> Parenting <
Yep. It’s that simple. I taught math and science at an urban school for years. Asian kids were maybe 5% of the population.
The Asian parents all had a rule: Homework was a group effort. And the older kids couldn’t start their homework until the younger ones had successfully completed theirs.
“And the older kids couldn’t start their homework until the younger ones had successfully completed theirs.”
That doesn’t make sense to me. Are the older ones helping the younger ones?
A good friend is Japanese-American. He remembers telling his mom, while he was in high school, that he got a B in Calculus.
“B? Why only B? You not work hard? You do better next time or you’ll be in big trouble!”
There has been a conviction that math is easier to learn in some languages then others.
What's the Best Language for Learning Maths?
According to a growing body of research, the words that different languages use for numbers can affect how easily we learn to count and understand basic concepts such as fractions.
For children taking their first steps into the world of mathematics, this can mean that some are presented with additional challenges based on the language they speak, while others are offered a head start.
In the mid-1990s, Kevin Miller at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne and colleagues put the idea to the test by comparing the numerical abilities of four- and five-year-olds in the US and mainland China. They found that the children from both countries were equally able to count up to 12, but the Chinese children were about a year ahead of the Americans in their capacity to count to higher numbers.
Further studies suggested that Chinese children find it easier to grasp the basic logic of our "base-10" counting system. Put simply, this is the fact that we use multiples of tens and units to represent numbers and that the order of the digits tells us which is which. In Chinese, this is more obvious: er shi, "two-ten" is easily understood as 2 x 10 = 20. The English word "twenty" doesn't spell this out so clearly.
This research is 20 - 30 years old, so I should catch up with more modern studies.