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by hasenj 5565 days ago

I was a top student (always perfect score) up until I was 11

After that I was still a great student, but not the top and not straight As. I still liked math.

By the end of high school, I was extremely dis-interested in math and specially in calculus. It all seemed like arbitrary pointless rules. (I blame the teachers and the curriculum).

3 comments

Qz 5565 days ago

I was a top student up until they put me in the special classes for top students, which mostly just involved extra work which I was too lazy to do.

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cmontgomeryb 5565 days ago

I bet a lot of people here can relate to this.

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realitygrill 5565 days ago

Very much so. Poll?

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mbm 5565 days ago

How do we change this?

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tokenadult 5565 days ago

How do we change this?

Here are some suggestions for improving the mathematics education of pupils who show early advanced abilities in mathematics:

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php?pa...

(Summary of the advice linked above is make sure students learn mathematics beyond the standard school curriculum, which is not designed for the top students, and make sure the top students have a chance to meet one another and to challenge themselves with difficult problems that they can discuss afterwards. The site that provides those links provides many of the opportunities necessary, largely for free.)

Here is commentary by a Fields medalist on what successful mathematics education looks like over the long haul:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0503/0503081v1.pdf

(Summary of Thurston's advice is emphasize connectedness of mathematics and deep understanding over racing through the standard curriculum.)

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hackinthebochs 5565 days ago

The problem comes from the teachers, who themselves don't really know the subject. They know it as a set of rules, and thus thats how they teach it. Get teachers who actually know the material and the problem will mostly solve itself.

A more practical solution would be to change how the books themselves are written. Math is taught as just a set of rules to be memorized. We've lost the fact that math was motivated by real problems that real people had. We need to teach it in a problem-analysis-solution manner rather than "here are some rules and now here are some contrived problems for practice".

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