It's unfair to generalize about "these 'math wizards'" or "these parents" just based on the context of the article. On the topic of "math competitions" or rewa

It's unfair to generalize about "these 'math wizards'" or "these parents" just based on the context of the article. On the topic of "math competitions" or rewarding kids for "being the best," "being the smartest", etc... I gotta say that really didn't work for me. I'm very slow at math (in a 'big picture' way), even though I love it. So making me do that anxiety inducing speed competition actually just made me feel like I was awful at math. The whole "speed multiplication tables" thing in 4th grade honestly made it impossible for me to quickly remember my 7's, 8's and 9's calmly or easily consistently, and even to this day I still have to think about it. So I see what you're getting at. But I'm not convinced that's all there is to the programs described in the article. While you're probably right that plenty of still parents put unwarranted pressure their kids to be good at math (or anything for that matter), I think you might be injecting your own experiences into this article a little bit. edit: one more thought... for me, math is a kind of spiritual practice. It is a way of exploring perspectives of things that would otherwise be assumed, under the radar. So for me it's very important, even if I don't "do something with the math" to have a healthy, creative relationship with it. A lot of people are effectively superstitious about math. It's a bummer. So called "advanced math" is usually just the most elementary stuff. Number lines and venn diagrams, sets and groups... these are things that people use every day! I wish more people had confident intuition about these kinds of things so that we could elevate beyond just taking our cultural mathematical constructs and perspectives as givens and evolve them to other possibilities.