She has been taking piano for nearly a year and when she has learned the pieces -- memorizing, she likes to play them quickly. And it is such a struggle to get her to slow down and learn to do it correctly.
We've had very much the same issue with DS on the piano. But after nearly three years, he's finally learning that practices actually go more quickly when he slows himself down. He still revels in how fast he can play a piece once he's learned it -- but he knows now he can't get to that point without slowing down first.
[...] the teachers were very nice and set each child a standard (rather than the whole class doing 100 in 2 min which is the usual GT standard- how can anyone write that fast?)
No kidding. That's just some fast writing no matter how you slice it. He's <2min for +/- and <2:30 for * & /, but I am most impressed by the fact that I can actually read his answers!
I give my kids timed math fact drills (we homeschool) because I want them to have the answers automatically. For us, having individualized target times was a lot less stressful than saying everyone has to do 100 problems in 5 minutes.
I completely agree with the importance of developing instant recall on math facts... but if he's already halved the standard and misses an average of 2 problems per test (or 8 out of 400 per week), I think he's pretty much done. Now the only "challenge" left for him is to see how screaming fast he can do it, which is what I don't like, because of the careless errors it brings to everything else in math that would really benefit from a more tortoise-like approach (thx, Wren!).
