Program so accelerated that 8th-graders take AP Calculus. Will that work?
washingtonpost.com
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Anyone can take college courses in high school for free under post secondary enrollment. Unless that is no longer the case, it was the case for me in 1992. I took a couple courses on DC circuits all for free when I was in 10th or 11th grade. I just had to pay for books. Now 8th grade is just a year shy of high school. Why not just go to college to learn calculus? Calculus would be a lot easier to learn if teachers focused on real problems that it solves. Even if the student doesn't join the field of study where those problems are illuminated in, the student will know how the approach is used.
In high school my math classes were about 60% abstract except for a few "word problems" which were often poorly written and of low quality (complex math for stupid problems no one has). Except for Geometry, which was a class I loved because the teacher's examples were all useful to me then and later in life.
That's true! I'm not certain if this specific program has much focus on real problems or not.
It hasn't been mentioned on HN for several years; several good discussions on learning math: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artofproblemsolving%20comments...
It's too bad that we're stuck with a dilemma: either track students early, missing some people and misdirecting others, or don't track them at all, missing potential excellence. I don't think you can avoid that dilemma entirely, but I do think you can take a guess and say "You don't seem to be enjoying the kind of math that leads in the direction of calculus, how about we put more effort into things that might be more fulfilling to you."