Decades ago when I was in school, East Germany's "polytechnical" 10 year elementary school they sent me to "Mathe-Olympiaden" (at least county-level math contes

Decades ago when I was in school, East Germany's "polytechnical" 10 year elementary school they sent me to "Mathe-Olympiaden" (at least county-level math contests) and to after-school math courses because they thought I had talent. Maybe I did, but when I saw the tasks they gave us, and when I saw how the others solved it I simply stopped caring and just wasted time. We got a nice food bag with sweets and the day off school, that was good enough for me. For example, loooong before we ever heard anything about this mathematical field, and this was way before the Internet so unless somebody tells you about something you have no chance of having heard about it as a young kid, we got a combinatorics question. Everybody in the room started writing down every single combination - which is why I knew what they were doing, neat columns and rows filling several pages that could only have been for this particular problem, and I had almost started doing the same. I thought it was WAY beyond silly that I should spend my time on this problem. I knew how to solve it in this simple fashion, there was no chance to come up with the real solution on the spot, so I switched to "annoyed" mode and gave up. The after-hours math club wasn't much better, nothing deep or substantial, just some riddles. TODAY I'd just go to Khan Academy, edX, Coursera and ignore my teachers. The Internet is great. Oh and cat pictures.