Thread by @nileshtrivedi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
A big factor for India’s math olympiad performance has been that many students are not even attempting this exam, simply due to lack of awareness. If you’re in school and enjoy mathematical problem-solving, consider taking IOQM, even if just for fun. Many schools and parents are not even aware that “SOF olympiads” are not true olympiads. It’s a just a feel-good exam that is too easy to do well on and feel good. Their “international olympiad” marketing has managed to fool many people. (3/N).
At International Math Olympiad, Indian students do okay on number theory and algebra but struggle with geometry which “needs serious creativity that is tough to learn in regular school. Problem #6 in IMO is where India has struggled the most across the years”. Our curriculum and schooling is too algebra-oriented. This makes our students good at symbol manipulation, but not so much at visual intuition. Things are particularly bad when it comes to 3-dimensional geometry. Books, blackboards, screens are all 2 dimensions and early schooling does not have enough 3D manipulatives to develop true spatial/geometric thinking. We have put too much algebra in trigonometry (9/N).
IIT-JEE requires physics and chemistry in addition to mathematics. This may be selecting against talent that leans more towards abstract and less towards concrete. Things are now changing with various IITs giving direct admissions to IMO participants without JEE. Computer science in particular will benefit from indexing more on mathematics. It’s a sub-field of mathematics anyway and very different from other engg departments.
Olympiad problems require much deeper thinking, which is evident in their format. Each JEE Advanced paper has 51 problems (maths+physics+chemistry) to be solved in 3 hours. IMO exam happens over two days. Each day you get 3 problems to be solved in 4.5 hours.
There’s a whole lot of low hanging fruit available at younger ages, but teachers lack the autonomy/incentives to try fresh approaches. For example, the notational mess of exponents, radicals and logarithms that causes confusion for no good reason and probably makes many people give up on maths who would have been very good at it precisely because of their talent for sense-making.
Poor pedagogy is prevalent in teaching computational thinking as well. When it comes to computing device for young kids, I strongly recommend you to get them a large-screen general-purpose computer (i.e. laptop/desktop) rather than a smartphone/tablet - which has been optimized as hell for consumption and addiction. Steve Jobs used to call computers “bicycle for mind”. Smartphones/tablets are very far from being that. This is an interesting idea.
Memes (i.e. culture) are upstream of everything. Since supply of excellent teachers can’t be increased easily, it might be much more effective to involve families and friends in building that culture. Waiting for teachers (whether schools or edtech players) to improve seems futile. We must involve families and friends in order to get a step change in learning. Again, we need good cultural memes to replicate.
Indians don’t want to pay for software but their behaviour is exactly opposite when it comes to education. They don’t value “free” stuff. The number of attendees in the free sessions by @dhimath_india or @ccl_iitgn is in typically in the 20s - from ALL OF INDIA! 😮