Re:How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?
by crabbone on Sunday July 30, 2023 @05:18AM
(#36929355)
> I am all in favor of kids learning new things as fast as they want.
You sound like you aren't a parent, or you are a parent of very exceptional children who have enough willpower and ability to organize their schedule to actually do something like learning math.
My experience, especially with kids until high-school and even into the high-school is that unless there's an external framework which tells them how and when and from what book and so on they won't do a thing.
Of course it would've been easier if left to their own devices children could just somehow organize their curriculum, but that isn't going to happen. So, the adults need to create the curriculum. Not just that, mathematical problems are very hard for independent study. They absolutely require guidance. It took many generations to prove theorems we find in introductory math books. So, the question is less about the students and more about the teachers -- how do they structure and plan their guidance to be more effective. And for that matter it'd be fair to make a simplifying assumption that children are more or less the same, since the guidance and the curriculum are orders of magnitude more important.
Now, as to how actually do it -- I don't know. I tried my hand a little, and it was a miserable failure. But, to put this into perspective, Wittgenstein, the author of "The Tractatus", one of the founding figures of modern mathematics, tried to be a school teacher for a while, and also failed to the point of being hated by his school students.
When I reflect on the school curriculum from a college perspective, I cannot help but to shrug about how most subjects and problems seem like a worthless dead-end stuff... and yet when I tried to work with students through more important mathematical stuff -- it just didn't work. Zero retention and very little understanding to begin with. Things I thought elegant or simple don't generate anything similar to my excitement when introduced to the students. No number of "creative" ways to explain this stuff ever made it more appealing. If anything, it sometimes causes resentment because, compared to their peers, the students may think they aren't getting the "good stuff" because they cannot do some worthless thing their peers were taught the automation of.
You sound like you aren't a parent, or you are a parent of very exceptional children who have enough willpower and ability to organize their schedule to actually do something like learning math.
My experience, especially with kids until high-school and even into the high-school is that unless there's an external framework which tells them how and when and from what book and so on they won't do a thing.
Of course it would've been easier if left to their own devices children could just somehow organize their curriculum, but that isn't going to happen. So, the adults need to create the curriculum. Not just that, mathematical problems are very hard for independent study. They absolutely require guidance. It took many generations to prove theorems we find in introductory math books. So, the question is less about the students and more about the teachers -- how do they structure and plan their guidance to be more effective. And for that matter it'd be fair to make a simplifying assumption that children are more or less the same, since the guidance and the curriculum are orders of magnitude more important.
Now, as to how actually do it -- I don't know. I tried my hand a little, and it was a miserable failure. But, to put this into perspective, Wittgenstein, the author of "The Tractatus", one of the founding figures of modern mathematics, tried to be a school teacher for a while, and also failed to the point of being hated by his school students.
When I reflect on the school curriculum from a college perspective, I cannot help but to shrug about how most subjects and problems seem like a worthless dead-end stuff... and yet when I tried to work with students through more important mathematical stuff -- it just didn't work. Zero retention and very little understanding to begin with. Things I thought elegant or simple don't generate anything similar to my excitement when introduced to the students. No number of "creative" ways to explain this stuff ever made it more appealing. If anything, it sometimes causes resentment because, compared to their peers, the students may think they aren't getting the "good stuff" because they cannot do some worthless thing their peers were taught the automation of.