Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

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My take on your list of advantages of soviet math/physics approach is mixed.

Fully agreed with you on the rigor regarding notation, really good progression of teaching (pacing and order in which the material is introduced), and soviet math textbook exercises being well thought-out and entertaining.

Very much disagreed on the rest, as my main personal gripe with learning math+physics in Russia was that there was zero emphasis placed on understanding of principles and logic and 100% on memorization. I spent 3 years taking physics classes there, and I learned effectively nothing, having to relearn it from scratch in the US. And that was the moment where I truly felt I understood what was going on, instead of treating physics as just another memorization exercise for a variety of random unrelated formulas. Similar with math, but to a lesser degree, because with math I was personally invested and was trying to understand the material rather than memorize, despite it hurting my grades in Russia greatly.

> - teachers are astute at spotting students who memorize blindly, and will intervene to correct that

> 100% on memorization

OP says it’s not 100% memorization and you say it’s 100% memorization. So which one is it?

That's why I posted my previous reply, despite me being in strong opposition of the "argue anecdata with your own anecdata" approach in discussions. But I couldn't resist replying, because all of my 9 years of experience in Russian educational system were the opposite of what OP claims in terms of memorization, and so were those of every single person I know in real life who went through that system (in other schools in Russia, not just from mine, obviously). Coworkers of mine (who went to Soviet schools a decade or two before I was even born) echoed the same sentiment in discussions on the topic, with the halfway sad "some things never change there, huh" sentiment.

Would have been less surprising if my school was doing poorly in rankings and such, but it was quite the opposite.

Of course, all my claims here are anecdata, but it just feels like something is off when the fantastic utopian description of how "soviet math" education works just runs counter to every single lived experience I had, as well as that of everyone I know in real life. Especially given that experiences of some of those people in real life I mention were separated from mine by both decades and geography (some did school in Moscow, others in smaller towns, some in soviet ukraine, etc.).

> So which one is it?

It's the grass being greener on the other side.

Being schooled in post-Soviet 90s/00s...

Overall both class and teachers didn’t like memorizers. On the other hand, it was possible to pass pretty well by memorizing. Sometimes teachers would put in random bits in tests to throw off memorizers. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. All in all, memorizing and actual learning lived side by side.

The main difference from what West looks like, the Soviet-ish system was designed for failure. For me it looks very weird when lots and lots of people get best grades. I was raised that 10 (out of 10) is rare perfection. 9 is great. 7-8 is fine. Even 5-6 is ok if you ain’t interested in a given subject. Not everybody is super smart, not everybody is passing school with perfect grades. And that’s perfectly fine.

Unfortunately a couple decades later our education system is westernized and everybody DESERVES best grades. And the system is bending over.

>Overall both class and teachers didn’t like memorizers. On the other hand, it was possible to pass pretty well by memorizing. Sometimes teachers would put in random bits in tests to throw off memorizers. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. All in all, memorizing and actual learning lived side by side.

I find it hard to believe, given my personal experiences and the fact that having to memorize a poem or a short story and then having to get up in front of the class to recite it word for word for a grade was an extremely common recurring homework assignment in literature classes in my Russian school (from elementary to high school).

Extra details about that type of a homework assignment for those curious: they cannot call up every student due to time constraints for each class period, so for every such assignment, only about half the students get called up (for some specific works that are "more important", they might call up everyone, but over 2 class periods; that was extremely rare though). But those assignments were so ubiquitous, you essentially got called up to the whiteboard to recite at least once every week or two.

I backup the original claim.

I've been in several provincial schools in 1990s, good and bad, and we've always had strong anti-memorizing sentiment in math classes, despite in literature classes memorizing was mandatory.

Both make perfect sense.

Now I heard it's turning more to the Western model, though.

We had those literature assignments as well. But in 12 years that happened a couple times most. Now don't get me started on literature writing assignment that are strongly advised to start in certain ways and it's best to just memorise the beginning off examples and just change few words....

Interesting to hear about an experience that's pretty much the same as mine, but rebalanced differently.

For us, writing was the same way as yours ("strongly advised to start in certain ways and it's best to just memorise the beginning off examples and just change few words"), but it only happened a few times at most, and more towards the latter years, while reciting stuff in lit classes was the norm the entire time.

And now I am starting to recall another type of assignments going until late middle school, where we had to write passages from textbooks in cursive in our "homework notebooks", mostly with small changes. Like "here is this 1000 word passage in the textbook written from the first perspective, rewrite it from the third perspective in pen". Made a typo? Well, restart, because while a couple of edits won't take much off your final score, any more than that makes a full restart a more worthy option (because it was required to use pen for those instead of a pencil; more diligent students who didn't wanna bet on getting it right on the first try, they did it first with a pencil and then traced it and erased the pencil). Another evening spent rewriting the same dull passage multiple times by hand in pen.

On the other hand, how do teach someone handwriting skills? Writing down a passage is better than random blabery IMO. I'll take the must dull passage any day over several pages of synthetic exercises.

For the record - my handwriting sucks.

>On the other hand, how do teach someone handwriting skills? Writing down a passage is better than random blabery IMO

I agree, however, doing it way past elementary school seems like a solid way of wasting time. When you are trying to learn writing or you are in elementary school, sure. But spending hours upon hours rewriting long passages multiple times due to random non-editable typos in late middle school felt mind-numbing and downright awful.

And of course, as you progressed in grades, less attention of graders was focused on the actual handwriting quality, with passages getting longer and more convoluted, so the handwriting tended to degrade the further you got in your elementary/middle/high school education. Not even mentioning what happened to it after high school, because by then (unless your handwriting was completely unreadable) no one cared.

And no, it didn't help in the long-term with handwriting at all. None of the adults tend to have textbook-good handwriting, it would barely even get a passing score in the best scenario (and that would be an exception). And just like in western countries, let's not even mention doctors' handwriting (but that's completely irrelevant to my point).

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