This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted.

I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.

And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...