Q&A: Resources and Advice for Gifted Student
Can you recommend resources/advice for my family? Seek resources to support 9 year old gifted son.
Answer
Advice
The most pivotal moment in my own education was when I decided to learn a bunch of advanced math much earlier than I would encounter it normally. This opened a ridiculous number of doors for me afterwards because
- it gave me the necessary foundations for pretty much any STEM research project, and
- it put me in this "special" category that made me a very competitive candidate for any research/scholarship opportunities.
Resources
I used MIT OpenCourseWare and related textbooks to teach myself math above my grade level. Although I learned a lot, it was also inefficient in lots of ways because I had to figure out what courses to take & what foundational knowledge I was missing, grade my own work, and look for other resources whenever I encountered an explanation that wasn’t clear to me (this happened pretty frequently).
In a perfect world, I would have had an expert tutor for an hour every day of the week. Obviously, that would have been ridiculously expensive: 100 dollars/hour x 1 hour/day x 5 days/week x 4 weeks/month = 2000 dollars/month.
As you probably know from my site, I’ve been working for mathacademy.com since 2019. We’ve created a fully automated and personalized online learning system that emulates the behavior of an expert tutor, and our monthly price is even less expensive than a single hour with an expert tutor.
This kind of resource would have literally changed the trajectory of my life if I had gotten to use it while growing up, which is why I’m so motivated to help create it.
We’ve gotten the system to the point that it can teach even better than what I can do manually. So mathacademy.com would definitely be my #1 recommendation as far as resources go.