To Kumon or not to Kumon. That is the question.

[megabored]

DD is starting school in September. Below are the Pros and Cons I have been debating recently.

1. She is bright, so should be okay without extra help in school
2. It is too early to put her through this
3. Kumon is expensive and time consuming.

The Pros

1. It may give her that bit of extra confidence at school
2. Earlier is better as then she can grow with that system
3. Its not so expensive as to be prohibitive.

I really cant decide either way. Please someone help?

never too young really to expose them to music notation surely? Son's school does music classes from recpetion. It is only once a week at that age and they don't really learn anything (at least my son didn't) but they are gaining a familiarity. Instrument lessons are available in theory from Year 1, but it is more like a 'club' as it is just once a week. He loves it and is keen to go on to the piano now.

"Agree too with PooshTun's anecdote about karate. We are the same in every subject. Let's make language teaching FUN so kids never learn any grammar. Let's make humanities teaching FUN so kids never learn any dates."

DS's first violin teacher was like that. He is just a child, she would say, so it doesn't matter that the technique isn't right or the piece is only 70% there. Lets move on to a new piece. After all, we don't want DS to get bored, do we?

DS's current teacher is a very nice Russian lady. She is a concert violinist turned teacher at his indie and she has basically spent the past 9 months stripping away the bad habits and rebuilding DS's technique from the ground up.

Some of the other mums don't like her because they feel that she is too strict but we love her because she is strict.

poosh again it is very British to down play everything. So it's okay if i had said my dd is not so bright and needs help with math (assume I am now talking about someone 8 and not 4). And I am so dirt poor that I can afford food. That would be okay to share. But if I share that my dd is bright and I have a phd in physics, that is stealth boasting ?

mega - Everybody has been concentrating on Kumon maths but what about Kumon English for your DC? Surely no one can find fault with something that encourages a 4 year old to read? Or am I being naive? :)

@mega - In the eyes of some, that is 'stealth boasting' :) I must admit that I never heard of the term before I came onto MN.

Yup, Poosh, we also had the FUN stuff with music. Utterly useless, really, and it's actually not FUN never doing anything well and never improving much, nor is it FUN to rely entirely on natural talent and social privilege (which is what FUN in education after around age 8 means) because those things are the things most threatened by good sound teaching for everyone.

Sorry, people, but it can actually be more constraining for your Dcs in the long run if you never teach them anything solid.

I love reading about other children's progress. Genuinely. Life if however more
Fun and interesting when there is healthy competition. Another problem I find with our system is we feel the need to downplay achievement. Of course it would be nice to
have dd in top group at school. I will try and ensure that by providing her with every opportunity to grow. Not just by 'play'. Why can't worksheets be play?!

poosh I began this topic by talking about english. But others kept on pushing it back to math. Maybe (dare I day it) most of the mummies here are my age. Circa 80s and 90s educated like me. But unlike me, they may have a complex relationship with Maths. As they maybe we nit taught the time tables repetitively like me. Where they feel almost threatened by it. Hence the continuous comments on make math fun. It is fun!
It is fun if u r good at it. U r good at it as u can do it fast and accurately and correctly. U can do it accurately and correct because u practice. Everyday. Using various methods including worksheets!

@exotic

"I don't like it because when I have taught DCs who do it I find them inflexible-they tend to state 'that is not how we do it at Kumon' and they don't want to even consider another method."

It has been a few years so my recollection is a bit vague but I think it was to do with column addition. Kumon taught DS the 'adult' way i.e. you add up the columns from the right and put the carry over on the column to the left. DS got into trouble with the teacher because she was teaching the method whereby you add the columns from left to right and she pulled up DS for using the adult/kumon method.

At that stage he had been doing column addition for a few months in Kumon where he was adding up multiple 4 to 5 column figures and here was this teacher telling him that he was doing it wrong when he could see that the method she was using only worked for small numbers. DS ended being quite upset because the teacher was not receptive to his 'that is not how we do it at Kumon' observation.

We spoke to the teacher after school one day and she accepted that it only works when a limited number of columns is involved but it is be the recognised method of introducing the concept of column addition to young children.

What wound me up was that faced with a kid that could use the adult method she still insisted that he use the kids method.

I obviously can't comment on your scenario. All I am saying is that my son was faced with a situation where the kumon method was the correct method.

"I consider that a good mathematician is the one who makes connections, knows why something is done, can pick the way that suits them and can apply it in other areas"

I agree with you there but, on the positive side, Kumon did equip DS with a Human Calculator mind :) so when it came to do 'proper' maths he could do the calculations in his head. And as I've said above, kumon is just an aid and not a total solution even though Kumon HQ might market it as such.

"To be fair, the children who go to Kumon are not the good mathematicians and they like a crutch so they can say 'this is....... and this is how you do it-but that is too rigid an approach"

This is the point I made above. Some parents look for help because their child is struggling with maths. Kumon comes along and says this is how you do it, follow these steps and you will get your answer. Given the above, of course you are going to end up with a child that is rigid in his approach and doesn't really have an indepth understanding of the subject.

"The really good mathematicians are more likely to play competitive chess etc."

That is only true in our culture. The common view here, and probably in the Real World, is that the OP's child is doing fine so there is no need for external learning whether it is Kumon or something else. So of course the kids who are already good at maths won't be signed up to do Kumon and Friends.

In my case, DS was good at maths and we put him into Kumon because we wanted him to be even better. Such a view isn't popular in our culture which is why a significant proportion of the Kumon kids that we saw at our centre were Asian and Oriental.

Be careful poosh. U may be branded as borderline racist as I was earlier in the thread. Of course it is not a competition as you study just naturally grow and develop. Anything barely taxing to the brain is being pushy. Your anecdote re. He addition methodology is similar to the comments I got to not teach my dd to read as they now use phonics system and therefore she won't be able to read if I taught her the old fashioned way.

Play is training for the unexpected.

In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Lev Vygotsky

Another thing I don't get is. It's okay to say, "oh, Maths is beyond me, I don't do Maths." no embarrassment. But would the same
people say, "oh, I don't do reading, reading (or writing) is beyond me,"

@mega

We also did Kumon English. While I can find faults with Kumon Maths while supporting it, I was totally satisfied with Kumon English.

Each worksheet would have passages from famous and not so famous novels and DC would be asked questions about the passages. At the early stages it was simply a case of searching the passage to identify the correct word missing from a sentence. By Year 6 DC had exposure to the works of Mark Twain and others that I can't remember here and now. DC had read about the experiences of slaves in the USA and how the Civil War freed them. Then there was the story about the experiences of a poor Indian girl and how she was going to be sold off as a servant to a rich family. Then there was the story about a family during the Great Depression (the book selection tend to have an American bias :) )

Like Kumon Maths, English is not a total solution. It doesn't develop essay writing skills for example. Having said that, it did greatly increase DD's vocab, trained her to scan a passage, quickly comprehend what it is saying, to pick out key points and to summarise these points.

Before people rush to say it, of course a parent can read with their children and it won't cost them £50 a month, we both work and we decided that we rather spend out Quality Time doing 'fun' stuff with the kids. In any case, Kumon English did not preclude us from getting our DCs to read their school/library books to us before going to bed.

Mrz. Fantastic. I don't know how I missed that one, hats off to you. I did a dissertation on Play.
Personally, I think the best learning comes from play. Its the attitude, it is an aid to consolidating a subject matter or task, often with a huge amount of fun.
My dd plays music, plays with maths, with English. Plays in bands, orchestras, groups etc.
All these activities are fun to her and nothing makes her demotivated to learn as she has the attitude of playing with them. To her nothing is hard work.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.

Carl Jung

A child loves his play, not because it?s easy, but because it?s hard.

Benjamin Spock

"He addition methodology is similar to the comments I got to not teach my dd to read as they now use phonics system and therefore she won't be able to read if I taught her the old fashioned way"

I've seen threads about phonics and I heard the terms used at parents evenings but I've no idea what it is. We gave our DCs a book. They read out loud to us. We corrected their pronunciation when required. Simples, as the ad goes.

more, great! My dd is therefore going to be so boring and off Maths as I will be TRYING worksheets with her. All day long. No play, just math worksheets hr after hr.

Well, now I have taught her the phonic method and the plain old method I learnt from, they r teaching other kids at schools using something called cued articulation!
So now, although she knows how to pronounce each and every letter clearly and can recognise them everywhere, she has to learn it another way. That's okay. It broadens her. But why can't I then teach more at home ie writing?!

Using, oh no! Worksheets!

In Singapore the head of a well regarded school filled with European teachers and some Australians told me 'phonics is not the only way'. I said you'd be hung, drawn and quartered for less if you said that to parents of UK children.

PooshTun, no disrespect but you clearly have more money than sense. I have given my dcs everything you have and much more by the sounds of it, without it costing anything near what you pay. If you pay for an indie school wasn't it your assumption that your dcs would get a better education. I can't see how pushing them further will help them at all, but maybe its a culture thing where you come from. I don't see it being a case of stealth boasting though as discussed above, because I don't think earning potential, salary comes into most peoples preferences for their dcs education.

Poosh's point about Kumon being generally used in the UK by children who struggle with Maths is an interesting one. I think MrZ, correct me if I am wrong, said she had always found Kumon children struggle etc?

In Asia there is, as most know, a huge enrichment culture. You might already be the best in the class at Maths and still might go every night for extra tuition, Kumon might be for your arithmetic and Elan Soma for your practical Maths/abstract and creative thinking session. You so get increasingly better.

Having lived in Asia for quite a while I would say 'pushing children further' increases intellect more than I'd ever have imagined possible.

morethan - I agree that paying for Kumon or any other kind of tutoring AND paying for private schooling at the same time is a questionable decision but we stopped Kumon at end of Year 6.