How are you supposed to go around what schools provide and do MIT courses when you are required to sit in school all day and then waste even more time on the pointless busy work they make you do at home?
It’s the classic way to treat school. Do your math homework during history class. During math class, prop up your school textbook and read a more advanced one behind it. Avoid any courses that advertise themselves as containing lots of busywork in the name of “rigor”.
I feel so lucky that my elementary school, in the 80s, had a special-education coordinator who recognized gifted and talented as part of her job, co-equal with developmentally disabled. Not all special needs are remedial, after all.
As a result, my parents had an ally who knew the workings of the system, had resources and connections, and would go to bat for me/us when the rest of the administration had their heads in the sand.
The end result was that I had some time each day to work on my own projects, and my teachers were required to make accommodations. I ended up leaving the school anyway because of one perniciously evil teacher and I'm still in therapy for the sequelae, but there were definitely some bright spots.
I can't say everyone aims 'em right, but there are definitely hammers to swing against the traditional structure and the disservice it does to gifted and talented students. In recent years, I understand that the guidelines around individual accommodation plans have only strengthened. I'd imagine there must be folks out there equally adept at making them work. Some of them might just need a reminder that their job includes this function.
Here's what they used to do at my school( state school, Lithuania,90s): the more gifted ones had a few options: they could skip a year(i.e. from 8th to 10th grade), not follow the curriculum the rest of the class did and simply do something more advanced during that time. I'm not gifted but was probably smart enough to find school easy,but couldn't be asked to do too much,so teachers usually used to leave me alone.
I totally half arsed school for this reason. There's much more fun (and learned skill) in learning stuff how you want. Personally, I took the route of combining all my subjects (maths, physics, CS) and took the route of building a couple basic physics sims. Best education of my life.
