Math from Three to Seven

Universities in eastern bloc were really elite places. Only low single digits percent of people were able to enroll. Also majority of degrees were in STEM, education or medicine as they were deemed useful for the state. To get degree outside of STEM, political background of your family was checked and things like having family member (even say uncle) who emigrated outside of country or having grandparents who owned businesses or farm decades ago will get you discarded. So the smart kids usually have very limited path forward, so STEM it was (if you were lucky)

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)

Soviet/russian tanks have not come out on top in any conflict for the past 50 years. On the battlefields of Ukraine, the t72 has been infamous for its design flaws wherein even mild penetration to the gun autoloader housed in the turret ring often leads to catastrophic explosions instantly killing all the crew inside.

In Israel's fights against Syria, syrian Soviet tanks had a critical design flaw wherein they were not able to shoot downward at an angle, effectively making them sitting ducks.

The last time Soviet jets had parity with the west was when both sides were copying the same German jet fighter designs appropriated from Focke-wulf at the end of world War 2.

Repeatedly in actual combat situations, the soviet equipment fares poorly... In Israel, Iraq, and Ukraine. Perhaps the only conflicts Soviet equipment has been used effectively is when Iraq deployed its mostly Soviet weapons against Irans mostly American weapons and even that's arguable considering the United States backed Saddam (and later obliterated his army with more modern western technology)

The SU and Eastern Europe countries were also such a 'combined block' though (both for trade via COMECON and militarily via the TFCMA (aka 'Warsaw Pact'). Although AFAIK Western Europe had a much higher population than the Eastern European socialist countries.

But in general, the education and health care systems were usually the 'flag ships' with easy and free access for the 'working class' (which also means extreme discimination against anybody else though).

In this country many teachers have been taught that it's important for kids to be able to use a range of approaches to solve a problem.

They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable.

In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.

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 kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems ("can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again"), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it's going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it has to come back, but I'd hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.