6 ms·

It's hard to stop Math Acceleration once you start

93 points by sebg 2y ago

graemep 2y ago
> If a US school year is 9 months and the summer vacation is 3 months, it means that every 3 years, a student who only does math in the summer will be accelerated by one yea That is simplistic. Amount learned is not proportional to time spent. Its the same problem as more hours at work does not mean proportionately more output. There are diminishing returns. > One family we spoke with has a kid (now homeschooled) Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? > One family we spoke to decided that what they valued most about going to school was " Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), My experience is that HE is is better for that - meet lots of different people in different settings rather than the same people in the same place daily. > The parents are now not only worried about what they would do for high school if the kid decides they want to go to high school, but they are now worried about what to do about college! Much less likely to be a problem. Its a lot less likely the child will be "ahead" as a young adult compared to other who are also good at maths. I do not think this is a problem unique to one subject either. Kids will progress at different rates in different subjects given the chance. its almost as if different people have different talents!
- nkrisc 2y ago
  > Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? There’s more to school than learning math. Learning how to work with other people, learning how to do things you don’t want to do, learning how to function in a group of people with different needs and goals, learning subjects other than math, etc. > My experience is that HE is is better for that - meet lots of different people in different settings rather than the same people in the same place daily. Those are all transient relationships. It’s still worth having long-lasting interactions/relationships - even with people who aren’t your family or maybe you don’t even care for.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > There’s more to school than learning math. Learning how to work with other people, learning how to do things you don’t want to do, learning how to function in a group of people with different needs and goals, learning subjects other than math, etc. Yes, home education is better at all that in my experience. I specifically said that maths is not unique. > Those are all transient relationships. No they are not. My younger daughter has relationships that have lasted many years so far from HE. Despite our moving twice in the last three years. If you go to the same classes or activities or have the same hobbies or stay in touch online.... You also have more time to maintain relationships outside school
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      I don’t doubt that some schools are worse than home-schooling. But think (for many, not all kids) the best school is better than the best home-schooling.
      - graemep 2y ago
        I disagree. I went to one of the best schools in Britain and my kids got a better education than I did. Kids are individuals with different talents and interests. Tailoring education to the individual is usually better than standardising it and that is the key difference between schools and HE. They can do subjects that schools rarely teach and follow interests. For example, my younger daughter has GCSEs in Latin and astronomy. Both my children have a really wide range of interests and and that broad education is something school rarely really deliver - they can make kids do subjects but few people seem to come out really enjoying a wide range of them. I very much doubt my older daughter would be in a very male dominated career (automotive electrical and electronics R & D) if she had gone to school. There is more room to be yourself without being brainwashed into stereotyped roles.
  - brobdingnagians 2y ago
    There are other places to learn the social networking aspects of school, and arguably so it better. Sports teams, churches, volunteering and other extra curricular activities can develop the friendships, group work, and compromise skills that are good for society, while also giving a family and child the choice to pursue their interests. Schools often do a low quality job of those. Teachers don't have a lot of time to mentor individual gruops, so often some individuals end up doing all the work and resent groups. Children get bullied and start hating school because teachers don't really have time, interest, or ability to stop it. It is more about learning to work and value knowledge. But it is easier to learn to work when you see some point in it. For a lot of people, school feels pointless other than the low quality social aspects of it. And teachers generally do a bad job of explaining the importance of anything. So a lot of children eventually leave school with the mentality that they won't use math and they don't need books and they only learned things so they could 1. Maybe go to college and 2. Maybe get a good paying job where they don't use those things anyways. Those answers are now cliche in our society. If we did more apprenticeships, application of knowledge in practical situations with adults and other members of the community (volunteering, organising events, work experiences, etc.) people would learn skills and be excited to keep doing it and feel like they fit in.
- yapyap 2y ago
  > Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? socialization
  - graemep 2y ago
    As I explained HE is better for socialisation. At the very least it is better at developing social skills. Schools (at least here in the UK) usually tell children they are not there to socialise so the people running schools do not agree with this idea.
  - jalk 2y ago
    And learn all the other subjects they don’t love to do in their spare time. Presumably the parents also have things to do when the kids are in school.
    - graemep 2y ago
      > learn all the other subjects they don’t love to do in their spare tims One effect of HE is that kids are more willing to learn and enjoy learning in general more, and develop greater motivation and self-discipline. > Presumably the parents also have things to do when the kids are in school. HE does not rely on teaching the hours schools do - it takes far less time to learn in other ways than it does to do the same in a classroom. I generally spent less time on HE than many parents do on getting their kids ready for school, and getting them there are back, etc. HE is not all (or even mostly) done by parents tutoring kids either. Self teaching, classes, tutors - whatever works for a particular time. I think parents should spend more time with kids than most do. This is why I am an advocate for requiring (by law) more family friendly working hours and conditions AND of greater involvement of fathers (which needs both social change and legal change) rather than raising children being a female occupation by default.
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    > What is the point of school? If you want a very long answer: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educat...
- pyrale 2y ago
  > Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? Regardless of the difference in skills taught by school vs. HE, simply put, school is the difference between early 18th century where those who could (i.e. a tiny minority) were homeschooled, and 20th century where every kid in a well-functioning society receives an education. There is a reason every single industrializing country started pushing mandatory education during the 19th century, and it wasn't benevolence.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
novia 2y ago
I am so jealous of these kids. I would have loved this.
red_admiral 2y ago
> Stop doing math While it's not the solution I would pick (my kid enjoys something that's not drugs - let them do it), as the following paragraph says, if someone really likes math and has an aptitude for it, they'll go on to major in math just fine. However, making them stop even thinking about a math career because that would be low status or outrageous or "defecting" in their community would be destructive. This hits all the usual battle lines like "women / black people / disabled people ... don't do math".
chongli 2y ago
We really need to break the stigma on this. If these kids had loved basketball (and grew to 7 feet tall in middle school) nobody would blame the parents for letting them play more basketball! Same goes for young chess prodigies! Yet if a kid gets addicted to math and loves all the math you can throw at them people start to panic and tell you to “slow down!” If your kid is accelerating in math and feels alienated from their peers, do what one of the families in the article did: find them a tutor such as a math major from a local college. Having someone to talk shop to with is essential for a kid, whether it’s basketball, chess, or math.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rors 2y ago
  Your analogy is a little biased in that most professional basketball players careers are over by the time they hit their mid-thirties. If they want to go pro then they need to be playing at a high standard in their teens. Whereas someone talented at math would be productive much longer than that.
  - nextlevelwizard 2y ago
    What is your point? That because athletic ability degrades faster kids should be pushed into sports as soon as possible so they can reap potential benefits, but since math is mental thing and mental acuity declines slower kids should be kept away from mentally demanding things so they can reap the potential benefits at a later date? Wouldn't both kids be better off if they could just do what they liked? Just because there is more money involved with sports and coaches and teams have noticed that they can get more bang for their buck when they focus recruiting as young as possible shouldn't make any difference if a kid is into chess or math or any other science.
  - mbeex 2y ago
    G. H. Hardy wrote: "Mathematics is a young man's game." Of course, you can continue to be a mathematician later, but for top performance, especially in terms of novelty, you have to start early.
hoseja 2y ago
Equitability focus has to be willful sabotage of national competitiveness.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  That's the problem when you start worshipping competition: when competition becomes central to your society and institutions then you're going to have lots of popular pressure to make the competition “fair”.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    It's a couple of things. 1. Treating education as a competitive sport/ tournament (zero-sum thinking). 2. Blank slate theory, assuming if a kid does well it's because of external factors.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  And, more importantly, massive sabotage of the individuals affected.
  - helboi4 2y ago
    Yeah it fucking ruined me and turned me from a very gifted kid into a non functional adult because I basically learnt to disengage with everything in my life and fail upwards. I find it really hard to get out of this habit and actually use the potential that I have. I mean, using your potential is much easier when you're a teenager and not a working adult that's already fucked up for a decade.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Yep! Not sure what to call it, kind of an "achievement ceiling" with standardised testing. Allows gifted kids to develop really terrible work and study habits and still appear to be doing well.
TrackerFF 2y ago
I sometimes wonder if academically talented kids also just burn out, in the same way many musically, athletically, etc. gifted kids do. I grew up playing instruments on a higher level, and met A LOT of wildly talented kids in my younger days. Anecdotally, I did observe that many such kids started quitting around the age 18-20. Some quit altogether, others just started pursuing other interests, and didn't do much to maintain their skills. You spend 10-15 years of intense work reaching the 80% mark, and then spend the rest of your life trying to complete the remaining 20%.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  It really depends on why they were doing the thing in the first place, and if they actually enjoyed it.
- holyknight 2y ago
  They surely can, you get burn out because you get constantly frustrated for long periods of time in your daily tasks. It can be caused by overwork, underwork, underperform, overperform, etc.
- helboi4 2y ago
  yeah I had that. For me I had an early childhood like these kids except my parents weren't even that active in accelerating me. My dad gave me a science book for middle schoolers when I was 4 and taught me my times tables. That, along with my incessant reading that got me reading history and literature at an adult level by the age of at least 10 meant that I was years ahead for most of my school career. I felt like I was wasting so much time to be in school, and all I got from it was being relentlessly bullied, to the point where I stopped engaging at all out of protest. I started to take pride in being as lazy as possible and getting top marks anyway and teachers who told me to work harder to reach my potential pissed me off because I knew everything they wanted me to work hard on was just too mind numbing to be worth it for me. In classes where I was too objectively ahead to be ignored, like Latin where I had literally already completed the first two textbooks they were using, they deliberately held me behind for everyone else to catch up. So it just seemed like a fucking scam when they told me to "reach my potential" I crashed and burned at about 17 because of this. Suddenly more long research projects that required discipline that I had purposefully thrown away were required rather than just acing exams effortlessly. I got moved to a private school where the kids around me had actually been receiving a proper education and the standards were higher. And I took one of my worst subjects as a higher level class (maths) and failed exams for the first time in my life. My identity was so tied to being a genius and I was so unused to not succeeding effortlessly I pretty much gave up. Like this shattering of my reality just made me full on depressed. Since then I've actually become stupider from the extra lack of effort and now I have severe issues dealing with frustration when not being immediately good at things and maintaining discipline or any focus whatsoever. I have so much resentment for the schooling system because I truly believe if I had been moved 2 years up as a kid I would have relished the challenge, kept gaining new skills and not created this learned helplessness for myself.
ipnon 2y ago
It’s absurd to claim being 6 grades ahead in mathematics doesn’t make your kid better than others in many dimensions. Having the mathematical ability to grok a cutting edge paper, or not grok it, can make or break an entire career. It’s detrimental to the child’s development to instill the belief that there’s nothing special about their abilities, because it risks them not finding any value in applying them! That has negative effects on all the levels of the individual, the family, the community and even the greater society.
- spoonjim 2y ago
  In America you can’t say that anyone’s better than anyone else. This even applies to murderers
  - scandox 2y ago
    In fairness many people will feel they are better than you because they don't agree with the idea of people being better than each other. While you oppose their view you should approve of them feeling that they are better for some reason as that supports your position.
    - kazinator 2y ago
      It's rather backwards. The liberals will believe these equality principles and whatnot feel that they're better than the deplorables who are not with the program, oblivious to the irony.
- ajuc 2y ago
  If you say to your gifted kid that they're great because of how well they do with math - then they will likely build their perception of self-worth on their math skills. Which seems fine at first (it's a great motivator as long as you're the best in your class), but later in life it often has very bad consequences if not addressed. It's a recipe for burnout and ego problems.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  While self-confidence is a superpower and definitely something we should foster, thinking you're better than the others on the other hands leads to lots of socialization issues down the road, so if you can avoid that to your kids they'll be much better off.
youoy 2y ago
> If a US school year is 9 months and the summer vacation is 3 months, it means that every 3 years, a student who only does math in the summer will be accelerated by one year. This means that after 9 years of school with math in the summer, the kid (having done no extra work during the school year) will now be radically accelerated. Roughly, this means that in the US math system, they will be taking AP Calculus BC as a Sophomore or Freshman in high school. And this is only doing math in the summertime. Imagine what can happen if your kid does math year-round?!?!?!?! If this is the reason why they are doing it, you are thinking about it the wrong way. What the kids are able to learn in those 9 years, a talented 18 year old (as I guess these kids are) can learn it and understand it better in a few months. Do it because they like it, as if they were playing soccer, but not for acceleration...
ThePhysicist 2y ago
If the kids are bright, send them to a school or an environment where they can live that out. I don't know about the US but in Germany the quality of schools varies dramatically both between regions and within. I loved computer science, physics and math in high school but my school did very little to encourage this. Only my physics teacher encouraged me and helped me sign up for competitions and a special programme that allowed me to attend university math/physics classes while still in school (I'm not a prodigy by a far shot, just very eager to learn and nerdy). When I came to uni and met other kids with the same desire to learn I was shocked how well they were prepared, they e.g. learned using Mathematica/Maple in school, had real computer science classes and a ton of extracurricular activities. We didn't have any of that, our only capable computer science teacher was an alcoholic and none of the other teachers knew anything about computers. In the end it didn't make a big difference though, I had to catch up a bit on some of the things but it wasn't like they were leagues ahead. The only thing I would be careful with is setting kids on a trajectory where their self worth gets coupled to feeling special or talented. Inevitably once they get into communities where more and more bright kids hang out they will regress to the norm, and some kids don't handle that well. Don't let them think they always need to be the best to be "worth" something, instead teach them to enjoy what they do for the sake of it.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  The last paragraph is very important!
- dangsux 2y ago
  [dead]
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  I agree with that last paragraph. It is more healthy to praise kids for the effort that they put in, rather than the results they get.
- wanderingbort 2y ago
  We chose to do the opposite. Our kids are in a school that provides excellent opportunities to build the skills they struggle with. They already pursue the things that come naturally to them. As parents, feeding those flames is easy and we take that responsibility personally. It is the other life skills that we need help with. Having qualified educators work on our kids non-preferred skill sets seems to be a better balance of resources. They may miss out on being nationally recognized math olympians BUT life is so much longer than that period.
holyknight 2y ago
I don't understand the problem. School is designed for the average (as it should be), spending your whole summer vacation doing math is far from an average thing a kid would do. If you enjoy doing something beyond what school offers, you do it in your free time and be done with it, as with any other hobby.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Designing for the "average person" suits almost nobody. Think ergonomics, car seats need to be adjustable for safety. And people vary mentally a lot more than they do physically.
  - holyknight 2y ago
    Everything is designed with an average and it works, because by definition most people is in fact around the average. It's not a perfect fit for anybody, but it's a decent fit for almost everyone. If you don't design stuff with an average user in mind, is literally impossible to build anything. You would never run out of edge cases to cover. EG: You design a chair. You design it up to hold up to 250lb, then you start going thinking it further and say "ok there are 10 people who weight 550lb, so yeah lets build all the chairs that way even if they now cost 1200$ each". No, what you do is design a regular chair that fits 80% the people and then if you want you can design one who fit 90%, another with 95%, 99% or how much ever you want. You always need to decide what the cut-off point is, and it's usually mandated by costs.
QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
My scenario was that I accelerated relatively hard when young (calc BC in sophomore year if highschool) and then slowed down to the standard pace, or a little slower because college math is just hard in a way that pre-algebra isn’t. This was really, really beneficial- I came into college with enough math credits that I could underload when I needed to to avoid burnout without falling behind.
eesmith 2y ago
> Almost every school we have talked to about helping our kids has been unsure of what to do. The public school system I went to in the 1980s offered summer classes for students who wanted to take an extra math or science course, not as remedial education, but as a replacement for a year-long course. I did math one summer and physics another. The high school I went to offered classes for the few advanced math students who wanted more. We had one course in linear algebra and another differential equations, and I think the latter counted for college credit. I also went to a state-funded summer science and math summer camp for six weeks at one of the state colleges. If those don't exist now, I'll blame tax cuts and our modern (post)Reaganomics switch away from New Deal social programs.
graycat 2y ago
Reasons for kids to do math: (1) It's a chaotic world out there that kids have to learn about. From math: In some respects it's possible to get rid of the chaos and separate junk from reliable truth. (2) Later in life, in career or just social contexts, it can help a lot, have the person at a big advantage, really be the best, for the person to be nicely ahead in some field or even just some small part of some field, maybe math, physics, chemistry, statistics, computers, publicity, .... Soooo, don't get to dominate always or everywhere but can help life a lot if just eventually happen to stumble on a situation where "nicely ahead" permits domination, e.g., maybe head of a new group, stock, starting a company, impressing a few influential people. Don't have to dominate all the time, but maybe get to be a founder of PayPal, program "Hot or Not", etc.
bell-cot 2y ago
While math is easy to get ahead in, and currently cool and STEM-y, it's the same deal in other "hard" academic subjects. Or non-"hard" subjects - try getting college-level support in accounting, history, languages, literature, music, sculpture, etc. for your junior high school kid from the public school system. From my PoV, the biggest problem here is attitudes & expectations. If 8th-grader Alize is college-level fluent in her second language (French), and already doing the accounting for her dad's chain of restaurants, then nobody expects the school system to be involved with those. It's all on her French-speaking relatives, and her dad's CPA. And that's perfectly reasonable. If Alize wants more, her family can consider student exchange programs in France, or talk to colleges.
physicsguy 2y ago
When I was in primary school (UK) aged about 10 I got flagged by a teacher for being gifted at Maths. At the time there was a local government scheme that put on little lessons at the local research intensive University on a Saturday morning. For me that was incredibly eye opening; nobody in my family had ever been to University and for the first time I also met people who had a shared interest in maths. The cohort of students was very diverse too. I did that for maybe 6 years and then due to cuts it closed down. At that point the staff tried to take it private and it ticked on for a few years during which I used to go and help (first Saturday job!). It was really really great for me, gave me a lot of exposure to advanced things way earlier, and not necessarily things that were on the normal syllabus either, so it didn't leap me forwards ahead of people in school, just gave me a much broader exposure to what maths was. I ended up doing a degree in Theoretical Physics and then a doctorate in computational physics. I vaguely kept in touch with a couple of guys from it, another one did a doctorate is now a researcher in Chemistry and the other did a degree in maths and is a software developer as well.
hermitcrab 2y ago
If you have a child who is interested in maths, check out: https://parallel.org.uk/ https://parallel.org.uk/ "A home for curious mathematical minds. For ages 10-16 anywhere in the world. 100% free." I particularly recommend the weekly quiz newsletter, which explores all sorts of interesting maths, not generally covered in school.
Patient0 2y ago
I think a lot of the hostility about over achieving kids is that parents and their fellow students instinctively recognize that a lot of the success that comes from education is "zero sum". There are only so many places and scholarships available at the elite universities, employers only pick the academic "winners" for their graduate programs etc. When a child spends all their spare time studying and does better in life as a result, a component of this success is actually at the expense of the kids who may have been as bright, but did not spend as much of their spare time on it. So now should all the other kids spend all their time studying so that they can keep up and not lose out? Maybe... I'm not saying that any of this is wrong or even unfair - just pointing it out.
- soup10 2y ago
  It's not always that simple, sure the more time you spend researching and reading books, the more certain types of knowledge accumulates but we all know someone that is book smart and life stupid. And so much about being truly intelligent and successful is having a framework in which you are able and motivated to apply what you've learned as well as the motivation to keep learning and doing more. Many kids will burn out(or worse, always shuffled into one matrix or another) if they don't have internal reasons for doing what they doing, not just parents or schools encouraging them but actual drive within themselves that goes beyond social validation, and part of that comes from exploring and learning about life and yourself through first hand experiences.
- Aditya_Garg 2y ago
  This is exactly the culture in Korea and other Asian societies. Kids regularly spend 3+ hours after school studying “just to keep up”
nicman23 2y ago
give him a C99 book and an arduino or something. that ll keep him occupied for couple of years
anonu 2y ago
I stumbled upon the Little Professor "calculator" from Texas Instruments. It's not actually a calculator but shaped like one and cycles through math quizzes. My 6 year old loves it.
bawolff 2y ago
> A common question we’ve seen online or when we talk with parents in our communities is whether it is equitable or helpful to help some kids excel academically while others are (so) far behind. Its disturbing that this is even seriously considered. I'm all for trying to improve equality, but there are two ways of doing that - providing help and resources for those that need it, or dragging down the people that don't. The latter is straight up dystopian.
- BroodPlatypus 2y ago
  Crabs in a bucket. Only 16% of people are born into first world countries, we should question whether it’s equitable to give them clean water and housing while others are far behind.
didgeoridoo 2y ago
> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? What in the Harrison Bergeron kind of question is this?
travisporter 2y ago
Anecdotally a kid in my high school maxed out Princeton math undergrad classes by 9th grade and was offered admission to MIT at tenth grade. He took it. Not sure where he is now but he seemed normal enough at the time.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
boringg 2y ago
You don't need to put in the paragraph about it being equitable and if anyone asks you that you should question their motives. The goal of society is not to hamstring development and intelligence because you have more free time to indulge your children's interests. I'm glad to see math acceleration - the public school isn't quite capable to handle leaps and bounds (and that isn't their responsibility - speaking to the point about equity debate). I would expect them to be able to accommodate except move up years.
g9yuayon 2y ago
> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? The fact that the author felt necessary to even discuss this shows how sick the US culture has become. Was it equitable that Newton could invent Calculus before he was 26? Was it equitable that Poincaré could manage to work only 4 hours a day yet still be the most successful mathematician in the world? Was it equitable that someone could get the idea of limit in one pass yet some kids struggled to understand even what percentage is? Was it equitable someone could beat the shit out of everyone in her class by merely engaging in class, while someone could flounder their math class despite taking 20 hours of tutoring every week? Since when the US elites have not been able to recognize that we should nurture talent instead of suppressing it?
hintymad 2y ago
> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? Many people seem refuse to accept that the innate talent can't be suppressed. In contrast, the biggest hurdle for kids to get ahead in math, or in STEMM in general, is their innate interest. At least that's my personal experience. I have two kids. One can focus for hours and is naturally excited when studying maths. The other is a born extravert, can't focus for more than 30 minutes, showed zero interest in math, and had a hard time intuitively understanding even elementary math concept like relative speed or ratio. Guess who effortlessly moved multiple grades ahead and who struggled, despite that they both had equal access to education and tutoring? I don't know how to create equitable education in a resourceful family, let alone the entire society.

93 points by sebg 2y ago

> If a US school year is 9 months and the summer vacation is 3 months, it means that every 3 years, a student who only does math in the summer will be accelerated by one yea That is simplistic. Amount learned is not proportional to time spent. Its the same problem as more hours at work does not mean proportionately more output. There are diminishing returns. > One family we spoke with has a kid (now homeschooled) Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? > One family we spoke to decided that what they valued most about going to school was " Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), My experience is that HE is is better for that - meet lots of different people in different settings rather than the same people in the same place daily. > The parents are now not only worried about what they would do for high school if the kid decides they want to go to high school, but they are now worried about what to do about college! Much less likely to be a problem. Its a lot less likely the child will be "ahead" as a young adult compared to other who are also good at maths. I do not think this is a problem unique to one subject either. Kids will progress at different rates in different subjects given the chance. its almost as if different people have different talents!

nkrisc 2y ago
> Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? There’s more to school than learning math. Learning how to work with other people, learning how to do things you don’t want to do, learning how to function in a group of people with different needs and goals, learning subjects other than math, etc. > My experience is that HE is is better for that - meet lots of different people in different settings rather than the same people in the same place daily. Those are all transient relationships. It’s still worth having long-lasting interactions/relationships - even with people who aren’t your family or maybe you don’t even care for.
- graemep 2y ago
  > There’s more to school than learning math. Learning how to work with other people, learning how to do things you don’t want to do, learning how to function in a group of people with different needs and goals, learning subjects other than math, etc. Yes, home education is better at all that in my experience. I specifically said that maths is not unique. > Those are all transient relationships. No they are not. My younger daughter has relationships that have lasted many years so far from HE. Despite our moving twice in the last three years. If you go to the same classes or activities or have the same hobbies or stay in touch online.... You also have more time to maintain relationships outside school
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    I don’t doubt that some schools are worse than home-schooling. But think (for many, not all kids) the best school is better than the best home-schooling.
    - graemep 2y ago
      I disagree. I went to one of the best schools in Britain and my kids got a better education than I did. Kids are individuals with different talents and interests. Tailoring education to the individual is usually better than standardising it and that is the key difference between schools and HE. They can do subjects that schools rarely teach and follow interests. For example, my younger daughter has GCSEs in Latin and astronomy. Both my children have a really wide range of interests and and that broad education is something school rarely really deliver - they can make kids do subjects but few people seem to come out really enjoying a wide range of them. I very much doubt my older daughter would be in a very male dominated career (automotive electrical and electronics R & D) if she had gone to school. There is more room to be yourself without being brainwashed into stereotyped roles.
- brobdingnagians 2y ago
  There are other places to learn the social networking aspects of school, and arguably so it better. Sports teams, churches, volunteering and other extra curricular activities can develop the friendships, group work, and compromise skills that are good for society, while also giving a family and child the choice to pursue their interests. Schools often do a low quality job of those. Teachers don't have a lot of time to mentor individual gruops, so often some individuals end up doing all the work and resent groups. Children get bullied and start hating school because teachers don't really have time, interest, or ability to stop it. It is more about learning to work and value knowledge. But it is easier to learn to work when you see some point in it. For a lot of people, school feels pointless other than the low quality social aspects of it. And teachers generally do a bad job of explaining the importance of anything. So a lot of children eventually leave school with the mentality that they won't use math and they don't need books and they only learned things so they could 1. Maybe go to college and 2. Maybe get a good paying job where they don't use those things anyways. Those answers are now cliche in our society. If we did more apprenticeships, application of knowledge in practical situations with adults and other members of the community (volunteering, organising events, work experiences, etc.) people would learn skills and be excited to keep doing it and feel like they fit in.
yapyap 2y ago
> Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? socialization
- graemep 2y ago
  As I explained HE is better for socialisation. At the very least it is better at developing social skills. Schools (at least here in the UK) usually tell children they are not there to socialise so the people running schools do not agree with this idea.
- jalk 2y ago
  And learn all the other subjects they don’t love to do in their spare time. Presumably the parents also have things to do when the kids are in school.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > learn all the other subjects they don’t love to do in their spare tims One effect of HE is that kids are more willing to learn and enjoy learning in general more, and develop greater motivation and self-discipline. > Presumably the parents also have things to do when the kids are in school. HE does not rely on teaching the hours schools do - it takes far less time to learn in other ways than it does to do the same in a classroom. I generally spent less time on HE than many parents do on getting their kids ready for school, and getting them there are back, etc. HE is not all (or even mostly) done by parents tutoring kids either. Self teaching, classes, tutors - whatever works for a particular time. I think parents should spend more time with kids than most do. This is why I am an advocate for requiring (by law) more family friendly working hours and conditions AND of greater involvement of fathers (which needs both social change and legal change) rather than raising children being a female occupation by default.
- red_admiral 2y ago
  > What is the point of school? If you want a very long answer: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educat...
pyrale 2y ago
> Home education is the logical endpoint of this. If your child is learning more at home than at school, what is the point of school? Regardless of the difference in skills taught by school vs. HE, simply put, school is the difference between early 18th century where those who could (i.e. a tiny minority) were homeschooled, and 20th century where every kid in a well-functioning society receives an education. There is a reason every single industrializing country started pushing mandatory education during the 19th century, and it wasn't benevolence.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

novia 2y ago

I am so jealous of these kids. I would have loved this.

red_admiral 2y ago

> Stop doing math While it's not the solution I would pick (my kid enjoys something that's not drugs - let them do it), as the following paragraph says, if someone really likes math and has an aptitude for it, they'll go on to major in math just fine. However, making them stop even thinking about a math career because that would be low status or outrageous or "defecting" in their community would be destructive. This hits all the usual battle lines like "women / black people / disabled people ... don't do math".

chongli 2y ago

We really need to break the stigma on this. If these kids had loved basketball (and grew to 7 feet tall in middle school) nobody would blame the parents for letting them play more basketball! Same goes for young chess prodigies! Yet if a kid gets addicted to math and loves all the math you can throw at them people start to panic and tell you to “slow down!” If your kid is accelerating in math and feels alienated from their peers, do what one of the families in the article did: find them a tutor such as a math major from a local college. Having someone to talk shop to with is essential for a kid, whether it’s basketball, chess, or math.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rors 2y ago
Your analogy is a little biased in that most professional basketball players careers are over by the time they hit their mid-thirties. If they want to go pro then they need to be playing at a high standard in their teens. Whereas someone talented at math would be productive much longer than that.
- nextlevelwizard 2y ago
  What is your point? That because athletic ability degrades faster kids should be pushed into sports as soon as possible so they can reap potential benefits, but since math is mental thing and mental acuity declines slower kids should be kept away from mentally demanding things so they can reap the potential benefits at a later date? Wouldn't both kids be better off if they could just do what they liked? Just because there is more money involved with sports and coaches and teams have noticed that they can get more bang for their buck when they focus recruiting as young as possible shouldn't make any difference if a kid is into chess or math or any other science.
- mbeex 2y ago
  G. H. Hardy wrote: "Mathematics is a young man's game." Of course, you can continue to be a mathematician later, but for top performance, especially in terms of novelty, you have to start early.

hoseja 2y ago

Equitability focus has to be willful sabotage of national competitiveness.

littlestymaar 2y ago
That's the problem when you start worshipping competition: when competition becomes central to your society and institutions then you're going to have lots of popular pressure to make the competition “fair”.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  It's a couple of things. 1. Treating education as a competitive sport/ tournament (zero-sum thinking). 2. Blank slate theory, assuming if a kid does well it's because of external factors.
HPsquared 2y ago
And, more importantly, massive sabotage of the individuals affected.
- helboi4 2y ago
  Yeah it fucking ruined me and turned me from a very gifted kid into a non functional adult because I basically learnt to disengage with everything in my life and fail upwards. I find it really hard to get out of this habit and actually use the potential that I have. I mean, using your potential is much easier when you're a teenager and not a working adult that's already fucked up for a decade.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Yep! Not sure what to call it, kind of an "achievement ceiling" with standardised testing. Allows gifted kids to develop really terrible work and study habits and still appear to be doing well.

TrackerFF 2y ago

I sometimes wonder if academically talented kids also just burn out, in the same way many musically, athletically, etc. gifted kids do. I grew up playing instruments on a higher level, and met A LOT of wildly talented kids in my younger days. Anecdotally, I did observe that many such kids started quitting around the age 18-20. Some quit altogether, others just started pursuing other interests, and didn't do much to maintain their skills. You spend 10-15 years of intense work reaching the 80% mark, and then spend the rest of your life trying to complete the remaining 20%.

HPsquared 2y ago
It really depends on why they were doing the thing in the first place, and if they actually enjoyed it.
holyknight 2y ago
They surely can, you get burn out because you get constantly frustrated for long periods of time in your daily tasks. It can be caused by overwork, underwork, underperform, overperform, etc.
helboi4 2y ago
yeah I had that. For me I had an early childhood like these kids except my parents weren't even that active in accelerating me. My dad gave me a science book for middle schoolers when I was 4 and taught me my times tables. That, along with my incessant reading that got me reading history and literature at an adult level by the age of at least 10 meant that I was years ahead for most of my school career. I felt like I was wasting so much time to be in school, and all I got from it was being relentlessly bullied, to the point where I stopped engaging at all out of protest. I started to take pride in being as lazy as possible and getting top marks anyway and teachers who told me to work harder to reach my potential pissed me off because I knew everything they wanted me to work hard on was just too mind numbing to be worth it for me. In classes where I was too objectively ahead to be ignored, like Latin where I had literally already completed the first two textbooks they were using, they deliberately held me behind for everyone else to catch up. So it just seemed like a fucking scam when they told me to "reach my potential" I crashed and burned at about 17 because of this. Suddenly more long research projects that required discipline that I had purposefully thrown away were required rather than just acing exams effortlessly. I got moved to a private school where the kids around me had actually been receiving a proper education and the standards were higher. And I took one of my worst subjects as a higher level class (maths) and failed exams for the first time in my life. My identity was so tied to being a genius and I was so unused to not succeeding effortlessly I pretty much gave up. Like this shattering of my reality just made me full on depressed. Since then I've actually become stupider from the extra lack of effort and now I have severe issues dealing with frustration when not being immediately good at things and maintaining discipline or any focus whatsoever. I have so much resentment for the schooling system because I truly believe if I had been moved 2 years up as a kid I would have relished the challenge, kept gaining new skills and not created this learned helplessness for myself.

ipnon 2y ago

It’s absurd to claim being 6 grades ahead in mathematics doesn’t make your kid better than others in many dimensions. Having the mathematical ability to grok a cutting edge paper, or not grok it, can make or break an entire career. It’s detrimental to the child’s development to instill the belief that there’s nothing special about their abilities, because it risks them not finding any value in applying them! That has negative effects on all the levels of the individual, the family, the community and even the greater society.

spoonjim 2y ago
In America you can’t say that anyone’s better than anyone else. This even applies to murderers
- scandox 2y ago
  In fairness many people will feel they are better than you because they don't agree with the idea of people being better than each other. While you oppose their view you should approve of them feeling that they are better for some reason as that supports your position.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    It's rather backwards. The liberals will believe these equality principles and whatnot feel that they're better than the deplorables who are not with the program, oblivious to the irony.
ajuc 2y ago
If you say to your gifted kid that they're great because of how well they do with math - then they will likely build their perception of self-worth on their math skills. Which seems fine at first (it's a great motivator as long as you're the best in your class), but later in life it often has very bad consequences if not addressed. It's a recipe for burnout and ego problems.
littlestymaar 2y ago
While self-confidence is a superpower and definitely something we should foster, thinking you're better than the others on the other hands leads to lots of socialization issues down the road, so if you can avoid that to your kids they'll be much better off.

youoy 2y ago

> If a US school year is 9 months and the summer vacation is 3 months, it means that every 3 years, a student who only does math in the summer will be accelerated by one year. This means that after 9 years of school with math in the summer, the kid (having done no extra work during the school year) will now be radically accelerated. Roughly, this means that in the US math system, they will be taking AP Calculus BC as a Sophomore or Freshman in high school. And this is only doing math in the summertime. Imagine what can happen if your kid does math year-round?!?!?!?! If this is the reason why they are doing it, you are thinking about it the wrong way. What the kids are able to learn in those 9 years, a talented 18 year old (as I guess these kids are) can learn it and understand it better in a few months. Do it because they like it, as if they were playing soccer, but not for acceleration...

ThePhysicist 2y ago

If the kids are bright, send them to a school or an environment where they can live that out. I don't know about the US but in Germany the quality of schools varies dramatically both between regions and within. I loved computer science, physics and math in high school but my school did very little to encourage this. Only my physics teacher encouraged me and helped me sign up for competitions and a special programme that allowed me to attend university math/physics classes while still in school (I'm not a prodigy by a far shot, just very eager to learn and nerdy). When I came to uni and met other kids with the same desire to learn I was shocked how well they were prepared, they e.g. learned using Mathematica/Maple in school, had real computer science classes and a ton of extracurricular activities. We didn't have any of that, our only capable computer science teacher was an alcoholic and none of the other teachers knew anything about computers. In the end it didn't make a big difference though, I had to catch up a bit on some of the things but it wasn't like they were leagues ahead. The only thing I would be careful with is setting kids on a trajectory where their self worth gets coupled to feeling special or talented. Inevitably once they get into communities where more and more bright kids hang out they will regress to the norm, and some kids don't handle that well. Don't let them think they always need to be the best to be "worth" something, instead teach them to enjoy what they do for the sake of it.

ykonstant 2y ago
The last paragraph is very important!
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]
hermitcrab 2y ago
I agree with that last paragraph. It is more healthy to praise kids for the effort that they put in, rather than the results they get.
wanderingbort 2y ago
We chose to do the opposite. Our kids are in a school that provides excellent opportunities to build the skills they struggle with. They already pursue the things that come naturally to them. As parents, feeding those flames is easy and we take that responsibility personally. It is the other life skills that we need help with. Having qualified educators work on our kids non-preferred skill sets seems to be a better balance of resources. They may miss out on being nationally recognized math olympians BUT life is so much longer than that period.

holyknight 2y ago

I don't understand the problem. School is designed for the average (as it should be), spending your whole summer vacation doing math is far from an average thing a kid would do. If you enjoy doing something beyond what school offers, you do it in your free time and be done with it, as with any other hobby.

HPsquared 2y ago
Designing for the "average person" suits almost nobody. Think ergonomics, car seats need to be adjustable for safety. And people vary mentally a lot more than they do physically.
- holyknight 2y ago
  Everything is designed with an average and it works, because by definition most people is in fact around the average. It's not a perfect fit for anybody, but it's a decent fit for almost everyone. If you don't design stuff with an average user in mind, is literally impossible to build anything. You would never run out of edge cases to cover. EG: You design a chair. You design it up to hold up to 250lb, then you start going thinking it further and say "ok there are 10 people who weight 550lb, so yeah lets build all the chairs that way even if they now cost 1200$ each". No, what you do is design a regular chair that fits 80% the people and then if you want you can design one who fit 90%, another with 95%, 99% or how much ever you want. You always need to decide what the cut-off point is, and it's usually mandated by costs.

QuadmasterXLII 2y ago

My scenario was that I accelerated relatively hard when young (calc BC in sophomore year if highschool) and then slowed down to the standard pace, or a little slower because college math is just hard in a way that pre-algebra isn’t. This was really, really beneficial- I came into college with enough math credits that I could underload when I needed to to avoid burnout without falling behind.

eesmith 2y ago

> Almost every school we have talked to about helping our kids has been unsure of what to do. The public school system I went to in the 1980s offered summer classes for students who wanted to take an extra math or science course, not as remedial education, but as a replacement for a year-long course. I did math one summer and physics another. The high school I went to offered classes for the few advanced math students who wanted more. We had one course in linear algebra and another differential equations, and I think the latter counted for college credit. I also went to a state-funded summer science and math summer camp for six weeks at one of the state colleges. If those don't exist now, I'll blame tax cuts and our modern (post)Reaganomics switch away from New Deal social programs.

graycat 2y ago

Reasons for kids to do math: (1) It's a chaotic world out there that kids have to learn about. From math: In some respects it's possible to get rid of the chaos and separate junk from reliable truth. (2) Later in life, in career or just social contexts, it can help a lot, have the person at a big advantage, really be the best, for the person to be nicely ahead in some field or even just some small part of some field, maybe math, physics, chemistry, statistics, computers, publicity, .... Soooo, don't get to dominate always or everywhere but can help life a lot if just eventually happen to stumble on a situation where "nicely ahead" permits domination, e.g., maybe head of a new group, stock, starting a company, impressing a few influential people. Don't have to dominate all the time, but maybe get to be a founder of PayPal, program "Hot or Not", etc.

bell-cot 2y ago

While math is easy to get ahead in, and currently cool and STEM-y, it's the same deal in other "hard" academic subjects. Or non-"hard" subjects - try getting college-level support in accounting, history, languages, literature, music, sculpture, etc. for your junior high school kid from the public school system. From my PoV, the biggest problem here is attitudes & expectations. If 8th-grader Alize is college-level fluent in her second language (French), and already doing the accounting for her dad's chain of restaurants, then nobody expects the school system to be involved with those. It's all on her French-speaking relatives, and her dad's CPA. And that's perfectly reasonable. If Alize wants more, her family can consider student exchange programs in France, or talk to colleges.

physicsguy 2y ago

When I was in primary school (UK) aged about 10 I got flagged by a teacher for being gifted at Maths. At the time there was a local government scheme that put on little lessons at the local research intensive University on a Saturday morning. For me that was incredibly eye opening; nobody in my family had ever been to University and for the first time I also met people who had a shared interest in maths. The cohort of students was very diverse too. I did that for maybe 6 years and then due to cuts it closed down. At that point the staff tried to take it private and it ticked on for a few years during which I used to go and help (first Saturday job!). It was really really great for me, gave me a lot of exposure to advanced things way earlier, and not necessarily things that were on the normal syllabus either, so it didn't leap me forwards ahead of people in school, just gave me a much broader exposure to what maths was. I ended up doing a degree in Theoretical Physics and then a doctorate in computational physics. I vaguely kept in touch with a couple of guys from it, another one did a doctorate is now a researcher in Chemistry and the other did a degree in maths and is a software developer as well.

hermitcrab 2y ago

If you have a child who is interested in maths, check out: https://parallel.org.uk/ https://parallel.org.uk/ "A home for curious mathematical minds. For ages 10-16 anywhere in the world. 100% free." I particularly recommend the weekly quiz newsletter, which explores all sorts of interesting maths, not generally covered in school.

Patient0 2y ago

I think a lot of the hostility about over achieving kids is that parents and their fellow students instinctively recognize that a lot of the success that comes from education is "zero sum". There are only so many places and scholarships available at the elite universities, employers only pick the academic "winners" for their graduate programs etc. When a child spends all their spare time studying and does better in life as a result, a component of this success is actually at the expense of the kids who may have been as bright, but did not spend as much of their spare time on it. So now should all the other kids spend all their time studying so that they can keep up and not lose out? Maybe... I'm not saying that any of this is wrong or even unfair - just pointing it out.

soup10 2y ago
It's not always that simple, sure the more time you spend researching and reading books, the more certain types of knowledge accumulates but we all know someone that is book smart and life stupid. And so much about being truly intelligent and successful is having a framework in which you are able and motivated to apply what you've learned as well as the motivation to keep learning and doing more. Many kids will burn out(or worse, always shuffled into one matrix or another) if they don't have internal reasons for doing what they doing, not just parents or schools encouraging them but actual drive within themselves that goes beyond social validation, and part of that comes from exploring and learning about life and yourself through first hand experiences.
Aditya_Garg 2y ago
This is exactly the culture in Korea and other Asian societies. Kids regularly spend 3+ hours after school studying “just to keep up”

nicman23 2y ago

give him a C99 book and an arduino or something. that ll keep him occupied for couple of years

anonu 2y ago

I stumbled upon the Little Professor "calculator" from Texas Instruments. It's not actually a calculator but shaped like one and cycles through math quizzes. My 6 year old loves it.

bawolff 2y ago

> A common question we’ve seen online or when we talk with parents in our communities is whether it is equitable or helpful to help some kids excel academically while others are (so) far behind. Its disturbing that this is even seriously considered. I'm all for trying to improve equality, but there are two ways of doing that - providing help and resources for those that need it, or dragging down the people that don't. The latter is straight up dystopian.

BroodPlatypus 2y ago
Crabs in a bucket. Only 16% of people are born into first world countries, we should question whether it’s equitable to give them clean water and housing while others are far behind.

didgeoridoo 2y ago

> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? What in the Harrison Bergeron kind of question is this?

travisporter 2y ago

Anecdotally a kid in my high school maxed out Princeton math undergrad classes by 9th grade and was offered admission to MIT at tenth grade. He took it. Not sure where he is now but he seemed normal enough at the time.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

boringg 2y ago

You don't need to put in the paragraph about it being equitable and if anyone asks you that you should question their motives. The goal of society is not to hamstring development and intelligence because you have more free time to indulge your children's interests. I'm glad to see math acceleration - the public school isn't quite capable to handle leaps and bounds (and that isn't their responsibility - speaking to the point about equity debate). I would expect them to be able to accommodate except move up years.

g9yuayon 2y ago

> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? The fact that the author felt necessary to even discuss this shows how sick the US culture has become. Was it equitable that Newton could invent Calculus before he was 26? Was it equitable that Poincaré could manage to work only 4 hours a day yet still be the most successful mathematician in the world? Was it equitable that someone could get the idea of limit in one pass yet some kids struggled to understand even what percentage is? Was it equitable someone could beat the shit out of everyone in her class by merely engaging in class, while someone could flounder their math class despite taking 20 hours of tutoring every week? Since when the US elites have not been able to recognize that we should nurture talent instead of suppressing it?

hintymad 2y ago

> Pushback: Is math acceleration equitable? Many people seem refuse to accept that the innate talent can't be suppressed. In contrast, the biggest hurdle for kids to get ahead in math, or in STEMM in general, is their innate interest. At least that's my personal experience. I have two kids. One can focus for hours and is naturally excited when studying maths. The other is a born extravert, can't focus for more than 30 minutes, showed zero interest in math, and had a hard time intuitively understanding even elementary math concept like relative speed or ratio. Guess who effortlessly moved multiple grades ahead and who struggled, despite that they both had equal access to education and tutoring? I don't know how to create equitable education in a resourceful family, let alone the entire society.