by Anh Nguyen
Chapter Two: Why do most Asians tend to be good at math?
In the Asian community, there has been a presence of a stereotype regarding our skills in mathematics for a very long time. People still have some misconceptions with their own bias that “Asians are good at math”. In this chapter, I will explain how the math stereotype has evolved to where it is today, in hopes of debunking some of the misunderstandings and biases that people have. The first thing we need to confirm is that Asian education and Western education do not have the same approach toward academic study in general. But to what extent? There are several reasons why Asian students (not U.S. born) tend to be good at math.
The first reason is the mathematical language. This might seem unimportant, but it has a lot to do with cognitive learning. For example, in the English language, there are numbers like: fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen–which sound simple when we imagine the numerical orders of that sequence. However, it is not the same case with eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen (oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen are not proper words). This is because those numbers are irregular numerical systems in the English language, which can be an obstacle for English users learning math. For the Asian language, numerical pronouns are very brief and easy to understand. For example, in Vietnamese, mười một (11), mười hai (12), mười ba (13), and mười lăm (15) are easy to understand because mười means ten, and it just goes along with any number to form the nearest tenth number.
The second reason is the academic study level. Since I’m Vietnamese and born in Vietnam, I can provide one example. In my public school from grades 1-5, their average study time is from 7:30 am – 5:00 pm, which is about 9h 30m. Whereas the maximum hours in a U.S. school day is 7 hours, which is less than my country’s public school by about 2 hours 30 minutes. This comparison really emphasizes why most students in some Asian countries face exhaustion from school days and overloaded homework.
The third reason is mathematics is very competitive in most countries in Asia. Students study advanced mathematics in order to participate in competitions to achieve monetary prizes, along with study abroad scholarships (Olympia Competition). Students require having extra math lessons by attending a math academy or at-home tutoring so that they can achieve a certain level to attend the math competition.
The final reason is time and hard work. As mentioned above, parents hire tutors outside of school study time; it follows that there is a correlation between the students’ math skills and the time they practice. Even though there are a lot of advantages to learning math in an Asian academic setting, there are some consequences that do not give these students the advantage of cognitive learning. It is likely that:
Math is indeed important in everyday life, but we do not use all those learned skills.
Most Asian students learn advanced mathematics, but it is not their passion to begin with.
Asian education does not help students explore the freedom of learning and follow their own unique dreams. Instead, they only teach students about hard work and discipline.
Due to the amount of time students have to study at school and the extra time at other tutoring places, they do not have much free time to enjoy what they do.
Asian students who choose mathematics as their college major likely do so because it is a safe choice as they already learn advanced math from the beginning.
Overall, mathematics in itself does not cause this much exhaustion in the students. Rather, it is the academic system that causes the pressure and the precedent that the subject is highly necessary as it is believed to be superior over other subjects. Students have to dedicate their time and hard work to math even when they are not good at it; so Asian people’s beliefs are usually: “more time to practice will make you good in math”.
Reference:
https://medium.com/@fesja/6-reasons-asians-are-better-at-math-ab88fcb3db0
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