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Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

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Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#121

Post by devonkim »

allendoerfer wrote: post #75
sannee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize the fact that humans have some really annoying bugs. a) The first one is the fact that we want (mostly) to help each other and make each other happy. This looks benign, but combined with b) can be really irritating b) Humans are bad at empathy. You might enjoy humanistic education or sports and so you automatically think that everyone else does too. This probably worked fine for our ancestors (get…

I think a bit different about humanism. I think a basic humanistic education is more like a drivers license for society. Know nothing about WW2? Well, you should not be allowed to vote, because it could turn out really bad for all of us. Democracy can be really dangerous without proper education. What does all technical excellence mean as long as the Middle East is a clusterfuck? Most really big problems have little…

The reality is that most people that vote do not know all that much about anything materially helpful from a geopolitical standpoint (many politicians themselves included I'll assert) and are basically low-information, single-issue voters that get pandered to in elections, unfortunately. While some arbitrary criteria is needed to keep people voting on issues that they have no information about (although I argue many 15 year olds are better informed than many 51 year olds, the average 15 year old is definitely not while we have some debate on the 51 year olds), establishing some "knowledge test" or something similar for voting is how we lose the basic foundations of democracy.

What really needs to be done particularly in the US is increased voter motivation because low turn-outs are not helping anything at all here. People don't want to talk politics out of "politeness" or something other passive policy and the country continues to have trouble talking about hard issues without leading to emotionally charged methods of "argument" that have led us to the current state of things with low voter engagement and politics devolving into a minstrel show of democracy.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#122

Post by agentultra »

lettergram wrote: post #105
agentultra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the…

Hell Im 23, and even with easy access to information its difficult if you have to work full-time to pay the bills. Ive been working full-time since I was 15, and no matter how many courses I completed or books I read, without financially stable parents there is no way a normal person can do this. Thats why most of us attend public school. I have full confidence most people are capable, but they would need some except…

The obligations and circumstances that get in the way are as challenging as ever. Time is the only constant in our experience. However kids today have instant access to MIT lectures and problem sets. I had to sneak out textbooks on classical mechanics and applied mathematics and that's all I had for years. Technology today has enabled us in so many ways that I envy my children who will get to have what I never did. So cool.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#123

Post by peter303 »

bitL wrote: post #26

I consider 4 years of my highschool a complete waste of time and would have loved to jump straight into a university right after elementary school. It would have been great to have OCW available at that time and not having to do everything myself including finding relevant books/sources. Good for Ahaan he escaped it and I wish him the very best of luck @ MIT!

I think I read the entire non fiction section of the local library to avoid my HS boredom. This was before the internet when you can find so much more online.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#124

Post by GrinningFool »

IshKebab wrote: post #78
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.

I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity. I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.

I had to read that first sentence a couple of times. Do you think the brain ossifies after a certain age, making you unable to learn no things?

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#125

Post by russnewcomer »

mrks_ wrote: post #119
russnewcomer wrote: post #30

I applaud this family, and am glad for Ahaan's sake that he isn't just shipping himself off to college, but is going to still have his support structure. I was homeschooled, along with my two sisters, my entire educational career until college. We all started taking college classes early, my older sister correspondence at 14, my twin and I correspondence at 15. All of us took classes at local colleges before starting…

You have an impressive background! If I may ask, how did (do?) you manage to read 10+ books a week? Was it sheer determination, or were you a fast reader? I know that quantity of books isn't necessarily indicative of any knowledge gained; however, I would love to work through my reading list a little quicker than my current rate.

I don't have as much time as I used to, having a job, marriage, and child now, so I don't currently read 10+ books a week (I'm more at 2 or 3 a month now).

But when I was a kid,

- I usually read a book or two a week as part of school,

- We typically were done with 'school' by lunchtime, and so I had a lot more free time than other kids.

- I stayed up late reading quite a bit

- We lived 15 minutes outside of town so I read in the car a lot (driving or in parking lots during my siblings' activities)

- I read a lot of not-intellectually-demanding stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, or similar novels mixed in with more serious history.

- I used to read at about 600-1200 wpm (depending on the test), which is on the higher side. It's a skill on top of natural speed, I'm now out of practice, and I top out around 500.

I skim a lot on fiction, I admit. I also read chunks of words instead of individual words when I am really going, which diminishes comprehension, and so I don't do that when I am reading theology or philosophy or something I want to deeply learn.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#126

Post by peter303 »

MIT has always had a few of these "show pony" geniuses around. Two of them sadly committed suicide during my years at MIT. I dont know their minds, but I guess some of their sense of self worth was being a smart ass and marching to to a different drummer. When you are surrounded by thousands almost as smart as you you dont really stand out for being you anymore. MIT people are impresses by you doing something really clever. Also I suspect these guys were very lonely too. I hope Adaan has a sense of self worth built on more than being at MIT.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#127

Post by jonesb6 »

The main argument for why this ok seems to be:

"Children are able to learn more, therefore any obsessively accelerated curriculum is justified even if it detracts from other aspects of child hood"

Um, I think that's just an excuse for not learning as an adult and pushing your own failed dreams on your offspring.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#128

Post by benjohnson »

agentultra wrote: post #94
benjohnson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's not so much despair but longing for something that never could have been. Providing an amazing environment for my children has erased all regret for my own childhood. I can see a new hope filled future with new eyes.

Yeah, same. Well, almost same. I have to remember not to be too eager! Update : Also... kind of terrified of the public education system. No time for home schooling though. Damn circumstance!

I've know two really good parents that have claim that if you spend about an hour each day "detoxifying" the children when they get home that they can survive public school. They let their children know that the public school is a manufactured environment, how to combat child peering (where children look to other children for role models), talk with them about their frustrations, and generally spend about an hour discussing ideas of substance.

So far, it seems to work - the children have a certain detachment to the school environment and a mindfulness about them when they talk about their situation.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#129

Post by Xcelerate »

thisone wrote: post #90
newjersey wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college. Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers. Now my professor i…

I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material. I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself. Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.

Haha, this is how I feel too. I had the mistaken assumption in middle school that "if this is all they're teaching me, there must not be that much to know". Then when I got to college I realized that everything taught at the undergraduate level and below constitutes a negligible fraction of everything that has been discovered.

Instead of stretching mundane material that could have been taught in a week or two (calculus, etc.) over a period of years, I would have much preferred taking all of my engineering courses then. That would have left plenty of time in undergrad to learn topics as diverse as representation theory, semidefinite programming, quantum information theory, lambda calculus, etc. Instead, I have to learn these things on my own as a grad student in an ad-hoc fashion. Occasionally, courses on these topics become available, but they pop up at random semesters and you can't take all of them.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#130

Post by VLM »

GrinningFool wrote: post #124
IshKebab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity. I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.

I had to read that first sentence a couple of times. Do you think the brain ossifies after a certain age, making you unable to learn no things?

Plasticity is the new phrenology, he doesn't really mean it, its just something ageist people signal to each other.
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