I imagine that a good portion of HN's readership (and probably MathOverflow.com's) were intellectually gifted as children. Or at the very least, remember themselves that way.
I would therefore caution people on two things: (1) your personal memories of early childhood are often quite distorted, and (2) it's not fair to impose upon a child today the expectations that come from your own ego-distorted memory.
This post caught my attention because I happen to be the father of a 5-year old son, and I myself have been searching for interesting mental exercises to share with him.
It's been an exercise for me as much as for him, teaching me about patience and tempered expectations.
Five years is YOUNG. A generation ago, early childhood educators in the U.S. didn't even typically introduce reading until age six. We start reading in kindergarten now, but typical 5-year olds can generally be expected to recognize repetitive words and basic arithmetic concepts (e.g. 1 + 2 = 3). Even that is limited to short periods of study in each sitting.
Children may vary, but I believe that many of the suggestions on that MathOverflow.com page (as well as comments here about chess, etc) would be better suited for around 7-8 and up. I think it would be unrealistic to expect the majority of 5-year olds to handle much of this, and it would be a mistake to push too hard at that age.
I sure as hell would never have enjoyed these games, except maybe Set, as a 5 year-old. My attention span was fit for assembling legos and catching lizards, and a few years later, I became interested in math and programming. Not because my parents foisted them upon me: math because math showed up in school, and I had questions that needed answering; programming because my dad was building a website, and I wanted one too. My siblings took very different paths as well that were similarly organic.
I got into math because of programming, oddly enough. As a kid, what I really wanted to do was make games to show off to peers. And to do that I needed some mathematical building blocks first. Programming was a way to explore those things and then I ended up being more into that stuff than making RPG games to look cool to peers.
And by accident I transformed a normal interest (games and showing things off) into something that turned out to be useful and insightful to me later.
Interest/enjoyment is a factor, but I don't think it's the only factor that matters. Long term success also matters. Pardon my racist stereotype but Asian families are supposedly very strict on and focused towards education for their children, seemingly in spite of the enjoyment of the child. The results here are obvious, Asian adults are kicking every other race's ass in basically every metric of success you can name: lower criminality rates, higher education, higher incomes, lower divorce rate, lower single motherhood rate, etc. Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone must adopt the stereotyped child rearing practices of Asian families, but it's worth considering that enjoyment for the child need not be the only priority.
Asian here, Indian to be precise. While I agree with you, I must point out the side effects. This obsession with grades and studies pushes lot of kids on a sort of rat race. There is immense pressure to succeed and success is typically narrowly defined like high grades and a secure job. I don't know the numbers in US, but in India this has caused a lot of rise in teenage and young adult suicides, it is not uncommon to here of suicides of kids studying for IITs due to pressure to perform.
Another side-effect of this obsession with academic achievement has given rise to herd mentality where everyone is pushed to pursue similar career paths like engineering or medicine irrespective of a child's aptitude or interest. In India, especially this has led to a huge number of engineers who never wanted to be engineers. This has also meant that despite the aptitude lot of kids never got to pursue arts or pure sciences, in fact the popular perception of someone pursuing arts or pure sciences is that he or she could not make into engineering or medicine. Not to mention that this also discourages risk taking and entrepreneurship. Last thing I want to mention is that in Indian culture the idea of social perception is very strong, what will the society say tends to be a big factor in how decisions are made. This is one reason why despite sizeable population, India tends to be behind the world in pure science or in many sports. The mentality is changing a bit but not a lot and it is coming at a cost of many innocent lives.
> The results here are obvious, Asian adults are kicking every other race's ass in basically every metric of success you can name.
Perhaps you need to look at more than just metrics of success. South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and a lot of this is due to societal pressures like exams and work. While China's done what everyone was skeptical about 20 years ago, it now recognises that there's a dire lack of the "innovative spirit" - which really is part and parcel of being "free spirit".
I do agree that we can't just pander to children's interests only. Still too young, and they need basic education as a foundation. But childhood is also the perfect time to explore as much as possible, and plant those seeds of interest. Go the "Asian" way if you want, but just bear that in mind to strike a fair balance.
I'm certainly open to the idea of studying the early childhood development practices of the parents of those award winners. Individualized success seems like it is more likely to attributable to unique factors such as high IQ coupled with obsessive personality traits. That may not be as helpful as looking at the practices of success groups the size of entire cultures. Shooting star vs rising tide sort of thing.
It's worth mentioning that Jewish people share most if not all of those same "benefits?" I mentioned for Asians: higher education, lower criminality, etc. So there's surely something there to look at.
It is really difficult to generalize but I see Jewish people less strict and giving more freedom to their children while valuing education. It seems there are multiple articles about the subject [1] mainly triggered by Amy Chua [2] bestseller. BTW I just discovered that her husband is Jewish and he has been interviewed here [3]. All this conversation is turning funny in unexpected ways.
I find it interesting to see almost no Sepharad on this list. And that the list exists at all.
>Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 887 individuals, of whom 195 were people of Jewish descent, although people of Jewish descent comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population.
Guessing it's due to upraising among Ashkenazi and strong networks effects.
My mother-in-law was a kindergarten teacher many many years ago and she said it was typical to have to teach 5-6 year-olds the names of colors, shapes, and to identify letters. Then Sesame Street became widely available and the next generation of kids already knew everything they would normally teach.
Fascinating, I wouldn’t have expected that. I’m sure it depends on the family, too—my parents read with me from a young age, and I liked it, so I learned quickly.
In retrospect, 3 was a big year for me, haha. I remember going from not being able to read, to my parents finding out that I could read on my own (when they discovered me reading aloud the opening of Legend of Zelda for the NES) to reading proficiently by myself (thanks, Dr. Seuss!)
And at 4, I remember being very surprised when I went to kindergarten, and some of the kids made me read things for them because they couldn’t yet. I thought they must have been joking or making fun of me at first, but it turns out my parents are just great.
My daughter was reading at ~18 months. Or something like reading. You be the judge: My wife took 3x5 cards and wrote words like "BUCKET" on them and put the card next to the bucket in the kitchen. All over the house on things. Then she'd go around with her and point out "Look at the bucket! That card says bucket. Look at the chair! That card says chair." Etc. Then she'd gather up the cards and put them on the floor face up in a grid and say "Now go find me bucket!" And she would find the card. Soon after that she was pronouncing words on billboards on her own. From there she started to pick out and read books from the library. It was awesome but of course it relied heavily on my wife's patience every day to do this.
It's not just the parents. Some kids just don't take to it. My wife and I are both voracious readers, we read to our kids every day, and our 7-year-old is just not that into reading yet. On the other hand, her 4-year-old sister is picking it up great, and is only a few steps behind her sister. Each kid is different, and engaged parents are helpful, but necessarily everything.
Indeed, our 10 year old didn't start reading independently until she was almost 9, but now goes through a book a week. Our 4 year old and 6 year old are both at the point where they can read common words, and sound out simple phonetically spelled words (and we neglected reading enough to our 4 year old because we had 3 older kids we were dealing with), so the difference innate ability and interest have is huge.
Memory is such a strange thing. I don’t remember many things from that time, but what I do is as if it happened yesterday.
I can feel the crooked wooden floorboards under my bony pajama-clad bottom, and the NES controller in my hands with its creaky plastic buttons, and the warmth of the summer afternoon sun, and the vibration of my boy soprano voice reading the text on the screen. I can smell the static of the Sharp CRT television, and my dad’s warm chamois shirt with (I now realise) maybe just a hint of weed on it. And I can hear him standing above me saying “You can read?”
This kind of thing is what makes me suspicious when I hear education experts say that N is too young to teach kids X. It's fine for each jurisdiction to have its own ideas about when to introduce particular topics, but they probably have very little info about how well things would have worked at a different rate or in a different order.
This all goes n-tupley when we consider any individual kid in. In that case you should just see what the kid can do and wants to do for yourself and not bother with what teachers think they are unready for.
> Five years is YOUNG. A generation ago, early childhood educators in the U.S. didn't even typically introduce reading until age six.
We used to start reading in 1st grade when I was a kid. That was 7 years old back then in my country. We learned letters and stuff in kindergarten, but reading was the main task of 1st grade.
My parents decided I was pretty smart so they tried to encourage me to learn how to read sooner than 7.
I vehemently opposed this idea and said that I'm not old enough yet to read and that they should leave me alone and that I will read when it's time to read. I was upset, I think, that people were pushing me to do things beyond my age and it seemed somehow like that was not what I want.
Somehow I was a fluent reader on the first day of 1st grade. I suspect I actually knew how to read before but refused to do it until I was the right age.
I'm not sure what my point was in sharing this story, but here we are.
I started learning to read around 4 and was reading pretty well before the end of kindergarten, basically because I had the expectation that I could. First grade had a few tracks, based on reading ability. Some wires got crossed, and I ended up in the remedial class. The teacher wouldn't let me go, and the principal supported the teacher. That year was hell.
I had a similar experience with remedial reading in 6th grade. When we were asked to bring in self-chosen reading material, I brought in "Complete Works of Shakespeare," as a protest. Turned out my reading level was measured at grade 12+, but despite being off their scale, rules gotta be rules!
I have the _exact_ same story. Parents thought I was reasonably smart so while the school starts teaching reading at 6 or 7 years old they tried to have me learn it earlier but I was extremely opposed to it since I didn't want to have nothing to do in school (and I thought that was all you'd learn there - which I guess is sort of true :^)
Great observation. There is more pressure on kids than in the past. My daughter (1st grade now) was assigned homework every day in kindergarten (age 5), at a regular public school in the US, albeit a small amount and she didn't seem to be too bothered by it. These do seem possibly above a 5-year-old's level, and potentially a turn-off if they don't latch on quickly.
However, I'm actually impressed that the Math curriculum at schools today is much less narrowly arithmetical, and much in the vein of some of the puzzles mentioned here, in particular the "sets" game.
These games are good ideas, I will definitely try them, at the same time if the kid just isn't into it, no need to give up on them going to college. Let them try something else, or just go outside and play.
If anyone wants to try Set out with their kids, I made a free[0] Android version a while back. It's called Pipster[1] and it uses dog/cat/rabbit pictures instead of abstract shapes. "Beginner" difficulty is 3 dimensions (shape/color/number of stripes) which is much more appropriate for young children; "normal" and higher difficulties add color-of-stripes as the fourth dimension, which is equivalent to the normal Set game.
An interesting case is famous educator László Polgár, who believed that "geniuses are made, not born" and raised his three daughters to become very, very successful in chess with "two of them becoming the best and second best women chess players in the world" (Wikipedia). He did this especially by beginning to teach them, when they were very young - four years old. "Judit was able to defeat her father at chess when she was just five"
I don't have much respect for the school system's standards for what age is appropriate to start teaching different subjects. Children in my family start reading around 3. I consider reading a power tool that bootstraps further learning. If I had waited until school to start learning, I would have been held back in my development for years.
Children have wildly different capabilities. I've seen quite a few who probably wouldn't be able to read at age three. As the father of two highly intelligent kids myself (according to a few unprompted remarks by a number of people), I don't see what the rush is either. Kids are kids, let them play! They can be serious the rest of their lives. If they are intelligent enough to read at three they'll be fine anyway....
If your kids can read at 3, then good. But the power-tool argument allows for flexibility.
I think I was a little slow, or at best normal in picking up reading as a kid. But for whatever reason, by about the age of 8 I was reading well ahead of the rest. So I never read The Cat in the Hat, but I read the The Hobbit long before most kids.
And I'm glad, because that second level is where the real power-tool lies. There's little point reading non-fiction at Cat in the Hat level. But there's plenty of facts available that are simpler to read than The Hobbit.
That isn't to say I didn't learn other stuff: my favorite childhood book was about science. But it had lots of pictures, and when fist got it, my parents read an explained it to me.
I was a precocious reader (<3yo), and I have a strong suspicion that kids who learn to read early read differently than those who learn "on schedule". I think early readers do something much more like code breaking, and I wonder if this affects second language acquisition or other skills. I don't necessarily think one style is preferable to the other, but I do think there is a potentially interesting difference.
I was very happy to read early, and I think it was advantageous for me, but I have not seen evidence that early reading in itself provides any lasting advantages on average. There may be a good deal of heterogeneity in the early-reading population.
"Code breaking." Interesting. I think I agree. I learned to read around 4 years old, and I did so by trying to follow along and predict words as my dad read to me. I can recall thinking "ok, there is a word coming up that looks like 'be'" and then verifying it was correct when he read it. I taught myself in that fashion. I can recall passing a road sign and reading "tippecanoe" aloud and surprising my parents shortly thereafter.
When we taught our own kids to read, I was surprised that this was not the way that they would learn to read. We ended up having good success with hooked on phonics with our first two and the last one did well with vast amounts of repetition and memorization of his favorite books.
> I imagine that a good portion of HN's readership (and probably MathOverflow.com's) were intellectually gifted as children. Or at the very least, remember themselves that way.
The worst potential harm in exposing a child to stimulating problems too early is that he could fail to become immediately interested in them; the potential harm in failing to do so is that he will never fulfill his maximum potential.
I'd think "experiencing failure" is only a problem if a parent persistently tries to push something inappropriate. Otherwise it is just part of life and of growing up.
The (minor) failure is still a learning experience, just a moral rather than mathematical one.
I would therefore caution people on two things: (1) your personal memories of early childhood are often quite distorted, and (2) it's not fair to impose upon a child today the expectations that come from your own ego-distorted memory.
This post caught my attention because I happen to be the father of a 5-year old son, and I myself have been searching for interesting mental exercises to share with him.
It's been an exercise for me as much as for him, teaching me about patience and tempered expectations.
Five years is YOUNG. A generation ago, early childhood educators in the U.S. didn't even typically introduce reading until age six. We start reading in kindergarten now, but typical 5-year olds can generally be expected to recognize repetitive words and basic arithmetic concepts (e.g. 1 + 2 = 3). Even that is limited to short periods of study in each sitting.
Children may vary, but I believe that many of the suggestions on that MathOverflow.com page (as well as comments here about chess, etc) would be better suited for around 7-8 and up. I think it would be unrealistic to expect the majority of 5-year olds to handle much of this, and it would be a mistake to push too hard at that age.