Prioritizing math

The idealism that used to inspire a generation of math students and teachers during the country’s wartimes seems to have waned in the modern era.

During the Vietnam War, Do Ngoc Diep, a current professor who works at the Hanoi-based Institute of Mathematics (IM), and other students in the first specialized math class under what was then the Ministry of Post Secondary and Vocational Training would stay away from home for two years, bringing their books to the northern mountainous province of Thai Nguyen.

They built classrooms under bomb shelters and didn’t “run back to their mothers” once the going got tough, as their professor Le Van Thiem had feared.

“We learned math there and then, feeling in our hearts that life is still beautiful, love is still beautiful [like the words in a famous war song],” Diep said.

Nowadays, white-haired mathematicians recount fond stories about their professor Thiem, the Hanoi math institute’s first director and the “father of modern Vietnamese math.”

At a recent workshop held by popular math website Vietnam Math Forum (VMF), former IM director Ha Huy Khoai told students that in 1949, Thiem left his established post in Europe to go home, following Uncle Ho’s call for national solidarity to fight the French.

With a few French textbooks, he walked for six months from the south to the north to set up a math school.

Later, he would lead his students to carry out directed explosions to clear canals clogged by bombs in the central Nghe An Province.

Khoai said people now talk too much about curriculum and textbook reforms, forgetting that the fundamental force driving an educational system is the teacher.

But Vietnamese teachers these days have to teach too many extra classes to offset modest salaries and don’t have time to research and improve their knowledge, while overcrowded classrooms are not conducive to students’ learning.

“I feel very bad in the lectures when I am the only person speaking,” said Rutgers University professor Vu Ha Van, a Vietnamese mathematician who has lived abroad for 20 years and last month won the prestigious George Polya Prize of the American Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

“I’d like to ask these questions,” Van said.

“Do students in Vietnam like to ask questions? Are they encouraged to do so? If the answers are both ‘no’, we are in trouble. Deep trouble.”

IM professor Le Dung Muu said instructor-dominated lectures are common in Vietnam.

Except for a few daring and curious students, the audience is generally too shy to ask questions or offer rebuttals.

Khoai said local teachers don’t have time to answer students’ questions because there are so many students in a class here, as the students to teacher ratio can reach as high as 50:1.

“Bringing this number down would probably solve more problems than [curriculum and textbook reforms] could do,” he said.

High hopes

Even with the myriad of pressing institutional problems, local secondary students compare well to counterparts elsewhere in the world when it comes to math.

Vietnam’s secondary math education was based on the French and former Soviet Union curricula, which are considered the quintessential of hundreds of years of math development in these two countries.

But mathematicians say efforts to reform the secondary math curriculum in recent years have undermined critical mathematical thinking and destroyed its beauty in students’ eyes.

Addressing the VMF workshop, FPT University instructor Tran Nam Dung said the contents of Vietnam’s math tests – including high school graduation and university entrance exams and math competitions – reflect the country’s “mathematical culture.”

These tests are too technical, filled with formulas, and require students to “solve” equations rather than “create” them.

Yet, it is this ability to “create” or simplify real world problems into equations that underlines high mathematical thinking.

“In other words, we have severed math’s connections to reality,” Dung said.

Nguyen Lim, a VMF administrator who went to high school in Canada and is presently majoring in engineering physics at McMaster University, said the Canadian education system makes sure its students integrate math with the real world.

“Sometimes my high school math teacher brought us to a hockey game to show the applications of math and physics in hockey,” he said.

But despite the faults in the Vietnamese system, Lim is optimistic about the country’s future in the field.

Young math students can “adapt information” quickly to keep the local math community vibrantly challenged.

“In the 1990s, there were not many new PhDs in math, but right now a new wave of young Vietnamese mathematicians is arriving on the scene,” professor Van said.

According to Van, in the US alone, there are at least 30 Vietnamese graduate students in math, mostly attending top universities.

“They are well educated and hungry for success,” he said.

But will this high achieving and ambitious segment return home to contribute their talents to advancing the field of math in the homeland?

“You will see me do it, instead of just nodding my head,” Lim said.

Reported by Thuy Linh