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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The "High School" Curriculum is basically an undergraduate mathematics degree.

Yeah, pretty close, although it's not like most universities will allow students to skip straight to graduate school. Our first cohort of students just graduated this past year, so we're just now getting a sense of how this is likely to play out.

My son, who's majoring in CS, is starting with 300 (junior-level) courses in both math and CS - although the departments were happy to allow him to start even deeper in the curriculum if he wanted. Another student, who collaborated with one our our math PhD instructors on some original research that's about to be published, is starting with at least one graduate math course this year (the last I heard, anyway).

I can't tell if they believe they have cracked the code that makes learning these concepts accessible or if they are suffering from a severe case of expert syndrome, totally unable to put themselves in the shoes of a novice.

Through trial and error and the application of some rarely employed, but highly-effective educational strategies like active learning, distributed practice, mixed review, mastery-based learning, interleaving, layering, etc., you end up with a pace of learning that's a little shocking. I realize it's hard to believe -extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that, but that's what got us started having our 8th-graders take the AP Calculus BC exam as as an outside, objective measure.

Opt-in educational programs of all sorts are usually heavily selection-biased toward students that are well-motivated and generally exceptionally easy to teach—good support from home, probably above-average SES, above-average IQ, et c.

Which doesn't mean such programs are useless, just that they're typically far less effective if you try to apply them to a representative slice of the overall student population.

It's true that the students in the school program are high-aptitude, but something like 70% of the students in the middle school where this all started are on the federal free and reduced lunch program (low SES) along with a couple of the top kids in the original cohort, who I taught personally and they were amazing.

> 70 % of the students in the middle school where this all started

but

> a couple of the top kids in the original cohor

Are their parents from a tight-knit immigrant community, highly educated in their previous country, with economic prospects in the US dimmed by language barrier and professional certifications that got dropped at the border?

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