How much teaching experience do you have? I'm including any time you tried to convey a skill to any other person.
Some of the main problems:
* A lot more people than you would expect have attention issues and just needed someone to give them one-on-one attention. They would get distracted in class for a minute and then be lost for the rest of the lecture. I got permission from our teacher to record the lectures and then had people work through them with the advantage of a pause and rewind button.
* Some people were really independent and our textbooks were utter trash. I brought them “more advanced” books like Spivak ayyy that didn’t treat the reader as an idiot too stupid for a rigorous explanation. Having someone not “teach down” to them opened up so much. Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read. It’s amazing how much lack of understanding comes from years of teachers treating them as stupid and trying to have them memorize shortcuts that convey no understanding and don’t generalize.
* A few people were very tactile and so I brought in my laptop with Mathematica and had a bunch of examples coded up and let them play with the sliders. So many people groked limits and integrals with this.
* Some people needed more or less abstraction. Symbol overload is real. I loved saying something like “and this is true for any 17.” Connecting problems to “real life” wasn’t as effective as I had hoped but putting numbers in or having a variable cheat sheet they could quickly reference the meaning / value worked great!
* Some people learn by machine learning. They need a bunch of problems to work algorithmicly to feel the pattens. I called them numeric tactile. Once they’ve done it 50 times or so they’re ready to hear the abstract explanation because they’ve oriented themselves.
* A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization. People didn’t have the toolbox of identities and little tricks at the forefront of their minds but some flashcards and cheat sheets fixed that right quick. I had like 5 people suddenly get trig identities once I made them memorize a few of the core ones. Constantly asking them to repeat something back to me whenever it came up was way more effective than I thought.
As you can clearly see I didn’t have much of a social life in HS.
I'm not quite sure what the connection is, but the combination of
> Easiest tutoring sessions ever when they just needed some quiet space to read.
> A lot of people struggled because HS has so little focus on rote memorization.
brought it back.
Of course it's not representative but I find it hard to believe that some no name school happened to be where the math nerds all hung out.
This condescension isn't even based on fact. I was in some honors classes but not in others and for the classes I was in an honors class, I had more aptitude than my peers. For those in the classes I was not in, those peers had more aptitude than me (probably more motivation too since it was for subjects I didn't care for like English Literature)
The “low performers” during HS, now that they’re unburdened by a stifling institution, are showing that they’re just as smart and talented but in areas that school didn’t bring out. One is a pastry chef, quite a few are artists and graphic designers, one is a copyrighter, one does industrial design, two are in theater now.
They could have done just fine in maths and physics but they, rightfully, didn’t really care.
The secret of being an honors kid isn’t aptitude but being told that you’re smart and your parents/peers expecting it of you.