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0 pointsjarin15y ago0 comments

I don't remember most of my Montessori school experience (other than making baked apples and learning how to wrap a sari), but I know that despite going to a very competitive and exclusive K-12 school afterward, I was one of only two kids in my kindergarten class who could already read. I used to sit in the back of the room and read during nap time.

I also vaguely remember having a head start on math as well, which allowed me to breeze through the math games during computer time and play more advanced games like Rocky's Boots (a game where you assemble logic gates). Like the "January-born hockey player" thing in Outliers, I feel that going to Montessori school may have possibly given me a compounding head start in my computer education. Either that or it just gave me an inflated ego.

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mirkules15y ago· 2 in thread

I was born and raised until age 12 in an eastern European country, and I will tell you that I was shocked when I first set foot in an American classroom in 6th grade - they were learning "longhand" division, something I did in grade 2.

What I take away from your anecdote combined with my personal experience isn't that the Montessori system is really awesome or that European schools rock, but that the public education system in America is really terrible.

TillE15y ago

> I was shocked when I first set foot in an American classroom in 6th grade - they were learning "longhand" division, something I did in grade 2.

I attended an American public school in the suburbs of New York 20-some years ago, and I very clearly remember learning long division in second grade. I remember it because I missed that day, and the teacher told me to learn it from a friend, which didn't work out so well.

The real trouble with public education in the US is that funding is almost entirely a function of where the school is located. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods will generally be good, and schools is poor neighborhoods will be awful. It's an absurd system.

onan_barbarian15y ago

Wow, you all must be genuises or something.

I went to a decent primary school in Australia and spend a year ( out of phase, so put forward into the second half of Year 3 and then Year 4) in the US at age 8. The thing that threw me at this age, that was part of the natural progression in that stage, was 'subtract with carry' (I'm pretty sure that was it).

I was 'put forward' past this interesting tidbit in my US school, assessed on a test that was almost entirely centeres around it, found wanting, and placed in the lowest class in school with about 7 streams. Each test I moved up a class. All up they regarded it as a triumph of American education :-)

Neither of these schools was terrible, either, and both had 'subtract with carry' around year 3. That's a far cry from longhand division.

No-one at my kids current school is doing long division in Year 2, either, although I have creeping doubts about its rigor.

I am hoping this pace continued for all y'all, so that you were doing calculus in Year 7, and proving exotic conjectures by Erdős in your first or second year of university, etc. :-)

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