6150 Bienville Ave. Children of exceptional ability delight in choosing what they will learn, and my experience is that, freed from a pre-set curriculum and viewing content apart from mainstream mathematics, they tend to choose well, says Harold Don Allen, a Montreal educator currently best known for summer and weekend work with the gifted and talented of the Ottawa area. He cites topics from informal geometry, probability, number theory, combinatorics, and non-routine problems solving as being well suited to capturing the imaginations and strengthening the abilities of younger students.
Teens think school mathematics is anything but useful, and there they are wrong.
What we teach is exactly what is needed to empower them, to enable them to go on in, and to apply, the subject. It is not, however, what best might capture the curiosity and the imagination of the ablest. Were we to teach English in the spirit in which we teach mathematics, it would be the business letter, to the virtual exclusion of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Allen was addressing a section meeting of the Tenth World Congress on Gifted and Talented Education, currently being hosted by the University of Toronto. The challenge of the more difficult problems seemed to possess distinct appeal, Allen noted.