Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The ba

Idk about you,maybe you won the Putnam, but when I was 15-20 my brain was still working on getting fiber down for the last mile of the prefrontal cortex. The bandwidth required to really grok calculus (or even write a coherent essay on the metaphors of The Great Gatsby) would have been a bit untenable. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been given these types of challenges at a younger age, if only to be forced to learn time management skills sooner. However the intuitive understanding of something like the mechanism by which integrals work would have been lacking, and resulted in an employee that lacked the ability to use the lesson taught by that particular type of abstraction in a diverse and creative way.