[Book Translation] Three Days in Dwarfland
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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.
1but English is not my first language.
This surprises me, given the writing quality of your longform comments.
Well, writing in English is easier than talking (for a person already good at writing), because I have a spellchecker, I can use an online translator when in doubt, I can slow down whenever necessary, and I can review my written text and rewrite some parts of it before publishing it, and you wouldn't see any of that. If you heard me talk in English, it would probably be quite obvious.
I am also exposed to English a lot, given that I spend a lot of time on internet and that is mostly on English-speaking websites (there are simply not enough Slovak speakers to get a sufficiently large community for a sufficiently nerdy interest, and I am not interested in talking to normies about politics); as a software developer practically all documentation related to my work is in English, plus I often work in international teams; and if I read a book, it is usually in English either because it wasn't translated to Slovak or because the translation is not available on Library Genesis.
Plus I am interested in languages and somewhat obsessive about grammar (the kind of person who would read an article on differences between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes), that probably helps, too.
I am probably in top 1% of English-as-a-second-language-speakers (or rather -writers) in my country. There are a few people around me who have spent years living in USA or UK, and I regularly surprise them by knowing some English words they don't. (This reminded me of a situation with my former girlfriend who once read an article in English and commented loudly "what the hell are the 'crustaceans'?" and I automatically gave her the Slovak translation, and she burst in tears, because she has recently returned from a year-long trip in UK and she was very proud of her English knowledge, and now she was like "how is it possible that I don't understand this word, you immediately know it, and I still don't understand what it means even after you have translated it?" - the last part, of course, was unrelated to knowing English.)
Where I perceive my weaknesses:
I use complicated words where simpler ones would suffice. That is kinda expected of a nerd... but actually when I speak in Slovak, I try to simplify things whenever possible, and I am very proud of that skill.[1] (It really helps me explain things to my kids, or give lectures to a general audience.) It's just that in English, the Latin-based words come to my mind first, because those are "international". Plus, in English, the simple way usually involves using one of those short words that have 100 different meanings, and putting it together with the right preposition... which is a skill I mostly gave up on. (This is like the "Feynman in Brazil" effect, where he impressed the Portuguese-speaking audience by using complicated words such as "consequentemente", but of course that is not difficult for an English-speaker. It would be more difficult for him to know the simple Portuguese words for "therefore" or "so".)
I know few synonyms in English; or rather, I know them passively, but when I speak or write, I can quickly recall only one of them, so my active vocabulary is limited along that dimension.
Even when I passively know the synonyms, one of them automatically comes to my mind, so I almost never use the others. (Unless I consciously revise the comment before posting it; as I did in this paragraph, twice: "practically never" -> "almost never", "rewrite the comment" -> "revise the comment".)
I cannot joke in English, which is something I do in Slovak all the time. The kind of jokes I make require precise timing and knowing the extent of the meaning of the words: noticing some potential for pun that can neither be too obvious, nor take too much time to process after getting the hint.
Composing a poem - virtually impossible. If I tried, someone would probably remind me that I pronounce the key words incorrectly and in English they actually don't rhyme.
I feel uncertain about using prepositions. That's where I typically made errors at school exams. Dunno, maybe after those years I mostly learned to use them right; but I still feel the uncertainty.
tl;dr -- my written English is decent, but not as good as my native language, and the spoken English is so-so
