Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

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Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative).

But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.

With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.

maybe pushing is the wrong word but i would say parents who care about their child's education have children who score substantially higher than children who don't have parents who care. And "caring" is highly related to family stability and the education level of one or both parents. Where education level manifests itself is in how a parent cares. My uneducated mom (who is asian) asked us to study and get good grades (an asian cultural value), but she couldn't really tel if we were actually "studying" since she was uneducated. Now the asian values meant that i at-least got "bare minimum" grades compared to other races of people but i never had enough "care" to excel (which i think i could have done). Now imagine a group of people with neither cultural values emphasizing education nor educated parents who might have their child's best interest and tell them to 'study and work hard' but given the circumstances and how kids will be kids, it is very very difficult for those kids to achieve.

I see that there is a finite bucket of cognitive energy. Learning higher-order concepts, as well as dealing with unstable family dynamics takes away from this bucket.

If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited.

These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.

Part of the struggle, at least in the US, is you have parents trying to help their kids with math being taught in ways they never learned.

My wife literally cannot help our 7 year old with her math because we were raised in a school system that taught rote memorization. I was too, but I suck at memorization and have had to rely on fundamental understanding in order to survive in math. So luckily I can help with things.

And parent involvement helps a ton. When our kid got 50% on the practice test I spent a few hours going over the material she didn't understand. She ended up getting 100% on the real test.

I saw a similar effect teaching at a coding school for adults: one of our strongest predictors for success was whether or not the student had someone close to them who was in tech. Having someone outside the system to practice lingo, talk about culture, or give an opinion on what topics matter makes a huge difference. I see no reason why grade school math would be different - I know my parents made a huge difference for me, not by "pushing", but by just being there to talk.

Kids are incredibly perceptive as to "what matters in this family". If parents show an interest in how the kid is doing in school, kids see that school is important. If parents show an interest in whether they won or lost a sports game, kids learn that's important. If parents show no interest but someone else does, whatever that person values takes on an outsized importance in the kids' life.

"Just being there to talk" is more than half the battle (but also more than half the time investment) pretty much no matter the topic.

> We all now

As a non-native English reader, it took me a while to understand that this means: We all know.

I think native speakers hash the words in their brain based on how they sound. And people who learned English at school primarily by reading and writing, hash the words by how they are written. The latter data structure makes it difficult to find that "know" and "now" are almost the same word.

Now and know sound nothing alike, so hashing by character composition would get you much closer than the hypothetical native speaker.

Sorry. Non-native so you figured me out. This was a pure error though. My mental pronunciation is quite different.

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