Reply to Russian School of Math for average math kid?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Your kid should first do Kumon math. Kids become really quick and accurate at basic calculations.

Too many kids are counting on their fingers or taking way too much time to figure out what is 6 + 8 , 15-7 or 27+59 or 100-73 or 7x 8. In later levels they do multi-digit multiplication, ling division and fractions.

Once my kid was so quick in these calculations it was way easier to solve multi/step problems and word problems. He finished math in class and homework so quickly that then he had more time for RSM / AOPS.[/quote]

Kumon is hideous.  They don’t even have instruction and charge hundreds of dollars a month for your kid to sit in their center to work on a bunch of worksheets.  You can buy the workbooks online and save your money.[/quote]

You get accountability and someone figuring out when you should pass to the next level. You often have to repeat packets at Kumon if you are not accurate and/or not fast enough. They aim to develop automaticity which then frees up working menory to tackle more complex problems.

So yoh go to the center 2 days a week, your kid does 5 or 10 pages of math and they get corrected and the student makes corrections. Or they take a test.  The other 5 days you get 5 packets to work on at home and they are checked to make sure they get turned in and checked in at the center (some parents grade them at home their kids make corrections and they are turned in). So the student is doing math 7 days a week.

Parents will pay the same amount of money a month for a once or twice a week karate or gymnastics class.

The best math program is the one that gets done. It is worth it for families but to prep worksheets and research what level of math, what to repeat and to have another person helping with accountability.

My son went from an average math student at the beginning of third grade to above grade level and knows by his teachers and peers as a strong math student by 5th grade after 2 years of kumon. Algebra is so much easier after doing level e of kumon which is all types of fractions. [/quote]

I don’t see substantial accountability in going to a center 2x a week and having a teacher grade a packet that nearly every parent is capable of grading.  And it’s still on the parent to make sure the kid does the Kumon homework daily.  It is true that parents will spend lots of money on kids and that Kumon is not the worst way to spend it.  But in the time you spend chauffeuring your kid to from Kumon, you could just as easily be having them do Kumon workbooks at home.

I’ve had kids in Mathnasium, RSM and Kumon at different points in their schooling (and have 1 kid in RSM now and the other in Mathnasium).  Kumon was the only one I really didn’t see value in enrolling in.
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