Reply to How hard is Alcumus for your child?

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[quote=pettifogger][quote=Anonymous]Thank you very much. I was once quite good at math competitions, I knew a few tricks, and I was surprised I hit the wall so quickly. I was going through this with my child - he was doing the problems and I helped him when he got stuck. Until I got stuck myself. So my worry now is that he won't be able to handle AoPS class. School math is easy for him; we tried RSM this summer and it is very repetitive and a lot of kids struggle even with that. So he clearly needs something more challenging. I know RSM has more challenging classes but it sounds like it will take some time to qualify for those and he already lost a lot of time. Thus AoPS.[/quote]
I think he will be ok with AoPS provided he has a couple of hours per week to work on the concepts he learns by reading the book/practicing problems. I assume he's taking the geometry class, which is significantly more challenging than the other introductory AoPS courses. However, it does start from the very beginning and does not assume anything more advanced than some algebra (i.e Pythagorean theorem, radicals, and a bit of quadratics/factoring but not too much). AoPS is also much higher ceiling as it is focused on developing deeper problem solving skills; this means there is lots of wiggle room where an 'A' could mean just being able to solve around 60-70% of the material. For some students this is great, as the focus is not on minimizing silly mistakes and being "perfect" on one/two step problems, but rather focusing on the higher order thinking needed to solve more difficult problems.

I believe that as an engineer you'll quickly find the AoPS type of thinking very closely related to what you're used to in the real world. One of the main goals of AoPS courses is to teach students to take basic tools and use them effectively to solve many problems in a variety of ways. So rather than introducing a whole bunch of tricks/formulas for various types of problems, AoPS prefers to focus on a smaller set of ideas/principles and show how to apply them to a wide variety of problems. In this way students develop flexibility and creative approaches to problems, to the point where eventually they become comfortable with working on problems they don't (initially) know how to solve. In my opinion, this approach is super valuable because it's very transferable to many other areas in STEM and also beyond. [/quote]

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