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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Do you mean a page out of a workbook a day at home, or going to Kumon twice a week? [/quote]

You go to Kumon twice a week but you also are given work the other 5 days a week to do at home, so it ends up being a program that is 365 days out of the year. So the student who is doing 15-30 minutes a day of extra math from Kumon for 3-4 years is going to get ahead regardless of intelligence.

So let's say an average of 20 minutes x 360 days a year (5 days off for holidays) = 120 hours a year, which is probably how much math instruction a student gets at school in a year. So a student can conceivably advance twice as fast in math.

I am not Asian but grew up in CA and had many Korean friends. They almost all supplemented in math. I was in the highest math classes and did well but they all did better. I finally realized in high school that they just put in more hours into getting better at math. Several of them were required by their parents to do the upcoming math textbook in the summer with other Korean kids at a Korean tutoring place, [b]so when the new school year arrived and the rest of us were learning math, they were reviewing math. [/b].  This of course makes it much easier to do well in the class.

So when I had my kids I signed them up when they turned 5 for Kumon. They did it until the end of second grade, then we moved on to a different math program for a couple of years, then Kumon for a couple of years, then other math. The value of being fast AND accurate is underestimated by many math educators in the US. Being solid in math calculations makes it so much easier to problem solve. They could finish all their school math in class in 1/3 of the time other kids did and finish their school math homework at school, so there was plenty of time to do math enrichment at home. [/quote]

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