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People seem to forget a lot that child math prodigies are being trained by parents to be math geniuses instead of enjoying being a kid. I had a 12 year old in m

People seem to forget a lot that child math prodigies are being trained by parents to be math geniuses instead of enjoying being a kid. I had a 12 year old in my freshman CS class and he was the most miserable unhappy kid I've ever seen in my entire life. Edit: Pretty good points in the replies. Probably a lot of latent jealousy on my side in this. I should have thought on this more before commenting.

saagarjha 2y ago
You don't have to be miserable to come up with a proof like this.
fardinahsan 2y ago
Conversely, you can't come up with a proof like this if you don't love math.
- croes 2y ago
  Why not? It may be more likely but not impossible.
Larrikin 2y ago
What's the take away you want from this comment? Advancement of humanity, feeling bad for missed childhood fulfillments, some mix? Did the child actually meaningfully contribute anything to your class? Were they a real person? Right now there's a lot we've "forgotten" about child geniuses that we should all know from our interactions from them ?
seszett 2y ago
Just to provide another data point, I also had a "math genius" friend at school and he was a well-balanced, fun and reasonably happy person.
- knightoffaith 2y ago
  Some more data - the math geniuses I knew were actually happier, more well-rounded, and fitter than the average person at my former school.
  - junon 2y ago
    There was a trope - track and math.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blueflow 2y ago
As someone who was enrolled in university starting from 9th class - i agree that this is not what children should be made to do. Adults were projecting weird ideas of success onto us.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
admissionsguy 2y ago
I was an extremely miserable 12 year old in a shit environment. Would have preferred to be miserable in a university class.
TrackerFF 2y ago
When I was tutoring HS kids (as a grad student myself), we also had afternoon practices for the kids that wanted to compete in the math olympiads. Truth be told, some of the kids loved it - but those were the kids that were really passionate about math, for the sake of math. But you also had a bunch of kids that seemingly hated every second of it. So why did they do it? - Some had pushy parents that wanted them to excel in extracurricular activities. Think typical tiger parenting... - Some had big ambitions about certain schools, and felt that they had to compete on a national level in something, in order to stand out in the selection/application process. Granted, this was over 15 years ago. A couple of years ago I checked up on some of the kids (LinkedIn), and the most passionate kids were either now math/physics Ph.Ds, or Ph.D track.
bradrn 2y ago
A counterpoint: I was accelerated by three year levels, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Otherwise I would have been intensely bored in high school for six years straight, with all the problems that would inevitably have brought. Of course, this depends so much on the person in question. Acceleration can be great for some people and awful for others. But it’s not about ‘enjoying being a kid’ — that’s something I hear a lot, but I enjoyed myself a lot more in the higher grades where I was actually learning material I found interesting.
- smeej 2y ago
  Can confirm: My parents made me go through the grades one at a time, despite the principal's recommendation that I start in 1st grade, move to 2nd mid-semester, do 3rd grade in the spring, and do two a year after that. It was intensely boring. I can see why they thought a bunch of teens and young adults wouldn't want to be friends with a much younger child, but I've always wondered if they would have been more willing to overlook the age difference than the other young children were willing to overlook the fact that the only thing we had in common was our age. Ironically, I found it decent preparation for life, though, which seems to be occasional bursts of furious activity punctuated by long stretches of repetition, which could easily become boring. I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting.
  - bradrn 2y ago
    > I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting. Oh yes… I also spent considerable time teaching myself interesting topics. It’s a good skill to have. But I was still bored a lot of the time, and being able to do the interesting stuff in school too was a much better experience for me.
    - smeej 2y ago
      Ultimately I've had to get to a point where I realize I'm grateful for the life I live now, and accelerating through school would have changed a lot of it, such that I probably wouldn't have met some of the people most important to me, so I'm grateful for it in the long run. But I don't know that I'll ever stop wondering, and it's not a comparative gratitude, because I'm sure my life could have become beautiful like this in other ways. It's more a practice of radical acceptance with gratitude. I will say one of the things that always made me laugh was that at each milestone, like finishing elementary school and starting middle school, my parents would try to tell me now it would be different, because I was at a higher level. I remember pointing out to them all the same doofuses from the previous years were moving up right along with me, and it wasn't just that I was ahead of them, but that I was faster, so this didn't seem to help. I never did understand why they thought that would work!
graemep 2y ago
The post may not make it clear that this was a student of Paul Lockhart's whose main aim is not make maths fun. This is a good teacher, not parental training. It was also similar to how I taught my home educated kids - do fun stuff. It worked very well. Both love maths (and hugely enjoyed studying in general). My older daughter is doing a degree apprenticeship in electronic and electrical engineering[1] and the younger one got a 9 in IGCSE maths[2] and plans to do A level maths and further maths[3]. The younger one hated maths while she was in school, which is common, and which is the problem Lockhart was trying to solve. This is not about pushing kids or making them prodigies, it is about making them enjoy what they do, which leads to higher achievement and and happiness. That said, not all prodigies are miserable. Ganesh Sittampalam who broke the UK record for youngest graduate taught himself for fun until he got into university! [1] UK term for degree paid for by employer done while working (and getting paid). Good for parental wallet! [2] UK exams sat at 16. 9 is a top grade. [3] Closest American thing is APs.
- graemep 2y ago
  Cannot edit anymore, and spotted a rather bad typo. It should read "whose main aim is TO make maths fun"
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Having just been caught in a situation where a ‘does’ versus ‘doesn’t’ typo in an email lead to a painful misunderstanding, this made me laugh.
aj7 2y ago
No parent can “train” a kid to be a math genius. There is a wide divide between a “math genius” and having a high SAT score for instance.
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > No parent can “train” a kid to be a math genius. While that's true, there's lots of parents who don't believe it, or don't care if the end result isn't actual mathematical genius as long as it's some sort of distinction. (I'm in the happy position where my parents encouraged me to pursue the paths that I enjoyed, which wound up with some acceleration, but my getting in the local newspaper meant that we were besieged by the kind of parents who do just want to push their kids towards some pre-determined "success.")
  - lern_too_spel 2y ago
    While I might quibble with the parenting technique because I believe an interest in useful topics can be cultivated, I'm not going to knock those parents for developing the ability to do hard work. The rest of the world is better off with these kids becoming competent professionals due to parental control than it would be if they became wastrels due to parental neglect or encouragement to pursue useless hobbies. In the US at least, the much larger problem is the latter.
    - JadeNB 2y ago
      > While I might quibble with the parenting technique because I believe an interest in useful topics can be cultivated, I'm not going to knock those parents for developing the ability to do hard work. The rest of the world is better off with these kids becoming competent professionals due to parental control than it would be if they became wastrels due to parental neglect or encouragement to pursue useless hobbies. In the US at least, the much larger problem is the latter. I think that's a very optimistic view of the outcome of this sort of thing, although it could be that I just didn't describe the parental behavior well. This wasn't parenting telling their kids "hard work is worth it!", but parents who decided on the specific honors that their child would achieve, and would permit no deviation from the path, as a result of which most of these kids either burned out before achieving their goal, or rebelled, usually in self-destructive ways, as soon as they were given a little freedom from parental control. Different parenting styles work for different people, but for me (as a child in the US in the '80s) I think that my parents did the best possible thing, which was to instill in me lessons about the value and importance of hard work, but to make it clear that, in the end, the decision about whether I would pursue those values was up to me. It probably helped that, despite the many other advantages I enjoyed, my family was insufficiently well off to represent a guaranteed financial fallback for me, so that I knew that, one way or the other, I'd have to make my way in the world—which made it particularly appealing to me to be able to find a way to earn my keep by working hard for something I loved.
bmacho 2y ago
Very untrue.
dhosek 2y ago
My son who is just finishingh fourth grade has been demanding harder math problems than he gets in school. He learned how to calculate square roots by hand from a YouTube video and enjoys doing these problems on his own, checking his answers against a calculator. When I pick him up from school, when we’re walking home, he demands that I teach him algebra. I’ve taught him how to solve basic linear equations (ax + b = cx + d) and also I have him take a number and try to find all the sums and differences of pair-wise factors (I haven’t told him why but people who remember high school algebra will recognize this as a skill essential to factoring quadratics) We’re going to learn Trachtenberg Speed Math over the summer. He also enjoys coding and I remember being astonished watching him—without guidance—figure out how to rewrite a program he’d done in Scratch using Python (although right now JavaScript has become his favorite language). I’ve not pushed him into any of this (I really would prefer that he not pursue programming as a career as I fear that we’re heading to a dark ages of software development, but he can do what he likes). His twin sister, meanwhile, has been demanding that I teach her social studies so I’ve been doing my best to give her bits and pieces of history and government from my memory. She doesn’t demand the math, but I’ve noticed that she is paying attention during the algebra on the walk lessons as she’ll occasionally jump in with an answer herself. My purely selfish side wouldn’t object to them skipping a grade as my ex-wife seems committed to them doing K–8 in private schools (even though our local public schools are quite good except at the junior high level, but 6–8 is hell at any school) and skipping a grade would save me a year’s tuition expenses.
- jacobolus 2y ago
  I recommend you find a copy of Lenchner's book Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics (2nd ed.). Lenchner ran math olympiads for late elementary school / middle school for decades, and does a good job of covering a wide variety of useful strategies for approaching nontrivial word problems (i.e. real math problems, not just arithmetic drills). But you don't have to be interested in contests per se to get a lot from the book. In my opinion that's going to be more pedagogically valuable and more fun than Trachtenberg. Here's an Internet Archive scan https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc Your kid would also probably really enjoy The Number Devil, a breezy novel about a kid who gets trapped in his dreams with a devil who won't stop telling him about elementary number theory, using various dream-world props. If you want more problems after that, there are a lot of great puzzles in Kordemsky's The Moscow Puzzles https://archive.org/details/moscowpuzzles3590000kord_m9a0 https://archive.org/details/moscowpuzzles3590000kord_m9a0, or you could take a look at Fomin, Genkin, & Itenberg's Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience which your kid could probably just about handle. There are also some great puzzles and games explained at the website of the Julia Robinson Math Festival, https://jrmf.org https://jrmf.org which can be played with fairly basic easily available materials.

saagarjha 2y ago

You don't have to be miserable to come up with a proof like this.

fardinahsan 2y ago

Conversely, you can't come up with a proof like this if you don't love math.

croes 2y ago
Why not? It may be more likely but not impossible.

Larrikin 2y ago

What's the take away you want from this comment? Advancement of humanity, feeling bad for missed childhood fulfillments, some mix? Did the child actually meaningfully contribute anything to your class? Were they a real person? Right now there's a lot we've "forgotten" about child geniuses that we should all know from our interactions from them ?

seszett 2y ago

Just to provide another data point, I also had a "math genius" friend at school and he was a well-balanced, fun and reasonably happy person.

knightoffaith 2y ago
Some more data - the math geniuses I knew were actually happier, more well-rounded, and fitter than the average person at my former school.
- junon 2y ago
  There was a trope - track and math.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

blueflow 2y ago

As someone who was enrolled in university starting from 9th class - i agree that this is not what children should be made to do. Adults were projecting weird ideas of success onto us.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

admissionsguy 2y ago

I was an extremely miserable 12 year old in a shit environment. Would have preferred to be miserable in a university class.

TrackerFF 2y ago

When I was tutoring HS kids (as a grad student myself), we also had afternoon practices for the kids that wanted to compete in the math olympiads. Truth be told, some of the kids loved it - but those were the kids that were really passionate about math, for the sake of math. But you also had a bunch of kids that seemingly hated every second of it. So why did they do it? - Some had pushy parents that wanted them to excel in extracurricular activities. Think typical tiger parenting... - Some had big ambitions about certain schools, and felt that they had to compete on a national level in something, in order to stand out in the selection/application process. Granted, this was over 15 years ago. A couple of years ago I checked up on some of the kids (LinkedIn), and the most passionate kids were either now math/physics Ph.Ds, or Ph.D track.

bradrn 2y ago

A counterpoint: I was accelerated by three year levels, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Otherwise I would have been intensely bored in high school for six years straight, with all the problems that would inevitably have brought. Of course, this depends so much on the person in question. Acceleration can be great for some people and awful for others. But it’s not about ‘enjoying being a kid’ — that’s something I hear a lot, but I enjoyed myself a lot more in the higher grades where I was actually learning material I found interesting.

smeej 2y ago
Can confirm: My parents made me go through the grades one at a time, despite the principal's recommendation that I start in 1st grade, move to 2nd mid-semester, do 3rd grade in the spring, and do two a year after that. It was intensely boring. I can see why they thought a bunch of teens and young adults wouldn't want to be friends with a much younger child, but I've always wondered if they would have been more willing to overlook the age difference than the other young children were willing to overlook the fact that the only thing we had in common was our age. Ironically, I found it decent preparation for life, though, which seems to be occasional bursts of furious activity punctuated by long stretches of repetition, which could easily become boring. I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting.
- bradrn 2y ago
  > I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting. Oh yes… I also spent considerable time teaching myself interesting topics. It’s a good skill to have. But I was still bored a lot of the time, and being able to do the interesting stuff in school too was a much better experience for me.
  - smeej 2y ago
    Ultimately I've had to get to a point where I realize I'm grateful for the life I live now, and accelerating through school would have changed a lot of it, such that I probably wouldn't have met some of the people most important to me, so I'm grateful for it in the long run. But I don't know that I'll ever stop wondering, and it's not a comparative gratitude, because I'm sure my life could have become beautiful like this in other ways. It's more a practice of radical acceptance with gratitude. I will say one of the things that always made me laugh was that at each milestone, like finishing elementary school and starting middle school, my parents would try to tell me now it would be different, because I was at a higher level. I remember pointing out to them all the same doofuses from the previous years were moving up right along with me, and it wasn't just that I was ahead of them, but that I was faster, so this didn't seem to help. I never did understand why they thought that would work!

graemep 2y ago

The post may not make it clear that this was a student of Paul Lockhart's whose main aim is not make maths fun. This is a good teacher, not parental training. It was also similar to how I taught my home educated kids - do fun stuff. It worked very well. Both love maths (and hugely enjoyed studying in general). My older daughter is doing a degree apprenticeship in electronic and electrical engineering[1] and the younger one got a 9 in IGCSE maths[2] and plans to do A level maths and further maths[3]. The younger one hated maths while she was in school, which is common, and which is the problem Lockhart was trying to solve. This is not about pushing kids or making them prodigies, it is about making them enjoy what they do, which leads to higher achievement and and happiness. That said, not all prodigies are miserable. Ganesh Sittampalam who broke the UK record for youngest graduate taught himself for fun until he got into university! [1] UK term for degree paid for by employer done while working (and getting paid). Good for parental wallet! [2] UK exams sat at 16. 9 is a top grade. [3] Closest American thing is APs.

graemep 2y ago
Cannot edit anymore, and spotted a rather bad typo. It should read "whose main aim is TO make maths fun"
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Having just been caught in a situation where a ‘does’ versus ‘doesn’t’ typo in an email lead to a painful misunderstanding, this made me laugh.

aj7 2y ago

No parent can “train” a kid to be a math genius. There is a wide divide between a “math genius” and having a high SAT score for instance.

JadeNB 2y ago
> No parent can “train” a kid to be a math genius. While that's true, there's lots of parents who don't believe it, or don't care if the end result isn't actual mathematical genius as long as it's some sort of distinction. (I'm in the happy position where my parents encouraged me to pursue the paths that I enjoyed, which wound up with some acceleration, but my getting in the local newspaper meant that we were besieged by the kind of parents who do just want to push their kids towards some pre-determined "success.")
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  While I might quibble with the parenting technique because I believe an interest in useful topics can be cultivated, I'm not going to knock those parents for developing the ability to do hard work. The rest of the world is better off with these kids becoming competent professionals due to parental control than it would be if they became wastrels due to parental neglect or encouragement to pursue useless hobbies. In the US at least, the much larger problem is the latter.
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > While I might quibble with the parenting technique because I believe an interest in useful topics can be cultivated, I'm not going to knock those parents for developing the ability to do hard work. The rest of the world is better off with these kids becoming competent professionals due to parental control than it would be if they became wastrels due to parental neglect or encouragement to pursue useless hobbies. In the US at least, the much larger problem is the latter. I think that's a very optimistic view of the outcome of this sort of thing, although it could be that I just didn't describe the parental behavior well. This wasn't parenting telling their kids "hard work is worth it!", but parents who decided on the specific honors that their child would achieve, and would permit no deviation from the path, as a result of which most of these kids either burned out before achieving their goal, or rebelled, usually in self-destructive ways, as soon as they were given a little freedom from parental control. Different parenting styles work for different people, but for me (as a child in the US in the '80s) I think that my parents did the best possible thing, which was to instill in me lessons about the value and importance of hard work, but to make it clear that, in the end, the decision about whether I would pursue those values was up to me. It probably helped that, despite the many other advantages I enjoyed, my family was insufficiently well off to represent a guaranteed financial fallback for me, so that I knew that, one way or the other, I'd have to make my way in the world—which made it particularly appealing to me to be able to find a way to earn my keep by working hard for something I loved.

bmacho 2y ago

Very untrue.

dhosek 2y ago

My son who is just finishingh fourth grade has been demanding harder math problems than he gets in school. He learned how to calculate square roots by hand from a YouTube video and enjoys doing these problems on his own, checking his answers against a calculator. When I pick him up from school, when we’re walking home, he demands that I teach him algebra. I’ve taught him how to solve basic linear equations (ax + b = cx + d) and also I have him take a number and try to find all the sums and differences of pair-wise factors (I haven’t told him why but people who remember high school algebra will recognize this as a skill essential to factoring quadratics) We’re going to learn Trachtenberg Speed Math over the summer. He also enjoys coding and I remember being astonished watching him—without guidance—figure out how to rewrite a program he’d done in Scratch using Python (although right now JavaScript has become his favorite language). I’ve not pushed him into any of this (I really would prefer that he not pursue programming as a career as I fear that we’re heading to a dark ages of software development, but he can do what he likes). His twin sister, meanwhile, has been demanding that I teach her social studies so I’ve been doing my best to give her bits and pieces of history and government from my memory. She doesn’t demand the math, but I’ve noticed that she is paying attention during the algebra on the walk lessons as she’ll occasionally jump in with an answer herself. My purely selfish side wouldn’t object to them skipping a grade as my ex-wife seems committed to them doing K–8 in private schools (even though our local public schools are quite good except at the junior high level, but 6–8 is hell at any school) and skipping a grade would save me a year’s tuition expenses.

jacobolus 2y ago
I recommend you find a copy of Lenchner's book Creative Problem Solving in School Mathematics (2nd ed.). Lenchner ran math olympiads for late elementary school / middle school for decades, and does a good job of covering a wide variety of useful strategies for approaching nontrivial word problems (i.e. real math problems, not just arithmetic drills). But you don't have to be interested in contests per se to get a lot from the book. In my opinion that's going to be more pedagogically valuable and more fun than Trachtenberg. Here's an Internet Archive scan https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc Your kid would also probably really enjoy The Number Devil, a breezy novel about a kid who gets trapped in his dreams with a devil who won't stop telling him about elementary number theory, using various dream-world props. If you want more problems after that, there are a lot of great puzzles in Kordemsky's The Moscow Puzzles https://archive.org/details/moscowpuzzles3590000kord_m9a0 https://archive.org/details/moscowpuzzles3590000kord_m9a0, or you could take a look at Fomin, Genkin, & Itenberg's Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience which your kid could probably just about handle. There are also some great puzzles and games explained at the website of the Julia Robinson Math Festival, https://jrmf.org https://jrmf.org which can be played with fairly basic easily available materials.