I have always done math in my head in Chinese (Cantonese). I emigrated to the US when I was six years old and I barely speak Cantonese anymore (except at home), but I continue to do math in Chinese. Never thought about it really – it’s almost subconscious. In second grade, we used to play this game call Around the World where one of the students would stand behind the next student in a circle. The teacher held up addition or multiplication flash cards and the first student to say the answer stood behind the next student in the circle. I would usually go around the circle a couple of times before someone would beat me, usually by luck. The other students said I was Asian so I was good at math. I was born with math skills. The Asian Math Gene – it made sense. I believed it. Never really questioned it after that.
During my drive to Milwaukee, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and in one of the chapters Rice Paddies and Math Tests, he actually had a valid rational for this phenomenon. Okay, my ancestor’s work ethics in the rice paddies translating into mathematical prowess seemed a bit absurd, but the neurolinguistic explanation did make a lot of sense:
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ’si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
So according to Gladwell, I might not actually be good at math, just quicker based on lingustics. Interesting theory – I always thought it was because of my individual talent and initiative. Oh well, it has carried me this far…
I love this quote. It’s like something I would get out of a fortune cookie: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich”
I digress. Outliers also had a whole chapter on KIPP – Knowledge Is Power Program, a public school program started in inner-city Houston back in 1994. Gladwell talked about the achievement gap between the performance of groups of students in different socioeconomic status and cited Karl Alexander’s “summer learning loss” research as the reason for this distinct academic disadvantage. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their high-income peers, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead:
What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding–all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it…For it’s poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that’s the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve.
KIPP students spent more time in class. Their classes started earlier, lasted longer, and sometimes ran on Saturdays. KIPP students did better because they worked harder. Also, KIPP schools are grounded in a culture that acted on a shared, authentic belief that all students can learn, and KIPP schools are populated by teachers who are deeply committed to making a difference. KIPP supposedly founded some of its first teachers by going to school parking lots in the evening and putting flyers on the cars of teachers who were still in the schools working. Teachers who worked into the evening because of their commitment to kids were the kind of teachers wanted at KIPP schools.
I didn’t know much about KIPP before, but definitely interested in learning more about the school. Check out this video:
Read the full article: The Asian Math Gene