Huh. That doesn't really match my American experience at all.
True, in elementary school I don't recall any word problems -- because everything was practical arithmetic through sixth grade. I think sixth grade was long division?
But seventh grade was algebra, and all the Russian examples of word problems look like the stuff we got all the time, seventh grade through eleventh grade. Twelfth grade was calculus, and I seem to recall word problems mostly disappearing then, since everything was just graphs and derivatives and integrals.
Granted I was in honors classes and also did extra-credit "Mathcounts" and "Mathletics" after school, where we definitely got more of that stuff too. But that was just a difference of difficulty and, well, even more practice.
Now obviously different countries have different math standards and different cultural attitudes towards the value of math.
But the difference the author is describing doesn't resonate at all with what I learned growing up in a small town in upstate New York.
[1] has some word problem examples for every year of primary school in England. Year 1 is age 5-6:
"Chris is going to buy a cake for his mum which costs 80p. How many 20p coins would he need to do this?"
I remember lots of these "coin problems" when I was 5 or 6, since we had plastic money to help understanding, but I don't remember other problems.
If I'm equating the grades correctly, the Russian problems appear to be about 1-2 years "harder" than the English problems, at least around age 9-10 (Russian grade 4, English year 5).
That is what I am noticing with my son's maths lessons. He is in year 5 at a British curriculum international school. The word problems seem a bit too easy, in my opinion.
I don't see a conflict - what you're describing is very consistent with the paper. No problem-solving until algebra starts, then focusing on using algebra to solve 'word problems'.
True, in elementary school I don't recall any word problems -- because everything was practical arithmetic through sixth grade. I think sixth grade was long division?
But seventh grade was algebra, and all the Russian examples of word problems look like the stuff we got all the time, seventh grade through eleventh grade. Twelfth grade was calculus, and I seem to recall word problems mostly disappearing then, since everything was just graphs and derivatives and integrals.
Granted I was in honors classes and also did extra-credit "Mathcounts" and "Mathletics" after school, where we definitely got more of that stuff too. But that was just a difference of difficulty and, well, even more practice.
Now obviously different countries have different math standards and different cultural attitudes towards the value of math.
But the difference the author is describing doesn't resonate at all with what I learned growing up in a small town in upstate New York.