From a
conversation/interview between Ben Orlin and Steve Strogatz on calculus and math education:
SS: I’m thinking of Finland—have you read Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids in the World? Finland made it so that only kids graduating in the top third of their college class could become teachers. They’re highly respected. And they turned around their country in math. So when we talk about pedagogical reform, I wonder if we’re really talking about getting different people to be teachers.
BO: That’s a third vision. Pipeline reform.
That is not a bad idea. If you can’t pay in money, maybe pay on prestige.
And in general, they are right about math education just being way too rote in the US. It’s gotten better; I like all the visualizations they use for compound multiplying. But I was talking to the guy yesterday about long division, and they still teach it at his school as an algorithm you just have to follow, so I had to tell him it was iterative division with divisors that decrease by an order of magnitude each step.
It sucks when you just have to follow a process and hope that it works. That’s like AWS CDK. Save that shit for downtrodden adult life!