> Which is not the case in typical maths schoolwork.
Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning.
I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal.
And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.
I think we're much better off now, thanks to Art of Problem Solving's Alcumus, Richard Rusczyk, all the top-tier video lessons out there, etc-- along with just things like being able to hand out Khan practice for general math topics. We're getting much better at teaching top students how to solve hard problems (and, as a result, the AMC8/10/12, AIME, Olympiads, MathCounts, et al... are getting much harder-- these days if you want to prepare for the AMC8 you should be studying old AMC10 problems).
The same can't be said about overall societal performance in teaching the entire population.
Because their 'preparations' usually suck. As someone has gone down the path many years ago (think pre 00), the problem is that many teachers didn't teach the right way to tackle the hard problem consistently. I quit the math olympic class half way in high school because I couldn't keep up with it anymore, as I was only brute forcing. I only learnt how to consistently tackle hard problems and being self introspective to maintain the high performance relatively easily many years later when I joined the workforce and being much better at learning.
I feel like this kind knowledge is lost in the current schools especially under circumstances, where let the students to explore their best potentials are no longer the goal.
And many ppl like me only rediscovered how to learn and work hard correctly and joyfully after adulthood through various online articles and videos.