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No Royal Road to Learning
Speaking of math, take a quick look at the winners of the University of Waterloo math and computing contests. There is a definite trend. Here are the names of the students with perfect scores on the Gauss Grade 7 contest.
Jahid Adam, Courtnie Baek, Anton Campbell, Victoria Cao, Joyce Chan, Victor Chang, Jiyang Chen, Sijia Chen, Jae Won Choi, Andrew Choi, Christina Choi, Jessica Clarke, Vivian Dai, Chris Diec, Kelly Dong, Daniel Gao, Nicholas Guetter, Courtney Hardy, Tony Hu, Simon Huang, Stefan Keselj, Cloe Kim, Hannah Kim, Hyeji Kim, Joo Ko, Matthew Lakier, Andre Vito, Luka Lawford, Junho Lee, Alice Li, Peter Li, Adam Li, Victor Li, Terry Liu, Frank Liu, Dale Lucier, Saeyon Mylvaganam, Aliya Nathoo, Plisov Oleg, Eric Pan, Justin Park, Ashley Qian, Young Jin Shin, Jordan Sinder, Laura Song, Richard Tuovila, Alina Wang, Bo Qin, Joy Wang, Brody Wong, Larkin Woo, Jeffrey Wu, Yidi-Lily Wu, Xiaoze Wu, Brian Yeung, Anne Yin
School for Thought would like to draw your attention to the fact that large numbers of Asian children are enrolled in Kumon Math by their parents. For those who have been living on Mars for the past few years, Kumon Math is a very popular tutoring method that drills the basics of arithmetic in a highly-repetitive fashion. It is criticized by many educators because it focuses on the mastery of basic skills, as opposed to conceptual understanding and higher-order problem-solving abilities. Yet the University of Waterloo math and computing contests definitely test understanding and higher-order skills, as a glance at the questions will make obvious.
In fact, the received wisdom of Ontario educators is exactly wrong. A solid grounding in arithmetic leads to advanced math understanding and the ability to solve difficult problems, while a premature focus on higher-order learning runs the risk of blocking advanced performance.
My dyslexic daughter, at the end of grade 3, was only doing grade 1 math. I was told, she would never be good in math, or will always have difficulty. I put that misconception to bed, by providing her a solid grounding in arithmetic, and prove to the educators, a solid grounding in basic math, leads to greater understanding and in fact I believe a deeper understanding of advance math concepts. No educator thought she had the ability to do math, much less taking advance math courses in high school, doing it her way,