I totally disagree with this! It isn't a fault of the curriculum, it's the fault of your teachers. I had my entire HS/college education in India. And if I may s

I totally disagree with this! It isn't a fault of the curriculum, it's the fault of your teachers. I had my entire HS/college education in India. And if I may say so, I would put myself in the "exceptional" category as well: I was in the international math olympiad, and rarely scored less than 100% in school tests. Anyway, I found the math classes thoroughly enjoyable. The teachers pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I didn't disrupt the class. I'd usually be a few chapters ahead, or helping out the kid next to me, or something like that. Very often, the curriculum was challenging even for me. We had Fermat's infinite descent in the eighth grade! I distinctly remember ruler and compass construction problems in my ninth grade that I'd have great trouble solving even now. The good thing was, the super-hard parts that I've mentioned were all optional and were never on the exams. It worked out perfectly -- students who were both smarter than average and self-motivated would spend most of our time on those parts. My teachers were happy to answer my questions about that stuff after class, even though it was irrelevant as far as our grades were concerned. One teacher in particular was amazing. She rewarded outside-the-box thinking, and if there was more than one way to solve a problem, she let us present them all. She acknowledged when she was wrong. Damn, writing this has made me all nostalgic and want to find her and thank her :-) One time, I was working through a textbook that was two or three grade levels ahead. I had a question that she couldn't answer right away. She went home, did her research, and helped me out the next day. How awesome is that? We had one horrendously bad teacher. They fired her after two months. Some other great memories.. we all learned to program in the fifth grade. That was tons of fun. A computer cost more than a building back then in India :-) Vector calculus in the ninth grade. And so on. Of course, everything except math and science was a disaster, but there's no way there was anything wrong with the math curriculum. I'm quite aware that 90% of my friends at other schools had completely unmotivated teachers, but again, not a fault of the curriculum.