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For child, being precocious in a subject is usually a curse. Being bright and a generally fast learner is also a trap. Hitting the wall is inevitable for almo

For child, being precocious in a subject is usually a curse. Being bright and a generally fast learner is also a trap. Hitting the wall is inevitable for almost everyone, but until that point your self-image is built on forward velocity, and especially relative velocity — you’re just faster than your peers. Turns out there are faster kids, they just aren’t at your school. Parents can make this worse but it’s pretty hard to prevent it.

tippytippytango 2y ago
Yep, we all have to hit the wall and that’s where we find out what we’re made of. It can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help.
- skyde 2y ago
  Can you give more detail on what you mean by it can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help. My son (7 years old) is gifted in Math and as a parent I find it extremely hard to decide how much I should push him (register him to math competition, weekend math club ...) and how much I should just let him get 100% on exam and not accelerate the learning.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    I guess how easy it is to do depends heavily on the district, but why not have him skip some math courses and leave extracurriculars for if he's really interested in it rather than just good at it? I ended up skipping three years of math by the end of high school, though I never did any club or competitions.
  - sebg 2y ago
    It really depends on how much your son wants to do math. As you can imagine, there is a whole world of kids like your kid who love math and want to do nothing more than math. If you're interested I can chat with you or recommend resources here if you decide to help your kid do more math.
  - dbcurtis 2y ago
    In my experience as a parent, you can provide the resource but don’t need to push. Love of math will happen if it has the right environment. For a 7yo I might suggest looking onto Epsilon camp, and Art of Problem Solving (which is on line). My own kid went to MathPath (middle school camp by same people as Epsilon Camp). Loved it. “Yes, dad really, I want to spent a whole month of my summer doing math.” The social experience is great for kids to be with other kids that like math.
    - gunian 2y ago
      rich people stuff is so fascinating to me my family went on one vacation my whole life i wonder why jesus made us poor because i loved school so much
      - mezzie2 2y ago
        If you're 'good' enough/identified a certain way as a kid, they'll bend over backwards to get you in things like that even if you're not well off. I wasn't from a well-off family, but test scores in the top 0.1% meant somehow there were scholarships to make camps and programs accessible once/if I expressed an interest. Whatever amount was required to make it affordable. I'm a thoroughly useless adult, so it was a waste of money on their part, but it does happen. Or at least it used to.
        in_cahoots 2y ago
        This might be the first time in my life I’ve seen someone with a similar experience. As a big fish in a small pond, opportunities just present themself to you. Free summer camp that provides college credits? Going to national/state competitions just because? It’s all second nature once you’re ’that kid’. Even bullying goes away because everyone knows you have the ear of the teachers and administrators and/or wants your help on homework. Of course you still hit the wall later. But I see all the reports of how terrible it is to be gifted and am so grateful that my experience was different.
        2y ago
  - tippytippytango 2y ago
    He needs to learn grit and how to ask for help. He needs to learn some things are hard and that he can’t always lean on his intelligence. The best way to guarantee a gifted kid wastes a lot of their potential is to be in an environment that is too easy. It creates a devastating mental habit that won’t trigger until later in life, like college. Whenever they try to do something that doesn’t come easy, their brain will try to shut down out of a kind of frustration. They won’t know how to overpower it. It will cause depression, anxiety, shame and low self worth later on. Because the gifted kid will know they are wasting their potential, but blame themself for not being good enough to deal with it. It feels like being broken. All of this is created by being rewarded for maxing out the rewards of a trivial environment. Someone needs to patiently and compassionately teach them to value overcoming appropriately sized challenges. To find and operate on the edge of their potential and ask for help to operate beyond those limits. So yeah, grit and asking for help. Intelligence is mostly wasted without it.
    - theodric 2y ago
      Hey, stop describing me accurately, that's mean.
    - GardenLetter27 2y ago
      It's just like exercise - if you just stay lifting weights you can manage easily, you never really progress, even though it still feels easy.
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    I faced the same problem. Some analysis in retrospect, having kids who have now graduated college: - your child has a wall. At 7 he is not hitting that wall. - that wall is probably mostly related to the pure math concepts, and probably less to his actual age when he encounters them. This is my assertion and I cannot prove it but let’s assume it is true. Precalc or calc is a typical wall moment, but for others it might be geometry or trig. - one response to an eager math learner is to move them through the curriculum faster. They are happy, because everything is fun prior to the wall! You get to be the parent of that kid who is great at math! Let’s put the pedal to metal! - what acceleration means is that your kid will hit the wall at 13 instead of 15, or 14 instead of 16, etc. - those two years can make a big difference. Accelerating might be positive, in that they hit that at an age where you can support them better. It might be negative, in that they now have a crisis that their peers can’t relate to. Not accelerating might mean that they respond to the wall by pouring their energies into age-appropriate activities instead, like listening to loud music or being grumpy. So no easy answers here. We did not think ahead clearly, and pushed forward, and had some decisions to make later. In retrospect I think it turned out fine, but I wish I had known that I was pulling the wall forward in time.
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      If you're hitting a hard "wall" either some concepts are not being taught effectively, or there are some undetected gaps in your previous learning that make some things difficult to understand for you. There's nothing specifically about precalc that makes it inherently harder than, e.g. Algebra II or whatever if the teaching is effective. So being able to access alternate sources of understanding, such as Khan Academy or the Math Academy OP talks about, can be especially important. Moving through the curriculum faster is a common approach but it's also risky, because that's how the gaps are created that can then hinder your understanding later. Of course if you have reached true mastery of a given topic, moving forward is preferable to being bored to death, but assessing whether that applies can also be difficult at times.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    The gifted programs we have liked most focus on depth over acceleration. Finding someone who can open the deeper views of things might be more supportive of his joy and longevity in the subject.
  - moi2388 2y ago
    You shouldn’t push him. You should encourage him. If he likes to do math you make it available, if he would rather play with legos instead of doing math you let him do that in his free time. You can encourage learning and problem solving without it having to be math, or pushing.
  - thechao 2y ago
    My youngest is not gifted in math. She's still in the top 1/3 of her class, through diligent study, repetition, and review. Over the last year she's gone from dreading to loving math. Please keep an open mind about your kiddo's interests and don't push too hard.
Swizec 2y ago
> Turns out there are faster kids, they just aren’t at your school Moving from Slovenia to SFBA in my mid 20's (~2015) was ... super fun like that. Sooo many people here are that most brilliant super talented engineer/founder/whatever from their home locale. But here we are just the norm.
- gunian 2y ago
  [flagged]
- zdragnar 2y ago
  We've got an idiom for that: being a big fish in a small pond. Then you move or have some experience that opens your eyes and you see that there are so many people out there that you're not actually as special / smart / talented / athletic etc as you thought. I've had the experience a few times myself, and it's always a bit of an existential wakeup call.
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    Yeah, i was the best physicist the tiny impoverished state school had seen in years. I'm_significantly_ behind everyone else in my PhD program. But then, i tell myself if i can't be the best prepared, i can be the hardest worker. But realistically... nah. I'd rather stay _inside_ the 5th story window of my office. It's not a race, unless you're losing
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      Erdos could learn as much in five minutes as the average person can in five years, but there are more things to study than he had five-minute intervals.
      - yapyap 2y ago
        What
        deleted 2y ago
gunian 2y ago
[flagged]
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Accelerated advanced math at Purdue as a freshman flung me into that wall at high velocity. Nothing like a competitively graded class to make you hate a subject for life.
- hinkley 2y ago
  The 'experimental' accelerated calculus program run by Stephen Wolfram had a similar effect and is why I decry trying to learn CS using AI and also why I don't like Mathematica or Wolfram. Fuck that guy. I loved math more than almost anybody I knew before that.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    As someone who tried to learn CS properly, as far as deep fundamentals, I was told by advisors that me being terrible at math would stop my career. I switched to a CIS degree, which at my local university was learning networking and Microsoft Office mostly. I dropped out of school and went into sales, while still having an interest in software. I started to pick up software development on my own, and found that I loved it even more without worrying about math. I ended up going to a "career" school, which would have turned out terribly, but I had a professor that taught all of the important programming and CS classes (there weren't too many CS classes, just fundamentals of OOP/data structures and algorithms). All of this to say I have been writing software professionally since 2006, and while I do struggle with the thinking behind functional programming and math-heavy subjects like graphics programming, I have written lots of business software that has brought me personal satisfaction. I would really like to understand calculus better, but I'm not sure if it would actually do anything for my skills in programming. If math is holding you back, think about whether you need the full breadth of CS knowledge, or if you just enjoy writing software. I became better at code organization, making code maintainable and simple enough to understand unless performance was an issue, and general people skills. I can understand why math and software are so close to each other, but at the same time, I don't think it needs to hold you back unless you really want to go into a topic that is deeply intertwined with math. It took me four times to get past pre-Calculus, and once I did, I realized that I just did not enjoy that type of math and didn't need it to build useful software (as in makes people's lives easier and/or generates profit for business) that I also find fun to create.
deleted 2y ago
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HPsquared 2y ago
The really bad thing about being precocious or a fast learner is it allows terrible working habits to develop in school - if you can max out the standardised tests by doing almost no work, this develops awful habits for life in general.
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  Yeah, this is why IMO there should be more project-based work and just move faster and harder for skilled students in general. Get students to build their own drone with MCUs - so they're forced to overcome challenges and practical trade-offs. Introduce algebra in primary school, and calculus much earlier - so Green's functions, etc. can be taught in high school to those who want to study mathematics, and they feel what it's like to struggle to master concepts early on. Hopefully with more of a shift to online courses and AI, this will be possible. Unfortunately the majority of schools just act more like a daycare centre / prison.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    "Introduce algebra in primary school, and calculus much earlier" algebra and calculus is college level century ago, we already bring it on HS level in some part of the world (Asian country) we already learn it earlier than most of the world but that's not sustainable
    - zelos 2y ago
      Calculus is 16-18 (A level, years 12-13) in the UK, 15-16 for kids who do advanced maths.
- dominicrose 2y ago
  Very true. Before working for a company I expected it would be OK or didn't give much thought about it. Meanwhile school was easy and I didn't put anything close to 40 hours per week. Plus the school was close. The first months working for a company were OK but then I was thinking oh damn I'm going to have to work 40 years like this? And then after a few years you learn that you can accept the workload but it's not enough to guarantee everything will be OK. In school everything is handed to us, really.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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tippytippytango 2y ago

Yep, we all have to hit the wall and that’s where we find out what we’re made of. It can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help.

skyde 2y ago
Can you give more detail on what you mean by it can be a valuable experience with the right people around to help. My son (7 years old) is gifted in Math and as a parent I find it extremely hard to decide how much I should push him (register him to math competition, weekend math club ...) and how much I should just let him get 100% on exam and not accelerate the learning.
- thfuran 2y ago
  I guess how easy it is to do depends heavily on the district, but why not have him skip some math courses and leave extracurriculars for if he's really interested in it rather than just good at it? I ended up skipping three years of math by the end of high school, though I never did any club or competitions.
- sebg 2y ago
  It really depends on how much your son wants to do math. As you can imagine, there is a whole world of kids like your kid who love math and want to do nothing more than math. If you're interested I can chat with you or recommend resources here if you decide to help your kid do more math.
- dbcurtis 2y ago
  In my experience as a parent, you can provide the resource but don’t need to push. Love of math will happen if it has the right environment. For a 7yo I might suggest looking onto Epsilon camp, and Art of Problem Solving (which is on line). My own kid went to MathPath (middle school camp by same people as Epsilon Camp). Loved it. “Yes, dad really, I want to spent a whole month of my summer doing math.” The social experience is great for kids to be with other kids that like math.
  - gunian 2y ago
    rich people stuff is so fascinating to me my family went on one vacation my whole life i wonder why jesus made us poor because i loved school so much
    - mezzie2 2y ago
      If you're 'good' enough/identified a certain way as a kid, they'll bend over backwards to get you in things like that even if you're not well off. I wasn't from a well-off family, but test scores in the top 0.1% meant somehow there were scholarships to make camps and programs accessible once/if I expressed an interest. Whatever amount was required to make it affordable. I'm a thoroughly useless adult, so it was a waste of money on their part, but it does happen. Or at least it used to.
      - in_cahoots 2y ago
        This might be the first time in my life I’ve seen someone with a similar experience. As a big fish in a small pond, opportunities just present themself to you. Free summer camp that provides college credits? Going to national/state competitions just because? It’s all second nature once you’re ’that kid’. Even bullying goes away because everyone knows you have the ear of the teachers and administrators and/or wants your help on homework. Of course you still hit the wall later. But I see all the reports of how terrible it is to be gifted and am so grateful that my experience was different.
        2y ago
- tippytippytango 2y ago
  He needs to learn grit and how to ask for help. He needs to learn some things are hard and that he can’t always lean on his intelligence. The best way to guarantee a gifted kid wastes a lot of their potential is to be in an environment that is too easy. It creates a devastating mental habit that won’t trigger until later in life, like college. Whenever they try to do something that doesn’t come easy, their brain will try to shut down out of a kind of frustration. They won’t know how to overpower it. It will cause depression, anxiety, shame and low self worth later on. Because the gifted kid will know they are wasting their potential, but blame themself for not being good enough to deal with it. It feels like being broken. All of this is created by being rewarded for maxing out the rewards of a trivial environment. Someone needs to patiently and compassionately teach them to value overcoming appropriately sized challenges. To find and operate on the edge of their potential and ask for help to operate beyond those limits. So yeah, grit and asking for help. Intelligence is mostly wasted without it.
  - theodric 2y ago
    Hey, stop describing me accurately, that's mean.
  - GardenLetter27 2y ago
    It's just like exercise - if you just stay lifting weights you can manage easily, you never really progress, even though it still feels easy.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  I faced the same problem. Some analysis in retrospect, having kids who have now graduated college: - your child has a wall. At 7 he is not hitting that wall. - that wall is probably mostly related to the pure math concepts, and probably less to his actual age when he encounters them. This is my assertion and I cannot prove it but let’s assume it is true. Precalc or calc is a typical wall moment, but for others it might be geometry or trig. - one response to an eager math learner is to move them through the curriculum faster. They are happy, because everything is fun prior to the wall! You get to be the parent of that kid who is great at math! Let’s put the pedal to metal! - what acceleration means is that your kid will hit the wall at 13 instead of 15, or 14 instead of 16, etc. - those two years can make a big difference. Accelerating might be positive, in that they hit that at an age where you can support them better. It might be negative, in that they now have a crisis that their peers can’t relate to. Not accelerating might mean that they respond to the wall by pouring their energies into age-appropriate activities instead, like listening to loud music or being grumpy. So no easy answers here. We did not think ahead clearly, and pushed forward, and had some decisions to make later. In retrospect I think it turned out fine, but I wish I had known that I was pulling the wall forward in time.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    If you're hitting a hard "wall" either some concepts are not being taught effectively, or there are some undetected gaps in your previous learning that make some things difficult to understand for you. There's nothing specifically about precalc that makes it inherently harder than, e.g. Algebra II or whatever if the teaching is effective. So being able to access alternate sources of understanding, such as Khan Academy or the Math Academy OP talks about, can be especially important. Moving through the curriculum faster is a common approach but it's also risky, because that's how the gaps are created that can then hinder your understanding later. Of course if you have reached true mastery of a given topic, moving forward is preferable to being bored to death, but assessing whether that applies can also be difficult at times.
- erikerikson 2y ago
  The gifted programs we have liked most focus on depth over acceleration. Finding someone who can open the deeper views of things might be more supportive of his joy and longevity in the subject.
- moi2388 2y ago
  You shouldn’t push him. You should encourage him. If he likes to do math you make it available, if he would rather play with legos instead of doing math you let him do that in his free time. You can encourage learning and problem solving without it having to be math, or pushing.
- thechao 2y ago
  My youngest is not gifted in math. She's still in the top 1/3 of her class, through diligent study, repetition, and review. Over the last year she's gone from dreading to loving math. Please keep an open mind about your kiddo's interests and don't push too hard.

Swizec 2y ago

> Turns out there are faster kids, they just aren’t at your school Moving from Slovenia to SFBA in my mid 20's (~2015) was ... super fun like that. Sooo many people here are that most brilliant super talented engineer/founder/whatever from their home locale. But here we are just the norm.

gunian 2y ago
[flagged]
zdragnar 2y ago
We've got an idiom for that: being a big fish in a small pond. Then you move or have some experience that opens your eyes and you see that there are so many people out there that you're not actually as special / smart / talented / athletic etc as you thought. I've had the experience a few times myself, and it's always a bit of an existential wakeup call.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Yeah, i was the best physicist the tiny impoverished state school had seen in years. I'm_significantly_ behind everyone else in my PhD program. But then, i tell myself if i can't be the best prepared, i can be the hardest worker. But realistically... nah. I'd rather stay _inside_ the 5th story window of my office. It's not a race, unless you're losing
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Erdos could learn as much in five minutes as the average person can in five years, but there are more things to study than he had five-minute intervals.
    - yapyap 2y ago
      What
      - deleted 2y ago

gunian 2y ago

[flagged]

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

Accelerated advanced math at Purdue as a freshman flung me into that wall at high velocity. Nothing like a competitively graded class to make you hate a subject for life.

hinkley 2y ago
The 'experimental' accelerated calculus program run by Stephen Wolfram had a similar effect and is why I decry trying to learn CS using AI and also why I don't like Mathematica or Wolfram. Fuck that guy. I loved math more than almost anybody I knew before that.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  As someone who tried to learn CS properly, as far as deep fundamentals, I was told by advisors that me being terrible at math would stop my career. I switched to a CIS degree, which at my local university was learning networking and Microsoft Office mostly. I dropped out of school and went into sales, while still having an interest in software. I started to pick up software development on my own, and found that I loved it even more without worrying about math. I ended up going to a "career" school, which would have turned out terribly, but I had a professor that taught all of the important programming and CS classes (there weren't too many CS classes, just fundamentals of OOP/data structures and algorithms). All of this to say I have been writing software professionally since 2006, and while I do struggle with the thinking behind functional programming and math-heavy subjects like graphics programming, I have written lots of business software that has brought me personal satisfaction. I would really like to understand calculus better, but I'm not sure if it would actually do anything for my skills in programming. If math is holding you back, think about whether you need the full breadth of CS knowledge, or if you just enjoy writing software. I became better at code organization, making code maintainable and simple enough to understand unless performance was an issue, and general people skills. I can understand why math and software are so close to each other, but at the same time, I don't think it needs to hold you back unless you really want to go into a topic that is deeply intertwined with math. It took me four times to get past pre-Calculus, and once I did, I realized that I just did not enjoy that type of math and didn't need it to build useful software (as in makes people's lives easier and/or generates profit for business) that I also find fun to create.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

HPsquared 2y ago

The really bad thing about being precocious or a fast learner is it allows terrible working habits to develop in school - if you can max out the standardised tests by doing almost no work, this develops awful habits for life in general.

GardenLetter27 2y ago
Yeah, this is why IMO there should be more project-based work and just move faster and harder for skilled students in general. Get students to build their own drone with MCUs - so they're forced to overcome challenges and practical trade-offs. Introduce algebra in primary school, and calculus much earlier - so Green's functions, etc. can be taught in high school to those who want to study mathematics, and they feel what it's like to struggle to master concepts early on. Hopefully with more of a shift to online courses and AI, this will be possible. Unfortunately the majority of schools just act more like a daycare centre / prison.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  "Introduce algebra in primary school, and calculus much earlier" algebra and calculus is college level century ago, we already bring it on HS level in some part of the world (Asian country) we already learn it earlier than most of the world but that's not sustainable
  - zelos 2y ago
    Calculus is 16-18 (A level, years 12-13) in the UK, 15-16 for kids who do advanced maths.
dominicrose 2y ago
Very true. Before working for a company I expected it would be OK or didn't give much thought about it. Meanwhile school was easy and I didn't put anything close to 40 hours per week. Plus the school was close. The first months working for a company were OK but then I was thinking oh damn I'm going to have to work 40 years like this? And then after a few years you learn that you can accept the workload but it's not enough to guarantee everything will be OK. In school everything is handed to us, really.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]