Growing up in Germany I was always bored in math class, despite going to “Gymnasium” (the branch of Germany’s multi-tiered system that leads up to university) and even taking the most advanced math class in our school (the so-called “Leistungskurs Mathematik”). The math we were doing included some multi-variate calculus and some probability but I never felt really challenged nor was there a clear opportunity to take something more advanced. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that one could do the same math we were doing in a more rigorous way nor that there was a ton of math beyond it. When I got to Harvard, I met a bunch of kids who had done college level math in HIgh School and I was suddenly scrambling to catch up.
I finally fully focused on the different levels available even at university and opted to take mostly graduate level classes. There are huge learning benefits that come from taking more challenging material. First, the amount of time spent is roughly the same but you go deeper. It’s a lot like working out at the gym. You can spend an hour futzing around or you can spend an hour pushing yourself. It’s an hour either way but only the latter will actually get you fit. Second, you get a glimpse of the current edge of knowledge. That provides a huge motivation because you can feel the excitement of pushing out that frontier. Third, you are surrounded by older students who tend to be more serious about actually wanting to understand the material.
One of the great things about homeschooling is that there is no artificial age-based ceiling on anything. With University Courses available online via EdX, Udacity, Coursera there is no reason to stop at high school math or physics or computer science if a kid is really interested in these. Much to New York City’s credit there is an additional wonderful option available here. Kids who are homeschooled can take courses at CUNY for free. We are still figuring out what (if anything) the qualification requirements are, but to the extent that our kids are interested we will definitely avail ourselves of this offering. If university courses wind up being something that our kids do – via CUNY or online – I will provide more detail on how well it worked.
