Sunday, May 11, 2014

Rice Paddies and Math Tests

I am not sure if anyone has read any of Malcolm Gladwell’s books but I am a huge fan and highly recommend them. In particular, I want to quickly take a look at the book Gladwell wrote called Outliers. This book looks at the story of success and what makes high achievers different from others.  Gladwell argues that we must focus on contributing elements around ones family, culture, generation, experience and upbringing.
The short story that I invite you to take a look at this short storty called, Rice Paddies and Math Tests. http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/
The significance of mathematics:
Certain Asian cultures have an early head-start in math compared to their Western counterparts, but it is not due to studying at an earlier age. It is based in the fundamentals of their language. The linguistics of our numerical system is organized in a very clumsy manner, and its structure doesn’t make a lot of sense. The following passage from this chapter could not have been stated any better:

In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twenty is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.


What are your thoughts on this?

3 comments:

  1. I haven't read the book, just what you've posted, but it seems very interesting. It's true that the English language is crazy. There are no rules! Especially now as I am trying to encourage my almost 5 year old to read...what method should I take, phonetically or memorizing the words (Fry's?). He is learning the alphabet sounds, but and tries to guess what a word might start with, but I've had to explain on many occasions that some letters sound the same, or in certain words. My son is learning counting, and is memorizing the number order. He gets to 19 and then forgets or stumbles at each "decade". Take a look at this: http://www.netplaces.com/learning-italian/numbers-time-dates-and-seasons/cardinal-numbers-from-0-to-1000.htm
    If you scroll down a bit, it lists numbers in Italian. Numbers 1-10 have their own name. The teens are split, when translated, 11-16, are their "base" number plus 10. Then 17, 18, 19 are translated as 10 + (7/8/9). The twenties are translated as 20 + the "base" number...which is interesting that the Italian language almost mirrors the English language in counting words.
    Or maybe Asian cultures are naturally ingrained with the 7 Mathematical Processes in their thinking and personal interactions? Thanks for sharing! Something to think about for sure!

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  2. I had never even thought about the structure of the language around math. I had thought about it, and maybe even though it was strange, but I just dismissed it. The same is true in french where 70s are made to sound like 60 plus 10+, and 90s are made to sound like 80 plus 10+. I also remember having a bit of difficulty remembering these rules while I was young. I guess if you're trying to learn the language of math in the early years instead of trying to understand math itself... that would certainly be problematic!

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  3. That's actually a very interesting point. I went to China for a month last summer on a teacher exchange program, and I did notice, once I started learning the language a little, that the number system was very logical. It took me almost no time to learn to count up to a million (only about 15 minutes actually). I had never thought about the language actually being able to affect math skills in this way though. I know that many students struggle with word problems, but who knew that the names of numbers could be what's giving kids a hard time. And I can only imagine what it must be like for our ESL students!

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