The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
As a parent:
For "mathy":
The best thing for my son was Khan Academy, which basically covers everything you'd want in grade school, up to a little basic undergraduate-engineering-major-level math. When Covid hit and all the other kids' brains started atrophying, he instead was thrilled to discover he could now go as fast as he wanted (or occasionally as slow as he needed to?) He started squeezing it in to the sad little "online school" schedule that had been hectically thrown together, then he eventually got permission from a teacher to let his little sister do his "real" math homework so he could spend more time studying way ahead, and he got far ahead before testing out of a few physical classes and joining others. (or "auditing" others; they have to call his Calculus class "independent study in math" due to some age/grade restriction, but fortunately there's no restriction on the AP tests).
When he got a bit older he really started getting into math competitions, so instead of just racing ahead he's spent a lot of time getting better at the sorts of questions that a typical kid his age knows enough math to understand but still can't necessarily solve. These have also been helpful at avoiding ego inflation, putting him up against the sharpest math students in the city or the country rather than just a few classmates and a standardized curriculum.
We've done a lot of talking together about the basics of things like set theory, boolean algebra, group theory, linear algebra. There's a lot of math that's understandable to very small kids but that doesn't get covered in a standard curriculum. This is reasonable of the standard curriculum, since most non-scientist non-engineers will never need to know e.g. what a power set is, and even most scientists and engineers can get away with believing theorems without picking up the groundwork to prove them themselves ... but if you've got a kid who's interested in math, then she may be interested in math enough not to worry too hard about which of the things she's learning have what future applications. Being able to learn multiple things at a time can also be helpful if one doesn't "click"; even professional mathematicians often just dive into one subfield they really enjoy, or end up mostly on one side of a divide like the "algebraist-vs-analyst" rift.
For "daughter":
I'm actually not sure? I might have screwed this one up badly somehow! My oldest daughter has a great talent for and a great dislike for math. She's taking Calculus at 15 and doing a couple math competitions, but solely to spruce up her college applications and get ahead on engineering major requirements. Watch from 4:55 through 6:10 of NewsRadio "Houses of the Holy", but imagine a girl doing math instead of a man doing magic tricks.
My youngest doesn't really dislike math, but she doesn't have any of the interest her brother does. She's joined him in a math club, but whereas he's there for the "math" part she's there for the "club" part. Your daughter might not have the stereotypical people-vs-things gender difference, but for any child having a community to work with and (to a limited extent) compete with can be strongly motivating.
As a former mathy child:
I really wish I'd grown up with more resources like Khan Academy, but also Wikipedia and especially math YouTube. The adults around me all tried to help me hit my full potential, to great effect, but there are interesting subfields that I didn't even know existed until I stumbled across references to them somewhere else.
I wish I'd somehow challenged myself more in high school. I took a few night courses at the local university after exhausting the available high school math classes, but still had a sudden shock when I got into a selective university and could no longer just ace every math test without serious study first.
I ended up in applied math, after nearly just going full engineering, and in hindsight this was more of a good idea than a mere diversion. The state of the art in pure math is so far ahead of us lowly applied mathematicians, and I think it's good for my morale to come up with ideas that I can then immediately implement and use, rather than ideas that for all I know might be foundational to 22nd century physics but that might more likely then be nothing more than footnotes in papers nobody reads. And despite what I said above about proper math brains not caring about future applications, it's still easier for me to remember new ideas I learn if I can immediately see a few ways to apply them to something connected to reality rather than if they just feel like a neat self-contained game.
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