I assume you’ve heard of Melik Duyar before…
In any other classroom, such a demand might seem impossible. But at the Mongolian Intellectual Academy, students routinely perform seemingly super-human feats, reading at 1,500 words per minute, mentally adding together long strings of numbers, rapidly multiplying eight-digit numbers without a calculator and flawlessly memorizing the order of a deck of cards – the discipline’s 100-metre dash – in barely 20 seconds.
Their godfather is Khatanbaatar, […] who first encountered competitive memorizing while watching the news at law school in Turkey. […] He dashed off to an Internet café and fell headlong into an obsession. When he exhausted what he could learn online, he began training under Melik Duyar, the co-founder of the Memoriad games held every four years – synchronized with the Olympics – and the closest thing memorizing has to a global star.
Khatanbaatar returned to Mongolia, [in] 2009, he began pitching his services. By 2011, he held Mongolia’s first national memory championships. Now, he estimates he has trained more than 15,000 people in different mental sports, some as old as 70.
Convinced memory techniques hold the key to overcoming Mongolia’s struggling academic performance, he has begun rewriting the entire national curriculum to incorporate those methods. This fall, he will open a primary school, with plans to open a middle and a high school, too, in coming years. He has already experimented with young children, teaching multiplication tables to five-year-olds.
…read the whole article for details.