That is indeed terrifying. Not to take away from the importance of a well-thought-out program, learning materials, or competent teachers, I was drawing attenti

That is indeed terrifying. Not to take away from the importance of a well-thought-out program, learning materials, or competent teachers, I was drawing attention to the immense time and effort that some students would invest often with an institutionalized help. In our case, the programs were standardized, the textbooks were virtually the same throughout the union. Barred special schools and eccentric teachers, all kids were studying the same things at the same time. What differentiated the bespoken Siberians from us was that order of magnitude difference in the time put in. It challenged my sense of normalcy in many ways: people being this good at math without being apparent geniuses, universities teaching math extra 4 hours a day, realization that there is enough undergrad calculus to last 3K hours.