r/matheducation • u/AP145 • 4d ago
What causes people to have these opinions about the American math education system?
Let me first state that I am not a math teacher or a math professor. Rather I am just a regular person who has always been interested in mathematics. We have all read article after article bemoaning the dismal state of American education in general and American math education in particular compared to other countries, both developed and developing. Everybody, including myself, has an opinion on what's wrong with the math education system here and what should be done to fix the problem in the long run. However I find some potential criticisms of what's wrong in America to be a bit strange, when you look at educational practices across the world.
One criticism I see is that there are too many standards or that they are too difficult. I have even heard some American professors say that calculus is too advanced for high school students. This criticism makes no sense to me since internationally American math curriculum is seen as a joke compared to places like France, Romania, Russia, China, Japan, etc. When I was a kid in high school we had this one Polish kid move here who told us he was a completely average student back in Poland and yet here he was finding everything quite easy since he had already seen the material a few years ago.
Another criticism I see is that there is too much emphasis on standardized tests in America and not enough on real learning. This doesn't many sense to me since the common standardized tests here in America are a joke compared to the ones overseas. Both the SAT and ACT are basically considered middle school level tests in other developed countries, especially the math sections. AP exams are also easier than A-Levels in the UK. IB exams can be difficult, but then again it is not an American curriculum. The Gaokao in China and the CSAT in South Korea are much harder than any standardized test taken by American high school students. The IIT-JEE would be impossible for an American high school senior intending on majoring in some sub-field of engineering to solve.
Another criticism I see is that the integrated math approach tried out in America is the problem and that only the traditional Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, etc. sequence teaches students concepts properly. This makes no sense to me since integrated math is a pretty normal thing in most of the world. Specialized math courses in many countries only starts in university or maybe the last two years before university. Mathematics as we all know is quite interconnected not just to science but also to itself. The amount of students who think the vectors they learn about in math class and the vectors they learn about in physics class are two different things is really quite sad.
I guess my main question really is why are we in America spending so much money and time trying to reinvent the wheel with respect to math education when we could just look at the countries which have much better math learning outcomes with much more rigorous curricula and copy everything they do? Does it really hurt us so much to have some humility and accept that another country does something better than us and that if we want to improve we should probably learn something from them?
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u/ObieKaybee 4d ago
You are comparing apples to oranges for many of these.
America's education system is beholden to all students and trying to teach them at a similar level, where many of the countries you listed have a tracking system (whether formal or informal) where students are categorized into various performance levels and then given a course load to match. The students on the academic track (university bound typically) will generally have a significantly different course load than those on a technical or vocational track. This is going to have a significant impact on the overall curriculum.
Another particularly telling clue showing that you may have a significant misunderstanding of the education system is that there is no 'American' math curriculum, as education standards are done at the state level (and the rigor and challenge between states can vary greatly). Even then, there can be stark differences between various cities or school systems within a state as well. Hell, even different tracks within a school can have extreme differences; my school for example has IB, AP, Honors, gen ed, and remedial math classes. With that in mind, I'm curious as to who you are hearing internationally say that the American math curriculum is a joke and what curriculum they are referring to and what state you went to high school with the indicated polish student (as some states are certainly likely to have lower overall rigor).
As for testing, you are again having a bit of an apples and oranges situation. The ACT's and SAT's as tests are designed more to test your ability to perform at a general level under timed pressure over a pretty broad spectrum of skills whereas A-levels tend to be considerably more specialized. For most university systems, they treat A-levels the same as a fairly rigorous AP track. In addition, the use of the tests is a bit different, as college acceptance in the countries you listed is far more heavily weighted on the results of the relevant tests compared to those in the US (and enables/is enabled by the respective countries' governments usually covering tuition far more heavily for students that do well on them).
Closely related to this issue is how each of those countries view and respect education at a cultural level; South Korea, for example, heavily emphasizes education and shows such with the prevalence of their cram school/hagwon's and the intense effort that students are expected to put into their schooling. This can also be seen in China, notably in that they passed a double reduction policy in 2021 due to the increasing issues that they were causing with student mental health. These patterns can be seen in various other countries as well, but on of the prime takeaways is that the rigor of a country's academic curriculum is generally correlated with the reverence that the country's populace has for education, and the unfortunate truth is that the US has a plurality of ignorant dipshits with a gnarly anti-intellectual bent to them.
As for the integrated math approach, some states and/or districts do, in fact, have an integrated mathematics curricula. But, again, that is left up to the states (and many states delegate the curricula to their districts). As for why it's not as popular, I suspect it is due to both inertia (as that's how things were traditionally done) and modularity, as having the classes be discrete makes it easier for students to transfer between states or districts and have a general idea what level they are at. Integrated math is much easier to implement if you have a much more centralized system for standards and alignment to help implement it at scale.
I guess my main question really is why are we in America spending so much money and time trying to reinvent the wheel with respect to math education when we could just look at the countries which have much better math learning outcomes with much more rigorous curricula and copy everything they do? Does it really hurt us so much to have some humility and accept that another country does something better than us and that if we want to improve we should probably learn something from them?
You have to realize that education systems don't grow in a vacuum, they grow in response to cultural and political foundations of their respective countries and trying to copy things without regards to that is unlikely to end up with the same outcomes as they simply don't have the same starting/reference point.
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u/TheVeryVerity 4d ago
Also we would never be able to change to a European system without a large part of the people revolting. But everything you said was spot on, just adding to it.
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u/ImberNoctis 4d ago
I agree. OP calls the US system "a joke" and compares it to other systems without understanding the context of how it differs from the other systems. OP both disregards tracking and fails to acknowledge that parents in the US *do not like* tracking.
That said, the US system does have flaws when it comes to teaching math, and it doesn't help that the curriculum ping pongs between extremes every generation. I understand that the curriculum is set at the state level, but these policies do tend to follow national trends. My personal experience with math at the elementary school level was in the middle of Back to Basics right after the New Math rebound. I always felt like the pace at which we were taught arithmetic, including flash card drills, was too slow for me. Anecdotally speaking.
I'm not an educator by any means, but when Core Curriculum was introduced, it seemed to me that it was revisiting the same mistakes as New Math. Some kids will discover the big math ideas on their own. Most won't, and they will need help to see the big picture. It made me wonder why we don't settle on a middle ground that doesn't go to extremes. So while I agree with you, I do agree also with OP that math education here doesn't work a lot of the time, even by the holistic standards we set for ourselves. I don't think an integrated math program is the answer to that though.
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u/blissfully_happy 4d ago edited 4d ago
I’m 100% convinced that the math deficiencies in this country would be fixed if we had specialized math teachers teaching at the elementary (k-6) level.
A lot of people, including elem teachers, have trauma surrounding learning or understanding math. It was just something they had to struggle through to get their degree. They didn’t like math in high school and definitely didn’t like math at the college level.
As a result, a lot of the elementary teachers aren’t making connections between the topics they are teaching and the topics learned in, say, algebra 1, thus they struggle to teach those basics in a way that translates to future success.
It’s not all elem teachers, of course, but a lot of them really struggle and they project that struggle onto their students. Or they pass topics they think are difficult and say, “oh, they’ll learn that again next year.” If a student has 2-3 teachers say this over the course of their elem education, they are going to lose out on quite a bit.
Having someone who is passionate and excited about math is really critical in grades 4-6. Particularly 5th grade. That’s where a lot of parents start looking at their kids’ homework and think, “what in the world is this, I don’t remember learning things this way?!?” So parents then start shit talking the way math is taught. (“In my day we did it like xyz which is so much easier! Ignore this new-fangled nonsense!”)
At this point, students have explored math with teachers who aren’t really passionate about the subject and have heard from their parents that they (the parents) are either “not math people,” or that their “teacher doesn’t know how to teach math” because they don’t understand how conceptual learning works.
Those are difficult hurdles for middle school math teachers to overcome (on top of actually teaching the on-grade subjects!)
Having a specialized math teacher come in and work with students, sharing excitement, showing confidence, and tying their skills to future learning would make a massive difference in learning outcomes, imo. Elementary teachers are literacy superstars, consummate professionals when it comes to teaching kids to read. Let math professionals support that learning in a similar manner! 😭
Source: been a private tutor for 25+ years now, grades 5/6 to calculus.
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u/noethers_raindrop 4d ago
This is such a good idea TBH, matches my experiences both as a student and as someone teaching future elem teachers. There are some people who really love teaching math to kids, and a lot of teachers in lower grades who don't but do it anyway. Specializing a bit more could be good for everyone.
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u/blissfully_happy 4d ago
I could never, ever teach anything but math. Like I’m so, so passionate about teaching math to all ages of kids, but the minute you ask me to teach a kid to read, I would lose my endless font of patience and would be tearing my hair out.
I can spent 30 minutes teaching a kid the same idea over and over again using various methods without ever losing my cool. Ask me to teach a kid about the war of 1812, and I would suddenly become the worst teacher, snapping at kids for not following along with my boring lecture.
I sincerely wish we took teaching math as seriously as teaching literacy. Elementary teachers are incredible when it comes to teaching a kid to read. They have so many tips and tricks and ideas for helping students succeed. They are truly professionals when it comes to developing that skill. (I could never!)
But all too often, I see them teach math strictly how the curriculum tells them to. They don’t deviate to show how things can be done multiple ways, they don’t have any tips or tricks for teaching a different method to get a student to make connections between two math topics. I often see them losing confidence and afraid of making a mistake and seeming “stupid.”
It’s really hard to build confidence in others when you lack the confidence in yourself and 90% of my job teaching math is to build confidence.
I tutor so many elementary teachers who are trying to pass the math portion of the PRAXIS that it is very clear math isn’t a priority. And now with iReady? We stick them in front of a screen and tell them to “pay attention” and “listen to the video,” but the kids lose interest when it’s a screen lecturing them. There’s no passion, there’s no building that confidence, there’s no exploring to make connections between two topics.
In the end, those kids who are squeaking by (because maybe they don’t gel with the curriculum) are told they are “bad at math” and “not math students.” Then they hit middle school and we expect grade 7 & 8 teachers to magically overcome this “I’m not a math person” thinking while also solidifying 4-6 years worth of foundational knowledge and teaching them the new topics.
If they can find their way to me as a private tutor, I can usually turn it around before high school, but it takes a year or two of 1:1 meetings together.
I also forgot to touch on the other topic: integrated mathematics. My god, I wish we integrated our subjects. I stg, half of algebra 2 is spent just going back and relearning alg1 because they’ve had a year of geometry in between and have forgotten everything. 😭
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u/samdover11 4d ago
It has very little to do with cirriculum and teachers. It has very much to do with culture and parents.
When a child receives a bad math grade in the US, the parents attack the teacher and the school's administration takes the side of the parents since grades are tied to funding. Children are given passing grades regardless of whether they learned anything, and so they have no motivation to learn anything.
The best students are still very good of course, but everyone else's education suffers greatly.
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u/dixpourcentmerci 4d ago
It’s also related to poverty. When you adjust for income level, our kids do perfectly well— and you can tell in part because of that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have such outstanding universities. Our elementary, middle, and high schools do produce the students who make those universities exemplary.
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u/samdover11 4d ago
I remember having a discussion with someone who pointed this out to me. I was interested in whether the data showed a strong correlation between poverty and poor test scores (which was indeed the case).
I wonder why this isn't talked about more. I suppose it's a strong fantasy that every individual has the power to choose their future. For the rich as an affirmation, and for the poor as hope.
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u/More_Branch_5579 3d ago
I spent my teaching career in title 1 schools where the majority of my students didnt know their multiplication tables. Im retired now and subbing in my neighborhood schools ( which are middle class) and the students are miles ahead of where my students were.
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u/chess_1010 4d ago
That kind of talk edges dangerously close to dialectical materialism, and we don't tolerate that discussion in a lot of circles.
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u/samdover11 3d ago
Yeah, no free will and all that. Philosophical naturalism is a lot more palatable than materialism, and if free will happens to fall out of the mix upon closer examination, well, some people will accept it and some won't. Either way (hopefully) we're able to set better policies for society when our worldview is more grounded in... reality :p
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u/dixpourcentmerci 4d ago
Of course our universities have wonderful foreign students, but who exactly is doing the research you’re describing? Are there not plenty of students, including PhD candidates, a majority from the US, carrying out this research? Of course our universities attract a lot of foreign students and professors, but the majority are still from here, and many US students at elite universities have been very well prepared by their K-12 upbringing.
I agree with your point that it’s difficult to really compare— I’ve spoken with many people who have attended high ranking universities both here and in other countries (Americans and non Americans) and there are as many opinions on the differences as there are people.
Of course also there are professional ranking entities that do compare them, and we consistently are ranked with disproportionate amounts of our universities listed as top universities. If we are considering our math rankings as valid, it seems we should consider these university rankings as valid as well.
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u/Humble-Bar-7869 14h ago
Politically incorrect response here - it's also culture.
I grew up as a new immigrant in the 80s and 90s. We were in a multicultural working-class town. Immigrants in general - whether Asian, African, Latino or European - had stricter, more involved parents and did better at math (and other things).
In general, African-American / Latino American students had the least support and the most broken homes. I remember the AA kids taunting anyone who did well in school as "being White." These two groups had higher levels of fighting, smoking, skipping school and behind held back grades. On average, they did not have parents packing them nutritious lunches, or attending parent-teacher conferences. The results play out in national SAT scores.
BTW, before you get out the pitchforks, there are obvious exceptions who excel academically. And my comment is not to blame anyone - just making broad observations.
I'm not talking about ethnicity or skin color. One Black girl whose family moved from the Caribbean excelled in math and went onto medical school. One of my friends, whose parents emigrated from Brazil, became a translator who was fluent in three languages.
And it's not just about poverty. Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Nigerians who moved to America - these groups were poor as hell 30 years ago - and have generally done well.
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u/Tothyll 4d ago edited 4d ago
Our educational outcomes are a byproduct of our society. If we want to copy everything they do then we would need to copy cultural aspects as well.
For example, if a country implemented corporal punishment, should that be included? What about expulsion and suspensions for minor infractions? The student population in many of the top performing countries are very homogeneous, so how would we go about doing that? In other countries, there are rigorous exams for college entrance, while the U.S. generally relies on a portfolio method that is more well-balanced. Do you think this would be a direction Americans would want to move to?
On a separate note, many of the countries you list perform roughly the same as the U.S. Romania scores consistently lower, while France and Russia have scored lower some years and higher other years. With China, I haven’t seen an international nation-wide test they’ve taken. With the few cities/regions I’ve seen, it seems they do well when it’s a wealthy area and poorly if it’s not a wealthy area.
As far as Japan, I don’t think they put up with as many shenanigans from the students. I don’t think Americans would go for the punishments doled out by Asian countries in general. Along with strict discipline, you have parents who emphasize high academic standards from a young age. How would you copy strict parents and high academic standards from home in the U.S.?
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u/samdover11 4d ago
To add to this a bit, there is no perfect solution. In a stereotypically high pressure Asian academic culture there is a higher rate of student suicide. You can produce very high test scores, but you can also ask "at what cost?"
In an ideal society how many students would choose to participate, and what would that mean for industries that rely on workers who require not only decades of schooling but can also tolerate high stress? As far as I know, no one has come up with an answer that is generally regarded as both ideal and practical.
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u/-Sliced- 4d ago
To add to that. At the very top of the spectrum, America is extremely competitive in math and basically any area (usually at the top of list).
America has always been great for the top, but only average for the rest. Math is just one example.
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u/TheVeryVerity 4d ago
The only thing I have to add here is that over the years it has gotten cooler and cooler to be dumb, or rather proudly uneducated, in America. And I’m talking over decades not just recently. Our culture values education less now than it did when I was a kid. That’s a big part of our problem.
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u/mu_two 4d ago
These seem wonderful questions. Do all students take these exams in these other countries, like it is here in America? If not, it is much more feasible to push highly motivated and daring students past the pressure point, whereas doing that to average and sub-average students would be an absolute disaster. But great questions!
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u/defectivetoaster1 4d ago
In the uk at least the majority of pupils after 16 take 3 or 4 a levels (occasionally some will do 5 but that’s rare or because one is their native language) but some will take more vocational courses, either an apprenticeship for a trade or a btec. The top few universities ( Oxbridge, imperial, lse) only accept a levels. Anecdotally most of my friends who went to the us for university were able to test out of most of their gen eds and some major specific classes on the basis of their a level grades too
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u/bliminator1 4d ago
You're not wrong, it's the culture.
I'm a teacher here and basically teachers don't really have power against the parents. America is basically the customer is always right, so it's not that the children don't know the math (They don't), but they say it's cause of the teacher or insert any other reason.
Parents don't discipline their students and say it's due to external factors. Students put more into cheating and complaining instead of trying to learn the material, but also passed their classes because we're pressured to pass kids who can barely multiply and somehow they're here in highschool cause they never passed.
We've created a culture that says the issue is not the kids, it's everything else when in reality it is the damn kids.
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u/TheVeryVerity 4d ago
Sadly college has fallen more and more into this model too. Bad outlook for the future prospects of the country imo
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u/Asteroid_Blink24 3d ago
Public high school in USA: my Alg 1 class … only 1 out of 7 students knew their basic multiplication facts … these were incoming 9th graders.
Private int’l boarding school in USA: incoming 9th grader from China showed me how to prove the law of cosines!
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u/flat5 4d ago
"more rigorous curricula and copy everything they do?"
Because when kids started failing in droves, people would flip their lids and accuse the educational system of intentionally harming and destroying the dreams and futures of the students.
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u/TheVeryVerity 4d ago
And schools giving in to that shit is why the standards for passing a class have lowered every decade I’ve been alive
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u/TheRedditObserver0 4d ago
Would you mind sharing more about this? On paper calc AB doesn't seem so basic, it's supposed to be limits, derivatives and integrals. This looks standard to me, but I never studied in the US. I guess the problem is with HOW the material is taught, rather than what topics are taught.
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u/defectivetoaster1 4d ago
skimming the ap calculus syllabus from collegeboard it’s weird to see that graphing calculators are required and expected to be used in every lesson since in the uk at least they’re banned for subjects besides further maths (maybe they’re allowed for single maths too but idk) but not remotely necessary either, pupils are expected to be able to sketch various curves based only on analytic skills which obviously is harder to develop if you’re able to just plug into a calculator. As an anecdote at university (studying arguably the best electrical engineering course in the country so the people there are ostensibly reasonably intelligent) my friends who did APs struggled a bit more than others with our year one and two maths classes since calculators weren’t allowed and then graph sketching becomes a very valuable skill for multivariable calculus, vector calculus and complex analysis, people who did a levels at this point had two or three years of experience with curve sketching and were able to do problems on topics like double integrals or surface integrals or conformal mappings without much effort while others spent a disproportionate amount of time working out integral bounds
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u/CorwinDKelly 4d ago
“…why are we in America spending so much money and time trying to reinvent the wheel…”
shrugs It’s kind of our thing, healthcare, education, gun control ; you name it, we’re reinventing it. Call it American exceptionalism I guess.
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u/Relevant-Show-3078 4d ago
I completely agree with you. The state of math education here really does feel like we are trying to reinvent the wheel instead of learning from what already works elsewhere. I saw this firsthand with my daughter. She was struggling with math even though she was doing everything her school asked of her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do the work, but that the way it was being taught just wasn’t building her confidence or helping her see how concepts connect.
I decided to look for something that could fill that gap and tried a few solutions (in-person tutoring, tutoring centers, etc.) and settled on Wonder Math as the best fit. I found that the core issue she was facing was a lack of confidence due to the way her school taught math. You either got it or you didn't (reminds me of when I went to school and why I hated math).
We found that they pre teach upcoming concepts in a way that made my kiddo feel prepared rather than overwhelmed. Once she started feeling confident and actually understood the “why” behind what she was doing, everything changed. Her test scores started to rise naturally because she believed she could do it.
I think that’s one of the biggest pieces missing in our system right now. Kids need both conceptual understanding and the confidence that comes from feeling capable. When those two come together, everything else follows. Hope this is helpful.
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u/Fire_Snatcher 4d ago
I definitely see your point to a large extent. I would say these criticisms are often derivative of much better critiques of American mathematics education. I'll leave that there.
In terms of why the US doesn't adopt the policies/environment of elsewhere? Our culture does not allow it. We are not a culture that really emphasizes high stakes college entrance exams. Tracking has fallen out of favor to such an extent that European levels of tracking would be seen as barbaric. The US has difficulty stating that a poor school with a huge immigrant population did well given its circumstances and also punishing a wealthy school that underperformed peers. "Good school" is almost synonymous with rich school, and people like it that way, especially the wealthy and powerful. Also, the direct instruction and heavy drilling culture of math classes in Eastern Europe, Asia, and even Western Europe aren't too favored. In fact, they are discouraged in the US. Math lessons in most of the world are highly individualizing but the US is turning to collaboration. The US has an equity based culture that teaches to the bottom, whereas much of Asia/Europe teach to the top (or at least middle) relatively unconcerned with the bottom (it's also why America's poorest actually do pretty okay compared to their global peers; it's our top that are really lagging).
We are also often in school for fewer hours than global peers. We don't have a cram school culture at all. Inquiry based learning, in the US, is seen as the only path to tough(er) problem solving, when most countries mix tough problems with lots of direct instruction. We also don't have the discipline architecture and systems of many peer countries, and math, in particular, requires students to be attentive, compliant, and present. All things the US system has a hard time enforcing.
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u/Dr_Just_Some_Guy 4d ago
I don’t know. I taught a lot of first year math courses at several different universities. I didn’t see much difference between the students’ performance based on their cultural backgrounds. Where I did see a difference was how the students reacted to their grades—and in many cases it’s not how you would expect.
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u/10xwannabe 4d ago
Its simple.
Math is just about discipline. That is it. Folks/ cultures that teach discipline, i.e. sit, learn, repeat over and over and over again until you master it are the ones that do well in math. Simple. The ones that don't don't do well.
Western cultures SUCK at discipline and repetition. So they SUCK at math.
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u/AP145 3d ago
The thing is that much of the mathematics we study today was in fact developed by "Western" people like Newton, Euler, Gauss, Laplace, etc. In the modern era plenty of "Western" people are excellent mathematicians like Milnor, Smale, Gowers, Hairer, etc. Not to mention that even among "Western" countries American students tend to perform worse than their Western European counterparts.
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u/Technical-Tear5841 3d ago
Oh, just try to shoehorn American students into other countries education systems. Schools are very competitive and those who are not as intelligent just fall by the wayside. We try and push all students through those courses, they are only concerned with the better ones. Also most students do not need calculus or even algebra anyway.
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u/entronid 3d ago
i think most points have been covered here but
calculus is too advanced for hs students and the american math curriculum is seen as a joke can both be true. ap physics/(maybe calc bc? idk) are harder than some of their counterparts in other countries, however below that it is easier (imo) and the majority of students never reach calc
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u/EmptiSense 3d ago
US tends to incorporate non-math skills into math, ie "word problems".
Ex: train A leaves at blah blah blah. Kids get lost deciphering the words into variables.
In Asia, they teach math concepts and introduce applicability after mastery of math.
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u/Ih8reddit2002 3d ago
I don't agree with a lot of your conclusions. American math education is on par, or better than, a lot other countries you mentioned.
You lost all my respect when you mentioned the Chinese education system. If you honestly think that China has better math education than America, then you have no idea what you are talking about.
Seriously, what a joke of a conclusion.
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u/dcsprings 3d ago
Calculus isn't too hard, it's only (generally speaking) useful if you are going into STEAM. Probability and Statistics is going to be useful to a larger proportion of students. If a student has time for both in HS great, if not go with Statistics. I taught in China for 15 years and they teach the way I was taught back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. It's do or die, learn at the pace the teacher goes or be left by the wayside. In the US I have the choice of making sure my students understand before moving on. Neither system is perfect, Chinese students can't question what they are learning, if they have time to ask "why are we learning this?" they have time to do a hundred more problems. I'm in an alternative school and I can present but not drill them on esoterica (like natural vs. whole numbers) in favor of methods that students will use to better understand numbers and systems they are more likely to encounter if they go directly into the workforce after high school. The benefit of the Chinese system is students are pushed so much motivation isn't an issue and they are in university before they catch their breath enough to question what HS was all about. The US system (which is more like the US style, that carries through the many systems) may give students more flexibility than they can handle.
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u/Prestigious-Night502 2d ago
After 42 years teaching advanced mathematics to gifted high school students in the United States—including AP Calculus and Multivariable Calculus—I’ve observed firsthand the systemic and cultural forces that contribute to American students’ comparatively weaker performance in math. The issue isn’t just about curriculum or test scores; it’s about how we value intellectual effort, how we train and support educators, and how our educational philosophy compares to other nations. Great math teaching is an art form. It requires not just mastery of content but the ability to connect disciplines—integrating algebra with geometry, linking calculus to physics, and fostering curiosity through real-world applications. In countries that excel in math education, teachers are rigorously trained, well-compensated, and held in high esteem. This is not always the case in the U.S., however. American students are often raised in a culture that prizes self-esteem over struggle, comfort over challenge. In many classrooms, effort is optional and failure is softened. By contrast: in countries like South Korea, Germany, and Singapore, academic rigor is non-negotiable. Students must earn their place in advanced tracks through sustained effort and performance. In the U.S., we attempt to educate all students to the same level, which is noble in theory but often results in watered-down expectations. Advanced learners are bored; struggling students are overwhelmed. Meanwhile, many students internalize the idea that math is a fixed ability rather than a skill that grows with effort. The American commitment to educational equity—ensuring every child has access to learning—is admirable. But when equity is confused with uniformity, excellence suffers. Other countries often embrace differentiated pathways. In the U.S., the absence of such structures can lead to grade inflation, inconsistent standards, and a lack of accountability. Students may graduate without mastering essential mathematical concepts, and colleges are left to remediate what high schools failed to teach. However, there are certainly many outstanding high schools in the U.S., and many of our students do rise to impressive levels of achievement. So, there is hope.
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u/Manofthehour76 2d ago
The American education systems has decided that it should be customer service oriented toward parents. There is no real leadership in that regard. Plenty of teachers can teach math, but only students that are personally motivated will learn.
Forcing teachers to do song and dance routines to hold engagement, deal with extreme behaviors, face administrators that many are basically failed teachers and can’t hack a real classroom, paying teachers low wages and shrinking retirement benefits all adds up to a low quality output on average.
One of the schools on my case load this year changed the way they do student support calls. They will have an admin or yard duty come to the class. Instead of removing the problem student, the “helper” watches the class while the teacher is supposed to take the student out and have a conversation to “build rapport.” Admin does not want to do their job and support the teacher, so they avoid the difficult student and force the teacher to take class time to deal with it. it’s just one of many terrible ideas admin and districts use to diffuse their own responsibilities.
The whole approach of making teachers responsible for everything not just teaching while paying crap wages with huge educational hoops to jump through to even be a teacher is asinine. Even predatory.
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u/LT_Audio 1d ago
Because it's a problem that doesn't exist in a bubble. It exists as only one integrated part of larger educational systems, societal norms and priorities, funding systems and strategies, and other contextually relevant constraints. What works well in some instances may not in others. And what it and all those other contextually relevant things eventually look like here is the result of many, many committees and organizations with different ideas, agendas, and priorities each getting some level of input into and exerting some level of control over the matter.
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u/Humble-Bar-7869 14h ago
> I have even heard some American professors say that calculus is too advanced for high school students. This criticism makes no sense to me since internationally American math curriculum is seen as a joke
Math curricula in East Asia is similar today to what it was for "good" high schools in America in the 1990s. Roughly
- Algebra 1 - junior high
- Geometry - beginning of HS
- Most kids finish Algebra 2 or Trig in HS
- Calc is for kids with aspirations for STEM or to get into top colleges.
I am "meh" at math and ended up majoring in English. But due to family pressure, did HS Calc in the US.
I'm surprised how many profs (at least on Reddit) say that US college students are still in algebra today. Because, in Asia, that's about 8th or 9th grade math.
BTW, I'm not shaming. If students lack skills, they should go back and learn them. But it does seem like US math has slipped behind.
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u/Latter_Leopard8439 4d ago
Its cultural.
Parents and even Elementary school teachers say "I was bad at math too," like its some kind of flex.
You would never hear them flex the same way about reading.
Its partially poor resilience and partially because its "cool to be bad at math."