The Double Education of My Twins’ Chinese School
The President of China compared moral education to buttons on clothes. The girls’ buttons were wrong from the start, but they learned the more valuable lessons that two systems can impart.
By Peter Hessler
One guiding principle behind Chinese third-grade math could be summarized as: Don’t be a sucker. Leslie said that when you read an American exam you can tell that the writers of the exam want children to get things right. But the authors of Chinese exams are aiming for wrong answers....
Throughout the day, children hardly moved from their seats. Lunch was wheeled into the classroom on a metal cart, and the kids ate at their desks, like little workaholics. During class, they sat with both feet on the floor and their arms crossed neatly atop the desks. If a teacher called on a student, the child stood up before speaking. In math, whenever a student drew a line in an equals sign, a minus sign, or a division sign, she was required to use a ruler. For a while, the math teacher tolerated Cai Cai and Rou Rou writing these symbols freehand, but then she started deducting points, and the twins quickly adjusted to using rulers. This discipline was part of the over-all emphasis on efficiency: if children were orderly, they wasted less time. The system also maximized parental support while minimizing input to effectively zero.
For the whole story:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/03/the-double-education-of-my-twins-chinese-school
Now, want to try some third-grade arithmetic?
The class has 18 boys and 18 girls who will participate in drill performances and group calisthenics.
Naughty: “During drill performances, we classmates stand in 4 lines.”
Smiley: “During group calisthenics, one pattern is formed by a set of 3 boys and 3 girls.”
In drill performances, what’s the average number of people standing in each line?
During calisthenics, how many patterns can be formed by 36 people?
While multiplying one two-digit number by another two-digit number, Little Sloppy misreads 22 as 25, and as a result his answer is higher than the correct answer by 69. What is the correct answer?
Ping Ping: “I was looking through a calendar and saw that there was one year when November had five Saturdays and five Sundays.”
Huang Feifei: “So what day of the week would November 1st have been that year?”
A certain number, when divided by 3, leaves a remainder of 2; when divided by 4, leaves a remainder of 3; when divided by 5, leaves a remainder of 4. What is the smallest that this number could be?