My kid was enamored by math from the earliest age, and pretty good at it too. He read proofs for fun at about age 6, and was writing them for fun by 7. Calculation seemed to come pretty easy to him as well.
But he is slow! He did a bunch of cognitive tests where he was testing 3rd std deviation on most tasks. Except processing speed, where he was in the 2nd percentile. You'd present him with his times tables, and he would take 15 seconds to get "8x7"... but he didn't slow down as as the psychiatrist progressed through the test. He'd get to some 6th grade problem, and it'd be the same 15 seconds and blank look before the solution came out. He was an O(1) machine with a huge constant.
And school utterly killed his interest in math. From grade 2 onwards it was speed competitions and public humiliation in front of his class. After grade 3 he refused to do anything related to math outside of what's required because he was "way to stupid for that".
Laurent Schwartz (former fields medallist) states in his autobiography (which I do recommend) that he was particularly slow - however being slow doesn't mean you're bad. It just means that you're slow, but this has no implication as to how far you'll go!
How long ago was this? Did he get back into it later?
My school had this thing called mental math, learning to do arithmetic really fast as a large portion of my 4th or 5th grade material. I absolutely sucked at it and I lost interest in any kind of math. My dad who teaches college math for a living was very disappointed when that happened.
Around 8th grade, I started doing some plane geometry and it sort of opened up my mind in a way that's hard to explain. I remember spending a lot of evenings working my way through several geometry books and problem sets. I sort of branched out into other areas and developed enough skill to make it to national olympiads and other such competitions. I don't do math now, but I think it had a reasonable amount of influence of my eventual path through life.
Who knows, maybe he'll pick it back up again in a few years.
I'm curious why you didn't get involved as the parent and possibly engage his interest outside of the classroom, or even put him in a different school or situation where he wouldn't be humiliated? I'm sorry for how this is going to sound, but your anecdote reads to me more that you killed his interest in math through your own (in)actions; the school simply serves as a useful copout.
But he is slow! He did a bunch of cognitive tests where he was testing 3rd std deviation on most tasks. Except processing speed, where he was in the 2nd percentile. You'd present him with his times tables, and he would take 15 seconds to get "8x7"... but he didn't slow down as as the psychiatrist progressed through the test. He'd get to some 6th grade problem, and it'd be the same 15 seconds and blank look before the solution came out. He was an O(1) machine with a huge constant.
And school utterly killed his interest in math. From grade 2 onwards it was speed competitions and public humiliation in front of his class. After grade 3 he refused to do anything related to math outside of what's required because he was "way to stupid for that".