Anonymous wrote:Why would an accelerated math kid need Mathnasium?
Am PP. My kids had shockingly obvious math knowledge deficits due to the pandemic and also suffered from an ineffective math teacher that all kids who take algebra get for 7th grade Pre-Algebra. My older son's Algebra class was online for the spring of 2020 and they basically lost 2 months of material. My younger son could not do division of a 3 digit number by a 2 digit number by hand in 8th grade.
I lost out on direct admission to an honors college with scholarship because of 10 math SAT points. I could not raise my score with my own prepping (took SAT 3 times). This was a scarring experience. I also had trouble in college calculus. And I had moved during childhood to MoCo. I was deleveled from the advanced math track in 7th grade after 2 months because I got lost and couldn't keep up with kids who had been in the system K-6. So I have a lot of resentment from all of this, and it motivated me to make sure my kids are more like my husband who got a very good h.s. math education and reached calculus in h.s.
I decided it would be worth paying for performance remediation to ensure a better high school GPA and SAT. That was achieved at a steep price of about $4K per school year per kid.
IXL (ixl.com) costs only $$-$200 per year. Khan Academy is free. But my kids refused to self-study math. My spouse and I work and don't have a lot of time to police math enrichment. Mathnasium seemed more friendly and oriented towards liking math vs. mastery through drilling (Kumon).
Overall, I think Mathnasium does a better job of targeting K-8. Their core demographic is elementary school students. My kids are outliers, but I like the owner/primary center director and he works well with my kids. He is a grad of the state flagship university where I went for MBA, and my older son will matriculate there in the fall. So I feel he knows what level my kids need to achieve to succeed there. It's a nationally highly-ranked, non-DMV school.