Monday, July 30, 2012

To Kumon or not to Kumon

A friend recently asked my opinion on how to help young children improve at reading and math. I wish I had the answers! I have had some success in establishing a love of reading in my children but math continues to be a challenge for me. I will share my experience and the lessons I have learned, and hopefully you’ll find some help or a path forward. My children did Kumon, I believe it helped us and I like the system. I wish we had started earlier than we did.

It took me a while to come to grips with my children’s shortcomings in math and why that bothered me. For a while I justified by thinking that it is fine as long as they know the concepts, or that I did not want to become one of those pushy moms. I wrote about it a little in this post. So when you start thinking about pushing your children in academics, first and foremost, dig deep and ask yourself why is it that you want your child to do well in math. Is it because other children her age are doing better, or is it just a reflexive reaction to your own upbringing that one has to do well in math to be successful in life?

I had to come to grips with all this when I saw my fourth grader counting on her fingers for addition, and found it really bothering me. I finally came to the conclusion that math is important to me because it is a basic building block of education, same as reading. If you can’t do basic math as a child (and you have to decide what ‘basic’ is. For me it is a higher standard than most), you don’t develop analytical skills, and can never go into a scientific field. Whether my daughters become scientists or not, will be eventually their choice but I do want to make sure that the door to that career option stays open for them.

Math is very much like music. Even if you can read notes, and know where the keys on the piano are, you still won’t be able to just sit down on the piano and play. You have to practice, and practice a lot. Practice is not fun, but it is challenging and it is necessary. Same is true for math. You may know all the concepts of multiplication and division, but if you don’t practice, you cannot do them fluently. If you cannot do basic arithmetic fluently, you will struggle with virtually all branches of math - algebra, statistics, even geometry. There are people who think that everybody doesn’t need to learn math. I believe the reason kids struggle with algebra in high school because we do not start math early enough - elementary schools do not have a rigorous enough math curriculum. To get good at math and to grow in it, you have to practice a lot. Yes, I am talking daily drills and they are hard and definitely not “fun”. But then again, I don’t think education needs to be fun all the time. That might be the primary problem with the US education system - everyone trying to make it fun. Believe me, children like a challenge and like to rise up to it. The best I can do is support my children through the challenge by motivating and guiding them. A friend of mine uses a web site to generate daily math drills for her children. I registered mine in Kumon. I do believe Kumon is a good system, and if parents approach it with the right attitude, it can provide a sense of achievement for the child. We did Kumon off and on, setting goals, taking breaks if it got too much for the children or if I was too busy otherwise to be supportive, but in the end my children became fluent in arithmetic. I do think I started too late and wish I had started them in first or second grade. They are in middle school now and use the Saxon math program which I like very much as well - there are no pictures, no fun real-life situations to illustrate concepts, just pure math with a challenge your child must rise to.

If only I had shown the same perseverance with music. Both my children tried and gave up musical instruments. I did not invest enough of my time in supporting and helping them through the daily practice. But then there is only so much I can do. sigh. Math won out over music, sad as that may be.