day 4: boarding schools and the opera

It’s going to be hard to blog today, because it’s already midnight.  Also this hotel charges 10 rubles (40 cents) per minute for internet access in their business center, or you can pay 300 rubles (12 dollars) for an hour of wireless access in the lobby which still doesn’t work in the room.

First we finally managed to figure out how to buy a phone card and use the phone, so I could call home.  Yay!  Breakfast in the hotel buffet was great. 

Then a bus ride over to Kolmogorov school.  Originally these schools were boarding schools for people living outside the big cities, but now they have some local kids too.  It’s sort of like NCSSM I think, just for the last two years of high school among other commonalities.  They select students by a regional system of written and oral exams, then a summer school.  The summer school helps rural folks catch up with the big-city kids, and it also is the final stage of the selection process: only half or so make it, and there’s nothing like summer schools to show you which kids really love learning math and are super-motivated compared with the ones whose parents are pushing them.

The Kolmogorov folks also echoed a common idea I’ve heard in Russia, that probably is equally true in the US: Don’t be managed by just one organization.  Have several sponsors.  Then when one tries to tell you to do something you don’t want to do, you can claim that you can’t do it because one of the other sponsors forbids it.  Or vice-versa, when someone tells you not to do something that you do want to do.

The pedagogy reminds me yet again of something that I keep meaning to write more about but never got around to.  To me, the big distinguishing feature that I’ve seen everywhere in Russia, compared with just about everywhere in the US, is the amount of individual attention that students get.  There’s much use of team teaching and of university students as TAs of sorts.  Homework often consists of quite hard problems, and then class time will be individually going through each student’s answer to each problem.  Some students will have solved a particular problem, and just explain their written solution to the TA.  Other students will be stuck, and have a conversation that may end with the student having been led to an answer, or maybe with a hint given for the student to work on for a while.  And “a while” might even be as long as half an hour or more!  For example, in geometry class, says Vladimir Dubrovsky, he would often give 3 problems for homework, so that they could have worked on them enough at home (over the span of a few days; geometry class meets only 3 hours per week, but so does algebra and calculus, so students choosing math as their focus have a minimum of 9 hours of math per week) so that when they come to seminar (two of the three hours are seminar, and one is lecture) they are ready to get some hints and really get somewhere.  I think I have more to say about this individualization; I think it’s an essential part of why the system here works well, and I have some ideas about in what ways it can be exported to the US.  But that discussion will have to wait until another time.

I also heard again about enthusiasm and motivation, but now more among the students: “Motivation is contagious”, so separating some of the most motivated students will cause a lot of the rest to become more motivated as well.  I certainly see that at Castilleja, where there are some students who surely wouldn’t work nearly as hard as they do if they weren’t in an environment where so many people work hard.

I could write more about curriculum, but my goal is to keep it shorter this time!

Then we visited the "Intellectual school" which is a sort of semi-boarding (during the week, but not on Sunday) school for kids who are generically bright, creative, and motivated.  One of the main parts of their entrance exam is a public presentation of the students (to each other, and a jury) on a topic of their choice.  At age 10.  It's a pretty neat school: they do lots of science-fair type stuff, and have a big humanities program, lots of kids interested in history, in addition to the math circles that brought us there.  We got a chance to meet some of their most interesting teachers: two fantastic math teachers, and a “correspondence math” teacher (but that’s too long a story for right now, except to say that he gave me a probability book as a gift which fits in perfectly with the next unit for AP Stats class, so they’ll be learning to read some Russian!).  We also met a science teacher who works with the younger kids (it's a grade 5-11 school) and is almost like a one-man Exploratorium -- and so charismatic! 

They served us a great lunch, somewhat like Castilleja’s (high praise indeed!) with plates of all kinds of stuff stacked on the table for us, and a hot main course too.  But smoked salmon!  And sturgeon!!  Yum.  The main difference to Castilleja is that the assistant principal whose primary job is to be the “dorm mother” was busy mothering us: pointing out how much food there was still on the table, and encouraging us to eat it.  She was wonderful, and fit every stereotype I could imagine of what such a person should be like.  As she showed us around school, she always wanted to tell us about every award that “her” kids had won.  It was great.

After lunch, ome people left to meet with the editors of Kvant (the magazine that used to be published in English translation, called Quantum, and will soon be again I think if today’s meeting is any indication), but a few of us stayed and met the English teacher and had a chance to talk to some of her older (9th and 10th grade) students.  They’ll be pen pals soon with Ms McKee’s Russian History class!  The English teacher was very excited about having Americans to correspond with, so if anyone’s interested in learning more about Russia by such a thing, let me know.

Oh, and I also got asked about a program called “Children International Summer Villages” or something like that.  If you know anything about it, tell me more!  Or maybe I’ll just google when I have internet access again.  There were also lots of questions from the kids about exchange programs, so there’s plenty of interest on the Russian end if there’s any on the US end.

Then we went back to the MCCME offices for a few more talks.  I was halfway asleep at this point: this seems to be my daily pattern.  Get not-enough-sleep, get up early anyway, have a great morning, be half-asleep for the late afternoon, walk around outside in the cold and wake up, do something fun, have a nice dinner, and then not be able to go to sleep, so stay up way too late blogging, and repeat.  (I’m not looking forward to the plane back: my plane leaves at 7am Monday local time which means getting up even more way too early than usual.  Maybe it means the plane is where I’ll finally catch up on sleep).

Anyway, we heard Boris Geidman talk about Russian math in elementary school.  I was very surprised to learn that most of the curricula are pure arithmetic.  Russian math at higher levels is so geometric!  There’s also traditionally almost no word problems at those age levels, he tells me (though I think I’ve seen other Russian elementary curricula that do have some serious word problems, I realized that he is right about the geometry for sure, and I believe him that the Russian elementary school book I saw may have had an unusually large amount of word problems). 

Geidman’s efforts (represented by a lovely collection of books that may well inspire me to learn enough “mathematical Russian” to be able to navigate my way through most of the books – though the word problems will still surely give me trouble!), um, Geidman’s efforts are aimed at changing that, by introducing lots of geometry and word problems in the early grades.  He also focuses on having a wide range of difficulty.  The problems are challenging enough that he says only 10% of teachers can handle it on their own, and maybe 50% with some professional development work.  That also sounds all too familiar.  He described it more as a lack of “mathematical culture” among the teachers, not ability or knowledge.  I thought that was an interesting word choice.

He said a couple other interesting things: partly because of the lack of teachers, he wants to make sure that his books are usable by parents, too.  That is good thinking.  He also showed some beautiful problems, like how to cut a square into pieces and reassemble them into a new square  in such a way that a particular given point in the old square becomes the center of the new square.  And he pointed out that graph theory, like the classic problems about tracing shapes or the Konigsburg bridges, makes a great way to motivate discussion of odd and even.

Sergei Shostakov teaches specialized math classes and also organizes a big problem book/database around the more basic-level math exams in the Moscow area.  He gave lots of good examples of easy, elementary problems that focus on what some idea means and penalizes people who are in the mood for mindless algebra.  For a calculus example, where if you understand calculus you should be done by the time you’re done reading the problem, but if you only “do” calculus mechanically without understanding, you’ll be at it all day or even longer: if f(x) = (x^2 + 1) * ln(x^2 + 5), and F(x) is an antiderivative of f(x), which is bigger: F(7) or F(8)?  For another somewhat harder one, given that x and y are integers, find a solution to the system of equations sqrt(5x – 6y – 4) ≤ 0.564 (that’s a less than or equal sign in case it doesn’t come through) and sqrt(6x – 5y – 7) ≤ 0.657.

Finally a couple guys whose names I didn’t catch showed us some of the best online math resources in Russian.  Makes me want to learn the language for sure:
http://math.ru
and one that can be used without so much Russian knowledge, with some cool computer animations:
http://etudes.ru

After that, we rushed over to the opera, a beautiful Traviata (and yes, Ms Pietrzyk, I brought you a program).  Then dinner at the “Moo moo” restaurant, which despite its name doesn’t serve too much cow, but rather just a nice assortment of small plates of Russian food that you pick up from the line like a cafeteria type thing.  It was yummy, and after the huge lunch (10 hours earlier) I still wasn’t that hungry.  So I had a couple small cottage cheese blini with sour cream, a big bowl of borscht, and a little plate of roasted eggplant wrapped around some tomatoes.  And a big glass of what I think translated as fresh squeezed cranberry juice!?  It was tasty, but with lots of sugar added as part of the recipe, not particularly distinguishable from the pseudocranberry we so often see in the US.

Then a walk back to the hotel, arriving rather late, followed by the writing of this blog, and now it’s way past my bedtime.  So goodnight!  No pictures uploaded today, maybe next time with some good pictures of the kids at the math circles we will meet tomorrow.

OK, Saturday morning now my time, and I woke up way too early.  Like 6am, after being up well past midnight.  But I’m awake, so be it.  At least it meant I got to call home (since 6am my time is 7pm back in PST).  And it means I have time to go upload this thing, I think.  And here I go!

Comments

[Mrs. Pang]

So, how much would you write if you were not "keeping it shorter"?

Thanks for sharing all of this with us!

[physical therapist salary]

By some weird arithmetic, the more life stuffs itself into the valley, the more spaces it creates for further life.