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by rsj_hn 1870 days ago
Russia has an amazing math education tradition. I always recommend Russian math books and Russian math programs. They are excellent.
2 comments

Any titles you can recommend?

I'm homeschooling my kid and have been using sample problems from both Russian and Singapore math. But I only have a single source for Russian math problems, which is a pdf of a paper by a Russian educator who taught in the US and then wrote a paper comparing the two educational systems.

It's interesting because he talks about how algebra is a big scary subject that is introduced late in the American system, while in Russia they start doing algebraic-type problems early in primary but they are solved with pictures. So when algebraic notation is introduced later it's just a next step to the types of problems that students have already been solving.

If you don't already have it, "Thinking Physics" by Lewis Carroll Epstein is very good.

Also: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/chicmath.htm Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18360071

"Thinking of Physics" is pretty great. Thanks for the rec.
Every Russian and ex-Soviet I've ever met was extremely proud of their school system, which arose from the Soviet system.
They really did a great job at math. The humanities were terrible, it was hopelessly politicized. But if you didn't want to deal with constant lectures about the struggles of the working classes, or constant coursework on marxism-leninism, you studied math or physics, or engineering. It helped, of course, that the government had as a national policy the promotion of STEM. But they did an amazing job at it, and produced a fantastic crop of world-changing talent.
What a great approach. The easy social studies courses are made so horribly boring that it drives students to study the hard sciences.