Slashdot Mirror

I have to say that you seem to make the mistake of regarding quantity equivalent to quality. [...] I find it pretty hard to believe that you [...] actually read and not merely skimmed them.

Well, I personally didn't read all of them, only the ones I *knew* I was going to be questioned on (like War and Peace, for instance). This usually amounted to like 50% of the list (we had a liberal teacher). But, since the "examination" was quite deep and required an actual understanding of the plot, characters, historical context, and many other dimensions of the book in question, you *had* to *read* and *understand* the book or risk getting a bad grade. Then again, my cute neighbor read *ALL* of them!
Feel free to ask someone, who went to school in Moscow or St. Petersburg (don't know about other cities, but I'd wager the situation was very similar), if you need confirmation. I know it's hard to believe for someone used to sparing the "poor kids" and providing them pre-chewed information laced with the teacher's opinion, instead of pushing the kids to solve problems on their own.

we usually cover one book per month during lessons (if that much) but in detail.

Yeah, I remember being bored on the second week of some of Duerrenmatt's or Lessing's (shorter) works, when a minority came prepared and we were reading the whole book in class (especially great, when it's that idiot, who never learned how to read properly and couldn't bind two syllables together), instead of discussing the plot, analyzing the literary style, etc. We were "reading" The Judge and his Hangman for 3 (three!) months. Seriously! WTF?!?
What I'm trying to say here is that maybe it'd be worth a consideration by the education panel to give a list of 20 books and let the students choose at least 2 of them to read over the holidays, but no, that'd be against the almighty law of not giving them *any* homework over summer. ; )

Judging by my (subjective, of course) experience, I'd say the general literacy of the population that went to school in the USSR is way higher than the general literacy of the "average German". I wouldn't expect otherwise, after I've overheard parents in DE say things like: "Oh, I really don't think my kid should go to a gymnasium, the load's too high (LOL), he/she's better off in a real [10 years total] or hauptschule [8/9 years total]", or a teacher deciding where your kid's going instead of you and/or the kid.
Eventually, when people get out of school, their prospect is to find an apprenticeship as a salesman or some other job that's going to be virtually non-existent, when RFID & Co hit the market, or their job as a construction worker get's automated away by an oversized 3D printer.
I never understood why the level of expectations in DE is so low in general.
As a comparison, in 2010 the attainment rate of tertiary education in RU vs DE is 54 (1st place) vs 25.4 (23rd place) percent for (25 to 64 year olds) source: OECD interactive tool.

Regarding PISA, of course you can dump most of the results, if they come during your last lesson and say whoever's finished can go home...*facepalm*
And regarding matrices (and other concepts): it just raises the student's general understanding and awareness of subjects. It's just one example of the "level-difference" that really stood out and that's why I mentioned it. I wish someone would have shown me this, back in school too, but maybe I'm just a nerd.

Why is the story tagged scientology?

The first video starts with a picture of an old book from 1559 called "The Cosmographical Glasse". The title on the book cover is hyphenated to start with COS- instead of having COSMOGRAPHICAL all on one line. At first glance it looks like the abbreviation for Church of Scientology.

Thanks for the great torrent link. And here is a link to the full website full of clickable movies that you can forward to your friends, some of whom might not know what a torrent is. :-)

If you click through the sciencenews.org article, you can get to the actual website of the people who made these videos. From there you'll find that these videos are Creative Commons licensed, and available for download as high res MOVs. I tried the torrents, but they all stalled, so I just used wget to grab them from the US mirror.

The link in the ScienceNews page that leads to the actual good stuff is broken; it links to .or, not to .org.

The article linked to in TFS fairly crummy, but following through leads to the full videos which are really good. I even sent it to a non-math nerd friend. Its worth a look for anyone who had little trouble imagining geometric shapes in Rn. God knows that was me when I had classes that delt with that. Eventually I was like "Fuck it. It doesn't have to make sense, just get to where you can pull it off on the final." Plus its doing a good job of showing multiple methods to represent it, past what your gif shows. Right now I'm only a few chapters in, so I hope it keeps up the quality.

I've read some of Rudy Rucker's stuff, but don't recall if I've read that one. I'll have to look it up. I just discovered "Dimensions", the movie made by some French mathematicians with POV-Ray, which I've used since the early 90's. The movie is really cool and talks about geometry, particularly in regards to 4-space, and of course is very visual (we're talking eye candy). The coolest part was that my kids loved it. They sat with rapt attention while this movie is demonstrating geometry proofs and showing 3-D projections of rotating hypercubes and stuff.

http://www.dimensions-math.org/

I've read a fair bit on the topic, but frankly, the visualization part eludes me still. ;-)