Comment by rvba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvba | Hacker News Reader

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Oversimplification is bad, but there is a reason why Western/US universities are so much better at teaching students.

Imagine your professors and textbooks werent there to teach you, but they were there to show off their knowledge or to prove you that you know nothing.

A very known problem in my country is that a professor is not making a lecture to teach you something or to explain you something, the professor wants to show off his knowledge - that he is the king and you are a nobody.

Then you get unreadable textbooks full of big words (sometimes you think authors dont grasp them)... which are just plain student unfriendly.

I remembet that I had borrowed some statistics books from USA - and they were easier to read in English than the crap I had in my own language. They were easier to read and easier to understand. No big words. Just explanations and examples.

On a side note, they taught us physics with English abbreviarions. When most students didnt know English.

Think you are in 5th grade and they nake you memorize things like: d = s x t

You have to figure out that it is distance, speed and time.

Note that those abbreviations have nothing to do with the local language. Also why even use abbreviations? Lazy teacher (AND lazy textbook) could have used full words at least. In own language, not English.

Most people from US dont realize how much easier you have. For starters you dont spend a lot of time learning English as a foreign language. Then the non-Americans can get books that are written to teach you something* not to show that the author is great. (* although now I think most textbooks are written for profit).

Indeed, the truth often lies somewhere in between.

It sounds like you might not have been studying to become a mathematician but had to take a statistics course as a requirement for your degree. In such scenarios overcoming vague and complex teachings can indeed feel incredibly cumbersome, often resulting in a negative overall experience. However, when it comes to topics you’re passionate about the situation can be quite different. While exceptions exist in every field passion can make certain teaching styles more tolerable.

For instance, I taught myself programming at the age of 13 and I vividly remember struggling with OOP. It took me 2 months to grasp it, but I persevered. English is not my native language and I was quite poor at it in school. I began learning English on my own because there were far more programming resources available in English than in my native language. I was terrible at math and finished high school with an E in math. Fast forward a few years I developed an interest in algorithms and theoretical computer science because I wanted to understand how compilers work. I spent months learning to comprehend mathematical symbols and notation, reading numerous resources that assumed a solid mathematical foundation which I did not have. I persevered because I was genuinely interested.

Making learning too difficult isn’t helpful, but neither is making it too easy. Like most things, it really depends.

I think this has more to do with budget. In many countries, professors are not paid specifically to write books, but if no proper book exists in the local language then they sort of have to do it one way or another. It usually ends up as some hodgepodge document, each chapter written by a different professor - whose are experts at their fields, but not at book writing!, which is a specific skill. Some or better at it, others absolutely suck. Then they just print it some way without any lecturing, unification of styles, references and use it as the course book, because they were sorta forced to.

In English, there is competition and people with actual experience can publish books, which will be used by multiple universities, if it becomes famous than multiple generations of students from multiple universities and years have criticized it making the nth version better, etc.

This is very different from the budget solution my med university (of which 4 exists in this language alltogether) could reasonably come up with.

Nonetheless, there were smaller topics, documents, chapters which easily surpassed the same found in any English language book, especially in mathematics (the Soviet block used to be famously good at mathematics, so the level was much higher than the west’s), for these small gems it does worth speaking obscure languages.

This sound ls very much like the experience of Greeks according to some friend.

While other countries use Greek letters for variables and functions)

100% agree, the same things happen in Poland and I wish it was closer to US.

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