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My college had a decent-sized contingent of Bulgarian & Romanian international students. The difference in their math abilities upon entry was striking. While

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.

paganel 5y ago
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.
- gnat 5y ago
  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.
  - rob74 5y ago
    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...
    - paganel 5y ago
      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.
      - selestify 5y ago
        > imo it greatly explains some of the political tendencies we see today That's very interesting, could you please expound on that?
  - visarga 5y ago
    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.
    - holoduke 5y ago
      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.
  - rogalact 5y ago
    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.
    - tw20212021 5y ago
      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.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        He's not exaggerating at all. 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.
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  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.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >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.
    - chucksmash 5y ago
      Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Jach 5y ago
  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.
  - paganel 5y ago
    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.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    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.
tsimionescu 5y ago
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).
- ratww 5y ago
  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.
petargyurov 5y ago
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.
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  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.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    What are the relevant channels? My kid is very interested in it but the 3B1B type stuff is a bit too far ahead. He wants to learn algebra next.
    - laputan_machine 5y ago
      Mostly it came from Khan Academy, https://www.youtube.com/c/khanacademy/playlists https://www.youtube.com/c/khanacademy/playlists
    - beojan 5y ago
      Try the Murderous Maths books.
    - dubya 5y ago
      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.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
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.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  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.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    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.
  - adventured 5y ago
    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.
boomskats 5y ago
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.
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  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.
  - mkl95 5y ago
    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.
g9yuayon 5y ago
It could be because you noticed only elite foreign students, while US education is accessible to a much wider range of American students.

paganel 5y ago

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.

gnat 5y ago
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.
- rob74 5y ago
  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...
  - paganel 5y ago
    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.
    - selestify 5y ago
      > imo it greatly explains some of the political tendencies we see today That's very interesting, could you please expound on that?
- visarga 5y ago
  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.
  - holoduke 5y ago
    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.
- rogalact 5y ago
  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.
  - tw20212021 5y ago
    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.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      He's not exaggerating at all. 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.
Wildgoose 5y ago
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.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >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.
  - chucksmash 5y ago
    Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Jach 5y ago
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.
- paganel 5y ago
  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.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  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.

tsimionescu 5y ago

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).

ratww 5y ago
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.

petargyurov 5y ago

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.

laputan_machine 5y ago
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.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  What are the relevant channels? My kid is very interested in it but the 3B1B type stuff is a bit too far ahead. He wants to learn algebra next.
  - laputan_machine 5y ago
    Mostly it came from Khan Academy, https://www.youtube.com/c/khanacademy/playlists https://www.youtube.com/c/khanacademy/playlists
  - beojan 5y ago
    Try the Murderous Maths books.
  - dubya 5y ago
    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.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

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.

spoonjim 5y ago
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.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  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.
- adventured 5y ago
  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.

boomskats 5y ago

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.

thinkingemote 5y ago
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.
- mkl95 5y ago
  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.

g9yuayon 5y ago

It could be because you noticed only elite foreign students, while US education is accessible to a much wider range of American students.