How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

https://kidswholovemath.substack.com/p/how-fast-should-you-accelerate-your

by sebg • 3 years ago

150 291 3 years ago

kidswholovemath.substack.com

As fast as your kid wants should be taken into account, but like, if your kid is alienating themselves, maybe take them to a baseball game. If your kid hates math, the answer isn't not teaching them at all. :D

Personally, I loved math, would have loved to be accelerated, but I didn't know this was something I could ask for and get.

mlyle• 3 years ago

A lot of the reason why your kid might be alienating themselves is being thrown into an environment where they're a couple standard deviations outside the mean and have to confront tedious busywork.

It's hard for many people to accept, but kids who are a couple sigma above the mean can end up having nearly as much problems in an inflexible academic environment from kids who are a couple sigma below.

My eldest is a very high performer who had behavioral issues in upper elementary. A whole lot of getting him to the point where he's maximally successful with peers, in other classrooms, and in sports and other endeavors was getting him into situations with appropriate challenge and opportunities for expression.

zeroCalories• 3 years ago

Yeah I don't always buy it when people advocate for very lax education. I was part of the upperclass-hippie parenting experiment, and in retrospect I suspect it hurt me far more than it helped. Given the choice I would always watch cartoons, play video games, and cheat the system all I could. It clearly works for some kids though.

klyrs3• 3 years ago

As a mathematician with a kid who thinks he loves math (but doesn't love effort), I try to expose him to fun math. I also casually reveal upcoming concepts (currently negative numbers and fractions), so he'll struggle less when his curriculum demands it. But I never push. When he asks for more, I'm always there. When his attention wanders, that's my cue to shut up.

tbihl• 3 years ago

Interestingly, the argument I've heard for math focus is to do it because it's something hard to use as a training ground for perseverance, which is nearly the reverse of your situation.

klyrs3• 3 years ago

If that's coming from within, I'm all for it. Pushing that on a child as young as mine should be criminal.

kevinventullo• 3 years ago

Going fast when the child wants to go fast and slow when they need to go slow is I think most of what makes one-on-one teaching superior to classroom teaching. But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap.

JoshTriplett2• 3 years ago

But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap.

It doesn't need to. Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers (such as by being intentionally scheduled in the middle what would otherwise be school hours).

And, of course, those are just the mass social activities, as opposed to small groups of friends.

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Public schooling has socializing built in - home schooling has focused 1:1 attention built in. (In their ideal state, respectively.)

Home schooling takes extra work to add socializing, public schooling takes extra work to add one on one instruction. Generally. There are exceptions out there, and there are opportunities to hybridize the practices. But again - that takes work.

Public school also functions as a means to take the work of watching and educating a child during the day off of parents’ plates, so they can remain at least partially employed, or even just have a small slice of their life back.

Homeschooling is a luxury most can’t afford.

kashunstva• 3 years ago

Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers

During the five years I homeschooled my daughter, I found that this was true but with one enormous caveat. We’re a secular family and homeschooling in many areas of the U.S. means that these groups are often organized around non-secular activities and principles. To each, their own. But I’m not going to sign a “statement of faith” to participate in a homeschool group. As a consequence, it really did feel that we were going it alone. Larger metropolitan areas are probably more inclusive; but otherwise secular homeschoolers have struggles in finding the right fit.

LanceH• 3 years ago

homeschooling can leave a big social gap.

I've been around and tutored way too many homeschoolers to give this a pass. If by "gap" you mean they behave in a more adult fashion, sure. There is a gap between the independence and social progression of homeschoolers and the nature of your average trend following high schooler.

Saying that homeschooling creates backwards kids is just a form of continued bullying.

firesteelrain2• 3 years ago

It’s not bullying. Give me a break. It’s a valid concern. No one is picking on people for being homeschooled.

klyrs3• 3 years ago

You didn't tutor my cousins' kids. Fresh out of high school, they can barely read and write and they get anxious if they're more than 10 feet from mom. I would never imply that homeschooling is uniform, but it definitely has risks of very bad outcomes both socially and academically.

ckz2• 3 years ago

The social gap question has been pretty hotly debated for decades (whether it exists and/or is even a concern). For the curious, here are a couple of relevant threads:

5 Days Ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36842564

10 Months Ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32746181

xcskier56• 3 years ago

I home schooled for 2 years in middle school I wasn’t a social butterfly (and still am not). We were part of a home school co-op where we went once or twice per week and the parents taught various classes.

The kids there were wildly brilliant… 6th grader getting a perfect SAT and ACT score, and almost all were very socially awkward. But I really doubt that regular school would have changed anything and may have made things worse.

The social issue is a chicken vs egg problem. Are the kids socially awkward bc they’re homeschooled, or are they homeschooled bc they’re brilliant and very awkward?

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

6th grader getting a perfect SAT and ACT score

Almost certainly an exaggeration :)

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

The social issue is a chicken vs egg problem. Are the kids socially awkward bc they’re homeschooled, or are they homeschooled bc they’re brilliant and very awkward?

This is a big annoyance for me in the homeschooling conversation. If someone is homeschooled and is socially awkward, it's the homeschooling's fault. If someone went to public school and is socially awkward, it's their fault / they're an outlier.

dbjacobs• 3 years ago

Like everything else in schooling, the social gap is highly child dependent. Our kids were a mix of home-school and private schools and the kid who did the most homeschooling was the most socially adept.

sanderjd2• 3 years ago

Are there programs where kids mostly play with other kids and then do the education side a couple hours a day of homeschooling individually or in small groups? I feel like that would be a nice structure through like middle school.

We have one starting kindergarten in a few weeks and honestly it seems like too much school time for a five year old to me.

bluepod44• 3 years ago

Seems like you’re thinking of Montessori-style schools (except for the homeschooling part)

helpfulclippy• 3 years ago

On the other hand, public schooling can cause lifelong psychological or physical trauma due to bullying, abuse or neglect by other students or school staff. In the US, the risk of school shootings is a reasonable concern as well.

heisenbit• 3 years ago

As if the social dynamic in private schools is so much healthier.

doix• 3 years ago

When I was a kid (elementary school) I ended up in the remedial maths class. My parents were shocked because at home they were teaching me things far beyond what was taught at school.

I have no recollection of any of this, but apparently I was just a little shit and refused to answer questions at school because they were "too easy" and "boring".

Not sure what the moral of the story is, but consider the second order effects of accelerating your kids.

noelwelsh• 3 years ago

I don't think you were being a little shit. I think that's a perfectly reasonable reaction to being asked to jump through arbitrary hoops that were meaningless to you.

r00fus• 3 years ago

LOL I was in remedial math in 5th grade in one (red) state and winning math competitions by grade 7 in another state.

Bored to tears and misdiagnosed capabilities…

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Article wasn’t great IMO, but looking forward to the comments.

We found that our kid was excited about math until she started doing it in school, where they just assigned busywork (zero times tables? Check!) and refused to let her learn with other kids at her level. We just kept doing math outside of school, for two reasons. In part, it was so she could learn more math, but equally important it was so she could see how to handle problems where the answer wasn’t immediately apparent to her. Otherwise she would just skate through elementary school, never being forced to persevere or really apply herself.

Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.

ryandrake4• 3 years ago

Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.

Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.

If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

ForOldHack• 3 years ago

Pretty much it was that way in the late 1960s... until... we got a computer programming class, but this is about math: In Berkeley, they had a program called 'Seed' that had a great idea, give middle school students access to PhD math students. It was going fairly well, until Dr Steven Giavant stepped into a classroom and wanted to teach the students the frontiers and history of math. ( look this guy up! Genius at Math, Super genius at education. ) I know that besides me, 6 other students got degrees in math, and we suspect 2 more. Absurd. The norm was 1.2, even for Berkeley. He shared his enthusiasm for math, and the children got it. We only found out about it by accident, when my Abstract Algebra professor said that they were in Berkeley Math at that time. ( 15+ years later ). And the second influence was Michael Griffin, who taught computer programming, when I asked him "How do I get to actually learn Calculus?" he basically laid out the curriculum that led to my degree. With two more break throughs, I now can use this to inspire sucess in math. Thanks Steven, and thanks Mike. https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804

brailsafe2• 3 years ago

Grade school is less a place for learning as it is a socialization experiment. Did you actually advance your level in any subject during grade school? Did your kid advance above their grade because of the grades that came before it? What's the utility in the school servicing your special child's aptitude when the school had nothing to do with either their current level or the lack of others'? But there are advanced level classes in some cases

bradley13• 3 years ago

You're right: low performing kids get the attention and resources. The kids doing well "don't need help."

Which is just wrong. The gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future. Boring them, stunting their potential, ruining their education is the worst thing schools can do.

Kids need to be in different tracks. You need at least three tracks. Obviously, it should be possible to move between them as appropriate.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

The CA Dept of Education used to require GATE programs. In 2014, they made them optional, so schools stopped offering them. What's shocking to me is that this happened even in districts where there are lots of high-performing kids, with families that care about advanced learning. When we moved to Menlo Park, we were surprised that our highly-rated school doesn't have any programs for kids who are advanced in learning. They just talk about how all their lessons have a "low floor and high ceiling" which sounds nice in theory but doesn't work very well in practice (at least when you have a mix of kids who range from 1-2 grades below grade level to 2-3 grades above grade level).

spamizbad3• 3 years ago

Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.

This is basically the education reform movement of the 90s and aughts getting their wish via the monkey-paw. Schools and teachers are measured and judged on how kids perform on standardized tests. Your kid is likely in the 95%+ percentile so there’s not much room for “growth” as far as the metrics are concerned. So their efforts are on pulling up kids from the 5th percentile up closer to the median.

Also, it’s not uncommon for low performing students parents to sometimes freak out at the school if their kid starts falling behind, so everyone scrambles to get these kids back on track so the parents don’t pull their kids from school (which will only make things worse for the kids academics)

bluepod44• 3 years ago

There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

I’m assuming you just mean in your school system. Or do you mean more school districts are moving toward this?

ChainOfFools• 3 years ago

"You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government.

The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.

Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones.

The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."

- C.S. Lewis (in the voice of screwtape), almost 80 years ago.

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons

Less developed children are challenging to the system, but it gets worse: there are children who are so violent that they essentially attend prison schools. Since this is CA, they are obviously not called that. Pretty sure that this is a massive drain on the educational budget.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today.

This is largely a legacy of state testing and “accountability” regimes which were accelerated by national policy like NCLB and focus intense pressure on minimizing the number of students testing below grade level.

Gustomaximus• 3 years ago

leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged.

At my childrens school, as work is often online they allow them to go ahead in modules. The teacher mist open it for them though to have some control.

Some people in year 7 are doing year 9 work. Great for challenging them but it will be curious where this goes as you might get some people finishing all of highschool classes for a particular subject quite early and need to keep educating and challenging them.

For english they have a program where you can finish your end of school exams for this subject the year early, freeing time for other subjects.

This is in Australia.

sgu9993• 3 years ago

If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".

Maybe, but at the same time it's OK if your gifted kid only has a PhD and a high paying job but not a Nobel prize. Whereas it's a bit problematic for society if Donny Dumbass spends his life being a burden to everyone because he remains problematic...

sublinear• 3 years ago

Otherwise she would just skate through elementary school, never being forced to persevere or really apply herself.

This really resonates. I rarely felt challenged until around high school when I accidentally tested my way into some advanced classes taught by teachers who demanded much more. It felt awful and my self esteem was shot, but I was grateful in the end. I had the same issues applying myself again in college, but for the opposite reason.

Nobody should have to stumble through school like that.

I do think it's important to diversify the experience of perseverance though. Math isn't everything.

troupe5• 3 years ago

"No child left behind" is another way of saying, "no child pulls ahead." The cost of a set of children not achieving what they are scheduled to achieve is infinitely more expensive to the school than the value of some kids doing much better than what they are expected.

Maybe this isn't bad for a public school system. Maybe the goal should just be to try to make sure no one falls below the floor. But the schools interests aren't well aligned with the needs of any student that is above that line, much less above average.

rahimnathwani10• 3 years ago

  Maybe the goal should just be to try to make sure no one falls below the floor.

This approach widens the achievement gap between rich and poor.

- If you're unchallenged at school and have rich, college-educated parents, they can pay for tutors or teach you at home.

- If your parents are working two jobs to make ends meet, your SOL.

The public education system is meant to give opportunity to everyone, not just the rich.

hinkley• 3 years ago

I will say it took us a long while to figure out that multiplication and addition were commutative, and the times tables helped drive that home.

It took me a long time to figure them out, and when it finally came to a parent-teacher conference to discuss why I was having trouble with math, I count that as the beginning of my adventure in self-directed study. I took teachers entirely at their word at 8 years old, and it simply did not occur to me that they were just another human with ideas that might or might not be universal. "This is how you learn this" became an opinion, not a fact, and it was off to the races for me. I also found myself from time to time playing ersatz tutor because some other kids also didn't understand the teacher, and occasionally they liked my re-interpretation better.

There is something about realizing you've been sweating bullets for something that is actually easy. Few lessons stick around like that, but the attendant feelings are complex and often not fun or helpful.

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.

Your... elementary schools?

LargeTomato2• 3 years ago

If your kid is smart and you don't challenge them they'll walk through life never trying and that will hurt them in the long run.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

There was no better investment in my childhood than making me copy out times tables endlessly. Instead of being baffled by multiplication and division, I barely think of it as math. Plenty of other adults I know can't divide no matter how much time they have, and it's a handicap in their social, professional, and political lives.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

But it’s the principles that matter, not the tables. If you understand the principles you can easily figure out 563*3557. If you only know the tables you get stuck on 16x21.

Though I agree that it’s convenient if multiplying anything under 10 is a idempotent action :)

bonzini• 3 years ago

My son was doing additions and subtractions on his fingers until he had to learn multiplication tables. Until that point it hadn't clicked with him that you could also memorize the results! When forced to memorize multiplication results, he unconsciously started memorizing adds and subtracts as well.

agentgumshoe6• 3 years ago

How often do you need to do that without a calculator (phone) at hand?

BlackjackCF• 3 years ago

That really sucks.

I know it's cliched to say: "It's the system that's broken!" But it is for (most) public schools in the US.

Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but public schools are pressured to make sure that standardized testing scores are at a certain level for funding. Teachers aren't paid very well, nor do they get the proper resources to adequately teach their students.

I'm sure I'm grossly simplifying the problems there, but I can already see how those two points make it so that there's a lot of pressure on teachers to conform to teaching what's on standardized tests. I can't imagine that any of those factors make it very easy for teachers to even WANT to teach, much less get creative about HOW they're teaching their students.

ChuckMcM• 3 years ago

Pretty much this. Teach them as much as they want to know. We were extremely fortunate and decided to home school our kids through elementary and middle school because a) they were learning faster than their peers and bored, and b) we had a lot of community involvement which was much better social interactions than school provided. If you are in the Bay Area and can send your kids to Reikes Nature studies[1] it is a wonderful program (as an example). Conveniently California provided all of the knowledge they "expected" kids to know[2]. Each of my children reached math proficiency differently, all of them went through calculus "C" in terms of subject matter but I don't thing the English/Business major took it past that, the other two (Physics, Bio) did.

[1] https://www.riekes.org/riekesnature

[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/ (side note, all of our kids could pass the high school "exit" exam when they started high school. I attribute this not necessarily to personal talents so much as a very low student/teacher ratio meant everyone learned things and a lack of "deadlines" on when they had to be done meant different approaches could be taken on a subject if one didn't seem to be working out)

adastra22• 3 years ago

Which after school programs do you use?

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

We started with Khan Academy, which was good but IMO didn't have enough practice (just straight from a lesson to a quiz, which a kid might get lucky on and think she's mastered the skill).

Then we added in some IXL (which we had access to via the school). That allows for lots of practice of new and old concepts, and it requires more thorough demonstrations of mastery. I also used free websites to generate worksheets for skills like long multiplication and division.

Right now we're looking at AoPS and Po-Shen Lo for her main curriculum for next year.

agentgumshoe6• 3 years ago

It's almost like parents could provide a better education for their own kids if only a) they could trust themselves and b) they had the time

paulryanrogers5• 3 years ago

IME the implication is not a universal truth.

whiddershins• 3 years ago

Yet we all keep sending our kids to these places.

agentgumshoe6• 3 years ago

Because we've been told for so long that any other option, or especially taking into our own hands, is a disaster and our kids will 'fall behind.'

And yet kids have never had more access to knowledge, information and quality learning resources outside of school, without the toxic social environment. Say you'll do it yourself thanks and people call you a child abuser - while their kids are bullied and 'underperforming' at school with teachers they don't like. It's insane.

tim333• 3 years ago

At my school (UK, a while ago) they dealt with differing abilities of kids in math class by having easier and harder questions in the textbook, so the teacher could explain the new concept simply enough for the slower kids to get it and then the faster ones could try to solve much tricker stuff and so not get too bored.

mattgrice• 3 years ago

If your child is interested in engineering, and won't be able to go to a private school, it is best to have Calc I and II done before they go to college. At state schools, Calc is typically a weed-out class with huge lectures and they want a certain percentage of students to not be successful because these classes serve as a gating function to the engineering school. Combined with other freshman semester distractions and adjustment it's a good idea to have it out of the way.

Other than that I'd say the best acceleration is enrichment. Teach stuff like proofs, "how to solve it" by Polya, gain intuition about linear algebra and complex numbers. Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines.

tzs2• 3 years ago

Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines

All of Gardner's Scientific American columns are conveniently available on CD-ROM for under $40 [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883855453

epups• 3 years ago

That's a great deal. Unfortunately CD ROMs have not been convenient for like a decade...

fn-mote• 3 years ago

This is such a fraught topic.

First point: a lot of students get "accelerated" by their parents as a way of improving their academic performance and aiming the toward an elite college. Of course you look outstanding in school if you have covered the material a year before at the local cram center. These "accelerated by rote" students memorized the multiplication tables early, so they were put in "advanced math"... but their rate of comprehension is ordinary. Their problem solving skills are ordinary. They took "advanced math" in summer school so when they take the course in the ordinary school year they have a leg up. I don't think this has to be bad, but it's not the "gifted acceleration" and can be tough on these students if expectations are that they are "fast".

A second point: acceleration traditionally means moving through the same material faster. If you have a gifted child PLEASE work with them on a breadth of things, don't just race them through multivariable calculus. Math contests are a good source of broader problems. Art of Problem Solving gets a huge shout-out for what is now years and years of acceleration and enrichment material. Look at them if you are a parent in this situation. (Actually, they are suitable for self-study.)

Edit: I am all in favor of kids learning new things as fast as they want. I don't see racing through the standard curriculum (in any country) as a route to happiness.

Random brain-stimulating math book: Donald Knuth, "Surreal Numbers".

pgustafs3• 3 years ago

I think problem solving math is definitely fun and can be a huge source of confidence, but I don't see why "racing" through the standard curriculum is a negative. Why should a smart kid do a million multiplication/division problems for 5 years when they would have a ton more fun and get a lot more long-term utility from learning some stat/algebra/geometry? If a kid demonstrates mastery of a concept, it's a lot more bizarre and potentially damaging to force them to relearn the same material over and over.

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

I think it's more that there are massive large fields of math that are just left out in the race to calculus.

I had a friend who grew up in Japan and he said he learned a lot more number theory-style stuff.

opportune• 3 years ago

I think you misunderstand OP’s point and maybe don’t know what problem solving math the OP is referring to. “Art of problem solving” and contest math is not rote repetition or basic arithmetic at all. It’s a way of challenging students with difficult math problems that are approachable without comprehensive study of high level math but require combining concepts, applying logic and deduction, solving world problems in a way that don’t fit a “type” that’s covered in class. Try searching for USAMO problem sets for example.

The reason racing through a math curriculum can be problematic is… what’s the goal? If it’s not “look as advanced as possible to a non-mathematician to get into a tier 2 college” and instead something like “expose kid to as much math as possible because they enjoy it/find it challenging” or “be a top mathematician for their age so they get into a tier1 college because mathematicians see promise in them” you don’t actually want to cram in subjects like typical community college or undergrad calculus, stats, and linear algebra at all. Those are not nearly as helpful for pursuing advanced mathematics as learning how to prove things, apply theorems to problems/reduce problems to theorems, or just generally becoming excellent at “lower” math like in contest math. In fact it might turn a kid off of math to get that far and still be doing mostly rote computational problems, and it won’t help that much in becoming a mathematician because those classes typically focus on the applied aspect (outside of particularly selective math courses at certain universities).

bradleyjg2• 3 years ago

First point: a lot of students get "accelerated" by their parents as a way of improving their academic performance and aiming the toward an elite college.

…

I don't think this has to be bad, but it's not the "gifted acceleration" and can be tough on these students if expectations are that they are "fast".

Their parents don’t care, on the contrary they want it to be tough on their kids. They aren’t interested in raising happy, well adjusted kids. What they want is rich kids (that marry the correct spouses.)

WalterBright• 3 years ago

Their parents don’t care

Pretty presumptive.

g9yuayon• 3 years ago

at the local cram center.

If school covers the advanced topics, we wouldn't need any cram center. Case in point, my teacher gave my class such challenging problems when I grew up, that tutoring schools were never necessary.

Also, not every tutoring school is about cramming. Instead, they are simply accelerating. The Art of Problem Solving is one of such schools. Another example would be those math camps, such as Math Path. Maths are fun, powerful, beautiful, and leads kids towards a promising future. American schools simply don't care enough about it.

_the_inflator• 3 years ago

If you have a gifted child PLEASE work with them on a breadth of things, don't just race them through multivariable calculus.

There will always be the nature vs nurture problem. And I agree with you: do not focus on one area without trying others first, since the very nature of a gifted child is, that there is positive manifold. Even excelling in one particular area does not mean you have a special interest there. Offer a lot of input and see what sticks.

Gifted children are a special topic. I highly advise to consult trained professionals (psychologists, usually necessary for IQ testing) as well as consulting with an organization like Mensa.

Potential problems from childhood do not magically disappear during adulthood. People usually do not react happily in competitive situations: "Wow, someone way more intelligent than I am! How cool!" There is a lot of envy and vice versa, there is also a so called "feeling alien" problem.

Many gifted people I know have different interests and also shunned Math later in life, because of missing learning strategies. Not everything comes easy. And then it is important to have the right support.

crabbone• 3 years ago

I am all in favor of kids learning new things as fast as they want.

You sound like you aren't a parent, or you are a parent of very exceptional children who have enough willpower and ability to organize their schedule to actually do something like learning math.

My experience, especially with kids until high-school and even into the high-school is that unless there's an external framework which tells them how and when and from what book and so on they won't do a thing.

Of course it would've been easier if left to their own devices children could just somehow organize their curriculum, but that isn't going to happen. So, the adults need to create the curriculum. Not just that, mathematical problems are very hard for independent study. They absolutely require guidance. It took many generations to prove theorems we find in introductory math books. So, the question is less about the students and more about the teachers -- how do they structure and plan their guidance to be more effective. And for that matter it'd be fair to make a simplifying assumption that children are more or less the same, since the guidance and the curriculum are orders of magnitude more important.

Now, as to how actually do it -- I don't know. I tried my hand a little, and it was a miserable failure. But, to put this into perspective, Wittgenstein, the author of "The Tractatus", one of the founding figures of modern mathematics, tried to be a school teacher for a while, and also failed to the point of being hated by his school students.

When I reflect on the school curriculum from a college perspective, I cannot help but to shrug about how most subjects and problems seem like a worthless dead-end stuff... and yet when I tried to work with students through more important mathematical stuff -- it just didn't work. Zero retention and very little understanding to begin with. Things I thought elegant or simple don't generate anything similar to my excitement when introduced to the students. No number of "creative" ways to explain this stuff ever made it more appealing. If anything, it sometimes causes resentment because, compared to their peers, the students may think they aren't getting the "good stuff" because they cannot do some worthless thing their peers were taught the automation of.

agentgumshoe6• 3 years ago

You have to ask who's goals and desires are in focus in these situations, I wouldn't say the child's as a first guess.

gpt5• 3 years ago

I think that many parents fall into the trap of acceleration to address their kids need to be challenged. While acceleration help mitigate some unnecessary repetition, by definition acceleration cannot go deeper than the standard curriculum, and deeper is where things become interesting and where you develop mathematical thinkers.

My children attend a school district where the norm is enrolling kids in after-school math programs. According to the standardized tests run by the school, about 50% of the students are pacing a full grade ahead.

The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10%. While the skip test covers the standard material, it does so with trickier questions, tripping up many students. They're moving fast, but without much depth.

What I found works best is to pick a challenging and exciting curriculum that allows talented students to immerse themselves and experience the excitement and satisfaction of intellectual discovery. There are a few examples of such programs. The most popular of which is the curriculum offered by AoPS (art of problem solving), which starts at first grade. Following this path naturally offers a large advantage to learning at the highest levels. If they are still moving faster with the rigorous curriculum - sure, let them accelerate.

jibe• 3 years ago

Accelerate is a misnomer, it is the go deeper, advanced track. There might be a one time jump ahead, but that’s not the heart of it.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10%

I ran into trouble with this as a kid. They put me ahead a grade in math in grade 2 because I could handle it and the class was a 2/3 split (half grade 2s, half 3s), so I just did math with the grade 3s. This worked going forward as there were 3/4 and 4/5 split classes at the school too.

But then after a couple years, I was reaching the point where the school only went to grade 5 and the teachers didn't even have books for grade 6s.

So they skipped me entirely ahead a grade. Into a new school (since the previous school only went to 5). With none of my friends.

My other subjects suffered because I was only really good at math. My social life died- kids are assholes at that age and pull each other down. And my mental health was pretty messed up for a long time. I wound up taking an extra year of high school just so I wouldn't be in college at 17.

BeFlatXIII2• 3 years ago

Why didn't you want to be in college early? The little fragments of the rest of your story indicate that you may have enjoyed meeting a self-selecting and (presumably) more mature group of peers for a fresh social start. Did your social life recover in high school?

Foobar8568• 3 years ago

I am a strong believer of :

- There is no depth in math without understanding properly our own language.

- One cannot master anything without actually writing stuff.

crawfordcomeaux• 3 years ago

This is very easy to answer:

Design toys and environments for them that promote the development of infinity category theoretical intuitions. Let them decide the pace from there.

markoutso• 3 years ago

I keep wondering how articles make it up to the first page. This one, for example, an article hosted by substack. A service with terrible user interface, that tries to make you think that someone is doing you a favour for letting you read their literature without paying, whereas... the opposite is true.

The article itself is irrelevant but since I read it, I can tell that it is a classical nonsensical piece on the benefits of listening to children. The author lacks any formal qualification on teaching from what I could also find.

In other terms a complete time waster.

graycat• 3 years ago

Early calculus in 60 seconds: Consider a car with a speedometer that says how fast are moving and an odometer that says how far have gone. Given the data from the odometer can find what the speedometer values were. That is the first half of calculus, differentiation. And given the data from the speedometer, can find what the odometer values were. That is the second half of calculus, integration. If start with the odometer values, differentiate and get the speedometer values and integrate those values, then will get back the odometer values -- that is the fundamental theorem of calculus. Differentiation is related to subtraction, and integration is related to addition.

Might be able to teach that to kids in the fourth grade.

ckz2• 3 years ago

An interesting argument I've heard recently (but haven't yet come to a personal conclusion on, so don't take this as an endorsement):

Emphasize math for older kids when their brain is better prepared for abstraction (some even argue age 10+!). Emphasize language and character for younger kids, especially because at _very_ young ages that's really what they're soaking in anyway.

The logic here being efficiency. An older child can learn in a week what a preschooler may drill for months. Cover some math facts in primary school to build a strong foundation, but strong language skills compound against _all_ education and should come first, with a heavier shift to advanced mathematics later in schooling.

Again, don't know if I ascribe yet (I was accelerated in math at a young age myself) or how this really looks in the real world, but definitely an argument that wise people make in good faith.

Probably impossible in a standardized school setting. :)

jimmychoozyx• 3 years ago

Some would say Math is a language. And I agree-- teach a 2nd language to kids before they reach 12. But I would also want to teach my own children advanced math during that time, if possible.

From what I've read in passing, it seems some former soviet countries of Eastern Europe & Russia teach advanced math to students a few years earlier than the US does.

It seems that private South Asian-majority schools in certain cities-- such as Houston-- also teach advanced math earlier than public schools.

sn9• 3 years ago

Here's an old educational experiment that supports the idea of literacy before numeracy: http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/three.html

theptip• 3 years ago

Scott Alexander hosted a book review on this subject recently, “The Educated Mind” by Egan. I’m interested in exploring these ideas too.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-e...

blackkettle• 3 years ago

This is pretty much exactly how the public education system is structured here in Switzerland. Early years focus primarily on socialization, multilingualism, literacy and basic numeracy. Then as you move through later elementary school to middle and finally through the Matura phase there are rapid accelerations and bifurcations. If you can keep up you continue on the path to ETHZ and other top Unis. If not you move into the trade or technical school or lower Uni tracks. There is a chance to come back but the baseline expectatio. Is that about 20% of students will go straight through the Matura process. If you complete you have basically free access to any university in Switzerland. ETHZ is something like CHF800/semester. But the trade and technical school path is also good IMO. It’s appropriate.

It’s also not a perfect system but much much better than what I grew up with in the US compared to what I’m seeing now with my son here.

davidguetta• 3 years ago

This idea that abstraction can only be leart at 10 is the most bullshit I've heard today. I was doing moderately advanced equations at 7 and it's also widely known great chess player started being great way under 9. Where is that nonsensical idea come from ?

Don't delay children.

pgustafs3• 3 years ago

Agree, but I don't like the framing of "accelerating." Math in school is for the median student. If you want a quantitative career or just want to have quantitative skills, you should be aiming for way above median. Aiming for median outcomes makes zero sense in the current world. Find your niche and hit it hard.

Kids intuitively understand this -- they like doing what they're good at. Unfortunately, most schools are not good at serving this need. A very important part of being a parent is to encourage kids to start compounding positive habits/learning early, and to prevent the schools from dragging them back to the median.

rahimnathwani10• 3 years ago

Right! No one talks about basketball acceleration or football acceleration.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

I was really impressed at Number Blocks, which my daughter and friends were all watching from Nursery age on BBC iplayer at home. By age 4 she already had an idea about square numbers and infinity. I honestly wish Number Blocks went all the way up to university level.

MandieD• 3 years ago

Oh, glad to hear that - my nearly-three year old is obsessed with the Alpha Blocks right now, and we saw the Alpha Blocks meet Number Blocks episode a few days ago.

WarOnPrivacy• 3 years ago

I spent 2nd and 3rd grade in a grade 1-6 environment (public school). Every student got the same series of math tests and instruction began at the level they failed a test. Kids could retest whenever they wanted. Older kids were assigned younger kids to broadly mentor.

This was the early 1970s. It was by every measure a success. I haven't seen it's like since.

JJMcJ• 3 years ago

Sometimes tiny schools in isolated areas will have something like that. Where there aren't enough kids to have separate grades.

raymondh• 3 years ago

In our case, the main push to accelerate is to get more knowledgeable teachers.

While experimenting with number sequences in Excel, our child said, "I found e, 2.718281828". When he went to show off his discovery, his two math teachers said that they had never heard of it before.

whimsicalism4• 3 years ago

We pay far too little to get people who are very strong at math.

This sort of lack of knowledge was not uncommon in my urban school district, the only teachers who were truly qualified were all doing it as essentially charity work after their high-powered careers.

dboreham• 3 years ago

My sons are both in college now, but during the K-12 years I took the approach that I could not try to "accelerate" other than by offering help with homework. That is, I didn't introduce any concepts that would arrive later in their curriculum. Instead, I introduced concepts (verbally, while driving to school and so on) that would never be covered at the HS level. These included: the idea that some things are provably unprovable (e.g. halting problem), that some things are provably impossible (e.g. constructibility of polygons), that everything in mathematics has a history around why it was invented, and a story as to what it's useful for, that generally doesn't get taught but can be very helpful in appreciating why you might want to learn about it.

hardwaregeek• 3 years ago

I had a good time at Russian math circle. It was competition math but also math proofs which helped instill rigor as a core concept. Which in turn helped when I started programming because really a lot of programming is about invariants and proofs of sort.

twump3• 3 years ago

My 6 year old is doing basic algebra and geometric proofs and I worry it's going to make him bored in math class. But even if my kid is a genius it's proven to me that we can be moving our kids much faster than we do. I don't think kids in Singapore have special DNA.

viraptor2• 3 years ago

I really like the idea of unrestricted learning (as long as it actually checks that you master the material). I remember reading a university level physics book and getting lots of fun math from it while in high school.

Currently (many years later) I'm going through the https://mathacademy.com/ ML course to get good foundations in that area. But the service itself starts at very basic math and allows you to go as fast as you want all the way to uni courses (with lots of practice and reviews), so I'm hoping to use it with my kid in the future.

albntomat02• 3 years ago

What're your thoughts on MathAcademy? I heard about it here on HN several months ago, and it's been on my list of things to check out, once I finish my current two side projects.

viraptor2• 3 years ago

Love it, 4 months into math for ML with a review of some earlier topics. It's actually almost entirely about practice in small chunks, which is different from many other services I've seen. (Means no sitting through longer videos / explanations) Basically it's what I would've really liked my school math to be. Each question is only a couple of minutes or so, so I really appreciate being able to do it here and there when possible, instead of having to dedicate full hours to the course. I've been following it being developed for years hoping to use it with my kid, but ended up using it myself first.

Also, seeing progress like this appeals to this nerd https://i.postimg.cc/SNjYL3vd/Screenshot-2023-07-30-09-03-01...

lanstin2• 3 years ago

I took 3,4, 5 and 6th grade math in 3rd grade. taught my self algebra and some easy calculus in 4 and 5th grade, then I went to math camp in 7th grade where i got credit for algebra 1 and 2 and took geometry and trig and precalc (passing some standardized test for each module). my school let me take BC calculus in 8th grade and then go to night school for math for 9th thru 12th grade. i was otherwise unaccelerated and had a pretty normal teenager hood.

i highly recommend it, especially for math where there is so much to learn; even by the end of undergrad, the newest math i was learning was from the 1950s and 1960s. plus it makes a lot of other things a lot easier to study. and it's fun to learn hard math; the years when i had to study math i already knew where really dull.

geniium• 3 years ago

Other than that, what’s ur story?

lanstin2• 3 years ago

Relatively ordinary. My teachers wanted me to go into grad school, which had sort of been my plan my whole life, but i had authority issues and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I also enjoyed programming so I let myself get pulled into internet programming, landing at AOL after a few jobs at smaller places. Since then I have been programming, except for a stint as a stay at home dad. My youngest just went to college and I have enrolled in a masters program in math at a local uni, weirdly enough. Learning math is still a profoundly fun thing for me.

Knowing a lot of maths has improved my life a lot but didn’t let me discover fusion or anything. I have written a lot of software and improved more software and helped people learn about how to understand software systems, but that has all been in service to keeping my family afloat; now that responsibility is lessening, I might try again to have a more maths career.

I was also sexually abused by a close relative from age four to about age six, so probably I would not have been up to the rigors of a doctoral program or an academic career. Till I got my self together, the scarcity of good programmers in the job market gave me the buffer I needed to succeed despite the authority issues. But the accelerated math was solely a blessing.

A lot of the people from the math camp (Duke’s Talent Identification Program) have had very solid careers but so far as I know not many Nobel prizes or Fields Medalists or whatever.

darkclouds• 3 years ago

Keep it fun, broaden their horizons so rather than just teach this is how you do x and how you do y, give them some examples of where they might expect to find x being used or where you might find y being used in real life so they having something relate to. Once you get past basic maths, a lot of it isn't instantly recognisable in the real world, partly because its behind closed office doors, so explain that some maths might be found in banking, some in mapping, some in hedge funds, physics, computer games, gambling, detective work etc etc.

Dont force anything because no one can predict the future and if things dont work out in the future, you dont want them looking back at this time as lost opportunities to have done other things, even socialising or learning something else, even though I doubt the demand for maths skills will ever die out apart from maybe WW3 breaking out.

lordnacho• 3 years ago

At the moment the plan is just AoPS. Looks good to me, I bought all the books. Seems to be roughly up to what I learned in high school, starting towards the end of primary school.

My kid plays around with math a lot. Asks interesting questions. Nothing has taken shape yet, so I just try to answer. But also try to get him to work through the AoPS. He likes it actually, there's always a question in there that he doesn't get and he likes the challenge.

What I don't really hear anything about is how to get the kid to self-ignite. He did this with chemistry. He knows the periodic table, he knows what the electron shells are, what acids and bases are. He asks interesting questions. I even hooked him up with my friend who is a PhD so he can ask his weird questions about molecules. On the math side, he just needs a little nudge. Same with programming. I just get the feeling he's not far from simply studying everything himself, I simply don't know what to do to spark it.

JackFr• 3 years ago

How about just get out of your kid’s way?

I muddled through long division and all the other crap I already knew in middle school while I was devouring all the Martin Gardiner collections and the Time Life series on mathematics. My parents dropped me at the library once a week and had some idea what I was doing — certainly they appreciated good grades, but there was not handwringing over support from the school.

refurb• 3 years ago

This is kind of my thought.

What one typically finds is that kids good at X, are interested in X. You can't force them to be interested, but you can offer opportunities to see if they are.

Some kids just won't find math interesting, and likely will just barely pass the requirements in school. And you as a parent can't change that.

And to be honest, it's not the end of the world. I know plenty of successful people who are terrible at math.

beebmam• 3 years ago

Stop relying on schools to entirely educate your children. School education is a baseline. Moreover, it's not entirely up to parents to "accelerate", much less educate, their children.

Let your children explore the world outside of a coercive environment, and they'll probably surprise you.

If your children don't want to explore the world when given the freedom to do so, then something might be holding them back, like addiction or depression. In the end, your child is going to become an adult one day and they'll need that self-motivation to be successful.

jrflowers• 3 years ago

At most you shouldn’t accelerate kids more than 4-5Gs, maybe up to 6G if it’s only for a few seconds.

thrawa8387336• 3 years ago

We need to evaluate schools by impact improving outcomes of the P80 not the P50 or the P0. Percentiles

aappleby• 3 years ago

9.8 meters per second squared.

ezekiel68• 3 years ago

How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

Definitely not to the speed of light. I understand 99% of that may be alright.

bluepod44• 3 years ago

Not sure why people downvote jokes lol

throwaway33381• 3 years ago

Sometimes I read these threads and see a lot of parents who seem to think that their child inherently loves something but to me it sort of looks like it's more of a forceful grooming. The word usage of some of the top comments is well very interesting... Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. Honestly, it's abusive.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

Abuse is a strong word. If we keep calling everything abuse then the only thing that would be acceptable is to let the kid do whatever they want. Which kid loves to go to school? So sending them against their "love" to school is forceful grooming?

rahimnathwani10• 3 years ago

  Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do.

This has not been my experience. My son will tell me clearly he doesn't want to do something, right after I've expressed how fascinating it is and how if he'll just spend a few minutes he'll see for himself.

I'm happy that he finds math interesting. And I'm happy he doesn't feign interest in things he doesn't find interesting.

bsder3• 3 years ago

Gee, instead of accelerating our children in math, how about we accelerate them in reading and writing--two skills which are FAR more important to their eventual success in life than anything related to math.

rahimnathwani10• 3 years ago

Going faster and/or deeper in math doesn't prevent a child from reading or writing.

bsder3• 3 years ago

Except, it seems to.

There are a finite number of hours in a day. If you take time to push one thing, you lose time for something else.

I would much rather see children being pushed to read well and efficiently, write logically and coherently with at least decent grammar, and speak in front of people without saying "um" and "like" every two seconds.

The problem is, it's very difficult to measure progress in those easily with a single test, so nobody values them.

I mean, the NMSQT weights itself with twice the verbal. If parents really wanted to help their child, they would drive improvement in their English.

otoburb2• 3 years ago

I'd venture a guess (possibly, a poor one) that most students who would/could be seeking accelerated math can already read. Writing, at least for my kids, is the skill that has required much more parental involvement and has not been as "easy" as reading and (simple) math.

Reading a lot doesn't seem to translate very cleanly into decent writing skills, speaking both from my own experience and watching one of my bookworm kids struggling.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Schools are more willing to differentiate learning when it comes to reading/writing than math. This is because it doesn't require different lesson plans to let kids read different books during free reading time, for example. And when grading a kids' writing, it's not hard for a teacher to focus on basic skills for kids that are slower, and more advanced grammatical nitpicks for kids who have the basics down.

You make the point down-thread that parents do accelerated math because it's easier to show a kid has mastered a given skill. This is definitely relevant, in that schools that fight parents who want to accelerate their kids (across the board) have a harder time resisting when it can be clearly demonstrated that the child understands a topic. Even with this evidence, schools still resist letting children learn at their level in math; I can't imagine how much harder it would be to accomplish in a more amorphous subject like ELA.

FWIW, in my family we emphasize both math and ELA, but we might be nonrepresentative since I work in literacy/edtech.

dragonwriter3• 3 years ago

Schools are more willing to differentiate learning when it comes to reading/writing than math. This is because it doesn't require different lesson plans to let kids read different books during free reading time, for example. And when grading a kids' writing, it's not hard for a teacher to focus on basic skills for kids that are slower, and more advanced grammatical nitpicks for kids who have the basics down.

Ironically, that's exactly the kind of individual-differentiation-without-group-tracking that people around here object to when it is proposed for math.

Schools are, increasingly, willing to differentiate this way for math. Conservative (in the “attached to past methods”, rather than ideological, sense, though there is considerable correlation here) factions in the populace are opposed to it, though.

durron• 3 years ago

“Parent-led homeschooling is the approach that puts parents in charge of the education decisions for their children.”

Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach. Yes, there are many kids in the classroom. Yes, your kid isn’t going to get the same type of 1 on 1 attention you can give them at home. However, work in conjunction with the experts, don’t presume you know better by default.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach.

There is no federal teacher licensing standard, and state standards vary (and only apply to public school teachers, IIRC). In several states, the only educational requirement is a bachelor's degree. [1] This educational requirement might be coupled with required teaching experience, but this experience can be gained by teaching in a private school, where such requirements do not apply. And none of these experiential requirements establish a baseline for excellence — they just measure based on "time served".

It is simply false to assume that all teachers are "experts" to whom parents (who may have many more years of education, not that formal education is the touchstone), should defer.

1: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/8-states-that-made-it-easie...

hakutsuru• 3 years ago

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes it is the kid who accelerates themselves (and their parents would have no sense of the material).

Just in case you are a smart kid in high school, or helping one, Do Not Skip Calculus 1 in college based on taking the material in high school. This can be a very dangerous mistake.

If you are really confident, then get the syllabus for Calculus I from the college, and do problems from the textbook. Taking Calculus II as a first semester freshman can be very tough.

Do this only if you are confident and bored with Calculus I. Rushing foundation studies is the wrong choice for most students. I made this mistake, and thought I received honors on my engineering degree (and was a Masters student in my fourth year) -- Calculus II was the lowest grade on my transcript. Good luck.

wombatpm• 3 years ago

But if you can get credit for Calc 1 and Calc 2 because you took the BC AP Calc test you should do. Starting Calc 3 as a freshman was great because it was a much smaller class.

foota• 3 years ago

I took a combined calc 1 and calc 2 class in college after taking a calculus class covering AP calculus AB and BC in high school, which I think was a nice balance probably (my school didn't let you skip it completely). The refresher was nice (it had been a year since I took calculus in hs), but I might have been fine doing multivariable regardless. It all made a _lot_ more sense for me in college, I'm not sure if it was maturity or what that made it easier for me, but the difference was shocking.

physicles• 3 years ago

Another option: take calc I, but differently. I finished calc II in high school, then for the first semester I took a class called “Honors Math I”, the first class in the math major track. I was a cs and physics major.

The class was sort of a survey that started with propositional and predicate logic, set theory, and hit bits of number theory and group theory before going deeper into continuous functions, differentiation and integration. Proofs all the way. At one point the prof quipped, “If you’re using numbers bigger than about 8, you’re not doing real math.”

The class did a great job reinforcing what I’d learned in high school, while setting me up for some of the beefier proof-based cs theory classes later on.

stevepike• 3 years ago

I had the exact same experience!

Patrol8394• 3 years ago

Parents should chillout; my kids go to private schools, they have a great math program but even that is not enough and most of their friends end up taking additional math class outside school.

I refuse to do that for my kids.

The amount of stress and expectations parents put on their kids is staggering.

Obviously, these kids will inevitably get bored in any school.

spywaregorilla3• 3 years ago

I'm really looking forward to teaching a child math. I'm curious how quickly I can get a kid grasping concepts like calculus, which is largely, imo, extremely obvious and intuitive, minus the implementation.

vonzepp2• 3 years ago

Education is an odd profession. Where people feel because they have had an education they are qualified to determine best practice. It is as if having an operation makes one feel as they understand the best practice in heart surgery. Teachers spend years studying teaching practice, always read the research on best practices, spend all day working in education settings. Yet people often dismiss their methods and demand change based on often misremembered anecdotes of their own youth over half a century beforehand and pride in their children. I wouldn't be shocked if a vast majority of parents thought their kids were above average, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes professionals know what they are doing.

ghiculescu2• 3 years ago

This seems like a very idealistic take on how teachers spend their day.

Do most programmers spend years studying programming practice and always read the research on best practices? (I don’t.)

vonzepp2• 3 years ago

You do however spend probably 8 hrs working on it, read hackernews on latest tech, probably better than you were 5 years ago. Now imagine your marketing department saying they went to a computer summer camp once in the 90s and therefore think you should rewrite the tech stack in perl.

gizmo686• 3 years ago

Teachers also operate under different constraints. Class sizes and number of classes per teacher varies, but a given teacher could easily have over 100 students. They also see those students for only a year before getting a new cohort to learn.

In contrast, parents have only a handful of children who they typically know from birth.

Not only does a parent have far more specialized insight into their child, but (perhaps more importantly) that parent does not need to make sacrifices for the greater good of the class.

Schools aversion to children getting ahead is largely duevto the practical challenges it imposes on the school system, not the pedalogical effects on a given child.

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

Personal anecdote: I started in private school for K-3, and then public school for 4-12. Public school was remedial until AP Calculus BC in high school. I was skipped in 6th grade to advanced 7th grade math but was harassed by the teacher who also encouraged the class to harass me as well.

I say nudge and try to introduce concepts with Kahn Academy videos and then do problems in between. See how far they can go because kids tend to learn faster than we give them credit for. Keep it fun because keeping curiosity alive is precious.

mo_422• 3 years ago

When I was ten, I was accelerating myself quite a bit in physics. There wasn't a physics camp at that time. So probably I also misunderstood quite some things but I also was ahead of most peers (I was ten). I think physics is even more approachable to children because they can play around physical things.

Well, it got me into some trouble. I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them.

How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

My answer would still be: as fast as your kid wishes for but consider social implications with teachers and peers.

Sidenote: after this experience with the teacher, I somehow switched to computers. Exploring computers and learning to program wasn't a subject in school so this was free territory.

timthorn2• 3 years ago

I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them.

What did you do to destroy the teacher's plan? It doesn't sound incompatible with you having advanced knowledge.

mo_422• 3 years ago

I remember we were doing something experiments with electricity and the teacher asked some question. I just answered that it’s a stream of negatively charged particles.

The concept of electrons or charged particles wasn’t introduced yet. So this didn’t make sense to students who learned according to the teacher's plan. I think he wanted us to develop an idea of charge ourselves instead of learning from a book.

(I think this is an outdated way of teaching because students have so much other resources on the internet to learn from.)

QuadmasterXLII• 3 years ago

The 8 AM section of multivariate calculus at UNC Chapel Hill is Close to half students from East Chapel Hill high school. The high school students want to take it at that time because it fits with the rest of their classes, the college students don’t want to take it at that time because screw 8 AM. I talked to the professor and he says it’s one of his favorite sections to teach because the students are all so enthusiastic and want to be there.

EliseEmma• 3 years ago

Exposing them them to problem solving fun games and puzzles might help.

zapregniqp• 3 years ago

I didn't know there was a way to actually do this

lazyant• 3 years ago

Reminds me of "there's no speed limit" https://sive.rs/kimo

How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

Related Stories