I love things like this, and always wondered why we never had these kinds of books as part of math curricula in elementary and middle school in the US.
In case of this specific book—it was not translated to English. But why aren’t there many books like this?
I guess these books are a result of the Sputnik era, a product of “the Soviet bloc realized that actually math is important, and the Party supported all kinds of efforts to make kids interested in it” combined with more slack for the authors, because there was less market optimization pressure during communism.
Writing such book requires a combination of writing skills, teaching skills, and math skills—individually, the required level is not high and the skills are not that rare, but I guess the combination of all three is rare.
And even if you have the required skills, it is not obvious that you should produce something like this. For example, the author of this book taught math at school and wrote stories for kids, but despite that it didn’t occur to him to combine the skills—until one day he included a short math dialog in an otherwise mainstream story, and a friend told him “hey, why don’t you write an entire book like that?”, so he did.
Not sure how universal this is, but in my country, teachers are paid little, math skills are valued, so a person with a combination of these skills would probably work outside of education, and wouldn’t have much opportunity to think about what kids learn and test their math stories on kids.
And even if someone wrote a book like this, the publishers would probably be skeptical: math is not considered cool among the kids and parents, how many copies do you expect to sell?
...on the other hand, this is an era when niche books can more easily be published, so perhaps a renaissance of the genre is possible.
Yes, my thinking is similar. Elementary school teachers often barely understand the math they are required to be teaching, and don’t have the fluidity needed to handle a more free-flowing discussion about a book that doesn’t conform to a specific curriculum. The whole system frequently retreats into drilling specific procedures that mean nothing to the teachers and students involved, even when the explicit stated goal is to help build understanding and problem solving skills. The idea that math classes even could include reading books is just not part of the conversation. Only English classes assign books to read—not history, not foreign languages, and definitely not science and math. Related: I had exactly one math teacher, in seventh grade, who assigned a term paper on any math topic of our choice. I got a 70, the lowest math grade I ever received in any year, and it was because, as he told me in his own words, he didn’t understand what I’d written and couldn’t follow it.
I will say, there are some English language books that deliberately incorporate math in ways that are both fun and educational, if you had a teacher able and willing to lead such discussions. There’s many such books by Ian Stewart. Alice in Wonderland would be a fair choice, and the kids probably already know the story. For middle or high schoolers especially, it doesn’t have to just be fiction, either. For the “When will we ever need this?” crowd, something like Nonplussed or Impossible?, both by Julian Haveil, could be a welcome and eye-opening change of pace.
I love things like this, and always wondered why we never had these kinds of books as part of math curricula in elementary and middle school in the US.
In case of this specific book—it was not translated to English. But why aren’t there many books like this?
I guess these books are a result of the Sputnik era, a product of “the Soviet bloc realized that actually math is important, and the Party supported all kinds of efforts to make kids interested in it” combined with more slack for the authors, because there was less market optimization pressure during communism.
Writing such book requires a combination of writing skills, teaching skills, and math skills—individually, the required level is not high and the skills are not that rare, but I guess the combination of all three is rare.
And even if you have the required skills, it is not obvious that you should produce something like this. For example, the author of this book taught math at school and wrote stories for kids, but despite that it didn’t occur to him to combine the skills—until one day he included a short math dialog in an otherwise mainstream story, and a friend told him “hey, why don’t you write an entire book like that?”, so he did.
Not sure how universal this is, but in my country, teachers are paid little, math skills are valued, so a person with a combination of these skills would probably work outside of education, and wouldn’t have much opportunity to think about what kids learn and test their math stories on kids.
And even if someone wrote a book like this, the publishers would probably be skeptical: math is not considered cool among the kids and parents, how many copies do you expect to sell?
...on the other hand, this is an era when niche books can more easily be published, so perhaps a renaissance of the genre is possible.
...assuming that kids still read books.
Yes, my thinking is similar. Elementary school teachers often barely understand the math they are required to be teaching, and don’t have the fluidity needed to handle a more free-flowing discussion about a book that doesn’t conform to a specific curriculum. The whole system frequently retreats into drilling specific procedures that mean nothing to the teachers and students involved, even when the explicit stated goal is to help build understanding and problem solving skills. The idea that math classes even could include reading books is just not part of the conversation. Only English classes assign books to read—not history, not foreign languages, and definitely not science and math. Related: I had exactly one math teacher, in seventh grade, who assigned a term paper on any math topic of our choice. I got a 70, the lowest math grade I ever received in any year, and it was because, as he told me in his own words, he didn’t understand what I’d written and couldn’t follow it.
I will say, there are some English language books that deliberately incorporate math in ways that are both fun and educational, if you had a teacher able and willing to lead such discussions. There’s many such books by Ian Stewart. Alice in Wonderland would be a fair choice, and the kids probably already know the story. For middle or high schoolers especially, it doesn’t have to just be fiction, either. For the “When will we ever need this?” crowd, something like Nonplussed or Impossible?, both by Julian Haveil, could be a welcome and eye-opening change of pace.