Also -- I'm willing to believe that the regular "boring honors stuff," as they put it, which they've apparently de-prioritized is not the best possible curriculum. But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either.
Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?
As someone who was on the team, the skills that allow you to excel academically in life are the competitive math skills.
And to be honest, not only is the "honors stuff" and "common core" material deprioritized, it's not even taught explicitly. You just get to such a high level understanding of the subjects Frazer teaches that it becomes trivial.
> But there's no reason to believe that the skills needed to solve math puzzles really quickly are either.
I disagree. I think that having a strong sense of mathematical properties and numbers is more useful than any specific rote drilled into students.
I see a lot of students up in precalc doing rote and not understanding at all why things work and that have no chance when you throw a curveball. On the other hand, the competitive math students are asking questions like:
* What's the graph of this function look like?
* What's it for the trivial case n=4 before I think about n=100?
* Does symmetry or any other pattern collapse this down?
* What properties do I expect the answer to have? Why does this direction "feel right"?
The kids who excel in math competition and on the normal math academic track get there by playing with it and understanding it.
Math is not debate or a spelling B. Math problem solving is absolutely applicable, in that form, in a number of fields like engineering, finance, video games, etc. etc.
Competitions are always artificial. This school is apparently pulling some really bright students now. Are they teaching them skills that will allow them to excel academically later in life, or are they teaching them how to execute the competitive meta strategy quickly?