That said, having spent most my adult life in Taiwan as well as years in mainland China, I don’t think your view of the schooling there is that accurate. A math academy started by an outsider within the public school system would have been utterly crushed. As much as it may dismay you, I think the non-uniformity of the US educational system is one of its greatest strengths.

Even in my own case, the loophole I used to self study and enter university at 13 in Colorado was limited only by my effort and ability and pay tuition. In China, it would have been utterly impossible.

I think this is a reasonable debate to have (I don’t know what the right answer is–I remember that when I was growing up, it seemed like we changed our math system every year. One year I might be learning set theory for kids, then it would be traditional story problems the next year)–for the traditional model of education. As you have said, anyone who has worked with kids realizes that there are huge difference in ability/grit. Age is a very course marker for these. For some students, they might be ready for a concept at 5 and others, maybe not until 10. I think grouping them by age is more a question of limited resources, rather than an optimal way of education.

Just to clarify my own background, I work a lot with magnet school kids who often finish calculus by 10th grade, and by 11th or 12th grade have usually done multivariate calc, a year or two of programming (and perhaps some ML), stats, etc. These students are internationally competitive. Different students progress at different rates and part of what I find exciting about math academy is that it could allow for students to actually progress at the rate that is optimal for them. If you have a student that needs more instruction, then they can take it, whereas another student might whiz through things, then find themselves challenged later. I think if a student can move quickly, it gives them options later–they will be able to catch a glimpse of what real work might be like. They also have a chance to figure out sooner what they like. Also, with a certain foundation, they can productively intern and get a better feeling for what they do and don’t want to do. For myself, I tried a lot of different internships in high school/college (nonlinear optics, inorganic chemistry, space physics, cosmology, astronomy). I sat my first graduate course at 16 in urban planning (fun, but not for me)–I’m a public school brat, but I was lucky to go to a school with good options. Another thing that I like about Math academy is the possibility of seeing it available to students in lower income schools with less options–I hate the idea of seeing talent wasted.

In short–I think the question of accelerate or not is the wrong debate to be having. The question should be can we move more towards personalized education? It’s really hard to see how to do this with a normal classroom environment where the teachers would have to be skilled both at teaching and at math through the calculus level–not to mention managing students of wildly different ability levels, so it seems only possible (except for the rich) with the aid of technology. There are a lot of crappy attempts at online education, but it seems like it should be possible to do it better.

However, let’s for the moment assume that I am correct. There could still be unintended consequences. Where maybe if you look at say a school in a low-income district and a school in a wealthy distract. Let’s imagine that you have two students with 4.0 averages from those schools. In the past, if the student from the low income district got a 1560 on the SAT, that might have gotten him into a good school (wow, he came from that school AND scored awesome!) whereas now, he might be locked out, because a college might assume that his school is not of the same caliber.

Anywho, my main point in all of this is that I’m not sure that this is a question of quality standards being lowered so much as it is a case of quality standards being questioned. Is the test predictive? Sometimes, I think we keep some things around simply because we went through them. For example, physics qualifying exams. Mine was 3 days of written exams on all of physics (7 hrs/ day) followed by 2 sets of oral exams–one on classical physics and the other on modern physics. I passed on my first try, but am not strongly tied to the practice. I can see changing the exam to be more focused to the particular area of research that someone is going into–but there are some that believe that it measures something important. Without data, I’m just not sure.

If you do dip your toes back into twitter, I would recommend less “sharing of articles” and more posting of unique content. As you mentioned, the best articles are showing up on HN, reddit, newsletters, etc — so your twitter feed is at best offering curation and at worst just reposting stuff people have already seen. Give people a reason to follow you and read your stuff, make unique content. No doubt a highly plugged in homeschooler parent in California has seen the articles about the advance math classes and SAT stuff — but where is the solution? Where is the alternative? That’s a gap you could be aiming for. Instead of sharing an article about how COVID remote learning has set students back 2 years in math progress, that’s the place for a thread about how to know if you kid is falling behind and what resources you could take.

Jason: Good luck getting your code back in line. I enjoyed the discussion about the diagnostic tool. Disappointed to hear about schools considering removing gifted programs.