This sounds fun. I wish I had access to teachers/mentors like this in high school instead of teachers who simply wanted to maximize the average score on AP Calc exams; for those in Europe, it's quite easy to get maximum marks on AP Calc 1 and 2 if you are competent at math. You certainly don't need to be gifted.
I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.
And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...
> In other words, it seems like a bad investment of time.
It's only a bad investment of time because of ineffective teaching methods. What these students need is rigorous yet effective instruction that doesn't simply expect them to "learn all the math by themselves" and actively helps them master the subject, in a step by step fashion. Unfortunately, this is very unpopular with current teachers because it's seen as "demeaning" the profession.
I can understand why many teachers try to give disproportionate assistance to students who are disinterested in or untalented at math, but a lot of these kinds of students are just taking the harder math class to pad their university applications. If a student is on the border, a committed teacher can get them into maximum-mark territory. But the odds of such students building on these learnings throughout their lives is probably very low. In other words, it seems like a poor investment of time.
And university rankings are obnoxious enough, but my goodness - this article invokes high school ranking? We live in a world where people want to rank everything and live with the false certainty of a nonsensical hierarchy. Well, I suppose that describes humankind for at least the past few millennia, so never mind. Back to work I go...