“For some reason, American kids seem to be willing to put in the work with athletics, but not put it in with the one subject that’s going to matter more to their lives than any other activity.”
"for some reason"? I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement. This is one of the ways in which popular culture lies to kids about likely outcomes, which distorts their ability to make rational decisions about the future.
Yes, part of the problem might be that mathematical achievement is not valued highly. But it cannot be the full explanation, since math is unpopular across the world, not just in the US. For example, I'm originally from Eastern Europe, one of the places where mathematical talent is supposedly valued highly, but I can tell you it absolutely isn't. I even went to a special math/programming-oriented high-school, and even there the cool kids were the ones that didn't seem to care about math at all, but instead had the looks/fashion/sports abilities.
Also, the comparison between American kids and Indian kids in the US is not quite fair, since these Indians are a highly biased sample of the true Indian population.
So the difference must be in something else, too. My personal guess is that the math in the US schools must be just too "easy". So, if kids everywhere on average learn about 60% of the math they are taught, they will be better in countries where the math taught is more advanced.
Arithmetic is given a lot of importance early in a child's education in India.
Kids learn multiplication tables (upto 10 atleast) even before they start their first year of school (1st standard).
This is so prevalent that reciting multiplication tables (the higher, the smarter you are) in front of guests, when you are 4-6, is a very common thing across all Indian cultures.
Extra math classes, like "Vedic mathematics", which provide shortcuts to faster arithmetic, are a rage in urban India.
Sorry, but your examples do not truly reflect the situation out here. (I am not too sure how much time you have spent in India.)
My take on why an 'average' Indian kid is a little bit better than an 'average' American kid in math, is just because (s)he has done more of it and with a bit more rigor. Everyone needs to pass a mandatory math exam here (as part of what we call class Xth board exams), and only after doing that one gets a choice to pick a stream of subjects of his/her liking (that may or may not include math).
As everywhere, some kids do have trouble liking/understanding math, but they do not have much of an option initially and their parents also keep the ante up, on studies for this particular subject. (Of all the kids who are not able to clear the Xth board exams, the percentage flunking in math is the highest).
Another reason that helps getting this subject more priority, is that for most of the better paying professions, it is a must. (Sadly, majors in humanities mostly have more trouble getting in to top earning bracket).
A similar example is about learning the English language. Kids in India do it more than kids in China/Japan, and hence do it better on an 'average'.
I have spent all my life in Bangalore, India and I'm nearing 30.
The Indian culture gives a lot of importance to having good math skills. If your mom asks you to get something from the neighbouring shop, you better have your math right. Kids are always taught to count the change and demand the correct change after a transaction.
So, addition and subtraction have to have on the spot without the help of a electronic teller. Perhaps that can give an insight into why I insist that the Indian culture requires you to be sharp with your basic math.
I have alternate story about maximum "fails" in the board exams. A lot of students dread Hindi (an artificially imposed third language in South India) and to a lesser extent English.
Yeah, I agree with your premise that good secondary math skills are a result of ultra-competitive nature of college admissions and job market. But, it still doesn't take away the fact that a student with average overall score in India will be better off than an average student in US when it comes to "usable" mathematics.
Just because the state syllabus mandates study of Hindi as an essential requirement to pass high school, it does not make the language welcome in all parts of south India.
The urban south-Indians learn Hindi, when necessary, by osmosis and from media.
AFAIK, passing hindi (score > 35/100) is no longer a criterion for getting one's high school diploma. Thank $deity.
I have spent all my life in Bangalore, India and I'm nearing 30.
Thanks, this helps in putting your comments in context. My first reaction to your post was that it probably came from someone has not spent too much time here. My bad.
who the "cool kids" are is a very shallow measurement of social expectation. As little as kids claim to value the respect of their elders, expectations do play a large role in what is valued.
Reserve some blame for the American college admissions culture which says that students who participate in a greater number of extra curricular activities are worth more than the student who did well in math.
>I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement.
You're just rephrasing the problem, though. WHY do certain societies give more status to athletic rather than to mathematical achievement, relative to other societies?
Probably for the same reasons we have more televised athletic tournaments than televised math tournaments. They are visual, more visceral, easier for a non-participant to judge. Athletes are seen as healthier, more social, and more sexually attractive. Athletic competitions represent our desire to successfully compete in these attributes.
exactly. humans are adaptation executers, not fitness maximizers. we are adapted to measure the metric of success by physical prowess because in the environment we evolved in that WAS the most important metric for success. Our monkey brains can not wrap our heads around the idea that something like sitting in a class room playing with numbers would be a better predictor of success.
Physical fitness is also a much easier metric to estimate visually, and we are lazy, visual creatures. We like to make snap judgments and rationalize them later.
Well, that's not entirely true - athletics are associated with 'fun', and math isn't. How many students here have seen the poster in your math class 'math is necessary for....' and then lists a bunch of occupations (aka 'work')?
Why not focus on the fun side of math from an early age?
Exactly right. Relatively speaking, our culture is very anti-intellectual and backwards. Athletic heroes are praised by the entire community, while the math whizes are ridiculed and viewed as socially undesirable. In that kind of environment, not many people who have both options will go the way of the math geek.
So... I spent the first 10 years of my life in India going through its education system and am currently a mathematics major at Caltech. From my experience, the Indian education system is heavily geared towards attaining high average output. The education system in the US is much more laissez-fair in this regard. It allows students to adjust to their needs and capabilities. Neither system is perfect. In the Indian system, the exceptionally smart students get shafted because they are bogged down by the rigid and usually rote curriculum. For the average person, arithmetic is sufficient but for an advanced major, giving them problems is crushing (I speak from personal experience). The complete lack of intellectual stimulus is very counterproductive. On the other hand, in the US system, a large portion of the students slack off and fail to use their opportunities. Going through the US education system has put me years ahead of where I would have been if I was still in India but along the way, I have seen many students miss out and just sit on the sidelines. [1]
This startup can be immensely helpful but please, don't see this as a begin and end all for mathematics education. If a student is capably of grasping the axiomatic principles of mathematics, such a learning path is infinitely preferable to the do-lots-of-problems method. [2]
[1] This is pretty much the exact same gripe that I have with programs like Kumon which give students lots and lots of problems without giving a solid mathematical foundation for why these problems behave as they do. For more information, Lockhart's Lament (http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html) is an excellent essay written by a mathematician on this topic.
[2] This is not to say that an axiomatic mathematics education is for everybody. For one thing, a student may not be interested or capable of such an education (just like how I am completely incapable of remembering anything). However, for students interested in mathematics, it is the way to go.
For the average person, arithmetic is sufficient but for an advanced major,
giving them problems is crushing (I speak from personal experience).
This is a very insightful observation. I loved mathematics till high school (in India), and solving problems was real fun (with a good understanding of what it was all about). Then i started my engineering (again in India), and was completely put off by the insanity of solving only problems without much thinking and appreciating the beauty and underlying principles.
I was also startled a bit by the following statement in the article:
Math homework in India consists of math problems that students work through, as opposed to the United States,
where homework is heavy on reading about math topics in a textbook.
To me, it's almost impossible to think of basic math without problem solving. May be it's only me, but the real 'fun' is not complete without it, and i daresay it is not the greatest strategy of attracting inquisitive kids to it.
For some reason, American kids seem to be willing to put in the work with athletics,
but not put it in with the one subject that’s going to matter more to their lives than any other activity.
Honestly, even i would prefer my kid to put more work in athletics if (s)he can handle the money and understand the way around converting measurement units. :-). I can't think of anything else i use it for these days.
I think an example of the failures of rote learning is a simple math problem.
An army is marching down a road at Xmph and stretches out 1 mile in length. An officer at the rear of the army notices a problem. How long does it take him to get to the front of the line traveling at Ymph and how many minutes does it take him to do the round trip?
Now, if you hand this to a bunch of collage students who have not seen it before a surprisingly small fraction is going to be able to do it quickly and they are not generally the ones who think of math a series of steps from problem to solution.
I totally disagree with this! It isn't a fault of the curriculum, it's the fault of your teachers. I had my entire HS/college education in India. And if I may say so, I would put myself in the "exceptional" category as well: I was in the international math olympiad, and rarely scored less than 100% in school tests.
Anyway, I found the math classes thoroughly enjoyable. The teachers pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't disrupt the class. I'd usually be a few chapters ahead, or helping out the kid next to me, or something like that. Very often, the curriculum was challenging even for me. We had Fermat's infinite descent in the eighth grade! I distinctly remember ruler and compass construction problems in my ninth grade that I'd have great trouble solving even now.
The good thing was, the super-hard parts that I've mentioned were all optional and were never on the exams. It worked out perfectly -- students who were both smarter than average and self-motivated would spend most of our time on those parts. My teachers were happy to answer my questions about that stuff after class, even though it was irrelevant as far as our grades were concerned.
One teacher in particular was amazing. She rewarded outside-the-box thinking, and if there was more than one way to solve a problem, she let us present them all. She acknowledged when she was wrong. Damn, writing this has made me all nostalgic and want to find her and thank her :-)
One time, I was working through a textbook that was two or three grade levels ahead. I had a question that she couldn't answer right away. She went home, did her research, and helped me out the next day. How awesome is that?
We had one horrendously bad teacher. They fired her after two months.
Some other great memories.. we all learned to program in the fifth grade. That was tons of fun. A computer cost more than a building back then in India :-) Vector calculus in the ninth grade. And so on.
Of course, everything except math and science was a disaster, but there's no way there was anything wrong with the math curriculum. I'm quite aware that 90% of my friends at other schools had completely unmotivated teachers, but again, not a fault of the curriculum.
I agree with the point that the teachers make a huge difference, especially in the formative years. (Not only in math, but all subjects).
I distinctly remember a few who made subjects like Sanskrit, Organic Chemistry, History (that itself is interesting in any case) appeal much more, and never let the curriculum dictate or slow down the learning process of fast moving kids.
You're right, being good at arithmetic isn't a substitute for training in axiomatic mathematics (for someone who is interested in math). Programs like this are about making sure everyone can make change without a calculator & and do back-of-the-envelope estimations, rather than training Putnam winners or even breeding more math majors.
I would recommend an India like system if your daughter is deficient in mathematics. Also, mathematics is unique in that it deals with absolutes. It starts with some axioms and places everything else on top with irrefutable proofs along the way. Its not for everybody (even though I would like to think that most people can enjoy the beauty of the subject). I also have several friends who are brilliant but run away from mathematics like it was the plague. There's nothing really wrong with this unless it affects their success in their own field/life/career etc..
Maybe you daughter just isn't very fond of arithmetic (what most high schools teach). An introductory book on some axiomatic branch of mathematics may be useful in that case.
I agree. Though even with the axiomatic approach I have to do a lot of problems to really understand. Of course the problems are mostly of the type "Prove that lemma" or "Find out whether that proposition is true and prove your answer".
"for some reason"? I'll tell you the reason: incentives. The kids are learning by social osmosis that status is gained by athletic achievement, not by mathematical achievement. This is one of the ways in which popular culture lies to kids about likely outcomes, which distorts their ability to make rational decisions about the future.