Independent George on "the naturals"

re: Allison on "the naturals"

I am a sample size of one, but this matches my experiences. I am one of those 'naturals' who got to college, and realized I had three choices:

1. Study twice as hard to become a median student in chemistry
2. Study twice as hard to become a top student in economics.
3. Keep my same work habits to stay a median student in economics.

Shamefully, I chose option number 3 (and am now paying for it by working four times as hard to become a top student in an MS program I probably wouldn't have entered if I'd wised up earlier).

The other point is all those pesky foreigners are now entering the easy subjects like economics and biology.

Allison on "the naturals"

The "naturals" will be fine, I think. Kids with natural math talent can come from behind. I could be too sanguine about this, of course...

You are. The kids with natural math talent who are not utter prodigies DO NOT come from behind at a school like Harvard, MIT, Caltech in the math or sciences. They are completely outclassed by the Russians, Czechs, Estonians, Koreans, Japanese, Singaporeans, etc. In physics at MIT, the Russian kids were an order of magnitude ahead of the brightest American math kid in physics. In math, it was the same.

What American kids have going for them is an escape hatch: the "naturals" in math can more easily go into Investment Banking and other places that math skills are wanted than the foreigners, such as the Russians can, it seems (because of a lack of H1 B visas, maybe?)

But the only thing keeping more of the best math and science foreign kids out of MIT and the Ivies are restrictions on percentages of foreign students.

In grad school, it's almost a lost cause. There are virtually no Americans in the top programs, and white American men are almost unheard of. They have to have been the real prodigy (skipped high school, or college at 15, etc. and never fell off the train of perfection) to get there.

what's possible in high school?

There's a fascinating article titled "The Incredibles" in yesterday's NYTimes EducationLife section. This article focusses on students who are superachievers in high school and may even be bored in college. It was clear from the article that there definitely are such students.

For example, the former mathematics department chairman of George Mason University now teaches at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which is a public magnet school in Virginia. Some students are taking "Complex Analysis" which has A.P. calculus plus a second year of advanced math as pre-requisite. [Yikes! That's my field and I'm not sure I understand it all even yet.]

However, of more relevance to our discussions was this interesting comment by the president of Pomona College. "High schools are trying to imitate college and teach college-type material instead of the high school material they used to teach ... They are now learning the advanced stuff, but not the basic stuff. We are finding students who have learned about s-, p- and d-orbitals -- a theoretical concept in chemistry -- but they don't know that chlorine is a gas."

Another educator concurred. "High school-age students are not mature enough to grasp the subtleties of some material...."