How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? | Hacker News Reader

How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

kidswholovemath.substack.com

150 pointssebg291 comments

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.

> 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".

> 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).

I don't understand why there would need to be separate advanced learning programs in schools.

In fact, every school already has an advanced learning program. It's called the next grade!

Not only are there social benefits from having mixed age groups of children (younger ones learn by observing the older ones), but they could also each learn at their own level. There's absolutely no reason for age-separated schooling.

> It's called the next grade!

Eh, there are a lot of different things you learn in school. For example, I was doing algebra at home with my mom (which I would ultimately do in school in 6th grade) in 2nd grade when I was still having trouble putting spaces in between my words with my handwriting. LikeIwouldwriteallmyhandwrittenwordslikethis. It was a big struggle for me to start adding spaces between words. and don't even start on my spelling. I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject. But yes, I needed advanced math.

When I was in 4th grade (and maybe other grades too, I don't really remember), a friend and I were sent off to a 5th grade class specifically for math. I don't know how practical this is in general; I was lucky to get a lot of accommodations when I had teachers that were willing or able to do so, and this was also the 90s, which presumably changes things in all sorts of ways I can't even imagine. But it did work back then.

Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.

Nice girls, very innocent. Eventually the rest of the class started catching up with our math progress and by the end of the school year we were let out of the cage.

It was a fond memory, I am not bitter about it, still remember some of the gags.

I dont think i lost that much, my math interest was more of a natural force rather than whatever i did in a repetetive schoolbook. And maybe I gained some social skills instead?

Just a little funny way of dealing with it

> Ha, when i was too far ahead (around 11yo), I got put in a separate room with two girls with a similar "problem", no teacher.

I had the same experience in 1st-2nd grade (in foreign language class, not math). Three of us were deemed too advanced for the grade so the teacher sent us out to the playground unsupervised with instructions to speak in the foreign language and correct each other.

I don't remember us speaking in that language too much but we played lots of games and it was fun.

> Nice girls, very innocent.

Haha, that came out a bit different that i meant to. I meant that we were all very innocent, just like 3 well behaved 11 year old kids.

> I was not ready to skip a grade level in every subject.

It's possible to go to a higher grade just on some subjects though. In our (my child's) elementary, kids could go up a grade on math only if that suited them better. They stay in their grade but during math hour go to the classroom of a higher grade.

It worked reasonably well but there's some limits since it is only an elementary school so beyond a certain point there are no higher grades available on campus.

Exactly.

When you stop thinking in age-related grades, and start thinking in individual subjects, you realize how stupid the current system is.

People are differently skilled/talented in different subjects, why group them by age, instead of subject-specific ability?!

No, an advanced learning program is not called the next grade. There are two problems with putting kids in higher grades:

1. Outside of academics, the younger children are not at the same level of emotional, mental, and physical development. This prevents the two age groups from building substantive social connections.

2. There is a Donny Dumbass in every grade. So even if you go to the next grade up, there is still a Donny Dumbass taking all of the teacher’s attention.

I have first hand experience with this. My school had two advanced levels. The most advanced was all kids from the same grade. The intermediate level was taking the normal class with the grade above. I took the intermediate class. I sat in the back and the girl next to me offered me mushrooms. I had not yet reached the point in my development where I would have regular exposure to drug users, so this was a shock for me. This girl also wasn’t the most enlightened study partner.

We've heard good things about MP public schools so that's disappointing! Did you guys end up going to private?

We’re still in the district, and have finally pushed hard enough that they let our kid take a diagnostic test and move ahead independently. But that literally took 3 years to accomplish, during which time zero math learning happened at school.

To clarify, this is the Las Lomitas district, which is west Menlo Park, not MPCSD, which covers downtown and the rest of MP.

If you want a magnet program, go to Redwood City — it has one. Even the privates are generally not great on math acceleration. I hear Menlo School doesn’t allow early acceleration either, and they’re one of the more academic private schools.

Feel free to email me (contact in profile) if you want more details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Excellent story about the government not allowing anyone to be too smart or beautiful.

Example. If you’re smart, you wear head phones that emit random loud noises so you can’t form thoughts for long.

https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1627038661115256843

  SFUSD became Harrison Bergeron Unified. It’s a cautionary tale, not a model. Push back.

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.

This is an interesting example of reaching the right answer for atrociously bad reasons.

i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.

Of course kids who are struggling might really just be stuck on one issue, and once they get past it they'll be fine - i.e. when I was in around Year 2, for whatever reason my reading-level reports for somewhat low. Post that of course, I shot ahead (I have no idea why or how, in that case the metric probably just was mis-measuring whatever my interest was at the time).

Which is an example of exactly the issue with the idea of "gifted kids" - they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults.

After all: plenty of gifted mathematicians, certainly people smarter then me. If they're working as mathematicians though, the lifetime earning potential of my average career in IT is going to be higher though.

>>> they don't really exist. They're anomalies in measurement methodology, likely to be temporally localized as well. Because everyone knows some "gifted" child, but no one can point to the unique and amazing accomplishments of them as adults

That's a shocking claim to make. Feynman, Von Neumann, Turing, Einstein, Gauss...I think I could go on all day naming people whose contribution to society was outrageously disproportionate and who were all stereotypical "gifted children".

Of course they exist. You wouldn't be having this conversation on a computer on the Internet if they didn't.

> i.e. kids doing well "don't need help" until they do is a much more common outcome - which is to say, you're smart enough to do very little work, but never actually learn how to do any work so once that no longer applies the reality-shock is pretty high.

Can sooo relate to that... That's essentially the thing where I took my top-3% highschool-degree (spending presence-hours+30min/day on school - the day I grade-overtook a person spending 4h/day by final results was fun) to a "mediocre" uni degree.

EDIT: back then, around 30% of people attended that kind of highschool.

What did I do with time: read prose of my native language and America (leading me to optimize highschool finals by dropping english for even less work old greek...) - I guess someone making me learn for 2h/day would have not really hurt my (very underused) culture knowledge and helped me a lot the uni years.

Idk man my public elementary school gifted peers all went on to be pretty successful - head dramaturge at a Broadway playhouse, doctors, poker champion, etc. I manage software developers at a dev shop with a bunch of ivy and prestigious euro university grads.

Some people are smarter than other people, and being smart gives you myriad advantages in navigating the world. This seems pretty uncontroversial.

The assumption is that the smart kids will find the resources they need to be successful, and will be successful regardless. It's the ones that are behind that need the help.

It's a blatantly false assumption, but one that persists in popularity among policy makers. The skills needed to be a zero-effort straight-A student are not necessarily the skills needed to make positive impacts on the world.

What you are talking about is a political decision, therefore there is no rational way to discuss it.

In most western government leadership now supporting smart people is basically elitism which is evil.

Despite the fact that practically it’s what needs to be done and what leads to a better society for everyone not. Not to mention most of Asia IS doing this and seem to be doing much better.

"gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"

Citation needed.

I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.

Common sense is frequently wrong and is usually invoked by people who want their beliefs to be taken as fact without needing to provide support

The problem here is that the specific statement in question is hard to come up with a citation for, but rests on a chain of reasoning for well-known statements that do have a lot of evidence.

And so "citation needed" is just a way to avoid trying to think.

One of the many chains of reasoning that apply here are:

1. Success in business, science and technology are all strongly associated with intelligence. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...

2. Intelligence tends to be relatively stable. https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/21726

Therefore intelligent children contribute an inordinate amount to advances in business, science and technology.

The next piece is not just how smart we are, but what we are interested in and how well prepared we are. There https://hechingerreport.org/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-crit... shows that there is evidence to believe that adolescence is a critical period - developing and supporting interests in that period will lead to lifelong improvement.

And therefore we have good reason to believe that appropriate interventions in that age range really should have an outsized contribution to advancements down the road.

Of course people who don't want to think can always ask, "Has there been a high quality longitudinal study demonstrating that adolescent interventions can result in an outsized impact on contributions to society later?" And, of course, there haven't. But even if they had, of necessity they would have happened long enough ago that enough has changed that the argument could come back, "The world has changed. Do we have reason to believe that this could work today?"

And so if you want to think, the conclusion really is obviously reasonable. If you don't want to think, the quality of the evidence is such that nobody can prove it to you.

On a question like that, how SHOULD we respond to a lazy "citation needed" demand?

There’s also plenty of evidence that improving educational outcomes for low performing students has an outsized impact. “Decreasing the number of high school dropouts by half would nationally produce $45 billion per year in net economic benefit to society … Improved education and more stable employment greatly increase tax revenue, such as a return of at least 7 dollars for every dollar invested in pre-kindergarten education … National savings in public health costs would exceed $40 billion if every high school dropout in just a single year would graduate”. [1] These show pretty clear economic benefits to improving outcomes for the average student.

But the bigger issue is framing with as a “struggling vs gifted” problem. Where we have to choose between supporting gifted students or helping struggling students. It isn’t, education is one of the few areas where there is a “free lunch”. Every dollar invested in education results in more than one dollar in return. We can easily find both of these things, the real question isn’t which we should fund, but why we aren’t funding both.

[1] https://www.elc-pa.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/BestInvest...

I agree that it is more of an "and" than an "or".

However I think that simply dumping money into education as it is is more likely to produce bad results than good ones. That's because the current education system is driven more by ideology than pseudoscience than by anything resembling an effective methodology. Given the "citation needed" atmosphere, I'll offer https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm as an argument. We have lots of changes being made educationally which are promised to produce better results over time. And, time and again, they don't. As Feynman said, the planes aren't landing.

But if we can invest, I also question the promised savings in the article. It does not distinguish between increase in income due to having the characteristics that help one get a degree, versus increase in income due to what is taught in a degree. This can be a very large difference. If you have a subscription to The Economist, read https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2015/10/29/our-firs... for how much college rankings and benefits change when you try to measure universities by estimates of value added.

That isn't to say that there is a better figure available for education. But it does not speak well to their intellectual integrity that they failed to point out this major shortcoming in their own data.

The paper you linked is based on reasoning like: "high school dropouts are way more likely to be unemployed therefore if we reduce rates of people dropping out of high school there will be more employed ones".

That's also a problem with "citation needed" argument - people who are in position to publish papers are often motivated politically or just bad at thinking and logic.

ah yes scientists, people known to be bad at logic and thinking... I guess you meant policy makers or people who implements those but whatever, what i know right...

I just quoted an obvious reasoning error from the paper man.

You can take a look at the average intelligence of current research and business leaders and conclude that on average, they contribute more visibly.

That doesn’t mean the cook in their kitchen, that frees up their mind to think about all that useful stuff isn’t just as necessary.

Your observation that they contribute more visibly is maybe the most important part.

If you include all the infrastructure and not just the cook then it becomes much more obvious that we are working much like an ant colony and we succeed and progress only as a unit and die as individuals. Humans are social animals. We need to ensure the success of every individual if we want to optimize the rate of progress of the entire group.

Correct.

Citation needed

Touché - “Science has widely come to be understood as a systematic assault on common sense. Common sense said the world was flat; science showed this to be false. Common sense said the sun and the moon were the same size; science showed this to be wrong. Common sense said the Earth was the center of the universe; science showed this to be false. Common sense said matter was solid; science has shown this to be false”

https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8c60...

Citation needed that those things were, in fact, common sense. The earth being the center of the universe comes from ancient philosophers, not commoners (there's a reason the geocentric model is also called the Ptolemaic model). Those same philosophers also usually said the earth was round, not flat.

Your intuition may be wrong. I know plenty of 80's gifted kids who are burnt out, unemployed, or just coasting through life.

Isn't that then wasted talent? AIUI, upthread comments were about putting more resources into the gifted children precisely because we don't want to waste their talent.

that doesn't refute that the progress that we've made has come from gifted kids. Not all the gifted salmon make it to swim all the way back up the stream.

being gifted is just the start. next you need to get inspired.

I'm minded to think that most education should be focused on the inspiration part. Give the kids intrinsic motivation and the tools to learn.

I'd rather be a member of a group of uninspired smart people than of a group of inspired dummies.

- (signed)Tired

of watching "inspired dummies" waste their time, other persons' time and their inherited fortunes.

indeed, you need to be gifted first

> I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university.

Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers.

The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.

The original statement:

> "gifted kids are far more likely to contribute significantly to our future"

didn't say anything about gifted kids being far more likely to be "wildly successful with mansions and all that" or "starting many businesses, hustling and selling".

It read "contribute significantly to our future".

+1 in fact it's hard to think of a statement that's less in need of a citation.

In a way, yes, citation is needed for the claim. But citation is not needed for policy. Predicting individual's "value" to society and granting/restricting opportunity based on that is not only hell of a slippery slope, but absolutely anti-thetical to democratic civilization. It's quite literally what both the fascists and the nazis did deliberately.

Every society has both codified and unofficial deviations from the principle of "equal opportunity". For instance, insurance providers that are allowed to discriminate based on age, among other factors. But giving up on the principle explicitly is a different beast.

We live in a winner takes all society in the USA. So if only the cream of the crop is allowed to contribute it’s where you want to put your resources.

I disagree with you.

The people that run society are the train drivers, the nurses, the local council staff, the garage handlers, etc. I'm sure some were considered "gifted" in school, but by definition, most likely not. It's those people who I want us to invest the most in.

On the other hand, so what if a kid can solve a few maths problems faster than some other kid?

I get what you are saying - but school is such a wonderful opportunity to expand your mind and find things to care about.

If some kid is all juiced up and excited about something, its tragic for the school to stamp that out through neglect and busywork.

IDK how we could build an education system that supports kids in excelling while not degenerating in to a caste system

you are talking like kids are excelling or not.

Some are great at maths and shit at other classes and vice-versa.

Exactly. However... The gifted people are the ones that discover electricity, That found the transistor, that allow is to build Integrated circuits at the nanometer scale, that found antibiotics that save millions of lives. Each of the people that made such strides are gifted. They saved millions/billions of people. A non-gifted nurse/train driver, garage handler etc simply can't even begin to compete. Not even if they had ten thousand hours per day.

Now take away all the nurses and every "non-gifted" contributer to society and see how much the gifted achieve. When you're spending half your time building and maintaining shelter, growing food, cooking, defending yourself from enemies, etc, how much time will you have left to innovate? We are social animals and it takes all of us to be as successful as we are.

No one is saying they aren't important or not needed. The point here is that there is a very large disproportionate focus on "not leaving children behind" while the gifted children are left to suffer. We just want gifted children to get the get just a little sliver of the same attention as badly performing students.

How are you measuring the proportions and then outcomes for society? I'm also not convinced the gifted children are left behind. Many brilliant contributors to society had a less than ideal education.

I agree that publicly funded schools should cater to as wide a range of needs as possible. And at a certain point it becomes the parents' responsibility. If your child is highly gifted you may need to invest your own time and money beyond the basic education provided by the state. Another preferable option is to invest far more money in public education. That is difficult to get widespread support for.

> How are you measuring the proportions and then outcomes for society?

You know damn well these metrics don't exist today. You yourself do not include any measurements in your logic. But still require it of others. I don't think you are participating in this discussion in good faith at all.

I didn't know those metrics don't exist. There are seemingly endless studies out there. You are of course free to ask me for supporting sources for any of my claims and I have no problem saying when I do and do not have sources and metrics.

Oke then, where is the source for your claim that the average non-gifted person contributes equal or more more to society then the average gifted person if the gifted person was as supported as the non-gifted person?

Or rather the core of the argument: Why is a single dollar better spend on a non-gifted kid rather then a gifted kid in terms of societal outcomes.

Non-gifted meaning in this case someone who get's a lot of support through government intervention like for example no child left behind.

We’re not talking about nurses train drivers or anyone capable of holding a job with post secondary education. A large chunk of educational resources go towards making sure your parking lot attendant can make change or you McDonald’s worker can read signs. Most of those industries already know their workers can’t do that well so they have used technology to automate it away.

Automation is great. And unemployment in the US is at its lowest in 50 years. People are just doing higher value work.

The people who run today's society use the creations of yesterday's gifted and motivated, along with their own, important, incremental updates.

The people who create tomorrow's society are the gifted and motivated here now.

We all create tomorrow's society. Every individual is hugely dependent on other humans. And many of the people we are dependent on have quite mundane jobs. Devalue these folks enough and they will no longer do work and society will collapse. History shows us this and the result is the opposite of progress.

What does it matter if a train driver is 10% better at math? If a gifted mathematician is 10% better at math they discover a new result.

Sounds like we really need the train drivers if we want gifted mathematicians to be able to focus on that.

I think the argument is that improving the train drivers maths skills by 10% has little to no return for society, while the same cannot be said of the mathematician.

You might be right about that being the argument.

I disagree. I highly value a society of people with basic education. I think a lot of people do. It's one of the things most people are happy to pay taxes for.

If our mathematicians are 10% better, we’re not going to have train drivers at all.

Train drivers will then move on to do more important work. You're always going to need other people if you want to progress at the fastest rate possible. Humans are social animals and all the great things we achieve are as a unit. An independent ant will never be able to compete with a colony.

They won’t though because there are only so many spots in higher educated fields. So you have the problem of baristas with phds and train drivers with advanced math degrees

Humans have never run out of work. By your reasoning trains themselves should have caused mass unemployment. With better tools we just do bigger stuff. This has been true for all of human history.

that's a problem of subsidized liberal education, not a problem of lack of education-based jobs

"We should institutionalize and normalize the inequities that are already present rather than working to reduce them" is a bad idea.

Try this: Google "IQ AS A PREDICTOR OF SUCCESS"

Depends on how one defines success.

It seems to me that the correlations for IQ are not too high for many of what people might call "success."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...

right or wrong, resources are often limited. when you have to choose between helping the strugglers catch up or preventing the gifted onces from getting bored then the strugglers are more important.

What makes them more important? I agree that in the short term it’s an allocation of resources problem, but the framework and criteria for the resource allocation model doesn’t seem clear to me, and I suspect is far from optimal.

The idea that we have to choose between helping struggler or gifted students is a false dilemma. Instead we should be asking why we aren’t allocating enough resources to education.

well, yes, obviously, but that is not in the power of those who have to make due with the resources currently available.

of course we should put more resources into education. worldwide, education is the primary tool to improve everyones life. and with that i don't mean just science and general knowledge, but also moral education that teaches us how to care for each other and for the world.

we need to learn not only how to make the world a better place, but also why. and we need to understand that it takes the contribution of everyone to achieve that. not just the gifted ones, which is why i believe that helping strugglers is more important right now, in order to reach a critical mass of people that understand this and sway public opinion towards more resouces in education, at which point we will be able to help everyone, gifted or not, to develop their full potential

It doesn't matter how much you put into education, the lions share is always going to go the the strugglers.

Note that I'm making no comment on whether I think this is fair or not.

Because, like almost everything else in the US, we treat students according to their class position.

There are social pressures why a kid wouldn't want to move between tracks. All their friends are there.

They may also want to avoid moving to a higher track to avoid teasing from colleagues for being a "smarty-pants" or perceived as too good for the friend group.

anecdata of one, but I was pretty far ahead of my class early on and as a result, I learned to behave like an idiot as a way to gain social acceptance. This culminated in resentment and general failure to socialize properly. It wasn't until 11th/12th grade that it clicked with me that I really ought to stop expending so much energy trying to maintain early childhood relationships and should instead try to make better friendships with my peers in advanced classes.

"too good" is elitist language, but I was clearly differently minded from my peers in early grade school and I think it harmed a lot more than it helped.

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

>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.

The way you wrote this it feels like you're about to say that Giavant tanked the program, and your parenthetical is sarcasm. I don't think that was your intent, but you may want to be aware in the future (and it could be an issue with the reader, of course.)

that's because Dr Steven Giavant was great at math, but nobody was teaching the kids english comp.

I was about to google "Steven Giavant" to see what flavor of serial killer he was.

Totally expected that comment to take a much darker turn.

Read it the same way.

I'd be very interested to hear more about Dr Giavant. I teach and I'm always looking to hear what works for folks.

> 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)

But won't it make it better for everyone else? Not even sure that bottom 5% should be in school. Just train them for a role that they can be competent in or decide that they will be a future ward of the state.

The bottom 5% is hopeless. Yeah it would be better if we did that, but people think about education as a means to provide the individual the chance for success in life rather than thinking about the broader impact of individuals on society and the disproportionate effect that the top has.

As far as most people are concerned, a kid that is acing everything is going to be fine in life and they don't worry about anything that could be going wrong there.

My parents were both [retired] teachers, and sadly this is the truth. Some bottom N%, I don’t know if it’s 1 or 5 or 10 or whatever, but they are absolutely beyond anyone’s ability to rehab, let alone educate. Often no fault of their own. Broken families, parents don’t care, gangs, lots of reasons. Any effort spent on them is wasted. They are inevitably fucked, and will end up in some kind of institution (prison, mental health) or unemployable, by age 25. It’s a sad reality and not something politicians like to talk about. We pretend that if we just whip the teachers so they teach harder, these people will miraculously grow up to be functional adults. It’s not going to happen.

I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.

> I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw. Spending 50% of the school budget on these blockheads is not going to rehab them.

What year and what school district did this happen in?

I mean I'm curious because that's violent assault, of the sort that generally makes the local papers.

I'm struggling to visualise how this would be physically possible.

ryandrake says:

"I remember a guy in my high school whose claim to fame was he dragged some other poor kid into the wood shop and filed his teeth down to nothing with a band saw."

Citation needed!8-))

Sounds like an urban myth (a good one)! Also, it is unclear that the story is relevant to this discussion. That is, one might say that grinding another's teeth with a shop band saw is quite clever, albeit an extremely unsociable (if not psychopathological) act."

Well, I was in Junior High at the time. It could have been exaggerated, but we all saw the ambulance. Both students were never seen around school again. The 80s were wild!

You make what you measure. We aren’t measuring whether gifted kids are challenged. That’ll never show up in data. But a kid who’s falling behind in reading who later catches up? That will.

That’s the reasoning anyway. It’s not like teachers are maniacally cackling over this situation - there’s significant turn-over. You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.

> You remove the testing and suddenly all these problematic incentives go away.

IME the teacher unions are also opposed to advanced learning. It requires teachers to do more work if classes are heterogeneous, since they would need to make up more lesson plans and assignments. And the teacher unions are opposed to tracking because then teachers don’t all have the same mix of students, which leads to member complaints. At least this is what we’ve been told.

It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but that's some of it.

First, creating lesson plans/assignments (and grading them) is extremely time consuming. So it's completely reasonable for teachers protest having their workload increased.

Second, things like gifted classes and magnet schools create a "creaming" effect, where the best students are pulled from regular classes and either sent to a separate school or in separate classes with high performers. If you're a math or English teacher that's getting professionally evaluated based on your students' performance on standardized tests, you are strongly incentivized to keep any high performing student in your class - the existence of gifted classes and magnets hurts you.

In the tech world, we sort of had a version of this during the Ballmer era of Microsoft, where engineering managers were sometimes reluctant to grade top performers too highly in fear their best developers will get reallocated. Some managers would give elite team members bad rankings just to keep them captive.

I agree that it's reasonable for teachers to not want to do more work. And I understand that creating tracks will separate students — but that doesn't require creating the perverse incentives you describe.

Teachers can simply be evaluated based on how their students do, relative to the students' prior performance. This wasn't a problem before 2014, when CA made GATE optional. Everyone understood that different teachers had different cohorts with different average abilities.

The teachers with lower-performing students weren't dinged because their students scored lower than the students in advanced classes. Instead, teachers could specialize in remedial, typical, or advanced learning.

It's partially babysitting. But also waiting for them to mature. They might make a great mechanic, truck driver or factory worker, all valid good and required jobs, but at 13-14 it is unsafe or they're not mature enough to drive or operate heavy machinery.

Slow walking someone through learning a vocation over 2-4 years while sprinkling in some academic outcomes is a good option.

> 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.

> 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...

We're living on a rock with limited lifespan.

Humanity itself is at risk from various extinction level events.

If you insist that it's okay for all gifted students to never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries, we're likely extinct sooner rather than later.

The nongifted people, even if all completely stop contributing to society, would not result in an extinction.

IOW, we are all relying on the gifted people to save us. Hobbling gifted people even slightly has a far worse impact than not helping non gifted people.

And yes, I am part of the non gifted.

> If you insist that it's okay for all gifted students to never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries

I did not write that.

> The nongifted people, even if all completely stop contributing to society, would not result in an extinction.

I'm not referring to not contributing, I'm referring to contributing negatively.

>> If you insist that it's okay for all gifted students to never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries

> I did not write that.

No, you wrote:

> it's OK if your gifted kid only has a PhD and a high paying job but not a Nobel prize.

Which is no different from "never exceed to the point of making ground breaking discoveries".

How do you imagine gifted people have or will save humanity from extinction-level events?

> How do you imagine gifted people have or will save humanity from extinction-level events?

Well, I don't see how the nongifted people will come up with any the technology required to leave this rock.

So the only other option is that we never leave, or we leave purely on the efforts of the gifted alone.

Considering humans evolved here I doubt it's possible to reach a compatible, alternative planet. And even if we could how likely are humans to survive there if they cannot live sustainably on their home planet?

I believe we are facing a strong case of naive techno-optimism. I'll give it a go: a 19 yo genius may find a way to capture kilograms of carbons in each leaf of peppermint through a new kind of photosynthesis, and by showing it to the world, we'll all be able to reproduce it and meet our carbon neutrality by 2050. And my uncle Joe, enlightened, will start spending his days drinking peppermint tea instead of making millions trading disposable plastic products from East Asia.

> I believe we are facing a strong case of naive techno-optimism.

I'm surprised to actually find that there are people who think that the life they currently enjoy was the result of train drivers and janitors.

Modern life, seems to me, a product of many ungifted people and a few gifted folks toiling for centuries. That includes relatively unskilled workers and those with decades of education.

Gifted people only ever educated and working in ivory towers would starve long before enhancing life for anyone, except for the efforts of their 'lessers'.

"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.

> 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.

Those kids are few and far between. Can’t imagine it’s a massive drain on the budget even if they cost 10 or 100x more to educate to the same level.

These children live in the prison. They also require extra staff who are paid more and their very own buildings.

> 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.

> 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?

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

If grade school is for socialization than it should be focused on socialization. Group activities, athletic competitions, creative projects, theater performances, etc.

Well, in many cases, it is. If the opposite of socialization is exclusively grinding problems, grade school is often quite closer to what you mention unless you deliberately seek a different style.

Yes, it should be!

"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.

  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.

Wait, what are you trying to say there?

It's not very clear to me, but the way I read it is that the school should say "if your parents help you at home, you don't need us at school". "So we'll just focus on those kids whose parents don't help them, because, you know, they have two jobs". Did I get that right?

My last Uber driver was a Pakistani, he told me his oldest son got into the Stuyvesant High School. He is one of those kids who needs to be challenged. Should he not be, because he's got "rich parents" ?

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'll try again:

Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.

If schools have everyone go at the same pace, some kids won't learn anything at school. Parents with resources can always pay for private tutors or, if that's not enough, pay for private school.

I'm glad you brought up Stuyvesant. Imagine if Stuyvesant didn't exist, and all students at all public high schools in NYC went through math at the same pace. Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school, and is too busy working to tutor his kids himself. Would it be fair that his smart kid has to go slow whilst an equally smart kid with rich parents will be doing Calculus BC in 11th grade?

The UK education system has the concept of "Progress 8" aka P8. It's somewhat controversial but tries to assess the progress a school makes with students between the ages of 12-16, compared to "baseline" - or the average for students with similar starting positions/demographics. It's a somewhat helpful way of assessing which schools are making a difference, but is quite blunt - eg you don't get a separate P8 score for high vs low performing students.

In the US, teachers' unions are in general against any objective measure of student progress.

The unions are powerful beyond what you'd expect (with a UK perspective) because, in many cases, the body on the other side of negotiations (school board) is comprised of teachers' friends (often ex-teachers and even former union leaders) or family members.

If you're interested in this topic, you might enjoy the book 'Race to the bottom'.

Thank you. I fully agree with what you are saying, but for some reason from your first post I came out with the opposite understanding.

> Imagine further that your Uber driver can't afford private tutors or private school

That's not hard to imagine. In fact I'm almost sure that indeed he can't afford private tutors (he told me he has 3 sons). As for private school, he even told me what school his eldest son was going to; it was a public one. I just googled it now, and US News ranks it as #1 among NYC's public middle schools [1]. I'd take that ranking with a solid grain of salt, but still, it's probably a very good middle school.

Now, here's the funny thing: 3 years ago, when his son moved from elementary to middle school, there were still selective public middle schools in NYC. Just one year later all selection was changed to lottery based. In the name of equity.

Thanks for your recommendation downthread for "Race to the bottom". I'll read it.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/new-york/ps-122-mamie-f...

> Schools should aim to maximize learning for every child, irrespective of their starting point or their parents' resources.

Lets say you have two kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum and you have $30,000 per year to spend on educating them. Do you spend $15k on each knowing that you'll get very unequal results? Or do you spend the bulk of they money on the one that needs the most help at the expense of the one who has the most natural talent?

Schools are making these types of decisions all the time. The average school does not spend 25% of their budget on the top 25% of their students.

Your question seems to assume that:

1. The availability of money is an important constraint on the ability of schools to support each student.

2. Schools (or those who run them: principals) have wide discretion to make the type of decision you present.

In my local school district (San Francisco Unified - SFUSD), neither of these is true, because:

- SFUSD's budget is about $27,000 per student per year[0]. Assuming teachers make no more than an average of $135k/year, and that average class size is at least 20, only 25% of that budget is required to pay for a teacher per class. There's a lot of headroom.

- Budgets (set by the district, not by individual schools or principals) are not designed to maximize learning for children, but to maximize employment for adults.

For that reason, I don't think your question makes sense.

Let me ignore that for now, and assume your question does make sense. What would it mean to allocate budget differently for kids at opposite ends of the natural talent spectrum? It sounds like the two kids would be in different classes, being taught by different teachers, perhaps with different class sizes. But that approach (which detractors call 'tracking') is disliked by many of the folks who control public education in the US.

Let's say you thought that the top 5% of students should be taught in separate classes, and that those classes should have larger class sizes, so these students only took 2.5% of the total budget. If you were to propose such a scheme, you'd be told it's unfair. Not unfair to the gifted students because they're receiving a lower per-capita share of resources, but unfair to everyone else because 'equity'.

[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sfusd-schools-budget-...

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

16 x 21 = (16 * 2 * 10) + 16 => (8 * 4 * 10) + 16 => 320 + 16 => 336

Is... that not how most people do mental math? I instinctively reduce everything to familiar patterns largely based on single digits numbers tables.

563 * 3557 is about 600 * 4000 => 6 * 4 * 100000 => about 2.4M

Are other people doing the standard algorithm visualized somehow?

I urge you to "figure out" 5633557 in base 9.

Guess what? You'll first need to manually* derive the approximate "multiplication tables" (for individual digits), only then you'll be able to multiply multi-digit numbers.

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

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.

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.

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

IME the implication is not a universal truth.

So? We should not just throw the baby out with the bathwater. God forbid some people get it wrong, the current education system is not exactly the shining beacon of 'good.'

If there's one thing I hate about social media especially, it's that we must skip all nuance to yell in absolutes.

"It's almost like" suggests to to me the author thinks homeschooling is the obvious and best answer, perhaps that folks are afraid to admit.

My experience has been that homeschooling has been worse than public schooling, even where parents have been professional teachers.

No doubt it can be better for some and in some areas may be the only sane choice. Some stats even indicate better academic outcomes.

Yet I've personally seen it bring a lot of strife, unreasonable expectations, and pain into the home. And the outcomes I've seen don't inspire confidence. As a group, at least where I've lived, homeschooling parents: don't give the kids a choice, do it for their own selfish reasons, produce kids without enough socializing among peers, and often indoctrinate the kids with religious 'teachings' that undermine critical thinking skills.

Oh for sure, if you're going to try and replicate 'the classroom' at home it's going to be pain. It needs some different thinking, especially around what the child does and doesn't actually need. As I said, it's not perfect, and people get it 'wrong,' but we're comparing to schools here (generalisation, there are of course very good schools and teachers around), which I don't think represents 'good' to compare to. It is a parent's prerogative if they wish to instill religious dogma and ignorance into their kids, unless we think we should enforce social conformity broader than what is created in the classroom? Schools are certainly not busy ensuring kids have strong critical thinking skills. Just look at the way universities are shutting down troubling topic debates for the mindsets arriving there.

I'm curious what does 'enough socialising' mean?

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.

Yet we all keep sending our kids to these places.

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.

Which after school programs do you use?

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.

> 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?

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".

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.

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).

I have nothing against contest math (I was a USAMO qualifier in high school), but contest math isn’t enough if a kid has to sit through years of tedium during regular classroom hours. Also, there is a large difference between contest problems which focus on cleverness and real-world problems which focus on conceptual understanding. Many kids prefer one or the other, and I think it’s a mistake to assume that contest math works for all kids who might be mathematically inclined.

Re: goals —- the goal is to let the kid learn as fast as they want assuming they have solid foundations. If they like proofs let them do proofs, if they like applications let them do that. Just don’t force them to sit in a classroom doing busywork for the most formative years of their lives.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

> Their parents don’t care

Pretty presumptive.

The thing speaks for itself.

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. :)

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Other than that, what’s ur story?

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.

During Covid, my wife and I needed our kids busy until at least noon during the week.

At the time, we felt khanacademy was our best choice. Between March and July that year, my 1st grader got all the way thru fourth grade math.

He is a rising 5th grader now. Last summer he took courses on unreal engine. This summer, he finished 5th grade math on khan academy in 4 days.

I don’t think he particularly gifted but math so far does come easy to him.

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.

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?

> 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.

> 6th grader getting a perfect SAT and ACT score

Almost certainly an exaggeration :)

> 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.

> 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.

In our area there were lots of secular activities available, but unfortunately that's not universally true.

Many people select places to live based on school districts; it may make sense to put the same amount of weight on quality of homeschooling options. But even then, that's not going to be universally available in a nearby location.

There are also potentially online groups to connect with others (even more so now than when I was that age), which could help with finding and organizing groups.

In a lot of the US, homeschooling is entirely about religious separatism, not better educational outcomes. My wife’s old moms group would keep trying to sell us on homeschooling and the sales pitch was always about legally avoiding certain topics that public school covers. It’s never: “homeschooling lets your kid zoom past the shitty public school system”. It’s always “homeschooling lets you teach from the Bible and protects your kids from evolution and sex ed (and nowadays: protects your kids from “woke”, whatever that is)”.

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.

> 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.

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.

Your argument would be valid if there is no risk of very bad social or academic outcomes at a private or public school. But there are kids in the public school system who graduate without being able to read and write and it doesn't take much to find students with extreme social issues.

Perhaps the risks are just inherent in growing up?

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

There are plenty of kids in public schools with and creating social problems. There are plenty of kids who "graduate" while being functionally illiterate.

So yes it is a concern, but it is a concern for kids in general and acting like it is a problem for homeschoolers would be like telling kids that "growing up to be stupid is a risk for red head children." It is either being done with intent to bully red heads or just based on ignorance..

These are not valid comparisons. The concern is lack of socialization not behavior of some selectively chosen public school kids.

With your selection, it is inherently showing a disgusting bias.

Disgusting bias? I'm just saying that most of the concerns people unfamiliar with homeschooling usually raise are risks inherent in childhood in general.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had the exact same experience!

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.

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.

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...

Thanks! I'll give it a shot!

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.

> 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

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

Here it is as ebooks [1]. $99 ($74.25 for MAA and AMS members). On sale for $59.40. I think the sale price is just for MAA and ASM members).

[1] https://bookstore.ams.org/gardner-set/

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

A few reasons. First and foremost: I had lost all will to work hard at all. Between mental health struggles and video game addiction as a means to cope with it, I just wasn't mentally up to the effort needed. I put in the bare minimum and got by because I was clever.

The second reason was that if I had graduated on time, it was a bad year to do it. The province was phasing out 'grade 13', called OAC[0], which had existed for decades as an optional pre-university year for students in high school. It was the last year it existed, so there would be almost twice as many students vying for places in post-secondary schools. Why compete when I could be lazy and have an easier time?

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Academic_Credit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

I think the more appropriate metaphor would be: imagine your company’s founder asking you to produce more output in the same time.

It’s not surprising parents will expect more outcomes from the time their kids spend at school, than the teachers delivering the teaching will.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Can you explain how this would work for math? How can one student learn about fractions or exponents when other students are doing addition?

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

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.

> Except, it seems to.

Based on what evidence?

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

Ease of testing is not the root of the fetishization of STEM. Perceived benefit to personal economic prospects (and active propagandization [0] around that by people trying to increase labor supply and decrease labor costs in STEM fields to unlock greater profits) is.

[0] note that I am not arguing that this perception isn’t, to a significant extent, true—that it is perceived to be is key to behavior, and that it is propagandized heavily is key to perception, but none of that is inconsistent with truth.

>>[...] and speak in front of people without saying "um" and "like" every two seconds.

You just added a third skill -- public speaking. You're right that the bar shouldn't be so low, but we are where we are, and families need to figure out ways to mitigate. I don't believe the NMSQT has a verbal (literally, oral) component, although one (ferverently!) hopes that clear writing translates more easily to oral speaking skills for the child.

It sounds like you're saying that it's impossible for a parent to support their child to 'accelerate' in math whilst simultaneously supporting their attainment of beyond-grade-level-expectation reading and written/oral communication skills.

Have I understood that correctly?

I'm not saying it's "impossible". I'm saying that "parents generally don't do it."

I suspect it's because measuring it is more difficult. Math is easy to measure. "Can you do those problems?" English is a lot harder to measure and takes mroe time. Proofreading a paper takes time--and you have to know how to write. Listening to a speech takes time. Discussing a book means that the parent needs to read it, too.

If that’s your theory, then I don’t see how reducing time spent on math would help.

If math requires so much less time, then the amount freed up wouldn’t be enough for the type of support you expect for ELA.

If parents shy away from ELA because it requires a type of effort that math does not, then reducing math isn’t going to somehow make them more willing to read books or learn to proofread.

I’m honestly surprised that you think slowing down math will help with ELA.

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.

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.

“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.

> 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...

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.

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

> How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

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

Not sure why people downvote jokes lol

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

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

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

9.8 meters per second squared.

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

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.

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?

  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.

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