OK, I read it. It seems pretty simplistic tbh. I too was talented in math and got fairly little encouragement from my math teachers. Despite this, I had the ma

OK, I read it. It seems pretty simplistic tbh. I too was talented in math and got fairly little encouragement from my math teachers. Despite this, I had the math bug hard and on my own initiative took college math classes up the advanced undergraduate level at the time. I went on to take a lot of math but not to become a mathematician. In a sense, the world of advanced academic subjects and the world of sports have a certain resemblance - there's room for only a handful at the top, especially now days. There are probably more tenured mathematicians in the world than there are professional sports stars but there aren't many of either and "feeders" tend to produce more of potential stars than can ever fully succeed. So coaches pushing everyone with athletic talent towards a professional sports track actually do severe disservice to lot of disadvantaged students. Someone going a long way in math will end up with more skills than the nearly successful athlete but thinking about it, if teachers are going to be encouraging, they should encourage a balance of learning and let the highly decide by themselves if they want to go the extreme. Which is to say HS math teachers should be different but probably not more like coaches. Another HS anecdote - another friend of mine, the son of an actual math professor (who probably had more raw talent than myself), came back from a Harvard interview with the comment - "I'm not going to be a mathematician. I found out that to be a mathematician you have to be always thinking, at the grocery store thinking, because all of the easy problems have been solved and to solve the hard problems you need to think 24/7". This isn't to say that math shouldn't be taught differently. What's needed imo is a curriculum where teachers evangelize math, and math-as-mental-discipline, for most students rather than math-as-needed for career or math for the most advanced.