they were stunned and didn't get how I did it. I'm not exaggerating a bit.

So those people were either from elites, or nostalgic.

On other courses in Soviet/Post-Soviet school.

Russian language focused mostly on orthography, punctuation and participles. Like if British school focused on spelling "coloUr" or "emphasiSe". The examples of good style were only 19th century literature, especially Tolstoi's suffocating long sentences.

Literature course is similar to what Paul Graham wrote about in his essays: old, boring and already unimportant literature, plus writing essays that must imitate literature critics. I think this was the most hated task at school, and it lasted all the way from 5th to 11th grade. Such essay writing is still obligatory till today in 2021, and I see consequences of it while teaching in a university: students write in unnatural high style, but have difficulties conveying their thoughts or selecting proper evidence (few can distinguish between facts and theories). And that's in a good university -- I'm scared to think what less smart people write. This is not a "degradation" of modern ages, it's almost unchanged since Soviet times.

History course conveyed a Communist narrative, cherry picked facts and asked you not to analyze anything but to remember dates/years. E.g. a textbook on medieval history (6th grade), a paragraph on knights and their armor started with exactly this phrase: "It was not easy for peasants to fight even one feudal lord." (then it described the armor). The entire country of Grand Duchy of Lithuania (at the time it was also called Lithuanian Russia) was omitted, except for being shown on a map. Because it was embarassing to compare that country with Russia under Ivan the Terrible (who became an icon in Stalin's age).

Geography was interesting to me, but when I got to Wikipedia in 2004 and started reading on languages and nations, I saw how much was missing from there.

Biology was a simple and rather boring literature, and the home work was to read a paragraph and be ready to retell it. Most students would simply learn them.

(Actually, with mediocre English teachers that was the case as well: read a text, called "topic" and retell -- and the teacher saw students telling the text learned by heard, but didn't care.)

So, to conclude, math in Soviet elite education was good. Other courses were probably reasonably good, because those elite schools for talented also attracted good teachers. But the average school was of much lower quality.

As I was reading the summary, I was thinking "well, of course -- that makes sense. Any teaching curriculum has got to be like that so what is so special about Russian math curriculum?".

Then I read in other comments about US math curriculum and I was shocked to learn that not only they were NOT doing this, but they didn't have a better alternative. This is mind boggling. It seems almost idiotic.

My schooling was done in India. Our curriculum was quite well planned, but what is laid out here is the methodology of teaching in addition to the curriculum and textbooks. And that depended on teacher to teacher and school to school. But nonetheless, the textbooks were very well written so everyone got exposure to pretty much the same level of teaching styles, more or less.

When I came to US in college, I was surprised to learn that people didn't know basic techniques and tricks for algebraic manipulations. Of course, we were taught the basics and whys behind every trick but emphasis was also given to internalizing these tricks for quick computation by hand. This, in my opinion, is important because these tricks also become your mental models when thinking about math. And quick tricks would lead to quick thinking, roughly speaking.

I am from India. The school I went to (70-80s) wasn't the best, but I had an innate aptitude for math (perhaps genetic). I was lucky to get introduced to some Russian math texts [1][2] from my 3rd/4th standards which helped me (alongwith some local texts) to get good scholarships and rankings in Maths and science competitions (including a national level Math olympiad) and a later admission to a top level engg college in IIT (again thanks to accessing good libraries for foreign authored books). I see the Russian books as having provided me with a good foundation by being fun and interesting, informative, affordable, immersive and engaging and it really fuelled my interest in math and science. Given the resurgence of the Russian school of math in the US I wish I could be there to educate my children in that tradition. But not being there (out of choice and circumstance, I studied in Boston for a while) I really wish something like this was available in India.

So my question is - is there some sort of a curriculum and associated training material (books, texts) available based on the Russian way of teaching, on which to develop a training plan locally in a country like India? Given the plethora of online school education options available today I do not know what exact training methods are used there, but platforms exist to have a broader reach for teachers to find interested students. I presume it would not be too difficult to setup a curriculum and training outside the normal school one with the explicit intention of developing strong math skills based on a Russian math education base if one wants to teach.

[1] Mainly by Mir publishers, some of which are thankfully still available online @mirtitles.org

[2] the ones I got were at throwaway prices, titles such as Yakov Perelman's Fun with Math, some Little Mathematics Library books physics, chemistry, cybernetics etc.