@ ColinsMum — Thanks for sharing your observations. The gifted children who I've worked with are unrepresentative in various ways (I teach for Art of Problem Solving) and it's good to hear what you think the situation is more broadly.
@ HowlerKarma — Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm very sorry to hear this. I think that this sort of thing is very common. Fortunately, it's not too late
(even if it would have been better had things gone differently).
@ Val — I think that broadly, school is best conceptualized as a constraint that one has to work within (assuming that homeschooling isn't an option, etc.) rather than a place to learn, and to think about time outside of school as the time for learning. Accepting this can be liberating. I was familiar with Hung-Hsi Wu, but these PDFs are new to me: thanks for pointing me to them, they'll be helpful.
@ bluemagic — I think that elementary Chinese math instruction is better than American math instruction on average in that the students actually develop computational fluency, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a good way for gifted children to learn math.
