Do we need special maths schools?

“If a person can recognize that a piece of music is organized into sections A, B, and then A again, that is math. Just seeing that the abstract structure is there and that it has symmetry means that you can save brain power.” — @DrEugeniaCheng

Sometimes you see interesting comment on social media channels — see the following comment to Simon Singh podcast on You Tube.

I am a German math/physics/computer science teacher and we had a similar idea at our school: take the best 1–3 kids of each class and give them a “special math class” while the remainder of their classes have regular math-practice-lessons. So the good kids just miss the “for them boring” practice stuff and the others won’t learn anything they might miss in later lessons. It worked “ok” but we had some issues like:

— some collegues sending not the best 1–3 kids, they sent the worst 10 to 15 kids to get rid of them and stop disturbing their lessons (and of course nowadays all those kids are “specially gifted” and just disturb the lessons because they arent challenged enough…. yeah….)

— you need someone special for that “special class”, someone who can really motivate and who loves maths, loves gifted kids, can awaken ambition in them and curiousity… and those kind of teachers are even rarer than golddust

— most kids age 12–16 dont get a lot of peer recognition for being good at maths, so they prefer trying to be good at other things (sports, fashion, whatever) in need of their peers liking them. it is not that they are bullied, it is just that they are not “the cool kids”. so it is not really attractive for them to be part of those gifted math kids group… only those who do not have any chance to get any peer-recognition with other things end up “remaining” in the math-physics-nerd-pool of kids… To change this, I think we have to talk a lot about our society, media, everything… anyone can say without blushing “I do not know anything about maths”, even laugh about this, but try saying you are really bad at reading or do not know any music… Now I teach a lot of international students and the public acceptance of maths and science in other parts of the world (e.g. asia) is much higher than in Europe.

This is just a glimpse of my thoughts about this topic, close to my heart, and I do not have a final solution. I think maybe most of these problems can be solved by founding “special maths schools” instead of just having those special classes at regular schools. It would influence that “being the uncool kid” problem, would make it easier to control the type of teachers you get involved… but it would be something like a nationwide “special place”, it has to be really good funded to be a place every kid would love to attend. it might even be cheaper than having a teacher at EACH school… but it would mean parents have to send their kids away to that “special school”… The russians and ukrainians have a system like this: some high schools have a “math focus”, so the kids there get much more maths and physics lessons (like 4 times the mount german kids get) and less of other lessons. From what I can tell (I teach some of those kids who try to study in germany) they have a really solid and good foundation for maths and engineering. BUT on the other hand in russia studying maths is like accepting to be underpaid, probably unemployed…it just has a bad reputation jobwise. But that’s a problem we do not have here at least, I think…

For Discussion: Russian School of Mathematics and other specialist schools are doing interesting work in the area. What are your thoughts? What do you think of alternative online options like Smartick?