24 September 2011

Young Pinoy math whiz takes college calculus



LOS ANGELES - Solving quadratic equations is not an everyday skill for most people, except for 7-year-old Filipino American math whiz Jared Holgado.



With only one year of formal math education, he’s already studying second-level algebra, which is normally taught to high school honor students or kids twice his age.

“We’ve already gone through fractions and decimals, pre-algebra, algebra 1 and he’s doing algebra 2 at this point. Pretty good at age 7,” said Dan Steinberg, Holgado’s math tutor.

For the past year, Steinberg has been privately tutoring Jared, who will soon enter the gifted program at his school.

Steinberg said Jared’s gift is the ability to understand complex problems with just one or two examples, which allows him to move on to more difficult math problems at an accelerated pace.

Steinberg expects Jared to finish college-level calculus by the time he is eight.

“He’ll begin to have many, many choices and he can start to look into what choices that interests him. Toys, computer programming–he can use the math when he wants to,” said Steinberg.

Parents Nancy and Ferdinand are proud of their eldest child and are shocked by how smart he is.

Nancy said by the time Jared was three years old, he already knew the alphabet and could count to 100.

As for Jared, he doesn’t know exactly want he wants to do yet. As far as his mother is concerned, the most important thing is that he is happy.

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