Maybe not, but I feel like most people understand it whether they think they do or not. It's not really 'that' hard to understand is it? I think people are just scared of math and that emotion makes it so much harder for people to understand in theory.
I also feel that in K-12 laziness and lack of caring play a huge role in kids 'getting' it. So, in that sense he is right, we are wasting money on a lot of kids who just don't give a damn, I know I didn't at those stages in my life. We should find a way to funnel that money to younger kids who are truly interested in Math and Sciences. Or, maybe leave sciences out of it all together, I hated math in high school, but I loved the sciences.
Of course, the public school system is so fucked up right now thanks to good old government incompetence, that it is impossible to fund only the bright and eager ones.
My oldest son started Kindergarten this year, and we made the tough decision to put him in a private school. We essentially picked academics over sports and friends, only because he is a smart kid, smarter than I ever was at that age. He was reading at a 5th grade level by age 4, understood addition and subtraction early on, and he is extremely creative. His creativity is very much in robotics, space exploration. etc. etc.. He was always sketching out designs for various robots he wants to build from a very early age, and while not always very practical, he was always solving problems with his inventions, and every now and then this 5 year old kid has some very good, good ideas, so good I'd like to claim them as my own.
Why was private school a hard decision then? Well, because both of my sons also have my body build (I'm 6' 4" 230, and 230 is skinny, not working out. Any men on my fathers side are tall and thick, viking heritage), my oldest will be taller than I, though isn't quite as thick yet, but I was tall and scrawny until about 6th grade also. He loves sports, football, soccer, basketball, baseball, as does my youngest. We play all of the time as a family, and they play city league sports together already. He is also fascinated by martial arts, probably due to my almost embarrassing kung fu fetish, so he takes Hapkido twice per week. Again, he is really a very big kid, and due to him unintentionally, and continually harming the kids in his age group, they quickly asked our permission to move him into the next age group. So even with kids nearly twice his age in some cases, he is still excelling, and earning new belts at about 1.5 time the rate of the rest of his class. He is highly competitive, and I believe it is healthy to let him play that out in individual and team sports through adolescence.
In his case, we felt that his love of science and engineering, paired with the fact that he is very bright, outweighed the social, sporting, and a few other pluses that we saw in public school. Now, we raised both kids in the same environment, in the same way, only we tried to recognize and foster their strong points. My youngest son is not stupid by any means, but he doesn't seem to have the aptitude for math and science that my eldest does. He is 4 now, and attending preschool. We are told that he does well across the board, be he too is excelling with reading. I believe they are both a testament to the importance of reading to your children daily, starting at birth. I very rarely miss a day of reading with my boys. In fact, my 5 year old learned of cryptography through some World War II documentary he watched that covered Enigma, etc., and is now currently obsessed with 'secret codes'. I pulled out my old copy of The Code Book, and that is what we are now reading. My 5 year old gets giddy every night at story time to learn more about cryptanalysis, while my younger son is very neutral about the book, he hasn't complained about it, but he doesn't care much either. My oldest and I have been making our own simple substitution ciphers and writing each other secret messages every morning. He takes a lot of pleasure in he and I having our special things like that.
Anyway, my younger son is a much gentler and 'sweeter' little boy, his interests are very much in sports and music. I teach him guitar and drum lessons weekly, and one of his favorite indoor activities is pouring over my vinyl collection in the den and listening to record after record on headphones (he is welcome to be noisy, he just thinks headphones are cool). I am very into music, even made a living as a guitarist for a few years. As a consequence I have an mp3 (192k minimum) collection just over 200 gb. I was suffering from 'music overload' with digital music. I had already inherited a very sizeable vinyl collection from my parents (who gave me my own record player for my room at age 5 so I would stay out of the den), so several years back I stopped with digital music. I bought a slightly better than entry level HiFi setup, and decided that it was a good way to manage my music overload. If it's not released on vinyl, I don't buy it. I also feel it is the best way for my son to make a connection with music. He loves putting on an album and sitting and looking at the art and liner notes, always asking for help reading more difficult words, and demanding that I translate these liner notes into concepts he understands. He is becoming a bit of a music history buff.
My youngest is also, even though younger and a bit smaller, better at almost every sport they play together (he despised Hapkido and dropped out after only 2 classes). At three years old he was batting 1000 with slow pitch, and is disgusted that he has to play tee ball instead of 'real ball'. We have to make the private vs. public choice for him next year, and I think that he will be a much harder decision. He is automatically accepted into our older sons private school (they allow all -younger- siblings of already admitted children guaranteed acceptance), but in many ways I think he might be a better fit for public school. I think it will come down to his decision on whether he cares about going to school with his brother or not.
Now I know that most 'geeks' aren't into sports, but I played, and I enjoyed it (still do), and I was pretty nerdy. I never really gave much importance to sports, like i did science and coding, and music, but it was still an important part of my childhood.
Wow, I am really, really rambling on here. The point is, that with public schools in the horrible state they are in today, I think it is a very hard decision for a lot of parents to make. There are trade-offs to each. If we could just get schools back on track using some common sense like in this article, it would be a much easier decision to make.
