Reply to Do you find it necessary to supplement your child's public school education?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Do you find it necessary to supplement your child's public school education?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Of course. American schools are very behind.  We tutor in math mostly. [/quote]

So at age 17 what level of math have kids in other countries reached? Is differential equations really so far behind the rest of the world?[/quote]

Don't know about other part of the world, but definitely far behind Asia. Middle school graduates in China (about age 15) can tackle SAT math problems without much trouble and get high scores. High school graduates consider themselves a big failure if not getting full score in GRE testings on math part. A Chinese friend of mine who left China and attend high school in US said he didn't need to make any efforts to get As in math class, and most scary/unbelievable part, he said he's a C student on math in his class back in China.[/quote]

heh. i am an immigrant and i remember when i took GRE as a college student. i couldn't believe the questions on the quantitative part. everyone i knew was at the 99th percentile. i did mine in half a time and scored 800.

that said SATs and GREs are a separate issue from the math curriculum. these tests simply don't test math knowledge but rather math ability. they are more like IQ tests than math tests. that is unrelated to math knowledge american students learn in school. even american students learn much more advanced concepts than those utilized on these tests. i say this is someone who is highly critical of the way american children learn math and consider these tests to be a big a problem with the admission process at american colleges. however, i do think american children would be better in math if they had to take real math tests for college.[/quote]

I agree that SATs and GREs are separate issues. But that's the well known test around the world you can compare the test result of math. The experience with my friend is more concrete (as from C to A) also he mentioned that he didn't learn anything new in HS for math. That means he's already ahead of US HS students at least three years on math in middle school.[/quote]

I must say that I am surprised. This is what I used to think but don't think anymore. As I said previously, the problem I see is the depth not the topic covered. My impressions is that Americans do calciulus on 12th grade. I am an immigrant from Eastern Europe and went to #1 magnet in my country. I also learned calculus in 12th grade. The difference is we were doing pretty difficult problems. Also there was calculus on the entrance exams so you can't really get into college for many majors if you are not fluent in it.[/quote]

PP here, I would think it is the depth if he went from C to A, but at least there are something related to topic covered or he would not say that he didn't learn much new in HS. But either way, it doesn't matter, what matters is from that I can say math is such a joke in US schools.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics