19 ms·

How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

150 points by sebg 3y ago

seeknotfind 3y ago
As fast as your kid wants should be taken into account, but like, if your kid is alienating themselves, maybe take them to a baseball game. If your kid hates math, the answer isn't not teaching them at all. :D Personally, I loved math, would have loved to be accelerated, but I didn't know this was something I could ask for and get.
- mlyle 3y ago
  A lot of the reason why your kid might be alienating themselves is being thrown into an environment where they're a couple standard deviations outside the mean and have to confront tedious busywork. It's hard for many people to accept, but kids who are a couple sigma above the mean can end up having nearly as much problems in an inflexible academic environment from kids who are a couple sigma below. My eldest is a very high performer who had behavioral issues in upper elementary. A whole lot of getting him to the point where he's maximally successful with peers, in other classrooms, and in sports and other endeavors was getting him into situations with appropriate challenge and opportunities for expression.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Yeah I don't always buy it when people advocate for very lax education. I was part of the upperclass-hippie parenting experiment, and in retrospect I suspect it hurt me far more than it helped. Given the choice I would always watch cartoons, play video games, and cheat the system all I could. It clearly works for some kids though.
klyrs 3y ago
As a mathematician with a kid who thinks he loves math (but doesn't love effort), I try to expose him to fun math. I also casually reveal upcoming concepts (currently negative numbers and fractions), so he'll struggle less when his curriculum demands it. But I never push. When he asks for more, I'm always there. When his attention wanders, that's my cue to shut up.
- QuarterReptile 3y ago
  Interestingly, the argument I've heard for math focus is to do it because it's something hard to use as a training ground for perseverance, which is nearly the reverse of your situation.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    If that's coming from within, I'm all for it. Pushing that on a child as young as mine should be criminal.
kevinventullo 3y ago
Going fast when the child wants to go fast and slow when they need to go slow is I think most of what makes one-on-one teaching superior to classroom teaching. But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap. It doesn't need to. Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers (such as by being intentionally scheduled in the middle what would otherwise be school hours). And, of course, those are just the mass social activities, as opposed to small groups of friends.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    Public schooling has socializing built in - home schooling has focused 1:1 attention built in. (In their ideal state, respectively.) Home schooling takes extra work to add socializing, public schooling takes extra work to add one on one instruction. Generally. There are exceptions out there, and there are opportunities to hybridize the practices. But again - that takes work. Public school also functions as a means to take the work of watching and educating a child during the day off of parents’ plates, so they can remain at least partially employed, or even just have a small slice of their life back. Homeschooling is a luxury most can’t afford.
  - kashunstva 3y ago
    > Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers During the five years I homeschooled my daughter, I found that this was true but with one enormous caveat. We’re a secular family and homeschooling in many areas of the U.S. means that these groups are often organized around non-secular activities and principles. To each, their own. But I’m not going to sign a “statement of faith” to participate in a homeschool group. As a consequence, it really did feel that we were going it alone. Larger metropolitan areas are probably more inclusive; but otherwise secular homeschoolers have struggles in finding the right fit.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
doix 3y ago
When I was a kid (elementary school) I ended up in the remedial maths class. My parents were shocked because at home they were teaching me things far beyond what was taught at school. I have no recollection of any of this, but apparently I was just a little shit and refused to answer questions at school because they were "too easy" and "boring". Not sure what the moral of the story is, but consider the second order effects of accelerating your kids.
- noelwelsh 3y ago
  I don't think you were being a little shit. I think that's a perfectly reasonable reaction to being asked to jump through arbitrary hoops that were meaningless to you.
- r00fus 3y ago
  LOL I was in remedial math in 5th grade in one (red) state and winning math competitions by grade 7 in another state. Bored to tears and misdiagnosed capabilities…
gnicholas 3y ago
Article wasn’t great IMO, but looking forward to the comments. We found that our kid was excited about math until she started doing it in school, where they just assigned busywork (zero times tables? Check!) and refused to let her learn with other kids at her level. We just kept doing math outside of school, for two reasons. In part, it was so she could learn more math, but equally important it was so she could see how to handle problems where the answer wasn’t immediately apparent to her. Otherwise she would just skate through elementary school, never being forced to persevere or really apply herself. Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it. Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today. If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".
  - ForOldHack 3y ago
    Pretty much it was that way in the late 1960s... until... we got a computer programming class, but this is about math: In Berkeley, they had a program called 'Seed' that had a great idea, give middle school students access to PhD math students. It was going fairly well, until Dr Steven Giavant stepped into a classroom and wanted to teach the students the frontiers and history of math. ( look this guy up! Genius at Math, Super genius at education. ) I know that besides me, 6 other students got degrees in math, and we suspect 2 more. Absurd. The norm was 1.2, even for Berkeley. He shared his enthusiasm for math, and the children got it. We only found out about it by accident, when my Abstract Algebra professor said that they were in Berkeley Math at that time. ( 15+ years later ). And the second influence was Michael Griffin, who taught computer programming, when I asked him "How do I get to actually learn Calculus?" he basically laid out the curriculum that led to my degree. With two more break throughs, I now can use this to inspire sucess in math. Thanks Steven, and thanks Mike. https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804 https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804
MrMan 3y ago
[dead]
mattgrice 3y ago
If your child is interested in engineering, and won't be able to go to a private school, it is best to have Calc I and II done before they go to college. At state schools, Calc is typically a weed-out class with huge lectures and they want a certain percentage of students to not be successful because these classes serve as a gating function to the engineering school. Combined with other freshman semester distractions and adjustment it's a good idea to have it out of the way. Other than that I'd say the best acceleration is enrichment. Teach stuff like proofs, "how to solve it" by Polya, gain intuition about linear algebra and complex numbers. Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines.
- tzs 3y ago
  > Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines All of Gardner's Scientific American columns are conveniently available on CD-ROM for under $40 [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883855453 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883855453
  - epups 3y ago
    That's a great deal. Unfortunately CD ROMs have not been convenient for like a decade...
    - tzs 3y ago
      Here it is as ebooks [1]. $99 ($74.25 for MAA and AMS members). On sale for $59.40. I think the sale price is just for MAA and ASM members). [1] https://bookstore.ams.org/gardner-set/ https://bookstore.ams.org/gardner-set/
fn-mote 3y ago
This is such a fraught topic. First point: a lot of students get "accelerated" by their parents as a way of improving their academic performance and aiming the toward an elite college. Of course you look outstanding in school if you have covered the material a year before at the local cram center. These "accelerated by rote" students memorized the multiplication tables early, so they were put in "advanced math"... but their rate of comprehension is ordinary. Their problem solving skills are ordinary. They took "advanced math" in summer school so when they take the course in the ordinary school year they have a leg up. I don't think this has to be bad, but it's not the "gifted acceleration" and can be tough on these students if expectations are that they are "fast". A second point: acceleration traditionally means moving through the same material faster. If you have a gifted child PLEASE work with them on a breadth of things, don't just race them through multivariable calculus. Math contests are a good source of broader problems. Art of Problem Solving gets a huge shout-out for what is now years and years of acceleration and enrichment material. Look at them if you are a parent in this situation. (Actually, they are suitable for self-study.) Edit: I am all in favor of kids learning new things as fast as they want. I don't see racing through the standard curriculum (in any country) as a route to happiness. Random brain-stimulating math book: Donald Knuth, "Surreal Numbers".
- pgustafs 3y ago
  I think problem solving math is definitely fun and can be a huge source of confidence, but I don't see why "racing" through the standard curriculum is a negative. Why should a smart kid do a million multiplication/division problems for 5 years when they would have a ton more fun and get a lot more long-term utility from learning some stat/algebra/geometry? If a kid demonstrates mastery of a concept, it's a lot more bizarre and potentially damaging to force them to relearn the same material over and over.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    I think it's more that there are massive large fields of math that are just left out in the race to calculus. I had a friend who grew up in Japan and he said he learned a lot more number theory-style stuff.
fn-mote 3y ago
[dupe]
gpt5 3y ago
I think that many parents fall into the trap of acceleration to address their kids need to be challenged. While acceleration help mitigate some unnecessary repetition, by definition acceleration cannot go deeper than the standard curriculum, and deeper is where things become interesting and where you develop mathematical thinkers. My children attend a school district where the norm is enrolling kids in after-school math programs. According to the standardized tests run by the school, about 50% of the students are pacing a full grade ahead. The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10%. While the skip test covers the standard material, it does so with trickier questions, tripping up many students. They're moving fast, but without much depth. What I found works best is to pick a challenging and exciting curriculum that allows talented students to immerse themselves and experience the excitement and satisfaction of intellectual discovery. There are a few examples of such programs. The most popular of which is the curriculum offered by AoPS (art of problem solving), which starts at first grade. Following this path naturally offers a large advantage to learning at the highest levels. If they are still moving faster with the rigorous curriculum - sure, let them accelerate.
- jibe 3y ago
  Accelerate is a misnomer, it is the go deeper, advanced track. There might be a one time jump ahead, but that’s not the heart of it.
- mabbo 3y ago
  > The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10% I ran into trouble with this as a kid. They put me ahead a grade in math in grade 2 because I could handle it and the class was a 2/3 split (half grade 2s, half 3s), so I just did math with the grade 3s. This worked going forward as there were 3/4 and 4/5 split classes at the school too. But then after a couple years, I was reaching the point where the school only went to grade 5 and the teachers didn't even have books for grade 6s. So they skipped me entirely ahead a grade. Into a new school (since the previous school only went to 5). With none of my friends. My other subjects suffered because I was only really good at math. My social life died- kids are assholes at that age and pull each other down. And my mental health was pretty messed up for a long time. I wound up taking an extra year of high school just so I wouldn't be in college at 17.
crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
This is very easy to answer: Design toys and environments for them that promote the development of infinity category theoretical intuitions. Let them decide the pace from there.
markoutso 3y ago
I keep wondering how articles make it up to the first page. This one, for example, an article hosted by substack. A service with terrible user interface, that tries to make you think that someone is doing you a favour for letting you read their literature without paying, whereas... the opposite is true. The article itself is irrelevant but since I read it, I can tell that it is a classical nonsensical piece on the benefits of listening to children. The author lacks any formal qualification on teaching from what I could also find. In other terms a complete time waster.
graycat 3y ago
Early calculus in 60 seconds: Consider a car with a speedometer that says how fast are moving and an odometer that says how far have gone. Given the data from the odometer can find what the speedometer values were. That is the first half of calculus, differentiation. And given the data from the speedometer, can find what the odometer values were. That is the second half of calculus, integration. If start with the odometer values, differentiate and get the speedometer values and integrate those values, then will get back the odometer values -- that is the fundamental theorem of calculus. Differentiation is related to subtraction, and integration is related to addition. Might be able to teach that to kids in the fourth grade.
ckz 3y ago
An interesting argument I've heard recently (but haven't yet come to a personal conclusion on, so don't take this as an endorsement): Emphasize math for older kids when their brain is better prepared for abstraction (some even argue age 10+!). Emphasize language and character for younger kids, especially because at _very_ young ages that's really what they're soaking in anyway. The logic here being efficiency. An older child can learn in a week what a preschooler may drill for months. Cover some math facts in primary school to build a strong foundation, but strong language skills compound against _all_ education and should come first, with a heavier shift to advanced mathematics later in schooling. Again, don't know if I ascribe yet (I was accelerated in math at a young age myself) or how this really looks in the real world, but definitely an argument that wise people make in good faith. Probably impossible in a standardized school setting. :)
- davidguetta 3y ago
  This idea that abstraction can only be leart at 10 is the most bullshit I've heard today. I was doing moderately advanced equations at 7 and it's also widely known great chess player started being great way under 9. Where is that nonsensical idea come from ? Don't delay children.
- jimmychoozyx 3y ago
  Some would say Math is a language. And I agree-- teach a 2nd language to kids before they reach 12. But I would also want to teach my own children advanced math during that time, if possible. From what I've read in passing, it seems some former soviet countries of Eastern Europe & Russia teach advanced math to students a few years earlier than the US does. It seems that private South Asian-majority schools in certain cities-- such as Houston-- also teach advanced math earlier than public schools.
- sn9 3y ago
  Here's an old educational experiment that supports the idea of literacy before numeracy: http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/three.html http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/three.html
- theptip 3y ago
pgustafs 3y ago
Agree, but I don't like the framing of "accelerating." Math in school is for the median student. If you want a quantitative career or just want to have quantitative skills, you should be aiming for way above median. Aiming for median outcomes makes zero sense in the current world. Find your niche and hit it hard. Kids intuitively understand this -- they like doing what they're good at. Unfortunately, most schools are not good at serving this need. A very important part of being a parent is to encourage kids to start compounding positive habits/learning early, and to prevent the schools from dragging them back to the median.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Right! No one talks about basketball acceleration or football acceleration.
stuaxo 3y ago
I was really impressed at Number Blocks, which my daughter and friends were all watching from Nursery age on BBC iplayer at home. By age 4 she already had an idea about square numbers and infinity. I honestly wish Number Blocks went all the way up to university level.
- MandieD 3y ago
  Oh, glad to hear that - my nearly-three year old is obsessed with the Alpha Blocks right now, and we saw the Alpha Blocks meet Number Blocks episode a few days ago.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
I spent 2nd and 3rd grade in a grade 1-6 environment (public school). Every student got the same series of math tests and instruction began at the level they failed a test. Kids could retest whenever they wanted. Older kids were assigned younger kids to broadly mentor. This was the early 1970s. It was by every measure a success. I haven't seen it's like since.
- JJMcJ 3y ago
  Sometimes tiny schools in isolated areas will have something like that. Where there aren't enough kids to have separate grades.
dboreham 3y ago
My sons are both in college now, but during the K-12 years I took the approach that I could not try to "accelerate" other than by offering help with homework. That is, I didn't introduce any concepts that would arrive later in their curriculum. Instead, I introduced concepts (verbally, while driving to school and so on) that would never be covered at the HS level. These included: the idea that some things are provably unprovable (e.g. halting problem), that some things are provably impossible (e.g. constructibility of polygons), that everything in mathematics has a history around why it was invented, and a story as to what it's useful for, that generally doesn't get taught but can be very helpful in appreciating why you might want to learn about it.
hardwaregeek 3y ago
I had a good time at Russian math circle. It was competition math but also math proofs which helped instill rigor as a core concept. Which in turn helped when I started programming because really a lot of programming is about invariants and proofs of sort.
raymondh 3y ago
In our case, the main push to accelerate is to get more knowledgeable teachers. While experimenting with number sequences in Excel, our child said, "I found e, 2.718281828". When he went to show off his discovery, his two math teachers said that they had never heard of it before.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  We pay far too little to get people who are very strong at math. This sort of lack of knowledge was not uncommon in my urban school district, the only teachers who were truly qualified were all doing it as essentially charity work after their high-powered careers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
twump 3y ago
My 6 year old is doing basic algebra and geometric proofs and I worry it's going to make him bored in math class. But even if my kid is a genius it's proven to me that we can be moving our kids much faster than we do. I don't think kids in Singapore have special DNA.
viraptor 3y ago
I really like the idea of unrestricted learning (as long as it actually checks that you master the material). I remember reading a university level physics book and getting lots of fun math from it while in high school. Currently (many years later) I'm going through the https://mathacademy.com/ https://mathacademy.com/ ML course to get good foundations in that area. But the service itself starts at very basic math and allows you to go as fast as you want all the way to uni courses (with lots of practice and reviews), so I'm hoping to use it with my kid in the future.
- albntomat0 3y ago
  What're your thoughts on MathAcademy? I heard about it here on HN several months ago, and it's been on my list of things to check out, once I finish my current two side projects.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Love it, 4 months into math for ML with a review of some earlier topics. It's actually almost entirely about practice in small chunks, which is different from many other services I've seen. (Means no sitting through longer videos / explanations) Basically it's what I would've really liked my school math to be. Each question is only a couple of minutes or so, so I really appreciate being able to do it here and there when possible, instead of having to dedicate full hours to the course. I've been following it being developed for years hoping to use it with my kid, but ended up using it myself first. Also, seeing progress like this appeals to this nerd https://i.postimg.cc/SNjYL3vd/Screenshot-2023-07-30-09-03-01-24-3aea4af51f236e4932235fdada7d1643.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/SNjYL3vd/Screenshot-2023-07-30-09-03-01...
    - albntomat0 3y ago
      Thanks! I'll give it a shot!
lanstin 3y ago
I took 3,4, 5 and 6th grade math in 3rd grade. taught my self algebra and some easy calculus in 4 and 5th grade, then I went to math camp in 7th grade where i got credit for algebra 1 and 2 and took geometry and trig and precalc (passing some standardized test for each module). my school let me take BC calculus in 8th grade and then go to night school for math for 9th thru 12th grade. i was otherwise unaccelerated and had a pretty normal teenager hood. i highly recommend it, especially for math where there is so much to learn; even by the end of undergrad, the newest math i was learning was from the 1950s and 1960s. plus it makes a lot of other things a lot easier to study. and it's fun to learn hard math; the years when i had to study math i already knew where really dull.
- geniium 3y ago
  Other than that, what’s ur story?
  - lanstin 3y ago
    Relatively ordinary. My teachers wanted me to go into grad school, which had sort of been my plan my whole life, but i had authority issues and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I also enjoyed programming so I let myself get pulled into internet programming, landing at AOL after a few jobs at smaller places. Since then I have been programming, except for a stint as a stay at home dad. My youngest just went to college and I have enrolled in a masters program in math at a local uni, weirdly enough. Learning math is still a profoundly fun thing for me. Knowing a lot of maths has improved my life a lot but didn’t let me discover fusion or anything. I have written a lot of software and improved more software and helped people learn about how to understand software systems, but that has all been in service to keeping my family afloat; now that responsibility is lessening, I might try again to have a more maths career. I was also sexually abused by a close relative from age four to about age six, so probably I would not have been up to the rigors of a doctoral program or an academic career. Till I got my self together, the scarcity of good programmers in the job market gave me the buffer I needed to succeed despite the authority issues. But the accelerated math was solely a blessing. A lot of the people from the math camp (Duke’s Talent Identification Program) have had very solid careers but so far as I know not many Nobel prizes or Fields Medalists or whatever.
darkclouds 3y ago
Keep it fun, broaden their horizons so rather than just teach this is how you do x and how you do y, give them some examples of where they might expect to find x being used or where you might find y being used in real life so they having something relate to. Once you get past basic maths, a lot of it isn't instantly recognisable in the real world, partly because its behind closed office doors, so explain that some maths might be found in banking, some in mapping, some in hedge funds, physics, computer games, gambling, detective work etc etc. Dont force anything because no one can predict the future and if things dont work out in the future, you dont want them looking back at this time as lost opportunities to have done other things, even socialising or learning something else, even though I doubt the demand for maths skills will ever die out apart from maybe WW3 breaking out.
lordnacho 3y ago
At the moment the plan is just AoPS. Looks good to me, I bought all the books. Seems to be roughly up to what I learned in high school, starting towards the end of primary school. My kid plays around with math a lot. Asks interesting questions. Nothing has taken shape yet, so I just try to answer. But also try to get him to work through the AoPS. He likes it actually, there's always a question in there that he doesn't get and he likes the challenge. What I don't really hear anything about is how to get the kid to self-ignite. He did this with chemistry. He knows the periodic table, he knows what the electron shells are, what acids and bases are. He asks interesting questions. I even hooked him up with my friend who is a PhD so he can ask his weird questions about molecules. On the math side, he just needs a little nudge. Same with programming. I just get the feeling he's not far from simply studying everything himself, I simply don't know what to do to spark it.
thrawa8387336 3y ago
We need to evaluate schools by impact improving outcomes of the P80 not the P50 or the P0. Percentiles
JackFr 3y ago
How about just get out of your kid’s way? I muddled through long division and all the other crap I already knew in middle school while I was devouring all the Martin Gardiner collections and the Time Life series on mathematics. My parents dropped me at the library once a week and had some idea what I was doing — certainly they appreciated good grades, but there was not handwringing over support from the school.
- refurb 3y ago
  This is kind of my thought. What one typically finds is that kids good at X, are interested in X. You can't force them to be interested, but you can offer opportunities to see if they are. Some kids just won't find math interesting, and likely will just barely pass the requirements in school. And you as a parent can't change that. And to be honest, it's not the end of the world. I know plenty of successful people who are terrible at math.
beebmam 3y ago
Stop relying on schools to entirely educate your children. School education is a baseline. Moreover, it's not entirely up to parents to "accelerate", much less educate, their children. Let your children explore the world outside of a coercive environment, and they'll probably surprise you. If your children don't want to explore the world when given the freedom to do so, then something might be holding them back, like addiction or depression. In the end, your child is going to become an adult one day and they'll need that self-motivation to be successful.
jrflowers 3y ago
At most you shouldn’t accelerate kids more than 4-5Gs, maybe up to 6G if it’s only for a few seconds.
aappleby 3y ago
9.8 meters per second squared.
ezekiel68 3y ago
> How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? Definitely not to the speed of light. I understand 99% of that may be alright.
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Not sure why people downvote jokes lol
bsder 3y ago
Gee, instead of accelerating our children in math, how about we accelerate them in reading and writing--two skills which are FAR more important to their eventual success in life than anything related to math.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Going faster and/or deeper in math doesn't prevent a child from reading or writing.
  - bsder 3y ago
    Except, it seems to. There are a finite number of hours in a day. If you take time to push one thing, you lose time for something else. I would much rather see children being pushed to read well and efficiently, write logically and coherently with at least decent grammar, and speak in front of people without saying "um" and "like" every two seconds. The problem is, it's very difficult to measure progress in those easily with a single test, so nobody values them. I mean, the NMSQT weights itself with twice the verbal. If parents really wanted to help their child, they would drive improvement in their English.
    - rahimnathwani 3y ago
      It sounds like you're saying that it's impossible for a parent to support their child to 'accelerate' in math whilst simultaneously supporting their attainment of beyond-grade-level-expectation reading and written/oral communication skills. Have I understood that correctly?
      - bsder 3y ago
        I'm not saying it's "impossible". I'm saying that "parents generally don't do it." I suspect it's because measuring it is more difficult. Math is easy to measure. "Can you do those problems?" English is a lot harder to measure and takes mroe time. Proofreading a paper takes time--and you have to know how to write. Listening to a speech takes time. Discussing a book means that the parent needs to read it, too.
throwaway33381 3y ago
Sometimes I read these threads and see a lot of parents who seem to think that their child inherently loves something but to me it sort of looks like it's more of a forceful grooming. The word usage of some of the top comments is well very interesting... Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. Honestly, it's abusive.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Abuse is a strong word. If we keep calling everything abuse then the only thing that would be acceptable is to let the kid do whatever they want. Which kid loves to go to school? So sending them against their "love" to school is forceful grooming?
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. This has not been my experience. My son will tell me clearly he doesn't want to do something, right after I've expressed how fascinating it is and how if he'll just spend a few minutes he'll see for himself. I'm happy that he finds math interesting. And I'm happy he doesn't feign interest in things he doesn't find interesting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
durron 3y ago
“Parent-led homeschooling is the approach that puts parents in charge of the education decisions for their children.” Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach. Yes, there are many kids in the classroom. Yes, your kid isn’t going to get the same type of 1 on 1 attention you can give them at home. However, work in conjunction with the experts, don’t presume you know better by default.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gnicholas 3y ago
  > Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach. There is no federal teacher licensing standard, and state standards vary (and only apply to public school teachers, IIRC). In several states, the only educational requirement is a bachelor's degree. [1] This educational requirement might be coupled with required teaching experience, but this experience can be gained by teaching in a private school, where such requirements do not apply. And none of these experiential requirements establish a baseline for excellence — they just measure based on "time served". It is simply false to assume that all teachers are "experts" to whom parents (who may have many more years of education, not that formal education is the touchstone), should defer. 1: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/8-states-that-made-it-easier-to-become-a-teacher-1513305313 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/8-states-that-made-it-easie...
hakutsuru 3y ago
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes it is the kid who accelerates themselves (and their parents would have no sense of the material). Just in case you are a smart kid in high school, or helping one, Do Not Skip Calculus 1 in college based on taking the material in high school. This can be a very dangerous mistake. If you are really confident, then get the syllabus for Calculus I from the college, and do problems from the textbook. Taking Calculus II as a first semester freshman can be very tough. Do this only if you are confident and bored with Calculus I. Rushing foundation studies is the wrong choice for most students. I made this mistake, and thought I received honors on my engineering degree (and was a Masters student in my fourth year) -- Calculus II was the lowest grade on my transcript. Good luck.
- stevepike 3y ago
  I had the exact same experience!
- wombatpm 3y ago
  But if you can get credit for Calc 1 and Calc 2 because you took the BC AP Calc test you should do. Starting Calc 3 as a freshman was great because it was a much smaller class.
- foota 3y ago
  I took a combined calc 1 and calc 2 class in college after taking a calculus class covering AP calculus AB and BC in high school, which I think was a nice balance probably (my school didn't let you skip it completely). The refresher was nice (it had been a year since I took calculus in hs), but I might have been fine doing multivariable regardless. It all made a _lot_ more sense for me in college, I'm not sure if it was maturity or what that made it easier for me, but the difference was shocking.
- physicles 3y ago
  Another option: take calc I, but differently. I finished calc II in high school, then for the first semester I took a class called “Honors Math I”, the first class in the math major track. I was a cs and physics major. The class was sort of a survey that started with propositional and predicate logic, set theory, and hit bits of number theory and group theory before going deeper into continuous functions, differentiation and integration. Proofs all the way. At one point the prof quipped, “If you’re using numbers bigger than about 8, you’re not doing real math.” The class did a great job reinforcing what I’d learned in high school, while setting me up for some of the beefier proof-based cs theory classes later on.
Patrol8394 3y ago
Parents should chillout; my kids go to private schools, they have a great math program but even that is not enough and most of their friends end up taking additional math class outside school. I refuse to do that for my kids. The amount of stress and expectations parents put on their kids is staggering. Obviously, these kids will inevitably get bored in any school.
spywaregorilla 3y ago
I'm really looking forward to teaching a child math. I'm curious how quickly I can get a kid grasping concepts like calculus, which is largely, imo, extremely obvious and intuitive, minus the implementation.
vonzepp 3y ago
Education is an odd profession. Where people feel because they have had an education they are qualified to determine best practice. It is as if having an operation makes one feel as they understand the best practice in heart surgery. Teachers spend years studying teaching practice, always read the research on best practices, spend all day working in education settings. Yet people often dismiss their methods and demand change based on often misremembered anecdotes of their own youth over half a century beforehand and pride in their children. I wouldn't be shocked if a vast majority of parents thought their kids were above average, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes professionals know what they are doing.
- ghiculescu 3y ago
  This seems like a very idealistic take on how teachers spend their day. Do most programmers spend years studying programming practice and always read the research on best practices? (I don’t.)
  - vonzepp 3y ago
    You do however spend probably 8 hrs working on it, read hackernews on latest tech, probably better than you were 5 years ago. Now imagine your marketing department saying they went to a computer summer camp once in the 90s and therefore think you should rewrite the tech stack in perl.
    - ghiculescu 3y ago
      I think the more appropriate metaphor would be: imagine your company’s founder asking you to produce more output in the same time. It’s not surprising parents will expect more outcomes from the time their kids spend at school, than the teachers delivering the teaching will.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  Teachers also operate under different constraints. Class sizes and number of classes per teacher varies, but a given teacher could easily have over 100 students. They also see those students for only a year before getting a new cohort to learn. In contrast, parents have only a handful of children who they typically know from birth. Not only does a parent have far more specialized insight into their child, but (perhaps more importantly) that parent does not need to make sacrifices for the greater good of the class. Schools aversion to children getting ahead is largely duevto the practical challenges it imposes on the school system, not the pedalogical effects on a given child.
sacnoradhq 3y ago
Personal anecdote: I started in private school for K-3, and then public school for 4-12. Public school was remedial until AP Calculus BC in high school. I was skipped in 6th grade to advanced 7th grade math but was harassed by the teacher who also encouraged the class to harass me as well. I say nudge and try to introduce concepts with Kahn Academy videos and then do problems in between. See how far they can go because kids tend to learn faster than we give them credit for. Keep it fun because keeping curiosity alive is precious.
mo_42 3y ago
When I was ten, I was accelerating myself quite a bit in physics. There wasn't a physics camp at that time. So probably I also misunderstood quite some things but I also was ahead of most peers (I was ten). I think physics is even more approachable to children because they can play around physical things. Well, it got me into some trouble. I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them. > How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? My answer would still be: as fast as your kid wishes for but consider social implications with teachers and peers. Sidenote: after this experience with the teacher, I somehow switched to computers. Exploring computers and learning to program wasn't a subject in school so this was free territory.
- timthorn 3y ago
  > I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them. What did you do to destroy the teacher's plan? It doesn't sound incompatible with you having advanced knowledge.
  - mo_42 3y ago
    I remember we were doing something experiments with electricity and the teacher asked some question. I just answered that it’s a stream of negatively charged particles. The concept of electrons or charged particles wasn’t introduced yet. So this didn’t make sense to students who learned according to the teacher's plan. I think he wanted us to develop an idea of charge ourselves instead of learning from a book. (I think this is an outdated way of teaching because students have so much other resources on the internet to learn from.)
mcarsonophelia 3y ago
[dead]
QuadmasterXLII 3y ago
The 8 AM section of multivariate calculus at UNC Chapel Hill is Close to half students from East Chapel Hill high school. The high school students want to take it at that time because it fits with the rest of their classes, the college students don’t want to take it at that time because screw 8 AM. I talked to the professor and he says it’s one of his favorite sections to teach because the students are all so enthusiastic and want to be there.
EliseEmma 3y ago
Exposing them them to problem solving fun games and puzzles might help.
timcavel 3y ago
[dead]
zapregniqp 3y ago
I didn't know there was a way to actually do this
lazyant 3y ago
Reminds me of "there's no speed limit" https://sive.rs/kimo https://sive.rs/kimo

150 points by sebg 3y ago

As fast as your kid wants should be taken into account, but like, if your kid is alienating themselves, maybe take them to a baseball game. If your kid hates math, the answer isn't not teaching them at all. :D Personally, I loved math, would have loved to be accelerated, but I didn't know this was something I could ask for and get.

mlyle 3y ago
A lot of the reason why your kid might be alienating themselves is being thrown into an environment where they're a couple standard deviations outside the mean and have to confront tedious busywork. It's hard for many people to accept, but kids who are a couple sigma above the mean can end up having nearly as much problems in an inflexible academic environment from kids who are a couple sigma below. My eldest is a very high performer who had behavioral issues in upper elementary. A whole lot of getting him to the point where he's maximally successful with peers, in other classrooms, and in sports and other endeavors was getting him into situations with appropriate challenge and opportunities for expression.
zeroCalories 3y ago
Yeah I don't always buy it when people advocate for very lax education. I was part of the upperclass-hippie parenting experiment, and in retrospect I suspect it hurt me far more than it helped. Given the choice I would always watch cartoons, play video games, and cheat the system all I could. It clearly works for some kids though.

klyrs 3y ago

As a mathematician with a kid who thinks he loves math (but doesn't love effort), I try to expose him to fun math. I also casually reveal upcoming concepts (currently negative numbers and fractions), so he'll struggle less when his curriculum demands it. But I never push. When he asks for more, I'm always there. When his attention wanders, that's my cue to shut up.

QuarterReptile 3y ago
Interestingly, the argument I've heard for math focus is to do it because it's something hard to use as a training ground for perseverance, which is nearly the reverse of your situation.
- klyrs 3y ago
  If that's coming from within, I'm all for it. Pushing that on a child as young as mine should be criminal.

kevinventullo 3y ago

Going fast when the child wants to go fast and slow when they need to go slow is I think most of what makes one-on-one teaching superior to classroom teaching. But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
> But, yeah, homeschooling can leave a big social gap. It doesn't need to. Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers (such as by being intentionally scheduled in the middle what would otherwise be school hours). And, of course, those are just the mass social activities, as opposed to small groups of friends.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  Public schooling has socializing built in - home schooling has focused 1:1 attention built in. (In their ideal state, respectively.) Home schooling takes extra work to add socializing, public schooling takes extra work to add one on one instruction. Generally. There are exceptions out there, and there are opportunities to hybridize the practices. But again - that takes work. Public school also functions as a means to take the work of watching and educating a child during the day off of parents’ plates, so they can remain at least partially employed, or even just have a small slice of their life back. Homeschooling is a luxury most can’t afford.
- kashunstva 3y ago
  > Many areas, particularly those good for homeschooling, have tons of social and extracurricular activities available specifically for homeschoolers During the five years I homeschooled my daughter, I found that this was true but with one enormous caveat. We’re a secular family and homeschooling in many areas of the U.S. means that these groups are often organized around non-secular activities and principles. To each, their own. But I’m not going to sign a “statement of faith” to participate in a homeschool group. As a consequence, it really did feel that we were going it alone. Larger metropolitan areas are probably more inclusive; but otherwise secular homeschoolers have struggles in finding the right fit.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

doix 3y ago

When I was a kid (elementary school) I ended up in the remedial maths class. My parents were shocked because at home they were teaching me things far beyond what was taught at school. I have no recollection of any of this, but apparently I was just a little shit and refused to answer questions at school because they were "too easy" and "boring". Not sure what the moral of the story is, but consider the second order effects of accelerating your kids.

noelwelsh 3y ago
I don't think you were being a little shit. I think that's a perfectly reasonable reaction to being asked to jump through arbitrary hoops that were meaningless to you.
r00fus 3y ago
LOL I was in remedial math in 5th grade in one (red) state and winning math competitions by grade 7 in another state. Bored to tears and misdiagnosed capabilities…

gnicholas 3y ago

Article wasn’t great IMO, but looking forward to the comments. We found that our kid was excited about math until she started doing it in school, where they just assigned busywork (zero times tables? Check!) and refused to let her learn with other kids at her level. We just kept doing math outside of school, for two reasons. In part, it was so she could learn more math, but equally important it was so she could see how to handle problems where the answer wasn’t immediately apparent to her. Otherwise she would just skate through elementary school, never being forced to persevere or really apply herself. Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it.

ryandrake 3y ago
> Our schools like to talk about perseverance/grit/etc. a lot, but when it comes down to it they don’t care enough to give students work that requires it. Well, they care, but just not about the students who are already excelling (and already bringing up test score averages). I've got a kid in elementary school, and it's pretty evident most of the school's resources are spent on the worst-performing kids, leaving the smarter ones bored and unchallenged. Yea, it was like this too when I was in grade school in the '80s, but it seems much worse today. If your kid is reading or math-ing beyond grade level, they're just going to get ignored and handed straight-A's while the teachers desperately spend all their time getting Donny Dumbass to at least stop screaming all day and eating crayons. There's no gifted program or tracking/segregating by ability anymore. I guess those are bad for "equity".
- ForOldHack 3y ago
  Pretty much it was that way in the late 1960s... until... we got a computer programming class, but this is about math: In Berkeley, they had a program called 'Seed' that had a great idea, give middle school students access to PhD math students. It was going fairly well, until Dr Steven Giavant stepped into a classroom and wanted to teach the students the frontiers and history of math. ( look this guy up! Genius at Math, Super genius at education. ) I know that besides me, 6 other students got degrees in math, and we suspect 2 more. Absurd. The norm was 1.2, even for Berkeley. He shared his enthusiasm for math, and the children got it. We only found out about it by accident, when my Abstract Algebra professor said that they were in Berkeley Math at that time. ( 15+ years later ). And the second influence was Michael Griffin, who taught computer programming, when I asked him "How do I get to actually learn Calculus?" he basically laid out the curriculum that led to my degree. With two more break throughs, I now can use this to inspire sucess in math. Thanks Steven, and thanks Mike. https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804 https://www.facebook.com/MillsMCS/posts/1920193231575804

MrMan 3y ago

[dead]

mattgrice 3y ago

If your child is interested in engineering, and won't be able to go to a private school, it is best to have Calc I and II done before they go to college. At state schools, Calc is typically a weed-out class with huge lectures and they want a certain percentage of students to not be successful because these classes serve as a gating function to the engineering school. Combined with other freshman semester distractions and adjustment it's a good idea to have it out of the way. Other than that I'd say the best acceleration is enrichment. Teach stuff like proofs, "how to solve it" by Polya, gain intuition about linear algebra and complex numbers. Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines.

tzs 3y ago
> Martin Gardner and AK Dewdney articles in old Scientific American magazines All of Gardner's Scientific American columns are conveniently available on CD-ROM for under $40 [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883855453 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0883855453
- epups 3y ago
  That's a great deal. Unfortunately CD ROMs have not been convenient for like a decade...
  - tzs 3y ago
    Here it is as ebooks [1]. $99 ($74.25 for MAA and AMS members). On sale for $59.40. I think the sale price is just for MAA and ASM members). [1] https://bookstore.ams.org/gardner-set/ https://bookstore.ams.org/gardner-set/

fn-mote 3y ago

This is such a fraught topic. First point: a lot of students get "accelerated" by their parents as a way of improving their academic performance and aiming the toward an elite college. Of course you look outstanding in school if you have covered the material a year before at the local cram center. These "accelerated by rote" students memorized the multiplication tables early, so they were put in "advanced math"... but their rate of comprehension is ordinary. Their problem solving skills are ordinary. They took "advanced math" in summer school so when they take the course in the ordinary school year they have a leg up. I don't think this has to be bad, but it's not the "gifted acceleration" and can be tough on these students if expectations are that they are "fast". A second point: acceleration traditionally means moving through the same material faster. If you have a gifted child PLEASE work with them on a breadth of things, don't just race them through multivariable calculus. Math contests are a good source of broader problems. Art of Problem Solving gets a huge shout-out for what is now years and years of acceleration and enrichment material. Look at them if you are a parent in this situation. (Actually, they are suitable for self-study.) Edit: I am all in favor of kids learning new things as fast as they want. I don't see racing through the standard curriculum (in any country) as a route to happiness. Random brain-stimulating math book: Donald Knuth, "Surreal Numbers".

pgustafs 3y ago
I think problem solving math is definitely fun and can be a huge source of confidence, but I don't see why "racing" through the standard curriculum is a negative. Why should a smart kid do a million multiplication/division problems for 5 years when they would have a ton more fun and get a lot more long-term utility from learning some stat/algebra/geometry? If a kid demonstrates mastery of a concept, it's a lot more bizarre and potentially damaging to force them to relearn the same material over and over.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I think it's more that there are massive large fields of math that are just left out in the race to calculus. I had a friend who grew up in Japan and he said he learned a lot more number theory-style stuff.

fn-mote 3y ago

[dupe]

gpt5 3y ago

I think that many parents fall into the trap of acceleration to address their kids need to be challenged. While acceleration help mitigate some unnecessary repetition, by definition acceleration cannot go deeper than the standard curriculum, and deeper is where things become interesting and where you develop mathematical thinkers. My children attend a school district where the norm is enrolling kids in after-school math programs. According to the standardized tests run by the school, about 50% of the students are pacing a full grade ahead. The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10%. While the skip test covers the standard material, it does so with trickier questions, tripping up many students. They're moving fast, but without much depth. What I found works best is to pick a challenging and exciting curriculum that allows talented students to immerse themselves and experience the excitement and satisfaction of intellectual discovery. There are a few examples of such programs. The most popular of which is the curriculum offered by AoPS (art of problem solving), which starts at first grade. Following this path naturally offers a large advantage to learning at the highest levels. If they are still moving faster with the rigorous curriculum - sure, let them accelerate.

jibe 3y ago
Accelerate is a misnomer, it is the go deeper, advanced track. There might be a one time jump ahead, but that’s not the heart of it.
mabbo 3y ago
> The school does offer an option to skip a grade in math, but the pass rate is a mere 10% I ran into trouble with this as a kid. They put me ahead a grade in math in grade 2 because I could handle it and the class was a 2/3 split (half grade 2s, half 3s), so I just did math with the grade 3s. This worked going forward as there were 3/4 and 4/5 split classes at the school too. But then after a couple years, I was reaching the point where the school only went to grade 5 and the teachers didn't even have books for grade 6s. So they skipped me entirely ahead a grade. Into a new school (since the previous school only went to 5). With none of my friends. My other subjects suffered because I was only really good at math. My social life died- kids are assholes at that age and pull each other down. And my mental health was pretty messed up for a long time. I wound up taking an extra year of high school just so I wouldn't be in college at 17.

crawfordcomeaux 3y ago

This is very easy to answer: Design toys and environments for them that promote the development of infinity category theoretical intuitions. Let them decide the pace from there.

markoutso 3y ago

I keep wondering how articles make it up to the first page. This one, for example, an article hosted by substack. A service with terrible user interface, that tries to make you think that someone is doing you a favour for letting you read their literature without paying, whereas... the opposite is true. The article itself is irrelevant but since I read it, I can tell that it is a classical nonsensical piece on the benefits of listening to children. The author lacks any formal qualification on teaching from what I could also find. In other terms a complete time waster.

graycat 3y ago

Early calculus in 60 seconds: Consider a car with a speedometer that says how fast are moving and an odometer that says how far have gone. Given the data from the odometer can find what the speedometer values were. That is the first half of calculus, differentiation. And given the data from the speedometer, can find what the odometer values were. That is the second half of calculus, integration. If start with the odometer values, differentiate and get the speedometer values and integrate those values, then will get back the odometer values -- that is the fundamental theorem of calculus. Differentiation is related to subtraction, and integration is related to addition. Might be able to teach that to kids in the fourth grade.

ckz 3y ago

An interesting argument I've heard recently (but haven't yet come to a personal conclusion on, so don't take this as an endorsement): Emphasize math for older kids when their brain is better prepared for abstraction (some even argue age 10+!). Emphasize language and character for younger kids, especially because at _very_ young ages that's really what they're soaking in anyway. The logic here being efficiency. An older child can learn in a week what a preschooler may drill for months. Cover some math facts in primary school to build a strong foundation, but strong language skills compound against _all_ education and should come first, with a heavier shift to advanced mathematics later in schooling. Again, don't know if I ascribe yet (I was accelerated in math at a young age myself) or how this really looks in the real world, but definitely an argument that wise people make in good faith. Probably impossible in a standardized school setting. :)

davidguetta 3y ago
This idea that abstraction can only be leart at 10 is the most bullshit I've heard today. I was doing moderately advanced equations at 7 and it's also widely known great chess player started being great way under 9. Where is that nonsensical idea come from ? Don't delay children.
jimmychoozyx 3y ago
Some would say Math is a language. And I agree-- teach a 2nd language to kids before they reach 12. But I would also want to teach my own children advanced math during that time, if possible. From what I've read in passing, it seems some former soviet countries of Eastern Europe & Russia teach advanced math to students a few years earlier than the US does. It seems that private South Asian-majority schools in certain cities-- such as Houston-- also teach advanced math earlier than public schools.
sn9 3y ago
Here's an old educational experiment that supports the idea of literacy before numeracy: http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/three.html http://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/three.html
theptip 3y ago

pgustafs 3y ago

Agree, but I don't like the framing of "accelerating." Math in school is for the median student. If you want a quantitative career or just want to have quantitative skills, you should be aiming for way above median. Aiming for median outcomes makes zero sense in the current world. Find your niche and hit it hard. Kids intuitively understand this -- they like doing what they're good at. Unfortunately, most schools are not good at serving this need. A very important part of being a parent is to encourage kids to start compounding positive habits/learning early, and to prevent the schools from dragging them back to the median.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
Right! No one talks about basketball acceleration or football acceleration.

stuaxo 3y ago

I was really impressed at Number Blocks, which my daughter and friends were all watching from Nursery age on BBC iplayer at home. By age 4 she already had an idea about square numbers and infinity. I honestly wish Number Blocks went all the way up to university level.

MandieD 3y ago
Oh, glad to hear that - my nearly-three year old is obsessed with the Alpha Blocks right now, and we saw the Alpha Blocks meet Number Blocks episode a few days ago.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

I spent 2nd and 3rd grade in a grade 1-6 environment (public school). Every student got the same series of math tests and instruction began at the level they failed a test. Kids could retest whenever they wanted. Older kids were assigned younger kids to broadly mentor. This was the early 1970s. It was by every measure a success. I haven't seen it's like since.

JJMcJ 3y ago
Sometimes tiny schools in isolated areas will have something like that. Where there aren't enough kids to have separate grades.

dboreham 3y ago

My sons are both in college now, but during the K-12 years I took the approach that I could not try to "accelerate" other than by offering help with homework. That is, I didn't introduce any concepts that would arrive later in their curriculum. Instead, I introduced concepts (verbally, while driving to school and so on) that would never be covered at the HS level. These included: the idea that some things are provably unprovable (e.g. halting problem), that some things are provably impossible (e.g. constructibility of polygons), that everything in mathematics has a history around why it was invented, and a story as to what it's useful for, that generally doesn't get taught but can be very helpful in appreciating why you might want to learn about it.

hardwaregeek 3y ago

I had a good time at Russian math circle. It was competition math but also math proofs which helped instill rigor as a core concept. Which in turn helped when I started programming because really a lot of programming is about invariants and proofs of sort.

raymondh 3y ago

In our case, the main push to accelerate is to get more knowledgeable teachers. While experimenting with number sequences in Excel, our child said, "I found e, 2.718281828". When he went to show off his discovery, his two math teachers said that they had never heard of it before.

whimsicalism 3y ago
We pay far too little to get people who are very strong at math. This sort of lack of knowledge was not uncommon in my urban school district, the only teachers who were truly qualified were all doing it as essentially charity work after their high-powered careers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

twump 3y ago

My 6 year old is doing basic algebra and geometric proofs and I worry it's going to make him bored in math class. But even if my kid is a genius it's proven to me that we can be moving our kids much faster than we do. I don't think kids in Singapore have special DNA.

viraptor 3y ago

I really like the idea of unrestricted learning (as long as it actually checks that you master the material). I remember reading a university level physics book and getting lots of fun math from it while in high school. Currently (many years later) I'm going through the https://mathacademy.com/ https://mathacademy.com/ ML course to get good foundations in that area. But the service itself starts at very basic math and allows you to go as fast as you want all the way to uni courses (with lots of practice and reviews), so I'm hoping to use it with my kid in the future.

albntomat0 3y ago
What're your thoughts on MathAcademy? I heard about it here on HN several months ago, and it's been on my list of things to check out, once I finish my current two side projects.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Love it, 4 months into math for ML with a review of some earlier topics. It's actually almost entirely about practice in small chunks, which is different from many other services I've seen. (Means no sitting through longer videos / explanations) Basically it's what I would've really liked my school math to be. Each question is only a couple of minutes or so, so I really appreciate being able to do it here and there when possible, instead of having to dedicate full hours to the course. I've been following it being developed for years hoping to use it with my kid, but ended up using it myself first. Also, seeing progress like this appeals to this nerd https://i.postimg.cc/SNjYL3vd/Screenshot-2023-07-30-09-03-01-24-3aea4af51f236e4932235fdada7d1643.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/SNjYL3vd/Screenshot-2023-07-30-09-03-01...
  - albntomat0 3y ago
    Thanks! I'll give it a shot!

lanstin 3y ago

I took 3,4, 5 and 6th grade math in 3rd grade. taught my self algebra and some easy calculus in 4 and 5th grade, then I went to math camp in 7th grade where i got credit for algebra 1 and 2 and took geometry and trig and precalc (passing some standardized test for each module). my school let me take BC calculus in 8th grade and then go to night school for math for 9th thru 12th grade. i was otherwise unaccelerated and had a pretty normal teenager hood. i highly recommend it, especially for math where there is so much to learn; even by the end of undergrad, the newest math i was learning was from the 1950s and 1960s. plus it makes a lot of other things a lot easier to study. and it's fun to learn hard math; the years when i had to study math i already knew where really dull.

geniium 3y ago
Other than that, what’s ur story?
- lanstin 3y ago
  Relatively ordinary. My teachers wanted me to go into grad school, which had sort of been my plan my whole life, but i had authority issues and it didn’t seem like a good idea. I also enjoyed programming so I let myself get pulled into internet programming, landing at AOL after a few jobs at smaller places. Since then I have been programming, except for a stint as a stay at home dad. My youngest just went to college and I have enrolled in a masters program in math at a local uni, weirdly enough. Learning math is still a profoundly fun thing for me. Knowing a lot of maths has improved my life a lot but didn’t let me discover fusion or anything. I have written a lot of software and improved more software and helped people learn about how to understand software systems, but that has all been in service to keeping my family afloat; now that responsibility is lessening, I might try again to have a more maths career. I was also sexually abused by a close relative from age four to about age six, so probably I would not have been up to the rigors of a doctoral program or an academic career. Till I got my self together, the scarcity of good programmers in the job market gave me the buffer I needed to succeed despite the authority issues. But the accelerated math was solely a blessing. A lot of the people from the math camp (Duke’s Talent Identification Program) have had very solid careers but so far as I know not many Nobel prizes or Fields Medalists or whatever.

darkclouds 3y ago

Keep it fun, broaden their horizons so rather than just teach this is how you do x and how you do y, give them some examples of where they might expect to find x being used or where you might find y being used in real life so they having something relate to. Once you get past basic maths, a lot of it isn't instantly recognisable in the real world, partly because its behind closed office doors, so explain that some maths might be found in banking, some in mapping, some in hedge funds, physics, computer games, gambling, detective work etc etc. Dont force anything because no one can predict the future and if things dont work out in the future, you dont want them looking back at this time as lost opportunities to have done other things, even socialising or learning something else, even though I doubt the demand for maths skills will ever die out apart from maybe WW3 breaking out.

lordnacho 3y ago

At the moment the plan is just AoPS. Looks good to me, I bought all the books. Seems to be roughly up to what I learned in high school, starting towards the end of primary school. My kid plays around with math a lot. Asks interesting questions. Nothing has taken shape yet, so I just try to answer. But also try to get him to work through the AoPS. He likes it actually, there's always a question in there that he doesn't get and he likes the challenge. What I don't really hear anything about is how to get the kid to self-ignite. He did this with chemistry. He knows the periodic table, he knows what the electron shells are, what acids and bases are. He asks interesting questions. I even hooked him up with my friend who is a PhD so he can ask his weird questions about molecules. On the math side, he just needs a little nudge. Same with programming. I just get the feeling he's not far from simply studying everything himself, I simply don't know what to do to spark it.

thrawa8387336 3y ago

We need to evaluate schools by impact improving outcomes of the P80 not the P50 or the P0. Percentiles

JackFr 3y ago

How about just get out of your kid’s way? I muddled through long division and all the other crap I already knew in middle school while I was devouring all the Martin Gardiner collections and the Time Life series on mathematics. My parents dropped me at the library once a week and had some idea what I was doing — certainly they appreciated good grades, but there was not handwringing over support from the school.

refurb 3y ago
This is kind of my thought. What one typically finds is that kids good at X, are interested in X. You can't force them to be interested, but you can offer opportunities to see if they are. Some kids just won't find math interesting, and likely will just barely pass the requirements in school. And you as a parent can't change that. And to be honest, it's not the end of the world. I know plenty of successful people who are terrible at math.

beebmam 3y ago

Stop relying on schools to entirely educate your children. School education is a baseline. Moreover, it's not entirely up to parents to "accelerate", much less educate, their children. Let your children explore the world outside of a coercive environment, and they'll probably surprise you. If your children don't want to explore the world when given the freedom to do so, then something might be holding them back, like addiction or depression. In the end, your child is going to become an adult one day and they'll need that self-motivation to be successful.

jrflowers 3y ago

At most you shouldn’t accelerate kids more than 4-5Gs, maybe up to 6G if it’s only for a few seconds.

aappleby 3y ago

9.8 meters per second squared.

ezekiel68 3y ago

> How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? Definitely not to the speed of light. I understand 99% of that may be alright.

bluepod4 3y ago
Not sure why people downvote jokes lol

bsder 3y ago

Gee, instead of accelerating our children in math, how about we accelerate them in reading and writing--two skills which are FAR more important to their eventual success in life than anything related to math.

rahimnathwani 3y ago
Going faster and/or deeper in math doesn't prevent a child from reading or writing.
- bsder 3y ago
  Except, it seems to. There are a finite number of hours in a day. If you take time to push one thing, you lose time for something else. I would much rather see children being pushed to read well and efficiently, write logically and coherently with at least decent grammar, and speak in front of people without saying "um" and "like" every two seconds. The problem is, it's very difficult to measure progress in those easily with a single test, so nobody values them. I mean, the NMSQT weights itself with twice the verbal. If parents really wanted to help their child, they would drive improvement in their English.
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    It sounds like you're saying that it's impossible for a parent to support their child to 'accelerate' in math whilst simultaneously supporting their attainment of beyond-grade-level-expectation reading and written/oral communication skills. Have I understood that correctly?
    - bsder 3y ago
      I'm not saying it's "impossible". I'm saying that "parents generally don't do it." I suspect it's because measuring it is more difficult. Math is easy to measure. "Can you do those problems?" English is a lot harder to measure and takes mroe time. Proofreading a paper takes time--and you have to know how to write. Listening to a speech takes time. Discussing a book means that the parent needs to read it, too.

throwaway33381 3y ago

Sometimes I read these threads and see a lot of parents who seem to think that their child inherently loves something but to me it sort of looks like it's more of a forceful grooming. The word usage of some of the top comments is well very interesting... Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. Honestly, it's abusive.

ramraj07 3y ago
Abuse is a strong word. If we keep calling everything abuse then the only thing that would be acceptable is to let the kid do whatever they want. Which kid loves to go to school? So sending them against their "love" to school is forceful grooming?
rahimnathwani 3y ago
Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. This has not been my experience. My son will tell me clearly he doesn't want to do something, right after I've expressed how fascinating it is and how if he'll just spend a few minutes he'll see for himself. I'm happy that he finds math interesting. And I'm happy he doesn't feign interest in things he doesn't find interesting.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

durron 3y ago

“Parent-led homeschooling is the approach that puts parents in charge of the education decisions for their children.” Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach. Yes, there are many kids in the classroom. Yes, your kid isn’t going to get the same type of 1 on 1 attention you can give them at home. However, work in conjunction with the experts, don’t presume you know better by default.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gnicholas 3y ago
> Teachers in the US are required to have a Master’s level education and multiple months of student teaching in order to be certified to teach. There is no federal teacher licensing standard, and state standards vary (and only apply to public school teachers, IIRC). In several states, the only educational requirement is a bachelor's degree. [1] This educational requirement might be coupled with required teaching experience, but this experience can be gained by teaching in a private school, where such requirements do not apply. And none of these experiential requirements establish a baseline for excellence — they just measure based on "time served". It is simply false to assume that all teachers are "experts" to whom parents (who may have many more years of education, not that formal education is the touchstone), should defer. 1: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/8-states-that-made-it-easier-to-become-a-teacher-1513305313 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/8-states-that-made-it-easie...

hakutsuru 3y ago

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes it is the kid who accelerates themselves (and their parents would have no sense of the material). Just in case you are a smart kid in high school, or helping one, Do Not Skip Calculus 1 in college based on taking the material in high school. This can be a very dangerous mistake. If you are really confident, then get the syllabus for Calculus I from the college, and do problems from the textbook. Taking Calculus II as a first semester freshman can be very tough. Do this only if you are confident and bored with Calculus I. Rushing foundation studies is the wrong choice for most students. I made this mistake, and thought I received honors on my engineering degree (and was a Masters student in my fourth year) -- Calculus II was the lowest grade on my transcript. Good luck.

stevepike 3y ago
I had the exact same experience!
wombatpm 3y ago
But if you can get credit for Calc 1 and Calc 2 because you took the BC AP Calc test you should do. Starting Calc 3 as a freshman was great because it was a much smaller class.
foota 3y ago
I took a combined calc 1 and calc 2 class in college after taking a calculus class covering AP calculus AB and BC in high school, which I think was a nice balance probably (my school didn't let you skip it completely). The refresher was nice (it had been a year since I took calculus in hs), but I might have been fine doing multivariable regardless. It all made a _lot_ more sense for me in college, I'm not sure if it was maturity or what that made it easier for me, but the difference was shocking.
physicles 3y ago
Another option: take calc I, but differently. I finished calc II in high school, then for the first semester I took a class called “Honors Math I”, the first class in the math major track. I was a cs and physics major. The class was sort of a survey that started with propositional and predicate logic, set theory, and hit bits of number theory and group theory before going deeper into continuous functions, differentiation and integration. Proofs all the way. At one point the prof quipped, “If you’re using numbers bigger than about 8, you’re not doing real math.” The class did a great job reinforcing what I’d learned in high school, while setting me up for some of the beefier proof-based cs theory classes later on.

Patrol8394 3y ago

Parents should chillout; my kids go to private schools, they have a great math program but even that is not enough and most of their friends end up taking additional math class outside school. I refuse to do that for my kids. The amount of stress and expectations parents put on their kids is staggering. Obviously, these kids will inevitably get bored in any school.

spywaregorilla 3y ago

I'm really looking forward to teaching a child math. I'm curious how quickly I can get a kid grasping concepts like calculus, which is largely, imo, extremely obvious and intuitive, minus the implementation.

vonzepp 3y ago

Education is an odd profession. Where people feel because they have had an education they are qualified to determine best practice. It is as if having an operation makes one feel as they understand the best practice in heart surgery. Teachers spend years studying teaching practice, always read the research on best practices, spend all day working in education settings. Yet people often dismiss their methods and demand change based on often misremembered anecdotes of their own youth over half a century beforehand and pride in their children. I wouldn't be shocked if a vast majority of parents thought their kids were above average, which isn't a bad thing, but sometimes professionals know what they are doing.

ghiculescu 3y ago
This seems like a very idealistic take on how teachers spend their day. Do most programmers spend years studying programming practice and always read the research on best practices? (I don’t.)
- vonzepp 3y ago
  You do however spend probably 8 hrs working on it, read hackernews on latest tech, probably better than you were 5 years ago. Now imagine your marketing department saying they went to a computer summer camp once in the 90s and therefore think you should rewrite the tech stack in perl.
  - ghiculescu 3y ago
    I think the more appropriate metaphor would be: imagine your company’s founder asking you to produce more output in the same time. It’s not surprising parents will expect more outcomes from the time their kids spend at school, than the teachers delivering the teaching will.
gizmo686 3y ago
Teachers also operate under different constraints. Class sizes and number of classes per teacher varies, but a given teacher could easily have over 100 students. They also see those students for only a year before getting a new cohort to learn. In contrast, parents have only a handful of children who they typically know from birth. Not only does a parent have far more specialized insight into their child, but (perhaps more importantly) that parent does not need to make sacrifices for the greater good of the class. Schools aversion to children getting ahead is largely duevto the practical challenges it imposes on the school system, not the pedalogical effects on a given child.

sacnoradhq 3y ago

Personal anecdote: I started in private school for K-3, and then public school for 4-12. Public school was remedial until AP Calculus BC in high school. I was skipped in 6th grade to advanced 7th grade math but was harassed by the teacher who also encouraged the class to harass me as well. I say nudge and try to introduce concepts with Kahn Academy videos and then do problems in between. See how far they can go because kids tend to learn faster than we give them credit for. Keep it fun because keeping curiosity alive is precious.

mo_42 3y ago

When I was ten, I was accelerating myself quite a bit in physics. There wasn't a physics camp at that time. So probably I also misunderstood quite some things but I also was ahead of most peers (I was ten). I think physics is even more approachable to children because they can play around physical things. Well, it got me into some trouble. I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them. > How fast should you accelerate your kid in math? My answer would still be: as fast as your kid wishes for but consider social implications with teachers and peers. Sidenote: after this experience with the teacher, I somehow switched to computers. Exploring computers and learning to program wasn't a subject in school so this was free territory.

timthorn 3y ago
> I basically destroyed my teacher's plan of early physics education. Basically, the teacher wanted to replay physics history a bit by explaining the early experiments and what people thought about them. What did you do to destroy the teacher's plan? It doesn't sound incompatible with you having advanced knowledge.
- mo_42 3y ago
  I remember we were doing something experiments with electricity and the teacher asked some question. I just answered that it’s a stream of negatively charged particles. The concept of electrons or charged particles wasn’t introduced yet. So this didn’t make sense to students who learned according to the teacher's plan. I think he wanted us to develop an idea of charge ourselves instead of learning from a book. (I think this is an outdated way of teaching because students have so much other resources on the internet to learn from.)

mcarsonophelia 3y ago

[dead]

QuadmasterXLII 3y ago

The 8 AM section of multivariate calculus at UNC Chapel Hill is Close to half students from East Chapel Hill high school. The high school students want to take it at that time because it fits with the rest of their classes, the college students don’t want to take it at that time because screw 8 AM. I talked to the professor and he says it’s one of his favorite sections to teach because the students are all so enthusiastic and want to be there.

EliseEmma 3y ago

Exposing them them to problem solving fun games and puzzles might help.

timcavel 3y ago

[dead]

zapregniqp 3y ago

I didn't know there was a way to actually do this

lazyant 3y ago

Reminds me of "there's no speed limit" https://sive.rs/kimo https://sive.rs/kimo