It's easy to look back as an adult and think "we could do all that stuff twice as fast". But half of kids are having trouble keeping up as it is. Double speed education is for prodigal geniuses.
It is certainly easy for adults to do that. But the potential of children remains unrealised.
When I was in kindergarten, the smarter kids, instead of saying numbers out loud to do addition, just used their fingers, increasing accuracy and speed. The average kids, on the other hand, were slow, inaccurate and rather confused. Fast forward a few years and the smart kids and the average kids are basically the same. They were just a bit faster than the average kids in two digit multiplication. The average kids didn’t get better. The smarter kids got worse. All the children were being made to apply principles they didn’t understand and weren’t taught. They were taught to use ‘tricks’ using the distributive property of multiplication. After some time, it was more about the tricks than actually understanding. Later, this understanding, which the smarter kids had more of, will affect their ability to do double integration and make proofs. The smart kids lost their ability to understand, and the average kids didn’t gain any.
Currently, I’m in fourth grade and very popular in my class. Using my popularity, I have convinced my classmates to do homework. The fifth and sixth graders’ homework. After explaining how and why 2x-x is x, they’ve developed the ability to find GCF’s, solve linear equations and use and solve problems with exponential notation. This all happened because instead of making the class recite ‘multiplication is repeated addition’ I made them understand the relationship between unary operations and multiplication. They figured out most of it with barely any spoon feeding from me. All I did was literally tell them what’s in the textbooks, give them some basic problems to solve and make them reason how to solve the more complex ones and derive methods of solving them.
So far, I’ve just been talking about how I did things. I am a typical nine-year old who is good at being popular. With some basic techniques, the kids in my class are at least a grade ahead of their peers. The class’s average score in tests has jumped by eighteen percent. And the lowest score is 72%, which was once 56%. The Polgar sisters were raised to be chess prodigies. Their childhood was full of chess. These people don’t have to spend much time or energy every day. They still have time to chat with their friends and go to football tournaments or whatever. Sounds like a good ROI to me.
The point is, you can make people improve significantly with little resources. This doesn’t make me some sort of genius child psychologist. This means that people are being given much, much less than they can chew. I’m not for making everyone great at everything. I don’t believe that’s possible. I just think basic education can be completed much faster and that humans can develop and improve more than they are currently doing. And no, I do not study in a school for gifted children.
I suppose it will be interesting to see how people react to your comments.
Regarding the forecast for a terrible heat wave in the US during the next week -
during the last two days the forecast has not changed for the better.
The heat wave is closer now. Becoming more and more likely.
What often happens is that air conditioning usage spikes. Heavily.
Air conditioning uses a lot of electric power.
And then there are electricity brownouts and blackouts because of too much demand.
Then there might be no air conditioning at all or even no electricity for fans.
Especially bad in cities.
That looks familiar. Oh yes. My comment #31110. Imitation being the most sincere flattery, I thank you.
I already knew about brownouts and blackouts during over-use of air conditioning during heat waves.
I lived through one of those in New York City a long time ago.
Idea: the approaching terrible heat wave about to hit the US hard is not about 'you and me'.