we are one of those parents (in Bay Area) who send our kid to RSM (Russian School of Math). We are very happy with it so far (6yo completed her first year) and, most importantly, our daughter is very happy with it too. It is not simple rule memorization and counting, even for 6yo the problems they come up with are interesting enough so that the kid wants to solve them.
What does the curriculum look like that differs significantly from standard school? Also, is your child bored in school at all? I got ahead in math early on and remember being very bored in math classes until AP classes came around.
By about 1/4th of the way through I wanted to just know what 'russian math' looked like. By Halfway it was pretty clear they weren't going to tell me. I skimmed the last half, nothing stood out.
> school's curriculum is based on Russian teaching traditions that emphasize reasoning and deeper understanding early on, not just memorization and practice drills. "The child should be brought to abstract level as soon as possible," she says, "meaning early introduction of algebra and geometry, not only arithmetic," and helping children figure out principles for themselves rather than spoon-feeding them.
I buy into having a deeper understanding, and in both work and school, it's pretty clear who has a deeper understanding and who's going through the motions.
That said, how is it that there's such range in pedagogy? So many people have studied teaching that you'd think we'd have a better idea of what works. Or maybe it's that goals are different.
The goals are different. The goal of the Russian school is to teach math. The goal of public schools is to dumb down the curriculum until everyone is equal.
The soviets were nationalists who believed the utility of the citizenry was in their contribution to their country.
You reinstill love of country, which really means love of society and others, which is another word for philanthropy, and you will quickly get this.
In America, instead of education and work being for the greater purpose of your nation and people, education is for the individual.
As usual, most people find more motivation when helping others than themselves, but the focus on ourselves in American education means it's easy to slack.
I think a big part of this is society's expectations.
For example while there was bullying in my primary school - there was no bullying because you were good at math. The opposite was true - if you were bad at math it meant you're "dumb" and kids will laugh at you.
It wasn't all perfect - it was uncool to try hard (means you're dumb and have to work for it and that's boring) but it was very fashionable to instantly know every answer. So teachers had it much easier because kids had intrinsic motivation to learn math.
Another part of it was probably that the unemployment was at 20% at that point and everybody realized you have to be well educated to have a chance of good job.
Not goals - incentives. I'm from Czechia and for me math education changed dramatically for the last year of high-school. All of a sudden it was crunch time to get the best result at the standardized tests that are part of government's examination.
Up until that point the math classes were very much Soviet-style understanding-first, daily hour-long homeworks that are described in the article.
Final year was about technique memorization.
Once you're gaming a system, education quality tanks.
The dilemma with tests is that we need them to measure competency, but once you introduce them, the specific form the test takes becomes a target, itself.
I wish American teachers could teach the reasoning behind math.
I don't think most math teachers know themselfs though---even at some colleges.
I don't think I have even seen a math book that goes into depth on why a equation, or problem, is solved a certain way.
I would like to see most memorization in math, and most subjects nixed for good.
I have found, including myself, my early difficulties in math were due to just memorizing how to do a problem.
It wasen't until I started over (I went to a CC early. I hated high school socially, and it affected my studies. Going to a CC was the best move I made.)
I took basic math, and algebra, trig., at the community college.
It made inorganic chemistry, and physics, so easy.
I went from terrible at timed tests of regurgitating basic arithmetic facts to one of the better math students in my school once the curriculum moved on to requiring some understanding of what was going on.
"Jane fills a bag with three types of chips. There are 3-point, 4-point and 7- point chips. Jane picks 3 chips worth 15 points. Which chips did she pick?"
Sample problem for grades 5-6 [2]:
"Pinocchio drank half a cup of black coffee. He then filled the cup back up with milk and drank one third of the mixture. Again he filled the cup to the top with milk, drank one sixth of the mixture and filled it back to the top with milk one final time before he drank the whole cup. Did he drink more coffee or milk?"
Those are pretty challenging problems and they also require a bit of working out. How many of these problems are students expected to solve in, say, and hour long test?
These represent classes of problems and the test checks which classes students have covered in their studies and which they slacked on.
These two are straight-forward problems, both will be allocated some basic nominal time. You either know how to solve them or you don't. Sometimes there'd be problems that are more puzzling, because they'd combine several problem classes and will take time to unfold (this is typical in math olympics). These will be allocated more time as they require thinking and searching for a solution.
From the examples I guess it is the ability to intuitively manipulate fractions? Like “oh that’s kind of like .8 of this other thing so it’s close to X” ?
I see what you mean by classes of problems. Some of the problems from the above links I know how to do (although working out might take some time and a pen and paper) and then there are some problems where I don't know where to start. I was just never taught how to think about numbers that way even though the link says those problems are for middle school children.
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. But I don't think it teaches you anything (maybe it does, didn't study pedagogy, and while I was good at such fun questions I preferred the more structured approach in university mathematics)
Edit: this might make the kids think you need some 'magical' insights to do math and if they don't see it they are not apt for it, while the opposite might be true.
For the other questions: 2 also seems to rely on a trick, 3 looks ok, 4 is ok, 5a looks dodgy (probably just trying out numbers), 6 looks ok
About the K1 question:these are for 3 year olds? I only met one 3 year old in my life who could read, probably I am missing something here.
> 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. But I don't think it teaches you anything
These word problems are intended quite precisely as introduction to algebra. They show you the kinds of questions that algebra can solve in a "structural" way, which makes it way easier to grok algebra later on since motivation for the subject has been provided in such depth.
Yes, but I am worried if a school uses question which can be solved with a trick that the whole instruction in class starts to revolve around tricks (which naturally will happen since the one kid who sees it will answer first).
Tricks? It's not tricks it's word problems, which is just as important as any other problem. You need to relate math to the real world and having a equation doesn't help, having stuff like Susan is taking a train at 2:32 for 50 kms going 60km/h what time did she get off helps people understand how to turn a real world problem into a math equation to solve it.
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.
#2 relies on understanding how numbers "work", i.e. on having spent time on playing with them.
#5a is a factorization exercise.
In general, Russian approach to the math includes exposing kids to the toolset as well as the theory. This particular case is solved this way, that is solved that way, etc. Keep on it for a while and it tends to develop an intuition for knowing right away which problem is solved with which approach. So, yeah, if there are shortcuts, you use them. If there aren't any, you brute-force it.
> 5a looks dodgy (probably just trying out numbers)
You can find the 4 zeros of the left side by eyeball, and use that to construct the rest of the equation group you need.
It's expected you've seen and solved this type of problem before taking the test. Not that many kids can come up with a working solution strategy on the fly.
"Trying out numbers" seems like the simpler approach to me. You have to multiply four consecutive numbers to get 1680. One of them must be 7 (since 7 divides 1680), one must be 5 or 10 for the same reason. That leaves only 3 possibilities, and you only have to check the middle one (5 x 6 x 7 x 8) since if the result too big or too small, you'll know which of the other two it is.
OK - you weren't guaranteed the solution was an integer or even real, but you should strongly suspect there's a simple answer because you didn't get generic fourth-degree polynomials in your class. Depending on the class, you might be expected to find one, two or all four solutions - but once you have the first one the rest are much easier.
Following the procedure taught in class (and I'm quite sure they didn't teach "make a guess") is safer. When you show the correct procedure and fumble say, and addition, near the end, you'll still get almost full points.
If you go off-road and get the wrong answer, it's up to how much the teacher likes you.
This doesn't line up with all the other problems, which reward having some insight as well as the concrete algebra/arithmetic skills to finish it out.
If anything, your approach sounds more like what's expected in American schools: either you have been taught a foolproof way to solve problems matching Pattern X, or you stare slack jawed at the question paper thinking "I must have been absent the day they covered this question pattern". Exactly the opposite of the kind of thinking described in the article.
Besides, as in another comment of mine on this page, there is no generic method your teacher could have taught you here that always works. (If you think so, please set the right hand side to 1681 and solve that version...). The principal method I was taught for solving cubics was to make a guess. Numerical methods came later.
K-1 means Kindergarten and 1st grade, so 5 year olds and 6 year olds. In the US earlier grades than that are called PK-3 (pre-Kindergarten and 3 year old) and PK-4. I don't think RSM has classes for these levels.
> Edit: this might make the kids think you need some 'magical' insights to do math and if they don't see it they are not apt for it, while the opposite might be true.
That's a valid point. However, what's the opposite to having insights? Is that following routines and/or exhaustively exploring the entire problem space (which the first problem in the GP comment seems to teach)?
Teaching those might have higher pedagogical value than conditioning children to find insights (as - at least at first sight - the increase in skill in those is more directly linked to the effort the child invests in learning) However, the von Neumann story in your sibling comment suggests that some people (and so, some children in the class) will perform routines faster than the other children no matter what. Seeing a "shortcut" solution gives a chance to those who are slower at routines to arrive at a solution fast, too.
Moreover, a lot of real-world problems (in academia as well as in business - from my limited experience in both) are exercises in pattern matching and finding shortcuts rather than in an exhaustive exploration of the problem space - and helping children to collect an arsenal of tricks (and more importantly, teaching them to look for insights and patterns by giving them multiple trick-based problems over the years) prepares them to handle those real-world problems.
Yes I definitely felt dumb in my Russian math classes when someone saw a clever trick and I did not. That made me try harder to look for tricks, it's a challenge in the end.
I ended up with a Math degree very later on. So I don't see how feeling dumb harmed me.
PS: the top level professional math is 90% tricks.
Which is a bit fiddly but hardly impossible. I think there is pedagogical value in doing the algebra accurately and I think it is annoying enough that the trick seems useful and memorable when it is pointed out. The trick is also quite broadly applicable to physics problems where there is conservation of some quantity.
Yeah I think the examples given are probably examples of hard exercises or the grades are a poor translation (maybe grade 1 has 6 year olds, for example.)
Another solution is with geometry:
Start with a 1x1x1 cube of coffee. Remove top half and replace with milk. Now remove left third of resulting combined shape (leaving a 2/3 x 1/2 x 1 cuboid of coffee). Now remove front sixth (leaving a 2/3 x 1/2 x 5/6 cuboid). Now drink it all. Now add up the volumes of the shape and write down the answer.
I studied in a top school in Moldova which follows a curriculum whose foundation was defined during the Soviet union times, so could be pretty close to the Russian curriculum. Just as an idea, in grade 10-11 I was studying limits, complex numbers, derivatives, grade 12 was dedicated to integrals and solving problems with them. Math got progressively harder starting with grade 5. I remember I was filling about 2-3 notebooks of 48 pages (little squares pattern) per semester with homework and in-class class problem solving. We always had homework to do, and often it would take me hours to come up with a solution to the more difficult problems that would give me a 10 (grade A+). My nephew who finished grade 4 has no homework (Canada), but I remember my grade 4 I had so much homework for each subject (math, French, Romanian, geography, arts, etc). Heck, in grades 1-4 we even had summer homework, which were books containing exercises for various subjects, and I remember that vividly because I hated to do homework in the summer. I'm quite sure that good Russian school are also quite intense..
Can’t speak for Moldova but had what seems to be same level (specialized math school) in Russia and 10-11 was 15-17 yo (you could start at different age back then)
I don't know if it's that, but for me math "clicked" when in 2nd class of primary school in Poland we had a whole year of solving intuitive math problems. Basically linear equations of 1 or 2 variables, but that was without knowing what any algebra or even what a variable is - we started with only basic addition and multiplication.
Teacher asked us (one by one) to describe how we would arrive at the answer to problems and why that way. Sometimes it would be a contest - who guesses the answer first and that person gets to explain the process and bask in the glory of being the smartest kid ;). And then we were shown how to write that solving process as equations and practiced changing from problems to equations and vice versa.
At the end of the year most kids understood algebra.
Not sure about these after-class schools, but I can compare my ex-ussr school and uni education with math or CS undergrad textbooks I read a lot in English these day. Not sure about early education though.
1. Russian math books are straight to the point, superconcrete. Hard to read in a linear fashion but very useful when student is serious about going through it ("Problems in mathematical analysis" by Demidovich is a perfect example, Mark Vygodskiy's "Elementary Mathematics Reference").
2. In most textbooks I remember nobody tries to build a dumbed down explanation of things. This might lead to the book being harder to understand without teacher's help. I remember how some American undergrad-level introductory math analysis books were trying to skip proofs, avoid certain details, giving too many intuitive explanations ().
3. Mid and late school math is pretty advanced, especially when compared to US typical level.
These days I live in UK. Kids go to school early here: 4-5 years. My daugther is 6 and is comfortable with trivial math. I've read a few secondary school textbooks and they feel quite ok.
I have a feeling it was more about the quality of the teachers than anything else.
I moved from “Deep” Russia itself to the periphery of the USSR (Bulgaria) when I was in first grade, and my parents had the foresight to make me repeat that grade so as to help me with learning a new language.
The quality difference was astounding. In 1992 Russia by first grade I was learning english with flash cards technique, drawing human shapes, animation, perspective, and some pretty good maths. The knowledge I gained there allowed me to learn almost nothing but the language up until about 3rd grade. And it was a school in the middle of nowhere.
I think the USSR trained some very good teachers and just sent them around everywhere, places they would not have gone themselves on their own volition kinda thing.
Oh and I remember teachers where highly respected, a thing I saw slowly degrade while the country was going through the 90s reforms.
Respect for teachers is a huge part of it. People want status as much as they want money. If culturally America venerated teachers the way it venerates soldiers we’d have fewer wars and smarter people.
Check out 'Word Problems in Russia and America' by Andrei Toom. Toom contrasts the poor state of the American math curriculum with his experiences with the Russian style, particularly its centering of 'word problems'.
I think the key difference is that it quickly moves from what's considered problems for kids (Ally had 3 apples, Booby had 2, etc) to abstract tasks and fundamental theorems in algebra, geometry and other areas.
The way math was taught in USSR and is still largely taught in Russia is by going as quickly as possible to calculus. I definitely studied limits and derivatives in school (around grade 8 or 9 out of 11 as I recall) and we briefly touched integrals in the last grade. There are some areas they don't really include, although in my opinion they should have, like mathematical statistics, which could be even more useful, but still.
That is a common approach recreated in some other subjects. For instances, teaching Russian includes not just basic syntax and phonetics but also just basic linguistic exercises like dissecting complex words and learning classifications, which you don't really need to talk it but they provide a deeper understanding.
If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this, known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my own experiences with it as a kid, it was very much about rote memorisation and doing the same sheet of arithmetic as quickly as possible. One of the exercises Kumon made kids do at the age of 5 is to simply place shuffled magnets with the numbers 1 to 100 in order on a 10x10 board.
I can't say that this approach really turned me onto maths: quite the opposite. Past a certain level, the Kumon teachers were essentially just marking from an answer book, without any understanding of the content themselves. They had zero interest (or perhaps ability) in conveying the beauty or applications of maths to the students.
The approach that made me love maths was one where I understood the intuition and purpose behind the methods, ideally enough to develop them from the bare minimum myself.
My sister sent my niece to one, as even her 'private' middle school in Newton, MA, was just not strong enough. She did sign up my niece in every summer class she could, without overloading her. It was always my nieces' choice, and half the time she choose arts and half science. Now, my niece is able to do college entry level data science classes (she is about to become a Junior in HighSchool), and she actually likes it a lot.
American schools are too soft on science in general. I did grades 1-11 in Albania and my senior year of HighSchool in the US. Some of my schooling in Albania was done under communism, and some after communism fell in the 90s.
The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science. Biology started at 5th grade, pre-Algebra at 5, and full blown Algebra at 6, physics at 6, and Chemistry at 7. Then in highschool you did the same, but more advanced. There was no choice at all, you had to do them all. The only choice in HS was a second foreign language. The whole idea was that you have to know all the basics of ALL sciences, so in college you know what to choose and pursue. If you never tried, you will have no clue if you liked something or not. (also basic music knowledge, sheet reading, and arts was a requirement as well).
When I came to the US, I was flabergasted how behind most of the kids were in science. I took AP physics, and it became boring as it was things I had done in 8th grade. I got 800./800 on the SAT 2, physics.
The math part, I took AP calc, and it was advanced enough, especially the part B to challenge me. But this was clearly an elective that only about 30 students took it, while back home it was a requirement for all.
Unfortunately, the current movement on dumbing down math and science in the name of 'equity' is a step behind and very dispiriting. It is bound to hurt poorer but smart kids, that can't afford private tutoring and have to rely only on public schools. Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and progress in this country, and are becoming actually regressive and backwards.
P.s. The only advantage of American teaching on science was that it relies more on experiments to teach concepts, while the Albanian one had no equipment, or lacked the basics of it. Heck, in the 90s we didn't even have glass on the windows and had to freeze all winter. Also basic electricity was lacking half of the winter.
Ps2. Most Americans have it good (condition wise), they just don't know it
Ps3. This is a good video how schooling was back then (in 88). Notice how the kids are wearing jackets inside, as there was no heating
https://youtu.be/yZD1jaKbz2g?t=251
I don't remember exactly, but it was the most advanced they offered. This was in Virginia, in 98-99. My teacher (Mr. Norris) was excellent, but it was clear that the overall course was something that I had done years before back in Albania. Since I knew a lot of things already, I was probably a bit annoying at class (having always the response), but I made some good friends in that class.
This is interesting. I studied physics at Harvard with many of the best of the best, there were a few from Romania.
I would be surprised if those people could be solving AP Physics C problems by 8th grade. 1 & 2, easily of course, but C is quite different.
If you found calculus BC hard-ish and physics easy in comparison, I think you were taking 1 & 2 as C was much harder. SAT II physics is a joke.
Virginia probably has some of the best STEM education in the entire country, at least the northern bit. Certainly better than what you can get at most schools outside of some in California, the boarding schools, and NYC magnets.
Not op, but I remember what got me into sciences was the “kids soviet encyclopedia”. Specifically the physics section.
We had “big soviet encyclopedia” and “kid” one on our bookshelf (A point of pride for my grandparents). Nobody told me that by “kids” the authors meant “teens”, so around 13yo I devoured those books whole.
Taught me structure of the atom, chemistry and lots of fascinating physical phenomena. And made most of the physics material easy to grasp up till last HS grade.
It had little maths, concentrating more on the understanding rather than the rigorous descriptions, which made the maths to describe them quite obvious, when I had to learn them in school.
Not sure if the current state of wikipedia is better or worse for that purpose- it was much better structured and paced for sure.
Why is dumbing down science teaching the fault of extreme progressive left and not, say, reduced education funding, favouring religious teaching, or even more likely, nuanced policy difficulties that don't fit nicely into a left/right divide?
ardit33 would know and having said "A doctor and a nurse probably lived in the same apartment, and had similar wages." I question both the idea that teachers were highly paid and that there was much status to be had in general in Albania.
Don’t know about Albania, but in Bulgaria the teachers had very low pay, (so were / are nurses btw). I think the difference was that they were very respected.
When I managed to attend teacher parent meetings I could see the deference people had for their children’s teachers. And children also deeply respected them for the most part.
The scenes from the beginning of Breaking Bad for example are rather alien to me - I can understand them, but I’ve never encountered such things when I was a kid.
> But Albania can finance rigorous teaching of science
> USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient solutions.
You're not wrong. Financialization of education continuing down from secondar to primary education, commodification of students—I think those are a bit better descriptions of the issue beyond "funding cuts" personally. Its incredibly easy to make things inefficient (or efficient at something else [0]) when quality/efficiency slowly fades from the conciousness of those in charge.
I'd say the more important thing is that there are large failures here, they were building before
"Extreme progressive Liberals" (which depending on how I read that I can agree with, from the left even). Saying this as someone who was a STEM kid in high school, took AP Calc at 15, etc.—I'm more mixed on the more static curriculum as described earlier, its not as important here tho
Writer Erika Hayasaki visited Cajon High. Here’s what she found:
A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.
...
A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”
Inclusive classrooms raise scores of the lower performing students. That's probably true.
It glosses over what it does to people on the other end of the spectrum.
As someone from the other end of the spectrum, growing up never having to put any effort, having few or no peers close to my level, and being constantly encouraged by the people around me to do poorly for curves etc... I can say I developed life long development/psychological problems as a result, and the idea that I or anyone in the future like me should be slowed down so everyone is more equal is deeply offensive.
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?
Because there is a distinct bias against students who understand the material who get ignored in favor of students who don't Having a bit of talent hides what you actually need which tends to get ignored because you're better at figuring things out.
I have a smart, popular nephew from a good home, who also got extra acconodations on exams for dyslexia.
You could spin that either way:
Priviliged people taking advantage of accomodations for those with problems.
Or smart people who previously got written off as disruptive troublemakers being better catered for (though maybe we'll have less entrepreneurs if we keep all the smart people in the standard education track).
In particular, the benefits of living in a society with a basic level of mathmatical (etc.) understanding seems powerful but hard to trace through.
But if we can't even talk about the trade-offs calmly and factually then its just a pointless sgouting match. The people with the academic skills should be leading the way on that.
I started in an average class in my year. Don't remember doing anything extra at home, or much at all, but still had an equivalent of all A's. At some point my parents realised something was wrong and moved me to the strongest class... Only then I started doing something. This is when I realised that some kids were already impossibly far ahead (we had world-level olympiad goers there).
Can't say I become world-class at anything but this helped to concentrate and work through the rest of school and uni without any problems.
The evidence does not suggest measurable harm for those on the other side of the spectrum from inclusive classrooms. Maybe there is some harm, but if so we haven't been able to devise a test or experiment that can find it.
I'm downvoted, but you can go look at the literature. Jump discontinuity studies for placement, testing comparison, etc. - none of them show the effect that most people on HN want them to show.
I am sorry you had that experience. Mine was similar (around 1990s).
But these days, integrated classrooms (as mentioned in your article) tend to be staffed with two teachers: one with a general education background and one with special education. They work as a team and can provide differentiated learning paths. The lower teacher/student ratio can help both the gen ed and special ed students.
In some places in the US it may be a funding issue, but in most places it’s not.
Take Baltimore for example. The public schools are very well-funded by any standard. And yet they have several high schools that didn’t produce a single student proficient in math.
Take New York City (which I'm familiar with, but it's likely the story is similar in many other places):
- each public school has the same budget per student. There is no "reduced education funding" for schools in district X vs district Y, or for any school, because the budget per student is equal. Each school's budget is public, and published on the web.
- favoring religious teaching: at least at the school my kids go to there's absolutely no religious teaching. I suspect this is the case for all the public schools in NYC
- nuanced policy difficulties? Not sure what you mean by this
Ok, now to answer your original question: why the fault of progressive left. As you see I skipped the word "extreme", as this is a loaded word; people who vote that way certainly do not perceive themselves as extreme.
At the recent mayoral primaries, the top candidates were the moderates Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia (1st and 2nd place), and the progressive Maya Wiley (3rd place). As far as the education was concerned, the hot topic was the selective "specialized high schools" [1], where the admission is test-based, according to a state law passed about 50 years ago. The current mayor (Bill de Blasio, progressive) has worked tirelessly for the last 4 years or so to lobby the State legislature to get the law repealed. The progressive candidate, Maya Wiley, promised to work towards the same goal. Here's the relevant extract from her platform [2]
>> To remove barriers that separate and label children, we will: [...] Eliminate discriminatory admissions “screens.”
In other words, kill the specialized high schools program.
Eric Adams (the winner, moderate) promised to keep the program as it currently is.
In case you wonder what the admission entrance exam is like, it's just two separate tests, one for ELA and one for math. Both tests are fairly challenging. The progressives think that these tests (and especially the math one) are discriminatory in nature.
Here's a sample math question [3, p.78] "In Centerville, 45% of the population is female, and 60% of the population commutes to work daily. Of the total Centerville population, 21% are females who commute to work daily. What percentage of the total Centerville population are males who do not commute to work daily?"
I believe you need it to figure out the total population of females who do not commute, from which you can then subtract from the total population (male and female) who do not commute to find the answer.
This is supposed to be a "challenging" problem? It seems quite obvious to me: we simply cannot answer the question as given, because we aren't told how many in the Centerville population are classed as 'both male and female', or 'neither male nor female'.
Thank you for such a detailed comment. Maybe then I'm just missing the American context. Having lived in the UK and Australia (which have their own lion's share of education issues), to me it's obvious that students struggling should get support, and students who excel should be able to go further, and I don't think anyone imagines a system where everyone is always in one classroom with 100% the same learning.
I'm very against the idea that struggling students should just be "sacrificed" for the advanced student, however, which some of the other comments seem to be implying.
Also out of curiosity, from where do you draw the connection that the lackluster schooling is caused by "extreme progressive liberals"? Maybe I'm just not well versed enough in politics but it appears to jump straight to that conclusion following your personal experience.
Recent trend to dumb down math and calling 'racist'. Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that will suffer the most. Most immigrants are poor, and don't have the connections and money to go to private tutoring route and rely heavily on public education.
At least you can homeschool your kids. It takes a lot of effort but I don't think money is a big issue here unless of course you are struggling with basic income then it's best to focus on income first.
Can you share what did you do with the students that could not do algebra physics and chemistry in junior high?
I’ve always thought yours was the right way. There are some students which will do the minimal but will manage if challenged. Seems the equitable way leaves them behind.
Since it was a communist country, everyone had the same conditions (crappy), and everyone had the same fricking clothes (only two clothing factories on the whole country), and same teachers (and no private schooling allowed), and we had the same books, and no calculators.
And it is clear, if all conditions are equal, still people are not born equal. Some kids are just smarter than others, and some are just dummies, or don't care about school. Since everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame 'systematic x'. It was all equal. A doctor and a nurse probably lived in the same apartment, and had similar wages. (think Cuba, or North Korea today. Albania was like the North Korea of Europe).
Grades/marks were 2 - 10, 2-4 was failing, 5 was passing, 10 was excellent (and hard to get).
Grades were given in the basis of
1. homework,
2. blackboard interrogation (you had to solve and explain everything in front of the class, similar to a whiteboard coding interview),
3. Exams, flash quizzes or pre-announced.
You had three types of students:
1. Great students, and are aiming for the 10s (and usually get a 9 or a 10).
2. People that struggle to do the basic, and just want to pass the class and are aiming for a 5 or a 6.
3. Everybody else that got a 7-8.
Every exam or homework, was done with this in mind. You usually had 3 type of questions:
1. Super basic, <- If you were in class, you could do it
2. Medium, <- Some thinking is required
3. Advanced <- Usually only the really good students got these
The teachers knew, that some students would struggle, and they will let them pass if they just did the basic effort. If a student failed even that, they would have to go to 'summer class' and take additional classes and exams to pass. If you failed a class, you failed the whole year and had to repeat every other class as well.
Also, the school over time divided the students by grades. Each cohort-year, might have 4-5 classes (of 30 students). Your class was the people that you studied with, and did everything. The top students usually were placed together, and spread in the class A, and B. The rest were put on the other classes.
So, the top classes had only excellent students, or average students, but not of the failing one. The idea was that failing students will just drag down all the top students and not let them excel. A top student can make an average student better, but there was little chance to do anything with a failing one. If you were initially a failing student but started doing better, you could move up to the better classes. This is similar to the soccer relegation techniques of most soccer leagues in Europe.
But: Every class, had the same subjects, and the same load. Even the failing students had to do pre-calc. But the teachers would just be much more lenient on them. Eg. do the very basic, and they will let you pass. But if you wanted a good grade, 8 or higher, you had to work your butt off.
This is totally politically incorrect in today's environment, but even communist Albania knew better. Some people are just not smart at all, and it is better to let them just do the bare minimum and pass, meanwhile let the smarter kids do more advanced work.
Do you have data or anecdata on the effect of repeating an entire year? In many modern Western schools that'd be frowned upon as punitive and as likely to provoke a "well screw YOU!" response or ingrain "I must really be stupid" mindset.
As a parent (in Switzerland of all places) I actually consider this a very good option for kids struggling. And took the opportunity for one of our kids and it worked out great.
Edit: Switzerland has a different approach where children are segregated by their ability starting from 7th school year. So you go to Gymnasium, A level, B level, C level.
I skipped a class (went from 3rd standard to 5th) because I could clear the entrance exam during changing schools (I also topped the exam, mainly because my tutor made me work hard). In college I failed a paper because I was lazy and didn't work hard. The first incident made me happy but didn't make me think that I was very smart and the latter didn't make me think I was dumb. I knew the reasons exactly. We under-estimate how much we know ourselves.
You have to fail two classes in order to repeat the whole year. If you fail only one, you'd still could pass (but had to go to additional schooling). But if you had failed two, then there was something wrong going on with with the whole year, and it had repeated.
Usually it was kids that had some discipline problems. Perhaps ADHD, etc... but at the time, no-one cared about those aspects as school psychologist were not a thing at all.
If you failed more than one year in a row, then the teachers will just give up on you and let you just slide the next year as long as you just showed up.
I have seen less than 0.1% in my school fail like this. But yeah, it was punitive and usually did provoke a "well screw YOU!" response or ingrain "I must really be stupid" mindset.
In the Netherlands, repeating a year is common. I estimate about a quarter of kids in my year had to repeat a year. If it happened twice, you had to leave school and go to a less exacting school.
Anecdotal but both my parents repeated a year (that was in the sixties in France), they went on to become a teacher teaching primary school teachers how to educate children for one and a headmistress at a relatively large primary school for the other.
Both of them looking back thought that repeating a year was a good thing for them, they went from being struggling average/below average students to top of their class and regained their confidence.
I think it really depends, in a place and time where repeating classes is more common, it maybe doesn't really destroy confidence as much whereas in areas where it's rare, then the psychological impact is much worse.
Also, one thing to note, both of them, in their experience with education, saw much better results when children were separated by level than when classes were mixed together for exactly the reason the OP mentioned. A top student can help bring an average student up but when there are both top students and very below average students, the teacher has to make the choice to either focus on the below average student or the top students and neither of those choices are good.
In France, we've had a push toward lowering the overall level and removing any elitism at schools. This has increased the amount of kids who graduate from high school with the Baccalauréat which is needed for university but has lowered the level of kids actually going to university (especially at engineering schools and elite institutions) and reduced the value of a university degree. It's a bit similar to what's happening in the US in STEM and I think it's a bad calculation for the long term competitiveness of the country.
> but has lowered the level of kids actually going to university (especially at engineering schools and elite institutions)
Come on, of course it hasn't. Entry requierements haven't changed.
The highschools providing the largest contingents of students to these elite institutions respect neither the national curriculum nor the ban of sorting students by ability without any consequences. Unsurprisingly the two most famous of these highschools are also exempt from the French purely geographical students draft and the places most politician children attend. As usual in France, the rule for all is not the rule for the elite.
In effect, the dumbing down of the national curriculum has just made a system which was already one of the most unequal in Europe even more unequal. But everything is fine. The French system only uses entrance exams and entrance exams are always fair, aren't they?
I remember being in my engineering school with prepa intégré and the teachers lamenting that we had not studied vector space in high school like students used to 15 years ago. I have a friend teaching at a math sup/math spé who complains about the lowering of the level. So yes, the level has been lowered and entry requirements have changed. I do know that in both prépa intégrés and math sup/math spé they try to compensate for the lower level out of high school by condensing all that should used to be done in high school within those two years. Of course those two most famous high school are an exception but those are such a small percentage of the total number of engineers.
All countries use entrance exams, it's not something that specific to France and of course there's an inherent unfairness to them, kids from better educated families are always going to get better results. In fact if we were talking about fairness then the disappearance of boarding schools (internats) have actually increased inequality. There was a time when a lot of kids spent the week in boarding schools, for kids from families with less focus on education (like my grandmother who kept telling my mum that she should stop reading because it'd cause her headaches), it removed them from non-optimal environment and put them in situation where they had better access to education. But I'm not sure that's desirable or optimal :)
My father repeated a year, bounced back from it and became a teacher later in life.
But usually it did not happen that often. When it did happen, it usually meant someone will change schools to a less demanding one (if in high school). So for example you may leave a gymnasium and go to a school for mechanics.
In elementary school it did not happen except for serious disciplinary problems. People with mental problems were able to have special programmes that tailored to their needs, so this did not result in repeating a year.
Teachers did not really like the idea of having someone repeat a year, so if you had a decent attitude you could get a passing grade but you had to put in the effort. This "effort" part is what is in my opinion biggest different, Eastern Europe schooling required you to put in a lot of work, if you were talented you didn't need to use so much time, but if you weren't natural at math, you had to put in plenty of hours to get decent grades. Problems usually were not of the sort that can't be learned through "brute force".
I've done some teaching on the side and when I was teaching a guy in a "US" school for children of diplomats, difference was that their problems were usually much more freeform and required deeper understanding but once understood, used primitive math or physics methods. Our normal schooling was different, it used advanced math or physics but the problems were often times many variants of the same problem (which allowed for brute force learning). Honestly I think that it would be the best to have both, as many of my fellow students did not really understand the material we studied but they could brute force it.
T.b.h. as somebody from ost-block country, I did hate the cast-system based on the performance. In my school we had a class that selected for the worst students, and surprise, it created a class where so many people failed.
I was in class that had an even mix, some really smart kids, some not so much, and some comparable to the worst of the D-class. Like third of the of my classmates went for the sports-focused high-school, because they were decent at basketball and bad at almost everything else. But nobody was failing.
Like, A-class should have been the top students, B and C middling, and D poor. In reality, A was ordinary, B and C contained the best and the average and D was a failure.
How did the A class become ordinary while B&C had a mixture of top and average? Was it that the ordinarily smart students were motivated by the sorting exams than the top smartest students?
I think part of it was that the sort happened when we were ~10yo? People from A-class were the sort of straigh-A student that then coasted on the fact learning came to them ~naturally, so maybe that is why the perceived performance declined.
Even more anecdotal thing, in my class there were more people doing extra-curicural contests, like Math-Olympiad and the like. We were even encouraged by teahers, along the lines of "No, try it even if you don't have top grades, that is the sort of thing where you need to understand what you are doing, not just ave all the right answers on the test." :D
Last hypothesis of mine is, that because we had a mix of sudents, the smarter(?) of us spend some time explaining to others (mix of goodnes of heart, being bullied and even having like a pay-for-homework manufacture?) ... and as they say, you learn best, when you explain?
But I could be completely wrong, rose-tinted glasses and long forgotten traumas and all that :D
Eh, I remember I was put in a D class. Math classes there were like "today we are going to study addition, who wants to ask this student to add two numbers?" so I volunteered and asked the guy to add 5 to 7 - I understood that the class somehow struggled with two digit numbers and wanted to see this in action. The teacher, though, realized what my plan was and said we can't do this level of complexity right now. That day I learnt something important though: that the crowd follows "the rules" without questioning them and that being a smartass isn't rewarded. We were 6-7 year olds then.
> Since everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame 'systematic x'. It was all equal.
This is certainly an advantage that Albania had over Alabama. There are still people alive who remember the school system having to be desegregated under armed guard. The struggle continues: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/1...
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 why event though I am liberal/democrat, I don't like the today's 'progressives', as they seem completely ignorant of human nature, and have no knowledge of the history of countries that went through socialism/communism, and yet want to repeat the same destructive mistakes by trying to achieve 'equality of outcome', which is impossible.
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.
> 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 some Virginia schools not teaching Geometry in 8th grade (for the record - I took Algebra in 8th grade and most people in my tiny high school took it in 9th).
Very funny, no one will resent you as a "leech on society due to" your “inferior mathematical ability.” However, if you actually choose to literally leech on society (e.g. choose to be unemployed and uneducated) then people will. Anyway, education exists to educate. If you care about social welfare, talk to the social welfare programs.
They absolutely do - they most likely consider people like me to be subhuman entities. It’s not like I have the mental ability to get into the fancy schools or fancy companies they got into.
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 me as a leech on society due to my “inferior mathematical ability” as you surely do?
Why is American society so centered around appearances and perceived judgment? You'd rather damn an entire state to stagnation than risk being looked down upon by some hypothetical elitist? And math is only one of many, many subjects.. I firmly believe everyone is good at something.
> Poverty is a far bigger problem than some Virginia schools not teaching Geometry in 8th grade
And how is terrible education supposed to help with poverty? Education is a great way, arguably the primary way, that people lift themselves up.
I’m sorry, could you give some context to non-Americans? What does “taking geometry” mean? My school had geometry as a subject in grades 7-11 (with 11 being the final year), were you expected to pack it all in one? How does that work?
I'd interpret the phrase "taking geometry" in this context to refer to the quality and depth of math education available, and to a lesser degree how wealthy the school district is.
Given typical HS math curriculum (algebra/geometry up to calculus) being able to offer geometry early gives enough time to offer calculus; otherwise a school could teach it late and it won't matter because math education stops early anyway.
Also connotes to a degree college-track vs non college-track students, again due to the highest math a HS offers. It is extremely desirable to take calculus in HS to prepare for college, but if most students don't go to college, no need to take/offer calculus, no need to start the math sequence early, etc.
I went to HS in the US and I remember a split in the math curriculum starting in 10th grade (I didn't go to my HS in 9th grade so I can't say). The vast majority of kids planning on college took a combined algebra 2/trigonometry class in 10th grade; the other kids took either algebra 1, geometry, or algebra 2 (without the trig) depending on previous courses.
So the comment "taking geometry in 8th vs 9th vs 10th grade" would mean something like comparing schools for numbers of college-track students and funding (8th grade great - implies a HS with a large body of students going to college, well funded in order to offer variety of classes; 10th grade not good - implies a HS with a small body of students going to college; not well funded, math stops before calculus, etc.)
> 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.
My experience in my home country of Romania was similar to yours, however my conclusions couldn't be more different.
> American schools are too soft on science in general. [...]The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science
How on earth is brutality in teaching a good idea? What was the effect of this approach on the average Albanian or Romanian student? Sure it worked fine for a few of us, but overall the results are disastrous, just take a look at the PISA rankings.
Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on in life?
> Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on in life?
Most people will do just fine with basic math training because it's what you normally need later on in life.
Most of my math training in the Eastern European school system has probably gone to waste. I only saw the point of advanced maths, calculus later on in technial university when I had to apply it in science. During my engineering career I only used the math I learned up to maybe ninth or tenth grade. No calculus. For materials science we also had to use maths up to tenth grade because of non linear properties of materials. However, calculus and advanced math was required to understand the physical phenomena. What went away was solving tricky integrals and series for which you had to think of an obscure substitution - the type of grinding math excercises we had to solve in high school. Last month I had to solve some RSA and ECC cryptography problems at work that could not be easily solved with existing crypto libraries. For example RSA signing checks were reimplemented using a big numbers library. That also did not require advanced maths, but rather a lot of grinding research done by reading crypto standards and technical guides.
My point was that a lot of advanced math can be taught later on. If it's forced down people's throats without them understanding why things are the way they are, all you're gonna get is ignorance and resentment.
In Romania I attended one of the "elite" maths/cs highschools. Except a hand full of people who would win medals in the imo etc. the rest of us were mostly clever, overworked automatons who learned problem solving tricks that we regurgitated on the page come exam time.
I think its not that it has to, its just more challenging and rewarding. I’ve read a lot about bulling and social problems in USA schools, but so almost none of that myself i Eastern Europe.
I think the subjects where so hard that it forced kids to cooperate, smart kids where considered a resource that potential bullies didn’t like to harm, as they would help them in the future. Additionally there was this sense of … maybe “esprit de corps” as we all were going through the same tough training.
I think that those hard problems were actually very rewarding and I saw very little of the “teenage problems” that are so prominently displayed in American media.
> bulling and social problems in USA schools, but so almost none of that myself i Eastern Europe
This has changed for the worse with capitalism and social inequality. We had some bullying back when I was a primary school student but it was physical bullying by higher graders towards younger students and it was mostly done outside the school. We had none of the psychological bullying that you see in the US and to a greater extent in Korea or Japan. We had roma and very poor students in our class. There was also almost no bullying during high school. The more odd kids were usually ignored and had friends of their own.
> I think that those hard problems were actually very rewarding
Well, maybe rewarding for some. I didn't like them and would rather go outside and play or ride my bike in the neighbourhood. Math for math's sake was never my thing. I only started to really like math in university when I saw its potential to solve real world problems.
> This has changed for the worse with capitalism and social inequality.
An interesting perspective which I feel might be the actual core of the problem. I grew up after the Revolution, so I can't make a before/after comparison, but (as I mentioned in a different comment) I see a tight connection between how aggressive other students were and how bad their family situation was.
> Math for math's sake was never my thing. I only started to really like math in university when I saw its potential to solve real world problems.
Perfectly legitimate. Pushing hard math early on can actually put you off the subject forever. Some of us started liking it in university, but a lot of capable students decide it's just not for them. With a different approach many might have ended up understanding and maybe even loving it.
> I’ve read a lot about bulling and social problems in USA schools, but so almost none of that myself i Eastern Europe.
There was some bullying back when I was in school, but possibly less than in the US. However, I think this doesn't have much to do with the curriculum, but with social conditions.
In my case I was bullied in secondary school (by kids in my class) even though school was tough and I was easily part of what you would consider "valuable resources".
The result was that the bullies would copy their homework off of the kids that copied their homework from me and I still got into fights daily.
In highschool bullying disappeared completely, but that's because I went to a selective school (the equivalent of a US magnet hs) where everybody was academically oriented and also came from more stable social environments.
In less academically strong highschools there are a lot of nasty things taking place - students abusing eachother, teachers abusing students, students beating up teachers etc.
PISA ranking? China and Singapore are at the very top. If you think what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger moms push their children.
I've also went through what could be considered a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term.
We had ~40 problem sets to solve every evening for homework, hours of work. I don't think anyone ever got an A+ in anything. If the student was better/stronger at something - they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder sets added to their homework.
As for the "stupid" Americans? STEM classes are full of foreign kids in top US schools.
> China and Singapore are at the very top. If you think what's described is brutality, you should watch tiger moms push their children.
There are a bunch of different approaches that can lead to top scores in that ranking. notably Finland does well with a non-brutal approach.
> a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term.
the term was used by the parent, not by me. We just happened to assess its value differently.
> they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder sets added to their homework.
It depends on what you think the purpose of school should be. If you want people to understand the world they live in, understand the "why" of things, think critically and creatively etc. then problem sets and ritualistic humiliation during oral exams won't take you very far.
> Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on in life?
They do just fine because they aren't selected to do jobs where they need those kinds of skills, because they tend not to have them.
If they were taught the stuff at least they would have the choice.
I'm not in favour of brutalizing the kids though, I think that ruins the experience for them. But a lot of kids are more capable than we think and ought to be shown advanced subjects.
> pressure during oral exams taught to work against the clock, develop conviction and do your best to defend your position.
In some students. In others it just engendered the feeling that they're morons and that math is just "not for them". Math and science are for absolutely everybody. Not everybody will make a career out of them, but everybody can enjoy them.
I don't think it's really "brutal" but "challenging". So if the kid has no interest in Math he/she would regard that as brutal and for others who do have interest it's just challenging and maybe even fun. Just like people who like to crack Leetcode problems, those are challenging and fun.
> I don't think it's really "brutal" but "challenging".
Brutal was the term used by the parent, I just picked it up from there.
> if the kid has no interest in Math he/she would regard that as brutal and for others who do have interest it's just challenging and maybe even fun
Throughout my education I was in both camps at different times. The more "brutal" things got (dry, formal curriculum, tough teachers) the more it put me off. On the other hand patient and engaging teachers could get me to spend countless hours after school working on math problems.
Interests are things that develop based on intrinsic attributes but also based on environmental feedback. I suspect the latter is fast more important.
>Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and progress in this country,
There is literally a major political party in the US that parrots science to be fake & that religion/faith in god is all that matters. Also, that "progress" (in a technological/scientific sense) is a bad thing
Last I checked, it was not the progressives that identify with this line of thinking.
The mainstream republican party does not say any of those things. You are taking fringe positions and making them emblematic of the party.
On the other hand, the democratic party openly and literally claims there is no distinction between male and female.
There are dumb policy positions all over the board. No one denies science as a whole. Everyone picks and chooses.
Consider my state of Oregon... they're literally removing the ability to do math and read as graduation requirements and the GOP minority is left asking 'why'? How can you honestly make the claim the democratic party is uniquely the party of science
>The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science. Biology started at 5th grade, pre-Algebra at 5, and full blown Algebra at 6, physics at 6, and Chemistry at 7. Then in highschool you did the same, but more advanced. There was no choice at all, you had to do them all. The only choice in HS was a second foreign language. The whole idea was that you have to know all the basics of ALL sciences, so in college you know what to choose and pursue. If you never tried, you will have no clue if you liked something or not. (also basic music knowledge, sheet reading, and arts was a requirement as well).
I've went through similar curriculum in Croatia and I hated it - the literature they forced on us was politically correct bullshit some figurehead decided should be common culture. As a result 30% of the class read it and the rest just cheated and studied for test.
It was like this in every class - I hated cheating and studying for the test - I was lazy and it was pointless - as a result I got barely passing grades based on slightly paying attention in class. But in casual conversation I could relate way more of the basics than my peers. And I lost interest in many subjects simply because of how they were taught (study random facts because it will be on the test - no context or application). I had to relearn algebra after highschool because of how badly it was taught - and I was interested in it since I was trying to learn 3d programming and I was going to math competitions in elementary school - teachers couldn't relate any questions I asked to stuff I was interested in.
I hope my kid gets way less material to study and more opportunity to figure out what he wants to learn.
Probably best to start with the Bronshtein - Semendyayev: Handbook of Mathematics. It's still widely used in a lot of slavic speaking countries. Google it, there's a pdf available.
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 that Americans didn't.
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 means. That class/hour stood with me ever since, even though 25 years have passed.
But truth be told it very highly depended on the quality of the math teachers. I was lucky enough to get into one of the best high-schools in my town so that we got a really good maths teacher, but the teacher "quality" was not that uniformly distributed across different schools.
Do the students bring any motivation to the classroom? Like, is there a culture of "study hard and pay attention in maths and sciences, because that's how we escape poverty" or something like that? Here in New Zealand, middle class parents put a high premium on being happy and fulfilled, and most (that I've seen across several schools) don't really prime their kids for academic success by saying "this is important, we value it, and you should too". It may be different for lower-class or upper-class kids here (I haven't spent a lot of time in those schools). Keen to know what it was like in Romania.
I grew up in Romania too (finished school in 1992), and at least during the communist regime I can't really remember a culture of studying hard to escape poverty, because that simply wasn't how you escaped poverty - it was more a mix of "choosing the right parents", the people you knew, a bit of luck, a bit of corruption and maybe some shrewdness, but Romania definitely wasn't a meritocracy at that time (that may however have changed since, at least to some degree). However, kids that studied hard and were very good in school weren't looked down upon and disrespected as they sometimes are in the West.
At University (after the regime changed), studying hard did become more common, but it was directed at scoring a job in Canada/USA/wherever, not at escaping poverty in Romania itself...
I finished highschool in 1999, grew up in a mono-industrial city which had just seen its only, well, industrial place in town close down and sold for scraps, in my case (and in the case of many of my colleagues) learning maths and getting into university with free admission was really one of the few escapes available from said town and, hence, from poverty.
I think those 7 years (1992 vs 1999) made a hell of a difference because of the economic "reforms" that were implemented in that time-interval and which actually saw many towns like the ones I grew up in become destitute in a matter of just a few years. Unfortunately that decade (the '90s) is not that well-studied yet in our history classes (maybe because it is too recent?), fact is I've only started to realise its true importance and its true, horrible economic and life-changing effects on our parents' generation (people who are now in the 60s and 70s) only recently. I think the same happened over almost all of the former Soviet Bloc, and imo it greatly explains some of the political tendencies we see today. But that is turning into OT, sorry for that.
Depends very much on the parents. Some families put a lot of importance on studies, and others don't. Usually those from countryside or without higher education would not care.
The most important thing is to shape your kids in such a way that they can make choices themselves.
Worst thing is when parents are pushing their children to go for the highest (their eyes) education.
A child who likes what he/she is doing, even when it is 'just' wood making becomes a much happier child.
Northern Europe is good in this. The US so so. But China and India are the worst examples. So many talented people doing things not in line with their real desires.
In Romania, from what i recall, it was usually the beatings. Didnt like math? The teacher would simply use the pointing stick to smash your hands. I was fortunate enough to have liked math but some weren’t. And so there were the beatings.
Those attending “olympiads” were brainwashed into thinking that somehow they were superior and at some point we had to look down upon those whom, god forbid, chose something else but maths. Some indeed went on to have high paying office jobs in western countries, many of whom are now turning back. Apparently being trained to win olympiads doesn't yield an entrepreneurial spirit nor does it lead to riches, and after a life wasted they now just want to live a bit.
You are exaggerating, I've never seen a beating in school (from a teacher to a pupil). Was in school in Bucharest from the 90's to 00's, had loads of maths and other stem classes. If you didn't keep up you'd get a bad grade, if you didn't pass the year you'd have a chance to correct it during summer school, and worst you'd repeat the year. Nothing uncommon here. And I don't share your hate against the ones competing in the olympics, I knew lots of them, later on they went into research, got jobs at Google, did PHDs at Harvard and Princeton and the likes and are now professors at top universities. And some of them are good entrepreneurs now, you'd be surprised.
I was in school in roughly the same period as you and although beatings from teachers to pupils were very rare, they did exist and happend if the pupil was very unruly and caused trouble in class (I had one classmate who nearly assaulted a teacher during class because he didn't like the bad grade he got), but usually the teacher had the "blessing" from the pupil's parents to perform such "corrections".
Beatings were much more common in the poorer parts of the cities/country with poor performing schools and broken families (alcoholism, domestic abuse, poverty). At top schools in big cities like the one you probably went to with alumni that go to Harvard and Google, beatings were not common at all because usually the children came from mid/upper-class families. But that's very small percentage of the pupils in Romania that are in such a performant environment.
When my dad was in school in the 60's, from what he told me, receiving beatings in school from teachers was very common all around even for stupid reasons as some teachers would go on aggressive power trips if you stepped on their nerves.
Depends on the teacher I guess, but we never got corporal punishment unless there were grave discipline issues like beating girls with snowballs or weaved scarves. Math? No. You just got a bad grade.
Most of our olympics are currenty researchers abroad or tech leads in the country. Entrepreneurs not so much, maybe the networking types.
The hardest math problems we encountered were from the USSR olympics. There was a magazine with math problems which collected such gems.
And there is your answer "from 90's to 00's". Beating was done in communist era, not after the fall of Iron Curtain.
I personally received beatings from my math teacher during middle school (5th to 8th grade), which was before '89. He would make me have the fingers up and together (think of like Italians argue) and then would hit my 5 thumbs altogether at once with a wooden stick.
I graduated around 2005, and yes, beatings were common. As were bribes and sexual abuse. The sexual abuse was so much in the open that some thought it was cool to see a student girl dating a professor.
It is more pronounced in universities - ask medical or economics students and you’ll uncover quite a few stories.
In primary school the older brother of a classmate has broken into a newsstand and has stolen a few porn magazines. My teacher beat him every day for a week as to serve as an example to everyone (yes he beat the little brother). He hit him around his temples so as to not leave marks and would lift him from the floor pulling by the hair. To this day i wont forget this.
Also as recently as few years ago there has been an uproar in romania as to how many parents beat their children for various reasons including poor school performance. You know, “bataia e rupta din cer”.
This happens in poor areas of romania such south or east provinces as much as in the north west.
“got jobs at X” - exactly. Excellence in romania’s education system means obedience. At the top it produces great workers. Not that working at google is not cool or getting a phd is not useful but romania needs more than that.
And while a small sample praises romania’s education system, and great maths, Romania suffers from roughly 50% functionally illiterate pupils. Just because a small sample gets good results in olympiads, frankly contests that mainly poor countries compete in, it doesnt mean the system is great. Quite the opposite.
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.
>our maths education has been seriously dumbed down.
I hear this complaint form nearly every country. It seems like the system has found this "hack" where if you dumb things down enough, then scores go up across the board, giving the impression that the children are performing better, so the people in charge can meet or exceed their KPIs, and everybody's a "winner".
For example, in Romania it was very difficult to get top grades at schools a few decades ago so those grades were used as entry criterias in universities, but nowadays everyone can get top grades without a sweat by carefully rigging the system, so universities have introduced their own entry exams since when everyone has top grades then they are all worthless.
I used to know online a Romanian who had moved to Canada sometime during high school, she made similar points about the slowness of the North American curriculum. I told her about my 11th grade AP Physics C material (which uses calculus) in America and she indicated that in Romania they forced her to learn all that stuff years ago. However she wasn't exactly helpful when I later asked if she could help me with something, she'd forgotten too much and anyway didn't have an interest to keep up or go further. I'm still left unconvinced in the superiority of other countries teaching their kids so much more so much earlier when it seems to be forgotten not long after, and of course there are the long-standing "where are the results?" counter-arguments. It's hard not to be skeptical of prolonged compulsory education of any quality.
I'm also not convinced about the superiority of any teaching system (especially now, after I've learned about and read some Ivan Illich), I was just trying to confirm OP's point that the education systems around this part of the world were indeed pushing harder when it came to some maths-related stuff earlier in a kid's "educational cycle", so to speak.
I'm also highly "skeptical of prolonged compulsory education of any quality" but, again, I think that maybe that will steer the discussion into OT territory.
I think we do see results in domains where math & science is particularly important. Eastern Europeans are consistently among the best algorithmic programmers I've worked with. My employer was co-founded by a Russian immigrant, son of a math professor. Russia beat us to space, and given the backwardness of the general eastern bloc economy they're remarkably strong in science and technology.
On the flip side, the American capitalist economy does a remarkably good job of making productive use of people who are not academically strong (this is a notable strength vs. the Chinese, as well). And American culture & education stresses team-playing, communication skills, and trust, all of which are weaknesses of many of the Eastern-bloc programmers I've worked with.
The thing is, I don't believe that the strengths of American culture are mutually exclusive with Russian and other Eastern European strengths in mathematics and science education. In other words, we could have both. What's stopping us from ripping out just the dumbed-down math curriculum from schools and replacing it with Russian-style instruction? I guess that's what the article is about, and some families are doing just that with private enrichment classes.
It's a nice dream, to have a populace educated to a much more advanced level in math, but I don't think it's doable with America as it is, i.e. we can't have both. We could at least stop sliding further down, perhaps, and I'd be glad to hear about many sorts of changes in state- and nation-wide curriculum, while we're to have such things, for what I believe to be marginal improvements. At the smaller margins we have individual parents doing what they can with things like these Russian Math programs, as they have done for a long time, and I think is probably sufficient to ensure the prodigies aren't snuffed out.
What's stopping us? For starters, over a hundred years of battling desires: https://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html Not any of the sides entirely without some merit. And that is closer to America's strength, in that try as we might to enforce Universalism in some domain, we're pretty bad at it against ourselves. This is a good thing, since while the surface of possibilities does suck and we can dream it was much better, it is not entirely uniform and solid, there are yet still many cracks for the precious few (many of whom being immigrants who found their own crack just to get here) to slip through, drag some along with them, and come out to do great things.
While this is partly true, and a point of national pride (I'm Romanian), it's also important to realize that this is the positive end of a very unequal system. If you have the good luck of having a good teacher, and enough material conditions to focus on learning, school will leave you with quite a good array of knowledge, especially in Maths and sciences.
However, the majority of people don't have this luck, and they get seriously left behind. I don't know as much about Bulgaria, but Romania has the largest percentage of functional illiteracy in the EU - almost half of Romanian high-school children can only theoretically read (they recognize the letter symbols, but can't actually read a text and understand what it meant, at the most basic level). A good percentage of people go through the mandatory K-10 education system through cheating, corruption, and basic knowledge.
Romania is very focused on national exams, one obligatory one in 8th grade and another one in 12th grade. There was a push about 10 years ago to implement some stringent anti cheating controls (cameras in each exam room, nothing fancier or more oppressive), and the pass rate plummeted from over 95% to 50% in that one year. There were entire high schools that had had straight As (10s) the year before and where no one passed the year after. This was the level of cheating and corruption.
I will also note that the stuff about having luck with your teachers is also not an exaggeration. I attended the second best high school in the country by admission grade (there is a national exam in 8th grade, and students choose their preferred high-school in a ranked vote style, and then every student is assigned to a high-school in order of exam grade + preference). This is also a high-school in the capital, and a wealthy area. I had some really good teachers in a few things, and a few really abysmal teachers in others. Even in CS, which was the high-school's specialty, I had teachers who seemed to barely know the basics (but also others who were pretty decent).
It's also important to note that there is widespread, normalized abuse in the teaching system, especially towards children with poor grades, or who are just poor. Things like yelling, demeaning, even spanking and hair cutting (for male students with longer hair, especially) are relatively common, and still considered normal in some areas (though, thankfully, fewer and fewer).
Oh wow, thanks for the post, this is really insightful.
Do you know why students have to resort to cheat and corruption for passing tests and going trough the K-10 system? Is it some external factor for the students, is it just lack of good teachers, or a combination? Thanks.
I am not an expert by any means, but I believe one of the main reasons is that there is a fixed national curriculum, that includes many different domains, with the same standards for everyone, usually withab a huge focus on knowledge accumulation and rote learning. The mentality is often centered around knowing and being able to repeat facts and formulae. The curriculum often goes into deep detail on relatively obscure subjects with no or very little context. Combined with poor teachers (both in terms of performance and financially), this leads to many, if not most, students being relatively left behind.
For an example of the top-level mentality, the compulsory school system used to include K-12 until a few years ago. In high-school, you used to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 10, and organic chemistry in grades 11 and 12. After the move to K-10, the curriculum was adjusted to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 11, and organic in 10 and 12, with the cited reasoning being that you can't have students graduating out of high-school without knowing the basics of organic chemistry, can you? This, again, in a country where a good third or more of those students can actually barely read - they've been lost since around grade 2-3.
>It's also important to note that there is widespread, normalized abuse in the teaching system, especially towards children with poor grades, or who are just poor. Things like yelling, demeaning, even spanking and hair cutting (for male students with longer hair, especially)
Americans will be appalled, without realizing that these are common hazards for poor, and especially black, students to face. In many cases, these tactics aren't even used for punishment, but as preemptive control measures (especially the hair-cutting).
It continues to surprise me how many parallels there are between the Eastern European and Inner City American experiences.
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 way.
What is surprising even still is that school in Bulgaria was from 07:00 to 13:00. In the UK it's 07:00 to 15:00. You had more time to do homework in Bulgaria and more time to be a child.
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 do maths', and I put this down to how it is taught, which isn't very well.
Not sure about youtube, but for the right age kid, maybe late-elementary to early high school, there's a weekly "Joyful math jamboree" online. The web page for it is not updated very often, but the registration form still works.
There's also the Julia Robinson Math Festival that's supposed to be good but I don't have first-hand experience.
Ideally, a Math Circle would could be good for some kids if your area supports one.
Has it changed since the 1960s? Maths where I grew (Swindon, Wilts., ) up was pretty good and from first form (age 11, 1966) on used the SMP course where there really wasn't any memorization of rote formulae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Mathematics_Project
The earliest I was introduced to discrete maths like this was my first year of uni -- that course looks really interesting. I know they teach CS at high school now
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'.
Ah that is lame that you had to go through that. I remember in my calc class the teacher said we would spend no time learning for the government standardized test. If you can't already pass it you have no business being in the class.
Yeah, with different tests it may be different. But in the UK the government pushes for 'more challenging tests', which means more stuff to memorise, a lot of the stuff is very specific (in science GCSE and A-levels there's specific phrases you need to use to get marks. Accurate descriptions which don't include those key phrases don't get marks), and there's a lot riding on getting near perfect marks. Someone who has a good memory and a few months to prepare and an expert on the topic with years of experience (but no specific preparation) have about the same chance with these exams.
All the schools I know of here in the London area start around 0830 to 0900. Some operate a club for busy parents to drop off their kids early but classes don't start until the rest of the kids show up.
I graduated high school in the USA in the past decade. I was never taught Calculus. I wasn't even very good at algebra.
Eventually I went on to get a math minor in college to go with my computer science degree, but I didn't even learn the first thing about Calculus until I was 21.
Math and Science education in the USA is really really abyssal until college, and then it's sink or swim.
I'd be wary of forming an opinion on foreign education systems from international students, as they're generally of more privileged extraction compared to the unwashed masses who can't afford to study overseas.
Not just privileged extraction, but likely high IQ. The Russian brain teasers are to get smart students excelling. The American system is set up to get the weak student stumbling to the finish line. The American school system isn’t designed to produce high achievers which is why the high achievers are produced by the parents and not by the schools.
I think its the same case for much of the west. Here in the UK, I remember maths being not the greatest but certainly every kid got through with a passable level of competance.
Unless you have a very high budget, which usually only private (or public as they're called in the uk, but they're the same thing) schools have, you can't have it both ways where both the weakest students pass and the strongest students excel.
What you're describing isn't the US system of education.
The US system is as bifurcated as the various European nations mentioned in this thread. The elite families in the US do not send their kids to the same (frequently) underperforming schools as the middle class or poor, just as those types of families don't do that in Russia or Romania.
> The American school system isn’t designed to produce high achievers
Which system are you talking about? There is no unified American school system. Nothing remotely close to that concept exists in the US. It's not possible to generalize so broadly. There are many different education systems in the US, varying based on where you live (varying dramatically from one state or city to the next even) and or what your economic capabilities are. Your description, if we were to attempt to utilize it, applies primarily to bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of society, not the top 1/3.
An obvious example would be elite private schools in and around Washington DC. The Washington DC region simultaneously has many of the richest zip codes in the US, and vast tracts of poverty and many horrible public schools. Washington DC, broadly, presents one of the starker examples of the US bifurcation in nearly all things socioeconomic.
> The US system is as bifurcated as the various European nations mentioned in this thread. The elite families in the US do not send their kids to the same (frequently) underperforming schools as the middle class or poor, just as those types of families don't do that in Russia or Romania.
To illustrate the point: the only Presidential candidate from one of the two major parties, since and including the 2000 election, not to have attended a private prep school, was Hillary Clinton.
Any idea how to figure out which camp a particular school is? There are wealthy zip codes with excellent public schools, but there are also crappy private schools so the public/private distinction is not always telling. Scores also don't work because they test dumb rote learning and have become gamed. I would love to find a school where teachers are the kind who know math/other subject "intuition" behind the knowledge like they had in some Soviet schools.
Absolutely this. My father was an immigrant from an eastern block country. Just a regular family, his father was a salesman, his mother a secretary. Father was valedictorian of his high school, speaks 6 languages, ect. Scraped together enough money to study at a British grad school, finished in 1 year as valedictorian. Then he immigrated to America. So someone looking at his math achievements might think wow, they really teach those soviet immigrants math well! But it was more like the best of the best immigrate while someone more average like me would be stuck in the old country.
Absolutely this. People seem to ignore selection effects when taking with immigrants from other countries, especially students. These people typically come from the richest/most connected families in their home country*
It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their home country because of economic reasons. This is the primary reason for immigration from Eastern Europe to the EU and the UK. If you're in the US, yes, the visa selection program requirements make your average immigrant come from richer or more connected families. For instance quite a number of people left my country to the US using connections in neo protestant church communities - that's what I've meant by connected.
Even many of those who left for economic reasons come from richer families that are leaving because of new policies that are less friendly to the wealthy or previously privileged classes. See, for instance, white emigration from South Africa or Zimbabwe to the United States.
Also, to be clear, this is specifically an American perspective and even more specifically, about international students - labor migration from Eastern Europe to the EU is of a decidedly different character and more analogous to the comments I was making about people from the Americas in the US.
> > people typically come from the richest/most connected families in their home country
> It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their home country because of economic reasons.
Another common reason for leaving is discrimination. Those people who leave because of discrimination are very rarely well connected or wealthy, or they usually wouldn't have to leave.
Then there are the outright asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants, who are also usually very poor and lack connections.
It seems like everyone replying has ignored my caveats.
Most international students are not there because of discrimination they faced. Most people who are seeking asylum or undocumented in the US are from the Americas.
For international students not from the Americas, most are wealthy or well connected by the standards of their home country, although often not by American standards. It's not uncommon to hear about the banker who became a taxi driver in the US, but what you hear less of is the farmer's kid - because they never even get a chance to come.
I think you are generalising and exagerating a bit. As it happens, I had a colleague and an acquaitance who both worked as a taxi drivers in Chicago and knew each other. They weren't bankers, nor farmers' kids. Their parents were middle class teachers and accountants. Reality is more boring and mundane than you might imagine.
Normally I'd be very wary of this, but I went to the #1 liberal arts college in the U.S. My American-born classmates included people like John Glenn's grandson, the heir to the Mead trapper-keeper company, the son of the guy who founded Kohl's department stores, the nephew of the famous Hollywood madame, etc. With the exception of the Mead guy, most of these people were functionally innumerate and never took a math course in college.
So I might be comparing the best & brightest of Bulgaria, but in theory at least I'm comparing them against the best & brightest of America (though in practice I suspect it's more like the richest).
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 physically assaulted. You don't see these things being corrected because standards and discipline have been branded as racist.
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.
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 do simple mental maths (I remember 8x3+17 being the 'hardest one').
The other kids were pretty fascinated with my slightly different long division methods, but the teachers were just obsessed with making me write an `x` instead of a `·` when writing out my multiplication, and trying to make me change the methods I'd learned previously.
I stopped finding maths interesting at that point (age 11) and it breaks my heart to this day. What I knew was enough to get me a couple of 'best-in-school + gold' medals in that Year 8 maths challenge, but it was all Bs and Cs at a-level. I did rediscover a genuine interest in mathematics again at uni as part of the foundations of AI course (CS degree), but that was short-lived and frustrating, as I knew I should have been better.
As a Brit, I was never any good at mental math at school, I still cannot do that hardest one without a calculator.
But later on, I swam like a fish in water in geometry, trig, logic and loved algebra and moved from the last of my year to one of the top. I was doing integration etc a good two years before it was being taught in the higher classes. These skills are good for programming and computers.
There was a limit; basically theorems, multi dimensional stuff and unreal? math, primes, pure math etc were completely out of my scope. Strange I guess, perhaps these are connected with being good at mental arithmetic?
My point is that I also think it's bizarre on the British obsession with mental maths early on, when for many algebra might be better and easier.
In my country (and I'd say this happens in some other EU countries), you do a ton of basic algebra as a kid, then take some rushed calculus and linear algebra 1-2 years before uni.
Once you pretend you have mastered the basics, there is a sudden, strange focus on advanced Calculus heuristics and obscure linear algebra techniques, effectively making most people hate these subjects. The way you are taught the stuff is basically a crime against Mathematics since it drives talented people away from STEM careers.
I felt the same way, but I noticed professors I admired often doing arithmetic in their head, clearly because they enjoyed doing it. So since then I make an effort to mentally calculate. And you know what? It's a more interesting hobby than you'd think. Whatever technique you adopt (or grow, in my case), it's a good, concrete, occasionally useful exercise in breaking down a problem into smaller parts, and then combining those simple results into something else.
Or maybe it's vanity. But I will say it's depressing to see all the cashiers (in the US) that can't seem to do any kind of math in their head, not even to minimize change (which seems totally ubiquitous in many other parts of the world; in fact, some cultures are aggressive about optimizing your change - China comes to mind).
I still have a hard time in mental arithmetics. During my school days, this is one of the things which had instilled the "math phobia" in me.
I never really took an interest in math, until I started doing competitive programming in college. I had to literally build a new understanding of division, multiplication, modulus, etc., it's difficult to explain. But I feel really ashamed in admitting that I still suck at math, probably because I just hated it during school days and no one was there to guide me. I don't really like blaming things on others, but I am not sure what else I could've done to learn math.
I think mental arithmetic is one of those things that simply requires vast amounts of practise. I’m quite slow at it, but when I’m forced to do a lot of it, say for keeping score. I quickly get faster.
I too was much better at applied maths and stats. It was fairly easy for me. But my brain just shuts down doing pure math.
I'm in exactly the same position at the age of 40. I've attempted to memorise the times table to no avail. It seems to me one of those things that you need to know cold. And then from there you can look at other things.
To me mathematics is a thing of beauty I just find I havent found the right handle to grasp it with.
I ask myself what would be the order in which one could most easily absorb the material. Does it really start with rote learning?
> I ask myself what would be the order in which one could most easily absorb the material. Does it really start with rote learning?
What are you trying to learn and why?
Math starts with axioms, which are some statements that everything else is built from. Axioms, as far as I understand, can't be derived. These are the most basic building blocks. Then through logic and deductions other machinery is built up. There is a certain amount that does need to be internalized or memorized, but that is the same for learning the alphabet.
In math classes, at least at the university level in Canada, knowing the statement of definitions and theorems covered exactly is somewhat important. If it's a proof based course this is more important, but the theorem will tell you where it's applicable, so knowing that helps.
Math builds. It took me until a third year complex analysis course to build up enough courage to ask a prof how he solves problems. Basically he said he has a hierarchy of theorems in a given field. When he sees a problem he will go through each of them starting with the easiest to apply and check the assumptions. If it applies, then he will use it and get the result. If not, move on to the next one. He goes and looks up the exact statements and how to go through with the calculations and checks. If you forget something, look it up.
Eventually after solving enough problems you'll build up some intuition and muscle memory for the problems.
As to how to progress, I am not sure. Some mathematicians say you kind of just pick things up and then connect the threads later on. It's not always possible to march through in a linear manner because there isn't an absolute ordering in what to learn.
There should be an appendix in the back of a textbook that reviews or outlines what's required for the book. There will be a few questions that rely on outside knowledge, but one can still learn the majority of the concepts without going to far afield for review.
Start with what you want and fill in the rest of the gaps by working backwards.
I wouldn't worry about memorizing the times tables (unless maybe you're interested in number theory?) if you're trying to learn math. Know algebra, functions, and graphing as a minimum, then start to learn what you want... I would just use a calculator or pencil and paper to multiply things out on homework. If this is for personal benefit, then don't hesitate to get some numerical methods involved to help learning the material.
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.
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 will explain it to us), and then at the UK university I went to we spent the first year just going through extremely simple algebra. It honestly felt like I was doing something wrong.
Hmm.. In my experience this would have been discrete math at best which is normal in CS classes. You'd have to have taken an engineering elective or math elective to get linear algebra.
Today, with AI being so hot, I'd bet that the programs include math for engineers e.g. matrices and linear algebra. Maybe an intro course in stats and probability.
That wasn't my experience in doing a CS degree in the 1980s - we basically did the same maths as the engineers for two years and then diverged into more discrete maths in 3rd year of a 4 year course. And this isn't even counting the pure CS mathematical components such as lambda calculus etc.
At my university in the U.K. we called the kind of linear algebra that computer scientists do “vectors and matrices.” It involved grids of numbers and maybe things like decompositions and eigenvalues/vectors. Computer scientists might get to go into topics like numerical stability or decomposition that are useful for computation. These have lots of practical uses and are relevant to topics like graph theory or Markov chains.
The thing we called “linear algebra” involved linear maps and vector spaces and bases and dual spaces and no grids of numbers.
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.
There’s a limited amount you can do when everyone around you is destitute. I seriously doubt future coal miners were taught sophisticated math in high school in the USSR - they took tracking and specialization to an extreme, whereas this is culturally verboten in America (for good reason).
It's the Germans who are extreme specializers, with separate middle and high schools for vocational, professional and academic tracks.
The Union had two optional years of high school, but everyone took the first eight with no tracks or optional classes. After that you could finish school or get three years of vocational education and join the workforce.
Soviet schools weren't really specialized. They could have some classes with a heavier focus on specific subjects but all changes were minor.
So yes, coal miners learned the same stuff. Only after grade 9 kids could apply to a professional school that would teach blue-collar professions and that's the first divergence point.
P.S. In Soviet/Russian schools "class" is literally a group of kids who study all subjects together from grade 1 to 11, they are very rigid.
Strangely enough, I'm an American who was taught Singapore math in elementary school.
Then my family moved to a nearby city where they taught standard American math and I wasn't allowed to solve math problems the Singapore way. Even though I got the correct answers, the teachers insisted I do math the "right" way, which I consistently messed up for the rest of my life.
Singapore math not only has a more reasonable pace to learning, but as someone with inattentive ADHD I found its approach to arithmetic easier for me to keep track of in my head.
Even if people have heard of Singapore math, they might not know that things like addition are done left-to-right rather than right-to-left.
I don't know about anyone else, but that is more like how I do math in my head on a day to day basis since the first step gets you closer to the answer. Just doing more addition underneath is also more visually clean than carrying numbers by writing them above the original equation. Paper is plentiful, and now I'm sure it could all be done digitally, so there's no reason to use standard American math to save space.
It is not Russian but 'Soviets math'. Ironically, Russia introduced analogy of USA's standardized right after Itina emigrated from Russia and now Russian's math is also optimized for memorizing but not for 'emphasizing reasoning and deeper understanding'
I graduated before USE, and my math classes were... mediocre. To graduate, you had to do 10 problems of average difficulty, so our textbooks didn't even have problems harder than that.
I took a look at the entrance exam at the uni I wanted to apply to and was shocked. Thankfully, I had my dad and he went through Skanavi's exercise book with me.
I look at the USE math exam every year and it's much better than my final exam (although I like gaokao more, it has more varied problems that make you combine different areas of math), but I don't know where the cutoff point for "I won't get into trouble for my students' low results" is.
That's a common criticism that mostly relies on emotions and not facts.
These standardized tests are changed little by little every year and are simply meant to a) ensure similar educational standards for smaller and remote cities b) enable kids to apply to any university in Russia.
Although some specific parents and teachers in particular school might want to focus on repetition of the same problems and tasks it doesn't mean everyone will and it certainly didn't affect me that much. In fact, having some definitive rules on how they assess an essay in Russian helped me get 100% for it the first time, since it was objective.
This is the video by the daughter of the founder of the Russian School of Math. We sent our son there over the summer, he enjoyed it and all the kids were pretty advanced in the class. California seems to want to hold everyone back in the name of equity. But that will force more people into the private school system, which is exactly what we did. I don’t trust the California government to have my children’s best interest at heart, I think they want to hamstring them in the name of equity.
Oregon governor Kate Brown has signed a law that allows students to graduate without proving they can read, write or do math. The law had overwhelming Democrat support & is justified on the basis that it will benefit non-white students.
Not sure how exactly the lack of these skills could benefit anyone.
I understand that the lack of a school diploma is a huge drag in life and that can primarily affect people from disadvantaged backgrounds, but shouldn't they focus on improving the way they teach kids instead?
> Not sure how exactly the lack of these skills could benefit anyone.
Lower the standards across all levels -- high school graduation, college admissions, job placements. Eventually we end up with surgeons and lawyers that are illiterate. But at least it is equitable!
This is about suspending mandatory testing prior to graduation. They did that last year due to virtual learning, and are extending the suspension longer while things get back to normal, and while they assess whether the approach to testing they have is suitable (and in line with what other states are doing). It is not (yet) gone forever, just for a couple years. And you still have to pass courses in all of those subject orders in order to graduate.
How is your interpretation any better than the editorialized 'brown drops education requirements'. The pandemic is no excuse to lower standards. It short changes these kids. If anything, public schooling should be extended as an option for those above 18 to freely learn what they missed. This is an immense loss for these children. The last two years of High school are extremelyy important.
Essentially large part of education falls onto the shoulder of parents, which is natural. I'm even preparing to sharpen up my Math/Physics/Electronics skills for the future. Time to re-learn those things that I mostly forgot!
> Essentially large part of education falls onto the shoulder of parents, which is natural.
Have to disagree. A parent can't be simultaneously up to speed on Math, English, a 2nd language, Biology, Science, History or any of the other subjects that a child will learn in school
School is meant to teach, parents are meant to socialise. Unfortunately that seems to have been swapped around somewhere along the line.
I mean it's impossible to master everything but to find something that motivates the kid and keep him focused is largely parent's work. It's really difficult to ask too much from the public education system nowadays :(
In the UK, by law (Education Act), parents are responsible for educating their children - this has slipped considerably, I wish it were still a central ideal : under such a regime schools should be a service that parents can use to educate their children. I'd like to, for example, use school for some things, other groups for others, and home schooling for other things (essentially Flexischooling). This is in theory an option in the UK, but it's left to individual headteachers to dictate their ideals to parents (regardless of the Edu.Act) so you have to be lucky to get a headteacher who supports your chosen pedagogy.
They typical standard for a teacher to be certified in a subject at a given grade level, in the US, is to be proficient at least one level higher than that grade level. That ensures you really know the level you're teaching very well, and also have a good understanding of where things are going, so you can offer enrichment to students who need it, and explain motivation behind or direction of certain topics, when asked.
They absolutely can. Most adults should be able to immediately recall the learnings from elementary to high school. This is not rocket science or highly specialized knowledge.
The fact that an arbitrary american adult educated in this country cannot easily differentiate and name some works of shakespeare and provide some quotes, etc, should be o source of national shame.
I'm not quite sure I understand the aversion to Russian teaching materials, other than a lingering negative reaction to communism. Gelfand's Algebra has become a real game-changing text for a lot of English-speaking students who struggle with the subject. His Trigonometry book is just as good, and helped me a lot when I needed a refresher when I became a land surveyor after being out of school for years.
Some education systems put an emphasis on critical thinking, some on absorbing tons of information.
Polish education is notable for memorization. One area where it doesn't seem to hurt is medicine. It appears Polish doctors and nurses are very much appreciated when they migrate. Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?
Once upon a time I was reading an article about Polish migrants in Norway. The Norwegians observe that Poles are reluctant to send kids to Norwegian schools for a few reasons: a) the language is very different, b) Poles fear children will become rebellious, because the schools emphasize critical thinking* c) Poles fear children will become... idiots. Because they won't know too many facts. It appears despite constant complaining about pointless facts and useless information, Poles take some sick pride in the suffering. Some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
* this reminds me of a rumor circulating about personnel of mental hospitals. Patients are often sedated not because it's good for the patients, but because it's convenient for the personnel.
No, I'm considering it. I need to travel more and compare before I make up my mind. It's unsurprising many people migrate because they're fed up with their country. Financial incentives is just another side of it, because it's demoralizing to work long and hard hours and be paid little. However, plenty of Poles migrate that can reconcile their desire for high wages with uncritical admiration for their country.
The country has taken an authoritarian turn. The aspects that annoy me personally is lack of critical thinking, lack of insight when it comes to history (it's a second state religion in practice which is two too many), low trust, bigotry, corruption, double standards, shallow XIX century understanding of patriotism. There's focus on "moral victories", heroic sacrifices and losing battles. Contempt is something very common in society - it's like everyone needs someone they can despise. Constructive criticism is very unwelcome and met with denial. Compromise is often called "rotten compromise".
Could you say that being a Pole makes you feel insecure about yourself? Or is it rather that you’re just better than most of people leaving in your country?
"Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?"
I was having a discussion about this recently, recalling the vast majority of my experiences with medical doctors who obviously just follow a cook book approach to how they practice medicine. Worse than that is how many doctors cannot correctly explain test results. Seems like although they completed a lot of schooling they did not take enough math.
I went through the Soviet/Russian school system with all the advanced topics being covered in high school as others described here. My moment of zen was on my third year in one of the top tech universities in Moscow. There were quite a few students coming from Novosibirsk University who were comfortably ahead of the curve when it came to math. When they showed their transcript ("zachetka"), they had ~3000 hours of Calculus in the first few years against our ~120... As they described it, each day after the usual roster of lectures and seminars, they would spend 4 hours in class in the evening solving math problems with a teacher. While we might have spent a few hours doing homework every now and then, it was nowhere near this. Not to mention doing it in class with a teacher who would likely also give them more challenging problems and valuable feedback. The sheer amount of time and mental effort was staggering.
My personal experience is that it wasn't just hours. Those who liked math spent a lot of time on it after classes. Those who didn't, avoided extras and still did OK (they would not go to top universities, but the base would be OK, with some practice, if they decide to go to a mid-level school).
The biggest difference for me in school was a consistent, well thought out program (one for the whole country) and books. A topic would be studied once, well, and there would be enough time to master the material. Consistency across subjects, too -- if physics covered a topic in, say, the second half of the grade 7, the math needed would be covered in the math classes before then.
What I now see in the US is horrible: teachers at grade N do not know for sure what the students already know, so they repeat a lot of the background, then jump around to cover a lot of material, much of which is never mastered. Which is considered OK -- it will likely be repeated in the same haphazard fashion next year. Or not, depending on what the next teacher decides.
Not to take away from the importance of a well-thought-out program, learning materials, or competent teachers, I was drawing attention to the immense time and effort that some students would invest often with an institutionalized help.
In our case, the programs were standardized, the textbooks were virtually the same throughout the union. Barred special schools and eccentric teachers, all kids were studying the same things at the same time. What differentiated the bespoken Siberians from us was that order of magnitude difference in the time put in. It challenged my sense of normalcy in many ways: people being this good at math without being apparent geniuses, universities teaching math extra 4 hours a day, realization that there is enough undergrad calculus to last 3K hours.
You’re describing an idea adjacent to “mastery” schooling; it’s the natural method people tend to use when self-taught; it’s also how some online schools, like Khan Academy, use to teach. Both of my kids earn “allowance” (extra screen time; robux; etc.) by doing Khan Academy courses. Watching how unevenly they pick up topics — there’s no rhyme-or-reason to the speed they pick up even “close” skills — makes me think there’s malice aforethought in the steady pace learning I had as a child.
The only thing mastery schooling taught me was empathy for people whose learning style doesn't fit the style used in a classroom.
It's hard to understand the the connections between and motivations for concepts when you are learning everything about a topic before moving on. I prefer the style described above, of learning the basics then moving on and circling back when more advanced aspects are needed.
Clearly different styles work better for different people.
>teachers at grade N do not know for sure what the students already know, so they repeat a lot of the background, then jump around to cover a lot of material, much of which is never mastered.
I spent my freshman year of high school in France, and went to a French school (this is 3ème, for my fellow Frenchmen).
I recall being stunned -- in the best way possible -- when our biology teacher started his class on the first day with: "So. You've seen X last year. Now we're going to talk about related-thing-Y".
That had never happened in my US curriculum. Never.
My wife went through the French "classe préparatoire" system and describes a similar degree of raw effort that was put into her studies (and in particular, mathematics). She talks about spending 10-12 hours a day either in class or studying at home, and I have to admit the amount of knowledge in that woman's head is absolutely astounding. Her education is elite in the same way that a sports team or military unit can be elite.
There are obviously issues with pushing young adults this hard, but my overall feeling is that American schools need more of this.
As an immigrant in the US from Central Europe, I am blown away by how much time American children spend on extracurriculars vs academics (at least based on what I see around me). My extracurriculars in high school were maaaybe 5 hours a week. Some kids in the US spend 5 hours a day, every day. And don't get me started on varsity sports - that starts to resemble a job!
In hindsight, after spending nearly a decade in France (initially for graduate school), it seems very strange to me as well.
I've come away from this with the impression that American schools are the best-funded in the world, and survive by importing the best-educated from elsewhere. This is obviously a bit of a caricature, but I think it's mostly correct.
Extracurricular activities are a way for US students to stand out in terms of college admissions. When I was in high school our college advisors told us that Universities look to fill niches in each class year. Good students are relatively interchangeable, but if the University wants a Lacrosse team, an Equestrian team, some Oboe players, and stagehands for its drama department it will look for applicants that have those backgrounds already. So, if you happen to have decent grades but a background in some niche thing, you are much more likely to be selected. So in that sense, going from a B+ to an A- in terms of overall GPA isn't going to help as much as having some in-demand skill.
>Extracurricular activities are a way for US students to stand out in terms of college admissions.
You are of course correct, but I think the parent comment is implying that this is a rather unfortunate situation. I agree with him to a large extent.
My experience with the French system has left me with the sense that American schooling has to some extent cheated me out of an education. On the other hand, I look at my wife (and other "prépa" students as well) and conclude that they suffer from a certain lack of imagination and intrinsic motivation, both of which have personally benefitted me greatly, and which I attribute to something in American culture.
As my wife puts it (I'm paraphrasing, obviously): "We were never asked what we enjoyed doing; if you were a good student, you were put on the good-student-track, which was a math/science-heavy curriculum. To this day, I don't really know what I want to do; I just know what I can do, and I feel an obligation to excel at it." She's an absolute brute at math, but she doesn't like it, and I think she would have been much happier studying something like literature.
So my feeling on the matter the French educational system is one of ambivalence, overall. Nevertheless, I am convinced the US has strayed much too far in the other direction.
A bit tangential here, but our calculus/math analysis professor actually told us that the Russian and later Soviet math school drew a lot from the French, although, he might have been biased due to his apparent partiality towards Bourbaki. According to him, the university level math was taught exclusively in French during the Tsarist times, and they had some troubles coming up with Russian terminology when Soviets ordered all teaching to be done in Russian.
I can’t help but wonder what value students see for studying calculus 8 hours a day every day for more than a year.
Maybe I’m actually just subconsciously jealous, but unless you major in math, what do you even do with that? Not to mention there’s little time left to study anything else.
As a Portuguese citizen, I was not exposed to Russian mathematics during my entire academic career until I entered university. Whilst slightly better than the UK, our educational system was also not brilliant when it came to maths, and we only started to do calculus close to Year 12 (the last year before university). Anyways, my one and only brush with Russian mathematics was as follows - I flunked Integral and Differential calculus on Year 1 at uni, and was getting really worried it would take me a while to do this subject. In Portugal you need to repeat a subject until you get a pass grade. Then a cousin told me I had to "do Piskunov".
In those days you didn't buy books, you'd photocopy them, so he gave me a very large photocopied manuscript of Piskunov [1] in Spanish. I had never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a game; it had very little instructions, and it started with absolutely trivial exercises, but continued on and on, relentlessly. And somehow, it got you hooked. I read the entire set of books compulsively, just to see what the next exercise would throw at me. I finished my exam really quickly and got 95% (in my rush, I made one mistake in the exam). My teacher even asked me about some of the ways in which I solved some of the exercises.
Oh yes, without a doubt. Even if you compare the level of teaching in my life time, from the 80s when I was in primary school to now it has improved dramatically. Portugal was really a developing country all the way up to the 70s and mid 80s, we have roads and infrastructure now :-) completely different place.
It is written by a mathematician who has taught in Russia, the US and Brazil. They have a lot to say about how math is taught in the US. The paper also has a lot of sample problems.
When I started high school in Canada, my math grades were pretty bad. Probably in the 60%s (a C letter grade). I remember staring at a quadratic equation, struggling to understand why those 3 terms drew a curve. I had no intuition for it.
The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th grade Russian math textbooks - which was strange to me of course because I was about to start 11th grade. One important rule was that a calculator was not allowed.
Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he had judiciously picked. Back in Ukraine he was a regional physics Olympiad winner, and a gold medal winner (in the Soviet Union, the top graduates from each high school were awarded a gold medal - goes to show how they valued academics I suppose). I can pull up some photos if anyone is interested.
The questions were very clever and pedagogical. You developed intuition by solving them. And you couldn't solve them if you didn't understand the underlying principles. And of course, there's the word problems. I could barely read Russian at the time, so I had to take my time, but they bridge the gap between theory and application. And without a calculator, you are forced to develop techniques for manipulating equations and numbers. You get really good at it.
I aced math and physics for the rest of high school (and later graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics).
The western education system really fails us. My dad sitting me down with those elementary Russian math textbooks and enforcing a no calculator rule was one of the best things he could have ever done for me. The Soviet mathematic curriculum was designed by some brilliant mathematicians who understood the importance of developing intuition. That importance seems to be lost here. People think that quantitative intuition doesn't matter as long as you can plug your equation into Wolfram Alpha. But when you approach math that way, you don't develop an analytical and quantitative lens.
I doubt the calculators were the problem. People going through the "AP class" route with calculators finish up all of the math (and more!) that gets covered in a french high school math class (from experience of moving to France in High School and learning zilch for 3 years).
Totally on point about the "analyticial and quantitative lenses". Multiple-choice questions and lack of "real" questions really hobble a lot of math classes.
I was lucky in middle school in particular to have classes that used textbooks with a much more indepth look at why we would do X/Y/Z than the average book (along with a system where you would work through exercises in groups of 3 or 4, so better people could help out people who were struggling more). But I had to do a hell of a lot more "work showing" in France.
The way I see it, learning to do basic math in your head is just as important if not more important then learning a procedure via a calculator. A calculator doesn't teach you anything, it just teaches you how to use a calculator.
Doing math in your head doesn't really teach you anything either though. Everyone has a calculator within hands reach these days. I don't think practicing mental math ever helped me understand principles, it just helped me memorize and learn tricks that are only helpful with doing mental arithmetic.
Calculators in calculus probably aren't a problem.
But in the US, calculators are used at almost all grade levels. My son's school allowed them while he was in elementary school, while still learning basic algebra.
As for math education in general (in the US), it's pretty terrible. The lack of practical applications of "advanced" maths is a big problem. Basic calculus didn't "click" for me until I started taking economics courses in college.
> The lack of practical applications of "advanced" maths is a big problem.
I vividly remember self-studying calculus because I absolutely wanted to know how to find the area under a polynomial curve. I knew how to find areas of normal geometric shapes, but finding the area under the curve seemed like black magic that I _had_ to learn. If schools could somehow give this to students, there would be no need for "practical applications".
Yes, exactly this. The amount of children who lost interest in a topic because of systems like this must be high. I clearly remember how I thought maths was way too easy and eventually I lost interest. Sadly I was lazy so I didn't do anything to use my skills (though one could argue it isn't the job of the child) and ended up not doing all my homework and just making up the answer on the spot when called to the blackboard, so today I'm very average which I guess is a success in the eyes of the system.
It is kinda ironic that the former Soviet Bloc, whose central ideology was built around equality, had a very streamed education system concentrated on recognizing talented individuals early, while the Anglosphere, usually renowned for its ceaseless competition, emphasizes equality at the cost of excellence now.
Well, it's only ironic because this is a bit of a simplification. Their ideology always recognized inequality of ability and comparative advantages of various individuals. The issue, at least on a theoretic level, receiving more value and power because you happened to own something (capital) instead of because you produced more or produced things that few people could produce. Which is why compensation was always unequal and often based on production.
Equality was non existent in the Soviet Union. Technically a talented researcher would earn just as much a factory worker but the researcher would have access to apparatus granted privileges like living in a better apartment, occasionally shopping in an non empty store, access to better hospitals, and so on
> What's happened in Canada, is that curriculum is designed to teach to the weakest student in a subject.
No, the curriculum is not watered down to meet the needs of the weakest students. Canada tends to align its curriculum to that of other western nations. On the other hand, when you're talking about math there is a bit of an issue where the background of teachers is mixed at the elementary level and students are not guaranteed to have a true specialist teacher until grade 10. That isn't to say that specialist teachers are the best teachers, but it is a bit disconcerting when a teachers college offers classes for math-phobic elementary teacher candidates (particularly since those grade levels seem to be where many children develop their attitudes towards math). It is also worth noting that the quality of teachers varies based upon region and schools, largely because teachers have a lot of choice as to where they teach.
As someone thinking of raising kids in Vancouver I was really disappointed by the honours stream being removed from VSB curriculum. If the school board truly wanted equality for their students they should be looking at external factors of why kids are not performing: do they have a place at home to complete homework? Do their parents value education? Do they believe in themselves?
I do believe that there is a natural difference in intelligence, but not enough to make the difference of a student getting into the honours stream or not. A lot of the kids say “I don’t get math” or “I’m just dumb” or they don’t have a stable household or family role models of success — all of which hold them back. Naturally these external problems are much harder for school boards to tackle so they would rather chop the legs off of honours students than address the students who come from a disadvantaged background.
You can have your kids take summer courses to finish the regular curriculum early. In some cases they can then be allowed to start taking courses at UBC or SFU. It was mentioned in my Surrey school over a decade ago that there were kids in Vancouver and Burnaby doing that. I think it's a nominal fee to register in the courses while in high school. Something to explore if you're still looking at Vancouver.
The article also mentions that AP (and, presumably, IB) are being maintained. These programs provide a recognized curriculum and the courses are typically taken by students who want advanced classes. I also took a quick glance at the BC mathematics curriculum, which is typically offered in different tiers, and it is offered in different tiers. Science appears to take the usual tact of a general course, with specialist courses for students who want to study biology, chemistry, or physics in more depth. In other words, regardless of whatever nonsense is being spewed by the board, differentiation between interest and ability is still available.
It is also worth noting that there would be significant public push back if there was a true degradation in the curriculum. Ontario tried replacing calculus with pre-calculus about a decade ago, which the government had to reverse due to public pressure.
It is also worth noting that there would be significant public push back if there was a true degradation in the curriculum.
Not so sure on that one. I agree some would push back, certainly. I feel it is fewer every year, with parents not caring for anything but what a piece of paper says.
But, perhaps I am a cynic, or am reading too many such stories.
It depends on which catchment zone you live in, and even the schools that offer AP don't offer the same AP courses. Last I checked one offered 2 AP courses and another offered 11, so there is huge variance between the schools offering AP. These are public schools, not private schools. There are private schools that also offer AP and IB. The IB private schools cost as much in tuition for one year of high school (IB senior years is a two year program) as a Canadian university does for the 4 year degree. Some of these private schools will teach second or third year university courses to advanced high school students.
The BC math courses are offered at different levels, but even the top level math is not for students who want to move ahead or be challenged. The top level math is the bare minimum to get into a Canadian university. Some schools offer calculus 12 and many other schools don't offer it at all. I guess that's "honors" math.
The "honors" math program that has been eliminated is a program that condensed the regular curriculum. I am so confused as to how that is inequitable, but AP (which has exam costs) and IB are allowed to stay.
In some Surrey schools there are programs to allow students to spend their last year doing a trades foundation program. This isn't evenly distributed either, but is a great way to allow students to start their careers. My brothers are both in the trades, but their friends at other schools spent grade 12 in a foundation program and saved 6k in tuition.
There is even a possibility to take summer courses and spend some of your last year taking college courses or university courses in the right districts. This is for Vancouver and Burnaby students that are close to UBC and SFU, but this isn't advertised or evenly available.
My point and rant about these is that it'll be a matter of time before all of these opportunities are also taken away. If they stay, I'll be pleasantly surprised and gladly admit I'm wrong.
> It depends on which catchment zone you live in, and even the schools that offer AP don't offer the same AP courses.
I grew up in Calgary. It was possible to apply to special programs outside of your catchment area, with a choice of multiple schools for some programs. Being admitted into a public IB program comes with the expense of a monthly bus pass, not the equivalent of several years of university tuition. I would be surprised if Vancouver is any different since out-of-area students are often the means of maintaining high enough enrolment to offer special programs ranging from academics to the trades.
Something that may have been a quirk of my home city: catchment area was not a hard-and-fast rule for middle school either. There were special programs one could apply to and, failing that, approaching the school's administration directly. Granted, for something like that the family must care enough to take the initiative. That may be in short supply in some areas, but it is by no means a measure of affluence.
> My point and rant about these is that it'll be a matter of time before all of these opportunities are also taken away. If they stay, I'll be pleasantly surprised and gladly admit I'm wrong.
There is also the possibility that you'll see the opportunities taken away, then be pleasantly surprised to see them return. The education system seems to go in cycles, based upon whatever the pedagogical fashions of the day are. Then again, I doubt that we will ever see the extreme of everything being taken away. People seem to like talking about things in extremes that don't truly exist.
The IB public programs are called "district programs," which give everyone in the district the ability to apply to the programs. So you're correct about that being open to those within Vancouver.
For one program it seems that there is a roughly $1,000 cost for each level, so it's a little over $2,000 to complete the entire IB program. The other IB program seems to cost $1,000. I don't know if either of those schools waive the fees or not, but looking at other districts they say the fees are for writing the IB exams.
I can't determine if AP courses are district programs or not.
My second child is suffering this in a UK school - the maths is too easy, his primary school had an 'advanced' group (quotes because it wasn't really advanced, didn't go as far as I did at primary school in normal class) to push the most able kids a bit. Now high-school they're back to doing absolutely remedial basics of arithmetic.
So much wasted time in school, he's frustrated not to make progress and bored with 'maths' (truly it's lack of maths, but to the young mind that gets confused with the subject and then you lose them).
> ...Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he had judiciously picked.
Your story is very touching, thank you for sharing it.
It also emphasizes the importance of a motivated teacher. Also I believe that such parent's involvement makes the process and the subject of learning so much worthwhile.
It's not a secret that as parents we want/need to outsource the kids into schools just to free ourselves up for what we want/need to do. Yet paradoxically we want the kids to know no less than we know ourselves.
It's just a luck if kids come across a good teacher which would help the kids demonstrate to us parents that they are worth of our attention. Kind of backwards...
I finished Grade 6 in Russia (in 1995) before emigrating to Canada.
I didn't learn anything new in Math class until mid-Grade 11 [1].
[1] Except Trigonometry. But I could tell the way it was taught was completely different from the concepts I learned in the Soviet/Russian system.
It was just rote memorization of sin/cos/tan - just clever formulas for deriving the angles and edge lengths of triangles that you solved by pressing the SIN/COS/TAN buttons on your calculator, rather than the "from first principle" explanation of what these concepts meant fundamentally.
> and a gold medal winner (in the Soviet Union, the top graduates from each high school were awarded a gold medal - goes to show how they valued academics I suppose).
I'm not sure where in Canada you moved to, but there are Governor General awards [1] to the top graduating students. It's bronze for top high school graduate, silver for bachelor's, and gold for higher degrees.
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.
One notable example would be the undergraduate Beginner’s Course in Topology - Geometric Chapters by Rokhlin et al. (Some “beginner” one must be, to be able to read it.)
Went to university in the UK, met a bunch of Russian post-docs whilst I was a researcher, and they were some of the best mathematicians I'd met.
Not unrelated, but today in the UK is A-Level results (for 18 yr olds), and the UK press and exam boards, as usual are reporting it as the 'best results ever'. This happens year on year.
There's a lot of argument about education standards getting lower in the UK. My "anecdata" is that I was the first year to sit GCSE maths exams at 16 yrs old, and we went through old O-level papers from the mid 1950s onwards (aimed at 16 year olds) to practice. Those O-level papers had advanced calculus that we didn't learn until our final year of A-levels. Those old papers were much harder.
tl;dr in the 50s/60s 16 year old Brits were taught advanced calculus. They're not now.
It depends what metric you're using for education improvement. For science based subjects, the fundamentals don't change. My narrow world view is maths and physics, and my data point of one, is that my peer group in the 1980s were taught to a lower level in maths (and physics) than in the 1950s/60s/70s, based on the content of O-level exam papers that we sat as mock exams. The fact was that we couldn't answer a percentage of the exams because we just weren't taught it.
The reverse wasn't true - we were not taught extra things that weren't in the exam, we were simply taught less.
I can't find a link, but there was talk of "remedial maths" lessons being taught at many universities in the UK to bring students up to the standards required for degrees because they're simply not taught at the same level any more. Universities on the other hand, don't have their curriculums or qualifications manipulated by the sitting government so their standards/requirements change much more slowly.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadWhat does "Russian Math" look like?
That said, how is it that there's such range in pedagogy? So many people have studied teaching that you'd think we'd have a better idea of what works. Or maybe it's that goals are different.
If that's the difference, why were the goals so different there, and how do we make US public school goals more like the Soviet ones?
You reinstill love of country, which really means love of society and others, which is another word for philanthropy, and you will quickly get this.
In America, instead of education and work being for the greater purpose of your nation and people, education is for the individual.
As usual, most people find more motivation when helping others than themselves, but the focus on ourselves in American education means it's easy to slack.
For example while there was bullying in my primary school - there was no bullying because you were good at math. The opposite was true - if you were bad at math it meant you're "dumb" and kids will laugh at you.
It wasn't all perfect - it was uncool to try hard (means you're dumb and have to work for it and that's boring) but it was very fashionable to instantly know every answer. So teachers had it much easier because kids had intrinsic motivation to learn math.
Another part of it was probably that the unemployment was at 20% at that point and everybody realized you have to be well educated to have a chance of good job.
Up until that point the math classes were very much Soviet-style understanding-first, daily hour-long homeworks that are described in the article.
Final year was about technique memorization.
Once you're gaming a system, education quality tanks.
I don't think most math teachers know themselfs though---even at some colleges.
I don't think I have even seen a math book that goes into depth on why a equation, or problem, is solved a certain way.
I would like to see most memorization in math, and most subjects nixed for good.
I have found, including myself, my early difficulties in math were due to just memorizing how to do a problem.
It wasen't until I started over (I went to a CC early. I hated high school socially, and it affected my studies. Going to a CC was the best move I made.)
I took basic math, and algebra, trig., at the community college.
It made inorganic chemistry, and physics, so easy.
"Jane fills a bag with three types of chips. There are 3-point, 4-point and 7- point chips. Jane picks 3 chips worth 15 points. Which chips did she pick?"
Sample problem for grades 5-6 [2]:
"Pinocchio drank half a cup of black coffee. He then filled the cup back up with milk and drank one third of the mixture. Again he filled the cup to the top with milk, drank one sixth of the mixture and filled it back to the top with milk one final time before he drank the whole cup. Did he drink more coffee or milk?"
[1]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Element...
[2]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Middle_...
These two are straight-forward problems, both will be allocated some basic nominal time. You either know how to solve them or you don't. Sometimes there'd be problems that are more puzzling, because they'd combine several problem classes and will take time to unfold (this is typical in math olympics). These will be allocated more time as they require thinking and searching for a solution.
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. But I don't think it teaches you anything (maybe it does, didn't study pedagogy, and while I was good at such fun questions I preferred the more structured approach in university mathematics)
Edit: this might make the kids think you need some 'magical' insights to do math and if they don't see it they are not apt for it, while the opposite might be true.
For the other questions: 2 also seems to rely on a trick, 3 looks ok, 4 is ok, 5a looks dodgy (probably just trying out numbers), 6 looks ok
About the K1 question:these are for 3 year olds? I only met one 3 year old in my life who could read, probably I am missing something here.
These word problems are intended quite precisely as introduction to algebra. They show you the kinds of questions that algebra can solve in a "structural" way, which makes it way easier to grok algebra later on since motivation for the subject has been provided in such depth.
A good review article on the subject: Persson, Ulf and Toom, André: Word Problems in Russian Mathematical Education, available at http://toomandre.com/my-articles/swedish/ULFENG.PDF
If you see the trick, you save some time on the calculation. If you don't you have to add some more numbers. It's not that difficult.
This trick discussion reminds me of the great anectode about von Neumann:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5950755
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.
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
#5a is a factorization exercise.
In general, Russian approach to the math includes exposing kids to the toolset as well as the theory. This particular case is solved this way, that is solved that way, etc. Keep on it for a while and it tends to develop an intuition for knowing right away which problem is solved with which approach. So, yeah, if there are shortcuts, you use them. If there aren't any, you brute-force it.
You can find the 4 zeros of the left side by eyeball, and use that to construct the rest of the equation group you need.
It's expected you've seen and solved this type of problem before taking the test. Not that many kids can come up with a working solution strategy on the fly.
OK - you weren't guaranteed the solution was an integer or even real, but you should strongly suspect there's a simple answer because you didn't get generic fourth-degree polynomials in your class. Depending on the class, you might be expected to find one, two or all four solutions - but once you have the first one the rest are much easier.
If you go off-road and get the wrong answer, it's up to how much the teacher likes you.
If anything, your approach sounds more like what's expected in American schools: either you have been taught a foolproof way to solve problems matching Pattern X, or you stare slack jawed at the question paper thinking "I must have been absent the day they covered this question pattern". Exactly the opposite of the kind of thinking described in the article.
Besides, as in another comment of mine on this page, there is no generic method your teacher could have taught you here that always works. (If you think so, please set the right hand side to 1681 and solve that version...). The principal method I was taught for solving cubics was to make a guess. Numerical methods came later.
That's a valid point. However, what's the opposite to having insights? Is that following routines and/or exhaustively exploring the entire problem space (which the first problem in the GP comment seems to teach)?
Teaching those might have higher pedagogical value than conditioning children to find insights (as - at least at first sight - the increase in skill in those is more directly linked to the effort the child invests in learning) However, the von Neumann story in your sibling comment suggests that some people (and so, some children in the class) will perform routines faster than the other children no matter what. Seeing a "shortcut" solution gives a chance to those who are slower at routines to arrive at a solution fast, too.
Moreover, a lot of real-world problems (in academia as well as in business - from my limited experience in both) are exercises in pattern matching and finding shortcuts rather than in an exhaustive exploration of the problem space - and helping children to collect an arsenal of tricks (and more importantly, teaching them to look for insights and patterns by giving them multiple trick-based problems over the years) prepares them to handle those real-world problems.
I ended up with a Math degree very later on. So I don't see how feeling dumb harmed me.
PS: the top level professional math is 90% tricks.
Another solution is with geometry:
Start with a 1x1x1 cube of coffee. Remove top half and replace with milk. Now remove left third of resulting combined shape (leaving a 2/3 x 1/2 x 1 cuboid of coffee). Now remove front sixth (leaving a 2/3 x 1/2 x 5/6 cuboid). Now drink it all. Now add up the volumes of the shape and write down the answer.
Teacher asked us (one by one) to describe how we would arrive at the answer to problems and why that way. Sometimes it would be a contest - who guesses the answer first and that person gets to explain the process and bask in the glory of being the smartest kid ;). And then we were shown how to write that solving process as equations and practiced changing from problems to equations and vice versa.
At the end of the year most kids understood algebra.
1. Russian math books are straight to the point, superconcrete. Hard to read in a linear fashion but very useful when student is serious about going through it ("Problems in mathematical analysis" by Demidovich is a perfect example, Mark Vygodskiy's "Elementary Mathematics Reference").
2. In most textbooks I remember nobody tries to build a dumbed down explanation of things. This might lead to the book being harder to understand without teacher's help. I remember how some American undergrad-level introductory math analysis books were trying to skip proofs, avoid certain details, giving too many intuitive explanations ().
3. Mid and late school math is pretty advanced, especially when compared to US typical level.
These days I live in UK. Kids go to school early here: 4-5 years. My daugther is 6 and is comfortable with trivial math. I've read a few secondary school textbooks and they feel quite ok.
So maybe this is a US problem.
EDIT: a few example books added
I moved from “Deep” Russia itself to the periphery of the USSR (Bulgaria) when I was in first grade, and my parents had the foresight to make me repeat that grade so as to help me with learning a new language.
The quality difference was astounding. In 1992 Russia by first grade I was learning english with flash cards technique, drawing human shapes, animation, perspective, and some pretty good maths. The knowledge I gained there allowed me to learn almost nothing but the language up until about 3rd grade. And it was a school in the middle of nowhere.
I think the USSR trained some very good teachers and just sent them around everywhere, places they would not have gone themselves on their own volition kinda thing.
Oh and I remember teachers where highly respected, a thing I saw slowly degrade while the country was going through the 90s reforms.
The way math was taught in USSR and is still largely taught in Russia is by going as quickly as possible to calculus. I definitely studied limits and derivatives in school (around grade 8 or 9 out of 11 as I recall) and we briefly touched integrals in the last grade. There are some areas they don't really include, although in my opinion they should have, like mathematical statistics, which could be even more useful, but still.
That is a common approach recreated in some other subjects. For instances, teaching Russian includes not just basic syntax and phonetics but also just basic linguistic exercises like dissecting complex words and learning classifications, which you don't really need to talk it but they provide a deeper understanding.
I can't say that this approach really turned me onto maths: quite the opposite. Past a certain level, the Kumon teachers were essentially just marking from an answer book, without any understanding of the content themselves. They had zero interest (or perhaps ability) in conveying the beauty or applications of maths to the students.
The approach that made me love maths was one where I understood the intuition and purpose behind the methods, ideally enough to develop them from the bare minimum myself.
American schools are too soft on science in general. I did grades 1-11 in Albania and my senior year of HighSchool in the US. Some of my schooling in Albania was done under communism, and some after communism fell in the 90s.
The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science. Biology started at 5th grade, pre-Algebra at 5, and full blown Algebra at 6, physics at 6, and Chemistry at 7. Then in highschool you did the same, but more advanced. There was no choice at all, you had to do them all. The only choice in HS was a second foreign language. The whole idea was that you have to know all the basics of ALL sciences, so in college you know what to choose and pursue. If you never tried, you will have no clue if you liked something or not. (also basic music knowledge, sheet reading, and arts was a requirement as well).
When I came to the US, I was flabergasted how behind most of the kids were in science. I took AP physics, and it became boring as it was things I had done in 8th grade. I got 800./800 on the SAT 2, physics.
The math part, I took AP calc, and it was advanced enough, especially the part B to challenge me. But this was clearly an elective that only about 30 students took it, while back home it was a requirement for all.
Unfortunately, the current movement on dumbing down math and science in the name of 'equity' is a step behind and very dispiriting. It is bound to hurt poorer but smart kids, that can't afford private tutoring and have to rely only on public schools. Extreme progressive Liberals are killing science and progress in this country, and are becoming actually regressive and backwards.
P.s. The only advantage of American teaching on science was that it relies more on experiments to teach concepts, while the Albanian one had no equipment, or lacked the basics of it. Heck, in the 90s we didn't even have glass on the windows and had to freeze all winter. Also basic electricity was lacking half of the winter.
Ps2. Most Americans have it good (condition wise), they just don't know it
Ps3. This is a good video how schooling was back then (in 88). Notice how the kids are wearing jackets inside, as there was no heating https://youtu.be/yZD1jaKbz2g?t=251
I would be surprised if those people could be solving AP Physics C problems by 8th grade. 1 & 2, easily of course, but C is quite different.
If you found calculus BC hard-ish and physics easy in comparison, I think you were taking 1 & 2 as C was much harder. SAT II physics is a joke.
Virginia probably has some of the best STEM education in the entire country, at least the northern bit. Certainly better than what you can get at most schools outside of some in California, the boarding schools, and NYC magnets.
We had “big soviet encyclopedia” and “kid” one on our bookshelf (A point of pride for my grandparents). Nobody told me that by “kids” the authors meant “teens”, so around 13yo I devoured those books whole.
Taught me structure of the atom, chemistry and lots of fascinating physical phenomena. And made most of the physics material easy to grasp up till last HS grade.
It had little maths, concentrating more on the understanding rather than the rigorous descriptions, which made the maths to describe them quite obvious, when I had to learn them in school.
Not sure if the current state of wikipedia is better or worse for that purpose- it was much better structured and paced for sure.
But Albania can finance rigorous teaching of science ... ?
USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient solutions.
For a less politically charged example: compare expenses of the Falcon rocket family to those of the Space Launch System.
When I managed to attend teacher parent meetings I could see the deference people had for their children’s teachers. And children also deeply respected them for the most part.
The scenes from the beginning of Breaking Bad for example are rather alien to me - I can understand them, but I’ve never encountered such things when I was a kid.
> USA spends a lot more money per pupil than any former Eastern Bloc nation. But you can spend a lot of money on inefficient solutions.
You're not wrong. Financialization of education continuing down from secondar to primary education, commodification of students—I think those are a bit better descriptions of the issue beyond "funding cuts" personally. Its incredibly easy to make things inefficient (or efficient at something else [0]) when quality/efficiency slowly fades from the conciousness of those in charge.
I'd say the more important thing is that there are large failures here, they were building before "Extreme progressive Liberals" (which depending on how I read that I can agree with, from the left even). Saying this as someone who was a STEM kid in high school, took AP Calc at 15, etc.—I'm more mixed on the more static curriculum as described earlier, its not as important here tho
[0] Like cranking out Amazon employees
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/amazon-warehouse-communit...>
"""
Writer Erika Hayasaki visited Cajon High. Here’s what she found:
A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.
...
A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”
"""
Inclusive classrooms raise scores of the lower performing students. That's probably true.
It glosses over what it does to people on the other end of the spectrum.
As someone from the other end of the spectrum, growing up never having to put any effort, having few or no peers close to my level, and being constantly encouraged by the people around me to do poorly for curves etc... I can say I developed life long development/psychological problems as a result, and the idea that I or anyone in the future like me should be slowed down so everyone is more equal is deeply offensive.
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?
It's very hard to disentangle though.
I have a smart, popular nephew from a good home, who also got extra acconodations on exams for dyslexia.
You could spin that either way:
Priviliged people taking advantage of accomodations for those with problems.
Or smart people who previously got written off as disruptive troublemakers being better catered for (though maybe we'll have less entrepreneurs if we keep all the smart people in the standard education track).
In particular, the benefits of living in a society with a basic level of mathmatical (etc.) understanding seems powerful but hard to trace through.
But if we can't even talk about the trade-offs calmly and factually then its just a pointless sgouting match. The people with the academic skills should be leading the way on that.
I started in an average class in my year. Don't remember doing anything extra at home, or much at all, but still had an equivalent of all A's. At some point my parents realised something was wrong and moved me to the strongest class... Only then I started doing something. This is when I realised that some kids were already impossibly far ahead (we had world-level olympiad goers there).
Can't say I become world-class at anything but this helped to concentrate and work through the rest of school and uni without any problems.
But these days, integrated classrooms (as mentioned in your article) tend to be staffed with two teachers: one with a general education background and one with special education. They work as a team and can provide differentiated learning paths. The lower teacher/student ratio can help both the gen ed and special ed students.
Take Baltimore for example. The public schools are very well-funded by any standard. And yet they have several high schools that didn’t produce a single student proficient in math.
https://www.k12dive.com/news/several-baltimore-schools-repor...
- each public school has the same budget per student. There is no "reduced education funding" for schools in district X vs district Y, or for any school, because the budget per student is equal. Each school's budget is public, and published on the web.
- favoring religious teaching: at least at the school my kids go to there's absolutely no religious teaching. I suspect this is the case for all the public schools in NYC
- nuanced policy difficulties? Not sure what you mean by this
Ok, now to answer your original question: why the fault of progressive left. As you see I skipped the word "extreme", as this is a loaded word; people who vote that way certainly do not perceive themselves as extreme.
At the recent mayoral primaries, the top candidates were the moderates Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia (1st and 2nd place), and the progressive Maya Wiley (3rd place). As far as the education was concerned, the hot topic was the selective "specialized high schools" [1], where the admission is test-based, according to a state law passed about 50 years ago. The current mayor (Bill de Blasio, progressive) has worked tirelessly for the last 4 years or so to lobby the State legislature to get the law repealed. The progressive candidate, Maya Wiley, promised to work towards the same goal. Here's the relevant extract from her platform [2]
>> To remove barriers that separate and label children, we will: [...] Eliminate discriminatory admissions “screens.”
In other words, kill the specialized high schools program.
Eric Adams (the winner, moderate) promised to keep the program as it currently is.
In case you wonder what the admission entrance exam is like, it's just two separate tests, one for ELA and one for math. Both tests are fairly challenging. The progressives think that these tests (and especially the math one) are discriminatory in nature.
Here's a sample math question [3, p.78] "In Centerville, 45% of the population is female, and 60% of the population commutes to work daily. Of the total Centerville population, 21% are females who commute to work daily. What percentage of the total Centerville population are males who do not commute to work daily?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_high_schools_in_Ne...
[2] https://www.mayawileyformayor.com/maya-wileys-plan-for-creat...
[3] https://cdn-blob-prd.azureedge.net/prd-pws/docs/default-sour...
"What percentage of the total Centerville population are males who do not commute to work daily?"
Otherwise you do need that first bit.
This is supposed to be a "challenging" problem? It seems quite obvious to me: we simply cannot answer the question as given, because we aren't told how many in the Centerville population are classed as 'both male and female', or 'neither male nor female'.
I'm very against the idea that struggling students should just be "sacrificed" for the advanced student, however, which some of the other comments seem to be implying.
IMO the prosperity of the US has made people entitled and it's easier to complain than to put in the work.
Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan https://forums.somd.com/threads/virginia-dumbing-down-educat...
Educational malpractice in the name of ‘equity’ By Post Editorial BoardApril 30, 2021 | 6:14pm | Updated
https://nypost.com/2021/04/30/educational-malpractice-in-the...
How?
You have advantage of being aware
I’ve always thought yours was the right way. There are some students which will do the minimal but will manage if challenged. Seems the equitable way leaves them behind.
And it is clear, if all conditions are equal, still people are not born equal. Some kids are just smarter than others, and some are just dummies, or don't care about school. Since everyone was the same ethnicity, you can't blame 'systematic x'. It was all equal. A doctor and a nurse probably lived in the same apartment, and had similar wages. (think Cuba, or North Korea today. Albania was like the North Korea of Europe).
Grades/marks were 2 - 10, 2-4 was failing, 5 was passing, 10 was excellent (and hard to get).
Grades were given in the basis of
1. homework,
2. blackboard interrogation (you had to solve and explain everything in front of the class, similar to a whiteboard coding interview),
3. Exams, flash quizzes or pre-announced.
You had three types of students:
1. Great students, and are aiming for the 10s (and usually get a 9 or a 10).
2. People that struggle to do the basic, and just want to pass the class and are aiming for a 5 or a 6.
3. Everybody else that got a 7-8.
Every exam or homework, was done with this in mind. You usually had 3 type of questions:
1. Super basic, <- If you were in class, you could do it
2. Medium, <- Some thinking is required
3. Advanced <- Usually only the really good students got these
The teachers knew, that some students would struggle, and they will let them pass if they just did the basic effort. If a student failed even that, they would have to go to 'summer class' and take additional classes and exams to pass. If you failed a class, you failed the whole year and had to repeat every other class as well.
Also, the school over time divided the students by grades. Each cohort-year, might have 4-5 classes (of 30 students). Your class was the people that you studied with, and did everything. The top students usually were placed together, and spread in the class A, and B. The rest were put on the other classes.
So, the top classes had only excellent students, or average students, but not of the failing one. The idea was that failing students will just drag down all the top students and not let them excel. A top student can make an average student better, but there was little chance to do anything with a failing one. If you were initially a failing student but started doing better, you could move up to the better classes. This is similar to the soccer relegation techniques of most soccer leagues in Europe. But: Every class, had the same subjects, and the same load. Even the failing students had to do pre-calc. But the teachers would just be much more lenient on them. Eg. do the very basic, and they will let you pass. But if you wanted a good grade, 8 or higher, you had to work your butt off.
This is totally politically incorrect in today's environment, but even communist Albania knew better. Some people are just not smart at all, and it is better to let them just do the bare minimum and pass, meanwhile let the smarter kids do more advanced work.
Edit: Switzerland has a different approach where children are segregated by their ability starting from 7th school year. So you go to Gymnasium, A level, B level, C level.
Usually it was kids that had some discipline problems. Perhaps ADHD, etc... but at the time, no-one cared about those aspects as school psychologist were not a thing at all.
If you failed more than one year in a row, then the teachers will just give up on you and let you just slide the next year as long as you just showed up.
Both of them looking back thought that repeating a year was a good thing for them, they went from being struggling average/below average students to top of their class and regained their confidence.
I think it really depends, in a place and time where repeating classes is more common, it maybe doesn't really destroy confidence as much whereas in areas where it's rare, then the psychological impact is much worse.
Also, one thing to note, both of them, in their experience with education, saw much better results when children were separated by level than when classes were mixed together for exactly the reason the OP mentioned. A top student can help bring an average student up but when there are both top students and very below average students, the teacher has to make the choice to either focus on the below average student or the top students and neither of those choices are good.
In France, we've had a push toward lowering the overall level and removing any elitism at schools. This has increased the amount of kids who graduate from high school with the Baccalauréat which is needed for university but has lowered the level of kids actually going to university (especially at engineering schools and elite institutions) and reduced the value of a university degree. It's a bit similar to what's happening in the US in STEM and I think it's a bad calculation for the long term competitiveness of the country.
Come on, of course it hasn't. Entry requierements haven't changed.
The highschools providing the largest contingents of students to these elite institutions respect neither the national curriculum nor the ban of sorting students by ability without any consequences. Unsurprisingly the two most famous of these highschools are also exempt from the French purely geographical students draft and the places most politician children attend. As usual in France, the rule for all is not the rule for the elite.
In effect, the dumbing down of the national curriculum has just made a system which was already one of the most unequal in Europe even more unequal. But everything is fine. The French system only uses entrance exams and entrance exams are always fair, aren't they?
All countries use entrance exams, it's not something that specific to France and of course there's an inherent unfairness to them, kids from better educated families are always going to get better results. In fact if we were talking about fairness then the disappearance of boarding schools (internats) have actually increased inequality. There was a time when a lot of kids spent the week in boarding schools, for kids from families with less focus on education (like my grandmother who kept telling my mum that she should stop reading because it'd cause her headaches), it removed them from non-optimal environment and put them in situation where they had better access to education. But I'm not sure that's desirable or optimal :)
But usually it did not happen that often. When it did happen, it usually meant someone will change schools to a less demanding one (if in high school). So for example you may leave a gymnasium and go to a school for mechanics.
In elementary school it did not happen except for serious disciplinary problems. People with mental problems were able to have special programmes that tailored to their needs, so this did not result in repeating a year.
Teachers did not really like the idea of having someone repeat a year, so if you had a decent attitude you could get a passing grade but you had to put in the effort. This "effort" part is what is in my opinion biggest different, Eastern Europe schooling required you to put in a lot of work, if you were talented you didn't need to use so much time, but if you weren't natural at math, you had to put in plenty of hours to get decent grades. Problems usually were not of the sort that can't be learned through "brute force".
I've done some teaching on the side and when I was teaching a guy in a "US" school for children of diplomats, difference was that their problems were usually much more freeform and required deeper understanding but once understood, used primitive math or physics methods. Our normal schooling was different, it used advanced math or physics but the problems were often times many variants of the same problem (which allowed for brute force learning). Honestly I think that it would be the best to have both, as many of my fellow students did not really understand the material we studied but they could brute force it.
I was in class that had an even mix, some really smart kids, some not so much, and some comparable to the worst of the D-class. Like third of the of my classmates went for the sports-focused high-school, because they were decent at basketball and bad at almost everything else. But nobody was failing.
Like, A-class should have been the top students, B and C middling, and D poor. In reality, A was ordinary, B and C contained the best and the average and D was a failure.
Even more anecdotal thing, in my class there were more people doing extra-curicural contests, like Math-Olympiad and the like. We were even encouraged by teahers, along the lines of "No, try it even if you don't have top grades, that is the sort of thing where you need to understand what you are doing, not just ave all the right answers on the test." :D
Last hypothesis of mine is, that because we had a mix of sudents, the smarter(?) of us spend some time explaining to others (mix of goodnes of heart, being bullied and even having like a pay-for-homework manufacture?) ... and as they say, you learn best, when you explain?
But I could be completely wrong, rose-tinted glasses and long forgotten traumas and all that :D
This is certainly an advantage that Albania had over Alabama. There are still people alive who remember the school system having to be desegregated under armed guard. The struggle continues: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/1...
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 why event though I am liberal/democrat, I don't like the today's 'progressives', as they seem completely ignorant of human nature, and have no knowledge of the history of countries that went through socialism/communism, and yet want to repeat the same destructive mistakes by trying to achieve 'equality of outcome', which is impossible.
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.
Some people are naturally stronger and some are weaker. But if you train, you will be stronger than you were, regardless.
You might not become world champion with weak genes, but you'll be stronger than everyone who doesn't train.
DNA
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 some Virginia schools not teaching Geometry in 8th grade (for the record - I took Algebra in 8th grade and most people in my tiny high school took it in 9th).
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 me as a leech on society due to my “inferior mathematical ability” as you surely do?
Why is American society so centered around appearances and perceived judgment? You'd rather damn an entire state to stagnation than risk being looked down upon by some hypothetical elitist? And math is only one of many, many subjects.. I firmly believe everyone is good at something.
> Poverty is a far bigger problem than some Virginia schools not teaching Geometry in 8th grade
And how is terrible education supposed to help with poverty? Education is a great way, arguably the primary way, that people lift themselves up.
And given we are otherwise doing just fine, I think stagnation is far more likely to come from somewhere else.
Given typical HS math curriculum (algebra/geometry up to calculus) being able to offer geometry early gives enough time to offer calculus; otherwise a school could teach it late and it won't matter because math education stops early anyway.
Also connotes to a degree college-track vs non college-track students, again due to the highest math a HS offers. It is extremely desirable to take calculus in HS to prepare for college, but if most students don't go to college, no need to take/offer calculus, no need to start the math sequence early, etc.
I went to HS in the US and I remember a split in the math curriculum starting in 10th grade (I didn't go to my HS in 9th grade so I can't say). The vast majority of kids planning on college took a combined algebra 2/trigonometry class in 10th grade; the other kids took either algebra 1, geometry, or algebra 2 (without the trig) depending on previous courses.
So the comment "taking geometry in 8th vs 9th vs 10th grade" would mean something like comparing schools for numbers of college-track students and funding (8th grade great - implies a HS with a large body of students going to college, well funded in order to offer variety of classes; 10th grade not good - implies a HS with a small body of students going to college; not well funded, math stops before calculus, etc.)
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.
> American schools are too soft on science in general. [...]The Albanian school was brutal in teaching science
How on earth is brutality in teaching a good idea? What was the effect of this approach on the average Albanian or Romanian student? Sure it worked fine for a few of us, but overall the results are disastrous, just take a look at the PISA rankings.
Have you ever wondered how it's possible that the same "stupid" Americans that don't learn integrals and group theory in highschool somehow manage just fine in university and later on in life?
Most people will do just fine with basic math training because it's what you normally need later on in life.
Most of my math training in the Eastern European school system has probably gone to waste. I only saw the point of advanced maths, calculus later on in technial university when I had to apply it in science. During my engineering career I only used the math I learned up to maybe ninth or tenth grade. No calculus. For materials science we also had to use maths up to tenth grade because of non linear properties of materials. However, calculus and advanced math was required to understand the physical phenomena. What went away was solving tricky integrals and series for which you had to think of an obscure substitution - the type of grinding math excercises we had to solve in high school. Last month I had to solve some RSA and ECC cryptography problems at work that could not be easily solved with existing crypto libraries. For example RSA signing checks were reimplemented using a big numbers library. That also did not require advanced maths, but rather a lot of grinding research done by reading crypto standards and technical guides.
In Romania I attended one of the "elite" maths/cs highschools. Except a hand full of people who would win medals in the imo etc. the rest of us were mostly clever, overworked automatons who learned problem solving tricks that we regurgitated on the page come exam time.
I think the subjects where so hard that it forced kids to cooperate, smart kids where considered a resource that potential bullies didn’t like to harm, as they would help them in the future. Additionally there was this sense of … maybe “esprit de corps” as we all were going through the same tough training.
I think that those hard problems were actually very rewarding and I saw very little of the “teenage problems” that are so prominently displayed in American media.
This has changed for the worse with capitalism and social inequality. We had some bullying back when I was a primary school student but it was physical bullying by higher graders towards younger students and it was mostly done outside the school. We had none of the psychological bullying that you see in the US and to a greater extent in Korea or Japan. We had roma and very poor students in our class. There was also almost no bullying during high school. The more odd kids were usually ignored and had friends of their own.
> I think that those hard problems were actually very rewarding
Well, maybe rewarding for some. I didn't like them and would rather go outside and play or ride my bike in the neighbourhood. Math for math's sake was never my thing. I only started to really like math in university when I saw its potential to solve real world problems.
An interesting perspective which I feel might be the actual core of the problem. I grew up after the Revolution, so I can't make a before/after comparison, but (as I mentioned in a different comment) I see a tight connection between how aggressive other students were and how bad their family situation was.
> Math for math's sake was never my thing. I only started to really like math in university when I saw its potential to solve real world problems.
Perfectly legitimate. Pushing hard math early on can actually put you off the subject forever. Some of us started liking it in university, but a lot of capable students decide it's just not for them. With a different approach many might have ended up understanding and maybe even loving it.
I went to American public schools my whole life and never saw any evidence of bullying.
There was some bullying back when I was in school, but possibly less than in the US. However, I think this doesn't have much to do with the curriculum, but with social conditions.
In my case I was bullied in secondary school (by kids in my class) even though school was tough and I was easily part of what you would consider "valuable resources".
The result was that the bullies would copy their homework off of the kids that copied their homework from me and I still got into fights daily.
In highschool bullying disappeared completely, but that's because I went to a selective school (the equivalent of a US magnet hs) where everybody was academically oriented and also came from more stable social environments.
In less academically strong highschools there are a lot of nasty things taking place - students abusing eachother, teachers abusing students, students beating up teachers etc.
I've also went through what could be considered a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term.
We had ~40 problem sets to solve every evening for homework, hours of work. I don't think anyone ever got an A+ in anything. If the student was better/stronger at something - they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder sets added to their homework.
As for the "stupid" Americans? STEM classes are full of foreign kids in top US schools.
There are a bunch of different approaches that can lead to top scores in that ranking. notably Finland does well with a non-brutal approach.
> a "brutal" system, very similar to whats described, although i wouldn't use that specific term.
the term was used by the parent, not by me. We just happened to assess its value differently.
> they'd only get harder and harder questions thrown at them during oral exams until they crumble, and harder and harder sets added to their homework.
It depends on what you think the purpose of school should be. If you want people to understand the world they live in, understand the "why" of things, think critically and creatively etc. then problem sets and ritualistic humiliation during oral exams won't take you very far.
They do just fine because they aren't selected to do jobs where they need those kinds of skills, because they tend not to have them.
If they were taught the stuff at least they would have the choice.
I'm not in favour of brutalizing the kids though, I think that ruins the experience for them. But a lot of kids are more capable than we think and ought to be shown advanced subjects.
at the very minimum, pressure during oral exams taught to work against the clock, develop conviction and do your best to defend your position.
In some students. In others it just engendered the feeling that they're morons and that math is just "not for them". Math and science are for absolutely everybody. Not everybody will make a career out of them, but everybody can enjoy them.
Brutal was the term used by the parent, I just picked it up from there.
> if the kid has no interest in Math he/she would regard that as brutal and for others who do have interest it's just challenging and maybe even fun
Throughout my education I was in both camps at different times. The more "brutal" things got (dry, formal curriculum, tough teachers) the more it put me off. On the other hand patient and engaging teachers could get me to spend countless hours after school working on math problems.
Interests are things that develop based on intrinsic attributes but also based on environmental feedback. I suspect the latter is fast more important.
There is literally a major political party in the US that parrots science to be fake & that religion/faith in god is all that matters. Also, that "progress" (in a technological/scientific sense) is a bad thing
Last I checked, it was not the progressives that identify with this line of thinking.
Come on.
On the other hand, the democratic party openly and literally claims there is no distinction between male and female.
There are dumb policy positions all over the board. No one denies science as a whole. Everyone picks and chooses.
Consider my state of Oregon... they're literally removing the ability to do math and read as graduation requirements and the GOP minority is left asking 'why'? How can you honestly make the claim the democratic party is uniquely the party of science
I've went through similar curriculum in Croatia and I hated it - the literature they forced on us was politically correct bullshit some figurehead decided should be common culture. As a result 30% of the class read it and the rest just cheated and studied for test.
It was like this in every class - I hated cheating and studying for the test - I was lazy and it was pointless - as a result I got barely passing grades based on slightly paying attention in class. But in casual conversation I could relate way more of the basics than my peers. And I lost interest in many subjects simply because of how they were taught (study random facts because it will be on the test - no context or application). I had to relearn algebra after highschool because of how badly it was taught - and I was interested in it since I was trying to learn 3d programming and I was going to math competitions in elementary school - teachers couldn't relate any questions I asked to stuff I was interested in.
I hope my kid gets way less material to study and more opportunity to figure out what he wants to learn.
Gelfand's Algebra: https://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/081763677...
Gelfand's Geometry: https://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/10716029...
Gelfand's Trigonometry: https://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-Gelfand-Mathematical-Sem...
But truth be told it very highly depended on the quality of the math teachers. I was lucky enough to get into one of the best high-schools in my town so that we got a really good maths teacher, but the teacher "quality" was not that uniformly distributed across different schools.
At University (after the regime changed), studying hard did become more common, but it was directed at scoring a job in Canada/USA/wherever, not at escaping poverty in Romania itself...
I think those 7 years (1992 vs 1999) made a hell of a difference because of the economic "reforms" that were implemented in that time-interval and which actually saw many towns like the ones I grew up in become destitute in a matter of just a few years. Unfortunately that decade (the '90s) is not that well-studied yet in our history classes (maybe because it is too recent?), fact is I've only started to realise its true importance and its true, horrible economic and life-changing effects on our parents' generation (people who are now in the 60s and 70s) only recently. I think the same happened over almost all of the former Soviet Bloc, and imo it greatly explains some of the political tendencies we see today. But that is turning into OT, sorry for that.
That's very interesting, could you please expound on that?
Those attending “olympiads” were brainwashed into thinking that somehow they were superior and at some point we had to look down upon those whom, god forbid, chose something else but maths. Some indeed went on to have high paying office jobs in western countries, many of whom are now turning back. Apparently being trained to win olympiads doesn't yield an entrepreneurial spirit nor does it lead to riches, and after a life wasted they now just want to live a bit.
I was in school in roughly the same period as you and although beatings from teachers to pupils were very rare, they did exist and happend if the pupil was very unruly and caused trouble in class (I had one classmate who nearly assaulted a teacher during class because he didn't like the bad grade he got), but usually the teacher had the "blessing" from the pupil's parents to perform such "corrections".
Beatings were much more common in the poorer parts of the cities/country with poor performing schools and broken families (alcoholism, domestic abuse, poverty). At top schools in big cities like the one you probably went to with alumni that go to Harvard and Google, beatings were not common at all because usually the children came from mid/upper-class families. But that's very small percentage of the pupils in Romania that are in such a performant environment.
When my dad was in school in the 60's, from what he told me, receiving beatings in school from teachers was very common all around even for stupid reasons as some teachers would go on aggressive power trips if you stepped on their nerves.
Most of our olympics are currenty researchers abroad or tech leads in the country. Entrepreneurs not so much, maybe the networking types.
The hardest math problems we encountered were from the USSR olympics. There was a magazine with math problems which collected such gems.
I personally received beatings from my math teacher during middle school (5th to 8th grade), which was before '89. He would make me have the fingers up and together (think of like Italians argue) and then would hit my 5 thumbs altogether at once with a wooden stick.
It is more pronounced in universities - ask medical or economics students and you’ll uncover quite a few stories.
In primary school the older brother of a classmate has broken into a newsstand and has stolen a few porn magazines. My teacher beat him every day for a week as to serve as an example to everyone (yes he beat the little brother). He hit him around his temples so as to not leave marks and would lift him from the floor pulling by the hair. To this day i wont forget this.
Also as recently as few years ago there has been an uproar in romania as to how many parents beat their children for various reasons including poor school performance. You know, “bataia e rupta din cer”.
This happens in poor areas of romania such south or east provinces as much as in the north west.
“got jobs at X” - exactly. Excellence in romania’s education system means obedience. At the top it produces great workers. Not that working at google is not cool or getting a phd is not useful but romania needs more than that.
And while a small sample praises romania’s education system, and great maths, Romania suffers from roughly 50% functionally illiterate pupils. Just because a small sample gets good results in olympiads, frankly contests that mainly poor countries compete in, it doesnt mean the system is great. Quite the opposite.
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.
I hear this complaint form nearly every country. It seems like the system has found this "hack" where if you dumb things down enough, then scores go up across the board, giving the impression that the children are performing better, so the people in charge can meet or exceed their KPIs, and everybody's a "winner".
For example, in Romania it was very difficult to get top grades at schools a few decades ago so those grades were used as entry criterias in universities, but nowadays everyone can get top grades without a sweat by carefully rigging the system, so universities have introduced their own entry exams since when everyone has top grades then they are all worthless.
I'm also highly "skeptical of prolonged compulsory education of any quality" but, again, I think that maybe that will steer the discussion into OT territory.
On the flip side, the American capitalist economy does a remarkably good job of making productive use of people who are not academically strong (this is a notable strength vs. the Chinese, as well). And American culture & education stresses team-playing, communication skills, and trust, all of which are weaknesses of many of the Eastern-bloc programmers I've worked with.
The thing is, I don't believe that the strengths of American culture are mutually exclusive with Russian and other Eastern European strengths in mathematics and science education. In other words, we could have both. What's stopping us from ripping out just the dumbed-down math curriculum from schools and replacing it with Russian-style instruction? I guess that's what the article is about, and some families are doing just that with private enrichment classes.
What's stopping us? For starters, over a hundred years of battling desires: https://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html Not any of the sides entirely without some merit. And that is closer to America's strength, in that try as we might to enforce Universalism in some domain, we're pretty bad at it against ourselves. This is a good thing, since while the surface of possibilities does suck and we can dream it was much better, it is not entirely uniform and solid, there are yet still many cracks for the precious few (many of whom being immigrants who found their own crack just to get here) to slip through, drag some along with them, and come out to do great things.
However, the majority of people don't have this luck, and they get seriously left behind. I don't know as much about Bulgaria, but Romania has the largest percentage of functional illiteracy in the EU - almost half of Romanian high-school children can only theoretically read (they recognize the letter symbols, but can't actually read a text and understand what it meant, at the most basic level). A good percentage of people go through the mandatory K-10 education system through cheating, corruption, and basic knowledge.
Romania is very focused on national exams, one obligatory one in 8th grade and another one in 12th grade. There was a push about 10 years ago to implement some stringent anti cheating controls (cameras in each exam room, nothing fancier or more oppressive), and the pass rate plummeted from over 95% to 50% in that one year. There were entire high schools that had had straight As (10s) the year before and where no one passed the year after. This was the level of cheating and corruption.
I will also note that the stuff about having luck with your teachers is also not an exaggeration. I attended the second best high school in the country by admission grade (there is a national exam in 8th grade, and students choose their preferred high-school in a ranked vote style, and then every student is assigned to a high-school in order of exam grade + preference). This is also a high-school in the capital, and a wealthy area. I had some really good teachers in a few things, and a few really abysmal teachers in others. Even in CS, which was the high-school's specialty, I had teachers who seemed to barely know the basics (but also others who were pretty decent).
It's also important to note that there is widespread, normalized abuse in the teaching system, especially towards children with poor grades, or who are just poor. Things like yelling, demeaning, even spanking and hair cutting (for male students with longer hair, especially) are relatively common, and still considered normal in some areas (though, thankfully, fewer and fewer).
Do you know why students have to resort to cheat and corruption for passing tests and going trough the K-10 system? Is it some external factor for the students, is it just lack of good teachers, or a combination? Thanks.
For an example of the top-level mentality, the compulsory school system used to include K-12 until a few years ago. In high-school, you used to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 10, and organic chemistry in grades 11 and 12. After the move to K-10, the curriculum was adjusted to have anorganic chemistry in grades 9 and 11, and organic in 10 and 12, with the cited reasoning being that you can't have students graduating out of high-school without knowing the basics of organic chemistry, can you? This, again, in a country where a good third or more of those students can actually barely read - they've been lost since around grade 2-3.
Americans will be appalled, without realizing that these are common hazards for poor, and especially black, students to face. In many cases, these tactics aren't even used for punishment, but as preemptive control measures (especially the hair-cutting).
It continues to surprise me how many parallels there are between the Eastern European and Inner City American experiences.
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 way.
What is surprising even still is that school in Bulgaria was from 07:00 to 13:00. In the UK it's 07:00 to 15:00. You had more time to do homework in Bulgaria and more time to be a child.
There's also the Julia Robinson Math Festival that's supposed to be good but I don't have first-hand experience.
Ideally, a Math Circle would could be good for some kids if your area supports one.
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'.
All the schools I know of here in the London area start around 0830 to 0900. Some operate a club for busy parents to drop off their kids early but classes don't start until the rest of the kids show up.
Eventually I went on to get a math minor in college to go with my computer science degree, but I didn't even learn the first thing about Calculus until I was 21.
Math and Science education in the USA is really really abyssal until college, and then it's sink or swim.
Unless you have a very high budget, which usually only private (or public as they're called in the uk, but they're the same thing) schools have, you can't have it both ways where both the weakest students pass and the strongest students excel.
The US system is as bifurcated as the various European nations mentioned in this thread. The elite families in the US do not send their kids to the same (frequently) underperforming schools as the middle class or poor, just as those types of families don't do that in Russia or Romania.
> The American school system isn’t designed to produce high achievers
Which system are you talking about? There is no unified American school system. Nothing remotely close to that concept exists in the US. It's not possible to generalize so broadly. There are many different education systems in the US, varying based on where you live (varying dramatically from one state or city to the next even) and or what your economic capabilities are. Your description, if we were to attempt to utilize it, applies primarily to bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of society, not the top 1/3.
An obvious example would be elite private schools in and around Washington DC. The Washington DC region simultaneously has many of the richest zip codes in the US, and vast tracts of poverty and many horrible public schools. Washington DC, broadly, presents one of the starker examples of the US bifurcation in nearly all things socioeconomic.
To illustrate the point: the only Presidential candidate from one of the two major parties, since and including the 2000 election, not to have attended a private prep school, was Hillary Clinton.
*If they don't come from the Americas
Even many of those who left for economic reasons come from richer families that are leaving because of new policies that are less friendly to the wealthy or previously privileged classes. See, for instance, white emigration from South Africa or Zimbabwe to the United States.
Also, to be clear, this is specifically an American perspective and even more specifically, about international students - labor migration from Eastern Europe to the EU is of a decidedly different character and more analogous to the comments I was making about people from the Americas in the US.
> It depends. Some of these people (their parents) left their home country because of economic reasons.
Another common reason for leaving is discrimination. Those people who leave because of discrimination are very rarely well connected or wealthy, or they usually wouldn't have to leave.
Then there are the outright asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants, who are also usually very poor and lack connections.
Most international students are not there because of discrimination they faced. Most people who are seeking asylum or undocumented in the US are from the Americas.
For international students not from the Americas, most are wealthy or well connected by the standards of their home country, although often not by American standards. It's not uncommon to hear about the banker who became a taxi driver in the US, but what you hear less of is the farmer's kid - because they never even get a chance to come.
And of course I'm generalizing! I have no doubt there are exceptions, but the fact remains that it is largely true.
So I might be comparing the best & brightest of Bulgaria, but in theory at least I'm comparing them against the best & brightest of America (though in practice I suspect it's more like the richest).
I say that as someone who has experienced both sorts of classrooms in my lifetime, which I think is a rarer experience.
The other kids were pretty fascinated with my slightly different long division methods, but the teachers were just obsessed with making me write an `x` instead of a `·` when writing out my multiplication, and trying to make me change the methods I'd learned previously.
I stopped finding maths interesting at that point (age 11) and it breaks my heart to this day. What I knew was enough to get me a couple of 'best-in-school + gold' medals in that Year 8 maths challenge, but it was all Bs and Cs at a-level. I did rediscover a genuine interest in mathematics again at uni as part of the foundations of AI course (CS degree), but that was short-lived and frustrating, as I knew I should have been better.
But later on, I swam like a fish in water in geometry, trig, logic and loved algebra and moved from the last of my year to one of the top. I was doing integration etc a good two years before it was being taught in the higher classes. These skills are good for programming and computers.
There was a limit; basically theorems, multi dimensional stuff and unreal? math, primes, pure math etc were completely out of my scope. Strange I guess, perhaps these are connected with being good at mental arithmetic?
My point is that I also think it's bizarre on the British obsession with mental maths early on, when for many algebra might be better and easier.
Once you pretend you have mastered the basics, there is a sudden, strange focus on advanced Calculus heuristics and obscure linear algebra techniques, effectively making most people hate these subjects. The way you are taught the stuff is basically a crime against Mathematics since it drives talented people away from STEM careers.
Or maybe it's vanity. But I will say it's depressing to see all the cashiers (in the US) that can't seem to do any kind of math in their head, not even to minimize change (which seems totally ubiquitous in many other parts of the world; in fact, some cultures are aggressive about optimizing your change - China comes to mind).
I too was much better at applied maths and stats. It was fairly easy for me. But my brain just shuts down doing pure math.
To me mathematics is a thing of beauty I just find I havent found the right handle to grasp it with.
I ask myself what would be the order in which one could most easily absorb the material. Does it really start with rote learning?
What are you trying to learn and why?
Math starts with axioms, which are some statements that everything else is built from. Axioms, as far as I understand, can't be derived. These are the most basic building blocks. Then through logic and deductions other machinery is built up. There is a certain amount that does need to be internalized or memorized, but that is the same for learning the alphabet.
In math classes, at least at the university level in Canada, knowing the statement of definitions and theorems covered exactly is somewhat important. If it's a proof based course this is more important, but the theorem will tell you where it's applicable, so knowing that helps.
Math builds. It took me until a third year complex analysis course to build up enough courage to ask a prof how he solves problems. Basically he said he has a hierarchy of theorems in a given field. When he sees a problem he will go through each of them starting with the easiest to apply and check the assumptions. If it applies, then he will use it and get the result. If not, move on to the next one. He goes and looks up the exact statements and how to go through with the calculations and checks. If you forget something, look it up.
Eventually after solving enough problems you'll build up some intuition and muscle memory for the problems.
As to how to progress, I am not sure. Some mathematicians say you kind of just pick things up and then connect the threads later on. It's not always possible to march through in a linear manner because there isn't an absolute ordering in what to learn.
There should be an appendix in the back of a textbook that reviews or outlines what's required for the book. There will be a few questions that rely on outside knowledge, but one can still learn the majority of the concepts without going to far afield for review.
Start with what you want and fill in the rest of the gaps by working backwards.
I wouldn't worry about memorizing the times tables (unless maybe you're interested in number theory?) if you're trying to learn math. Know algebra, functions, and graphing as a minimum, then start to learn what you want... I would just use a calculator or pencil and paper to multiply things out on homework. If this is for personal benefit, then don't hesitate to get some numerical methods involved to help learning the material.
Hmm.. In my experience this would have been discrete math at best which is normal in CS classes. You'd have to have taken an engineering elective or math elective to get linear algebra.
Today, with AI being so hot, I'd bet that the programs include math for engineers e.g. matrices and linear algebra. Maybe an intro course in stats and probability.
The thing we called “linear algebra” involved linear maps and vector spaces and bases and dual spaces and no grids of numbers.
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.
The Union had two optional years of high school, but everyone took the first eight with no tracks or optional classes. After that you could finish school or get three years of vocational education and join the workforce.
So yes, coal miners learned the same stuff. Only after grade 9 kids could apply to a professional school that would teach blue-collar professions and that's the first divergence point.
P.S. In Soviet/Russian schools "class" is literally a group of kids who study all subjects together from grade 1 to 11, they are very rigid.
Then my family moved to a nearby city where they taught standard American math and I wasn't allowed to solve math problems the Singapore way. Even though I got the correct answers, the teachers insisted I do math the "right" way, which I consistently messed up for the rest of my life.
Singapore math not only has a more reasonable pace to learning, but as someone with inattentive ADHD I found its approach to arithmetic easier for me to keep track of in my head.
Even if people have heard of Singapore math, they might not know that things like addition are done left-to-right rather than right-to-left.
https://youtu.be/HS7BDq73pRE?t=44
I don't know about anyone else, but that is more like how I do math in my head on a day to day basis since the first step gets you closer to the answer. Just doing more addition underneath is also more visually clean than carrying numbers by writing them above the original equation. Paper is plentiful, and now I'm sure it could all be done digitally, so there's no reason to use standard American math to save space.
I took a look at the entrance exam at the uni I wanted to apply to and was shocked. Thankfully, I had my dad and he went through Skanavi's exercise book with me.
I look at the USE math exam every year and it's much better than my final exam (although I like gaokao more, it has more varied problems that make you combine different areas of math), but I don't know where the cutoff point for "I won't get into trouble for my students' low results" is.
These standardized tests are changed little by little every year and are simply meant to a) ensure similar educational standards for smaller and remote cities b) enable kids to apply to any university in Russia.
Although some specific parents and teachers in particular school might want to focus on repetition of the same problems and tasks it doesn't mean everyone will and it certainly didn't affect me that much. In fact, having some definitive rules on how they assess an essay in Russian helped me get 100% for it the first time, since it was objective.
https://www.msri.org/people/staff/levy/files/MCL/Zvonkin.pdf
https://www.ted.com/talks/masha_gershman_how_math_can_prepar...
https://thepostmillennial.com/oregon-governor-signs-new-law-...
I understand that the lack of a school diploma is a huge drag in life and that can primarily affect people from disadvantaged backgrounds, but shouldn't they focus on improving the way they teach kids instead?
Lower the standards across all levels -- high school graduation, college admissions, job placements. Eventually we end up with surgeons and lawyers that are illiterate. But at least it is equitable!
Here’s another article with more: https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-legislature-passes-bill-t...
And here’s the text of the bill (PDF): https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2021R1/Downloads/Meas...
And here’s the Department of Education’s page on the Essential Skills Graduation Requirement: https://www.oregon.gov/ode/educator-resources/essentialskill...
Key points from my quick read:
This is about suspending mandatory testing prior to graduation. They did that last year due to virtual learning, and are extending the suspension longer while things get back to normal, and while they assess whether the approach to testing they have is suitable (and in line with what other states are doing). It is not (yet) gone forever, just for a couple years. And you still have to pass courses in all of those subject orders in order to graduate.
Have to disagree. A parent can't be simultaneously up to speed on Math, English, a 2nd language, Biology, Science, History or any of the other subjects that a child will learn in school
School is meant to teach, parents are meant to socialise. Unfortunately that seems to have been swapped around somewhere along the line.
The fact that an arbitrary american adult educated in this country cannot easily differentiate and name some works of shakespeare and provide some quotes, etc, should be o source of national shame.
Polish education is notable for memorization. One area where it doesn't seem to hurt is medicine. It appears Polish doctors and nurses are very much appreciated when they migrate. Perhaps critical thinking is not a useful skill in medical practice?
Once upon a time I was reading an article about Polish migrants in Norway. The Norwegians observe that Poles are reluctant to send kids to Norwegian schools for a few reasons: a) the language is very different, b) Poles fear children will become rebellious, because the schools emphasize critical thinking* c) Poles fear children will become... idiots. Because they won't know too many facts. It appears despite constant complaining about pointless facts and useless information, Poles take some sick pride in the suffering. Some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
* this reminds me of a rumor circulating about personnel of mental hospitals. Patients are often sedated not because it's good for the patients, but because it's convenient for the personnel.
The country has taken an authoritarian turn. The aspects that annoy me personally is lack of critical thinking, lack of insight when it comes to history (it's a second state religion in practice which is two too many), low trust, bigotry, corruption, double standards, shallow XIX century understanding of patriotism. There's focus on "moral victories", heroic sacrifices and losing battles. Contempt is something very common in society - it's like everyone needs someone they can despise. Constructive criticism is very unwelcome and met with denial. Compromise is often called "rotten compromise".
I was having a discussion about this recently, recalling the vast majority of my experiences with medical doctors who obviously just follow a cook book approach to how they practice medicine. Worse than that is how many doctors cannot correctly explain test results. Seems like although they completed a lot of schooling they did not take enough math.
The biggest difference for me in school was a consistent, well thought out program (one for the whole country) and books. A topic would be studied once, well, and there would be enough time to master the material. Consistency across subjects, too -- if physics covered a topic in, say, the second half of the grade 7, the math needed would be covered in the math classes before then.
What I now see in the US is horrible: teachers at grade N do not know for sure what the students already know, so they repeat a lot of the background, then jump around to cover a lot of material, much of which is never mastered. Which is considered OK -- it will likely be repeated in the same haphazard fashion next year. Or not, depending on what the next teacher decides.
Not to take away from the importance of a well-thought-out program, learning materials, or competent teachers, I was drawing attention to the immense time and effort that some students would invest often with an institutionalized help.
In our case, the programs were standardized, the textbooks were virtually the same throughout the union. Barred special schools and eccentric teachers, all kids were studying the same things at the same time. What differentiated the bespoken Siberians from us was that order of magnitude difference in the time put in. It challenged my sense of normalcy in many ways: people being this good at math without being apparent geniuses, universities teaching math extra 4 hours a day, realization that there is enough undergrad calculus to last 3K hours.
It's hard to understand the the connections between and motivations for concepts when you are learning everything about a topic before moving on. I prefer the style described above, of learning the basics then moving on and circling back when more advanced aspects are needed.
Clearly different styles work better for different people.
Highlighting this because I love the idea and can't wait to try it out :-)
I spent my freshman year of high school in France, and went to a French school (this is 3ème, for my fellow Frenchmen).
I recall being stunned -- in the best way possible -- when our biology teacher started his class on the first day with: "So. You've seen X last year. Now we're going to talk about related-thing-Y".
That had never happened in my US curriculum. Never.
There are obviously issues with pushing young adults this hard, but my overall feeling is that American schools need more of this.
I've come away from this with the impression that American schools are the best-funded in the world, and survive by importing the best-educated from elsewhere. This is obviously a bit of a caricature, but I think it's mostly correct.
You are of course correct, but I think the parent comment is implying that this is a rather unfortunate situation. I agree with him to a large extent.
My experience with the French system has left me with the sense that American schooling has to some extent cheated me out of an education. On the other hand, I look at my wife (and other "prépa" students as well) and conclude that they suffer from a certain lack of imagination and intrinsic motivation, both of which have personally benefitted me greatly, and which I attribute to something in American culture.
As my wife puts it (I'm paraphrasing, obviously): "We were never asked what we enjoyed doing; if you were a good student, you were put on the good-student-track, which was a math/science-heavy curriculum. To this day, I don't really know what I want to do; I just know what I can do, and I feel an obligation to excel at it." She's an absolute brute at math, but she doesn't like it, and I think she would have been much happier studying something like literature.
So my feeling on the matter the French educational system is one of ambivalence, overall. Nevertheless, I am convinced the US has strayed much too far in the other direction.
Maybe I’m actually just subconsciously jealous, but unless you major in math, what do you even do with that? Not to mention there’s little time left to study anything else.
In those days you didn't buy books, you'd photocopy them, so he gave me a very large photocopied manuscript of Piskunov [1] in Spanish. I had never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a game; it had very little instructions, and it started with absolutely trivial exercises, but continued on and on, relentlessly. And somehow, it got you hooked. I read the entire set of books compulsively, just to see what the next exercise would throw at me. I finished my exam really quickly and got 95% (in my rush, I made one mistake in the exam). My teacher even asked me about some of the ways in which I solved some of the exercises.
[1] https://mirtitles.org/2012/03/06/integeral-and-differential-...
It is written by a mathematician who has taught in Russia, the US and Brazil. They have a lot to say about how math is taught in the US. The paper also has a lot of sample problems.
The summer before 11th grade, my father decided he had enough. It was time to learn math, Soviet style. He sat me down for a few hours each morning with problems from 6th and 7th grade Russian math textbooks - which was strange to me of course because I was about to start 11th grade. One important rule was that a calculator was not allowed.
Everyday he had a list of questions ready for me that he had judiciously picked. Back in Ukraine he was a regional physics Olympiad winner, and a gold medal winner (in the Soviet Union, the top graduates from each high school were awarded a gold medal - goes to show how they valued academics I suppose). I can pull up some photos if anyone is interested.
The questions were very clever and pedagogical. You developed intuition by solving them. And you couldn't solve them if you didn't understand the underlying principles. And of course, there's the word problems. I could barely read Russian at the time, so I had to take my time, but they bridge the gap between theory and application. And without a calculator, you are forced to develop techniques for manipulating equations and numbers. You get really good at it.
I aced math and physics for the rest of high school (and later graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics).
The western education system really fails us. My dad sitting me down with those elementary Russian math textbooks and enforcing a no calculator rule was one of the best things he could have ever done for me. The Soviet mathematic curriculum was designed by some brilliant mathematicians who understood the importance of developing intuition. That importance seems to be lost here. People think that quantitative intuition doesn't matter as long as you can plug your equation into Wolfram Alpha. But when you approach math that way, you don't develop an analytical and quantitative lens.
Photos: [My father and my grandmother on the way to university in the 80s - https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tgv2gpy428rKs2GS8
Gold medal - https://photos.app.goo.gl/KsisSEvb4fbNEE419
Physics Olympiad diploma with translation - ]https://photos.app.goo.gl/b3hw6HXmQN25iXay9]
Totally on point about the "analyticial and quantitative lenses". Multiple-choice questions and lack of "real" questions really hobble a lot of math classes.
I was lucky in middle school in particular to have classes that used textbooks with a much more indepth look at why we would do X/Y/Z than the average book (along with a system where you would work through exercises in groups of 3 or 4, so better people could help out people who were struggling more). But I had to do a hell of a lot more "work showing" in France.
The way I see it, learning to do basic math in your head is just as important if not more important then learning a procedure via a calculator. A calculator doesn't teach you anything, it just teaches you how to use a calculator.
But in the US, calculators are used at almost all grade levels. My son's school allowed them while he was in elementary school, while still learning basic algebra.
As for math education in general (in the US), it's pretty terrible. The lack of practical applications of "advanced" maths is a big problem. Basic calculus didn't "click" for me until I started taking economics courses in college.
I vividly remember self-studying calculus because I absolutely wanted to know how to find the area under a polynomial curve. I knew how to find areas of normal geometric shapes, but finding the area under the curve seemed like black magic that I _had_ to learn. If schools could somehow give this to students, there would be no need for "practical applications".
Yes please!
This is thought of as being fair, of helping, for of course everyone is intellectually equal.
Thus, those who can accel, are denied their future, for those which will leave high school, and never touch (for example) advanced math again.
Equality comes from recognising our differences, and enabling best outcomes for all. Not pretending we are all identical.
Sadly, this seems lost on many.
No, the curriculum is not watered down to meet the needs of the weakest students. Canada tends to align its curriculum to that of other western nations. On the other hand, when you're talking about math there is a bit of an issue where the background of teachers is mixed at the elementary level and students are not guaranteed to have a true specialist teacher until grade 10. That isn't to say that specialist teachers are the best teachers, but it is a bit disconcerting when a teachers college offers classes for math-phobic elementary teacher candidates (particularly since those grade levels seem to be where many children develop their attitudes towards math). It is also worth noting that the quality of teachers varies based upon region and schools, largely because teachers have a lot of choice as to where they teach.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-sc...
With no advanced/honours tract, you have two choices.
Subjects too difficult for a large portion of the class, or everyone gets education tailored to the least capable students.
Clearly, they aren't removing advanced classes, then suddenly failing 1/2 the class...
I do believe that there is a natural difference in intelligence, but not enough to make the difference of a student getting into the honours stream or not. A lot of the kids say “I don’t get math” or “I’m just dumb” or they don’t have a stable household or family role models of success — all of which hold them back. Naturally these external problems are much harder for school boards to tackle so they would rather chop the legs off of honours students than address the students who come from a disadvantaged background.
It is also worth noting that there would be significant public push back if there was a true degradation in the curriculum. Ontario tried replacing calculus with pre-calculus about a decade ago, which the government had to reverse due to public pressure.
Not so sure on that one. I agree some would push back, certainly. I feel it is fewer every year, with parents not caring for anything but what a piece of paper says.
But, perhaps I am a cynic, or am reading too many such stories.
These are not accessible to all students.
It depends on which catchment zone you live in, and even the schools that offer AP don't offer the same AP courses. Last I checked one offered 2 AP courses and another offered 11, so there is huge variance between the schools offering AP. These are public schools, not private schools. There are private schools that also offer AP and IB. The IB private schools cost as much in tuition for one year of high school (IB senior years is a two year program) as a Canadian university does for the 4 year degree. Some of these private schools will teach second or third year university courses to advanced high school students.
The BC math courses are offered at different levels, but even the top level math is not for students who want to move ahead or be challenged. The top level math is the bare minimum to get into a Canadian university. Some schools offer calculus 12 and many other schools don't offer it at all. I guess that's "honors" math.
The "honors" math program that has been eliminated is a program that condensed the regular curriculum. I am so confused as to how that is inequitable, but AP (which has exam costs) and IB are allowed to stay.
In some Surrey schools there are programs to allow students to spend their last year doing a trades foundation program. This isn't evenly distributed either, but is a great way to allow students to start their careers. My brothers are both in the trades, but their friends at other schools spent grade 12 in a foundation program and saved 6k in tuition.
There is even a possibility to take summer courses and spend some of your last year taking college courses or university courses in the right districts. This is for Vancouver and Burnaby students that are close to UBC and SFU, but this isn't advertised or evenly available.
My point and rant about these is that it'll be a matter of time before all of these opportunities are also taken away. If they stay, I'll be pleasantly surprised and gladly admit I'm wrong.
I grew up in Calgary. It was possible to apply to special programs outside of your catchment area, with a choice of multiple schools for some programs. Being admitted into a public IB program comes with the expense of a monthly bus pass, not the equivalent of several years of university tuition. I would be surprised if Vancouver is any different since out-of-area students are often the means of maintaining high enough enrolment to offer special programs ranging from academics to the trades.
Something that may have been a quirk of my home city: catchment area was not a hard-and-fast rule for middle school either. There were special programs one could apply to and, failing that, approaching the school's administration directly. Granted, for something like that the family must care enough to take the initiative. That may be in short supply in some areas, but it is by no means a measure of affluence.
> My point and rant about these is that it'll be a matter of time before all of these opportunities are also taken away. If they stay, I'll be pleasantly surprised and gladly admit I'm wrong.
There is also the possibility that you'll see the opportunities taken away, then be pleasantly surprised to see them return. The education system seems to go in cycles, based upon whatever the pedagogical fashions of the day are. Then again, I doubt that we will ever see the extreme of everything being taken away. People seem to like talking about things in extremes that don't truly exist.
For one program it seems that there is a roughly $1,000 cost for each level, so it's a little over $2,000 to complete the entire IB program. The other IB program seems to cost $1,000. I don't know if either of those schools waive the fees or not, but looking at other districts they say the fees are for writing the IB exams.
I can't determine if AP courses are district programs or not.
So much wasted time in school, he's frustrated not to make progress and bored with 'maths' (truly it's lack of maths, but to the young mind that gets confused with the subject and then you lose them).
Your story is very touching, thank you for sharing it.
It also emphasizes the importance of a motivated teacher. Also I believe that such parent's involvement makes the process and the subject of learning so much worthwhile.
It's not a secret that as parents we want/need to outsource the kids into schools just to free ourselves up for what we want/need to do. Yet paradoxically we want the kids to know no less than we know ourselves.
It's just a luck if kids come across a good teacher which would help the kids demonstrate to us parents that they are worth of our attention. Kind of backwards...
I finished Grade 6 in Russia (in 1995) before emigrating to Canada.
I didn't learn anything new in Math class until mid-Grade 11 [1].
[1] Except Trigonometry. But I could tell the way it was taught was completely different from the concepts I learned in the Soviet/Russian system.
It was just rote memorization of sin/cos/tan - just clever formulas for deriving the angles and edge lengths of triangles that you solved by pressing the SIN/COS/TAN buttons on your calculator, rather than the "from first principle" explanation of what these concepts meant fundamentally.
I'm not sure where in Canada you moved to, but there are Governor General awards [1] to the top graduating students. It's bronze for top high school graduate, silver for bachelor's, and gold for higher degrees.
[1] https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/governor-generals-awards/govern...
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.
From my interactions with French students and Romanian students in college, the Romanians seemed further ahead and the french were just on par.
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.
Not unrelated, but today in the UK is A-Level results (for 18 yr olds), and the UK press and exam boards, as usual are reporting it as the 'best results ever'. This happens year on year.
There's a lot of argument about education standards getting lower in the UK. My "anecdata" is that I was the first year to sit GCSE maths exams at 16 yrs old, and we went through old O-level papers from the mid 1950s onwards (aimed at 16 year olds) to practice. Those O-level papers had advanced calculus that we didn't learn until our final year of A-levels. Those old papers were much harder.
tl;dr in the 50s/60s 16 year old Brits were taught advanced calculus. They're not now.
Just from interacting with people of different ages, it seems to me there was a marked improvement in quality of schooling, maybe in the 90s?
The reverse wasn't true - we were not taught extra things that weren't in the exam, we were simply taught less.
I can't find a link, but there was talk of "remedial maths" lessons being taught at many universities in the UK to bring students up to the standards required for degrees because they're simply not taught at the same level any more. Universities on the other hand, don't have their curriculums or qualifications manipulated by the sitting government so their standards/requirements change much more slowly.