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Agreed that the news articles tend to dramatize these differences as some daunting gap in competence, and the subjects tend to be cherry-picked to illustrate th
by z2 12y ago
Agreed that the news articles tend to dramatize these differences as some daunting gap in competence, and the subjects tend to be cherry-picked to illustrate that point. Still, patterns can differ in complexity and depth too. Say it's geometry question--recognizing a 3-4-5 right triangle is one matter. Creating a general proof of perpendicularity in a 3D object that contains right triangles is objectively more advanced. (I'm referring to another hyped-up article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm )
- guard-of-terra 12y agoI had to solve tests not unlike the chinese one from the article you refer (less complex, but closer to first one than to second) to get accepted into university - and never had any use for any of those skills. This called "admission math" and despised by people who are into real math. It's all grinding values without understanding where they lead. I had a whole class failing to apply basic logarithm2 in a bisection algorithm and they had no idea what's going on. They didn't see logarithm as a tool! They solved a lot of questions with half dozen of uneven logarithms, but they had no idea when they met one in a real life. http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg http://egeurok.ru/resh_mat/10_11kl_Mordkovich/5/43.22.jpg I'm talking about craziness like this.