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If you go to any of the wealthy or upper-middle-class suburbs, especially those with large immigrant populations, you'll see half the students secretly doing th
by TuringNYC 2y ago
If you go to any of the wealthy or upper-middle-class suburbs, especially those with large immigrant populations, you'll see half the students secretly doing this, whether it is via Kumon or RSM or something else.
In many ways it skews the ratings of the schools because they can be lazy and not teach as well...but still show great school average scores, since so many kids are already enriching externally. Before you know, the school is just a motion and the real learning is at home. I suppose it is idealistic to think teachers "should" teach well, of course, since in reality not all do.
- lupire 2y agoIt's not secret. It's out in the open and people who don't do it are looked at with scorn or dismissal.
- TuringNYC 2y ago>> It's not secret. It's out in the open and people who don't do it are looked at with scorn or dismissal. Amongst the participants, it isnt secret -- you see all the other participants at the center weekly, or more. I think a lot of it is a class thing that runs side by side. For the outsiders, it is a secret. I was part of a group in K12 that didnt even always have consistent nutrition. The Kumon kids were a strange breed -- folks who had money to "splurge" on "private" education.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAll the kids I knew in those programs hated it. Last thing they wanted to do after school was more school. They wanted to play games or sports but their parents decided being an A student in elementary school is better than any potential social or physical development.
- DowagerDave 2y agoWestern society loves to make every kid "special" either in their challenges or abilities. We seem to forget that every kid IS special, in the sense they are diverse, inconsistent, immature and range dramatically across different types of skills & abilities. If you're a middle-class or higher new parent in the West, let me give you my parenting book for free: chill the fuck out.
- galdosdi 2y agoWell, it could also be priorities, not extra money to splurge. Private school costs way more. Kumon OTOH may be just a couple hundred a month, modest enough even a working class person can easily afford by bucking up and treating their childs' education as higher priority than having cable or being able to ever eat out, or not having to work a second job on saturday mornings. This is how I was raised and how my family went from sugar cane peasant farmers to school teachers in one generation and from school teachers to software engineers and doctors in just one more. From 6th grade dropouts to high school degrees in one generation, and from there to masters degree in one more. Culture matters. Values matter. There was a time in my young life when my parents slept on the couch so the kids could have a bedroom, so we could live in a tiny place so we could pay less rent and afford to live in a really really good public school district where many kids' parents were ivy league college professors. It paid off. It usually does. Culture. Matters.
- tptacek 2y agoI put my kids through school (they're both out of college now) in an upper class Chicagoland suburb and this was definitely not the case. I'd be a little careful with venue effects on a discussion like this: this is a group of people that have, as a cohort, a particular fixation on academic and especially mathematics status signals.
- gjvc 2y agoWhat is the preferred choice between Kumon and Russian School of Mathematics?
- dh2022 2y agoI sent my son to both of them and I prefer RSM by far. Kumon to me was rote learning - lots of very similar problems. My son did not last even the first semester. My son then attended RSM from first grade. RSM instruction started from problems like "there are 3 birds on a branch. 1 bird leaves. how many birds are now on the branch" and progressed onward. By grade 7 he is learning logarithms and, at a very basic introductory level, abstract concepts such as function (by function I mean the real definition of a function, not the easy f(x) = 2 x + 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics))
- gowld 2y agoThat's the same as Kumon and regular school, but a faster pace than regular school. (Kumon is self-paced.)
- felixg3 2y agoAs a victim of Kumon I am still traumatized from Vieta's formula to establish relationships between the coefficients of a polynomial and sums and products of its roots. I stuck with it for 6 months during self study and now I see it everywhere in the world.
- abyssin 2y agoCould you give an example of how you see it everywhere?
- alephnerd 2y ago> any of the wealthy or upper-middle-class suburbs Working class too if you're Asian American. Asian American kids in SF public schools and the closest suburbs (eg. Daly City, SSF) skewed working class but the parents would also push their kids to attend Kumon or cram schools. Same story in working class Asian neighborhoods of SoCal and Boston like SGV or Quincy+Malden respectively.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoTrue for college math too. I took calculus for the first time in my life in college. Half the class had it in high school, half of those students took AP calc. Exams were so brutal for those of us taking it for the first time especially. Nothing could have prepared me for them. The lecturer would schedule a two hour block outside of class and the exam was 7 very challenging questions. Most of us would not finish before the 2 hours were up. Class averages were in the 50% range. I took my C and moved on with my life never needing to do calculus by hand ever again.
- rawgabbit 2y agoMy son did "Business Calculus" at a large state university. I have a masters in science and had taken many quite difficult math courses in my day. I looked at what he was asked to do and saw his exam papers. Needless to say "Business Calculus" had little to do with business and a lot to do with making math as difficult as possible. The class average was a C and I believe many of the students had taken AP calculus in high school. It was one of the courses whose purpose was not to teach but to prop up the university-industrial complex. EDIT. Below is an example (not from his instructor but the same material). Remember this is for "business calculus". It just seems like silly math tricks to me. https://people.tamu.edu/~jdkim/math142fall2019/math142week11-2complete.pdf https://people.tamu.edu/~jdkim/math142fall2019/math142week11...
- Acrobatic_Road 2y agojust glancing over this pdf it doesn't seem so bad. The first couple of problems are just integrations with some very obvious u-substitutions.
- conductr 2y agoEducation is a part of culture. The American culture is one that doesn't actually value education. It's one of shortcuts and minimum effort and coasting by checking the boxes along the way to a decent enough paying job, or so we hope. We place value on our social lives much more so. Eg. popularity, sports, fraternities, "the college experience", etc
- DowagerDave 2y agoSure there are cases as you describe, but painting the entire American culture wrt education with your very wide brush is unfair and incorrect. It's also soundly refuted by the global demand for American education, and historic performance.
- galdosdi 2y agoA certain large and loud sector of American culture hates education. Another smaller sector likes it. You foreigners mostly interact with the smaller sector that likes it, which is no coincidence, because education pulls you up, so what you see is the top of society. In America, our best is superior to the best in other places, but our average is far below the world average. If you are growing up as an average working class or lower middle class American, the education-hating culture is hard to escape except in a small number of places. If you are growing up upper middle class, your family can just avoid those problems by living in a nice suburb where everyone values education. Believe me, I'm knee deep in this dilemma right now. You can inculcate certain values as parents, but your kids WILL absorb the culture from the kids around them too to some degree.
- anon291 2y agoGiven his recent prominence, JD vance talks about this a lot in hillbilly elegy
- reducesuffering 2y agoAnd also said "We [Republicans] are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people"
- sharadov 2y agoI send my kids to Singapore Math, because the math curriculum and how they teach math is lacking - it's superficial, they gloss over the concepts. In schools my kids look at a worked example, then solve problems that very closely follow that example, repeating all the same steps with different numbers. In Singapore math, students must think through the concepts and apply them in new ways from the very start.
- hintymad 2y ago> via Kumon or RSM or something else. My kids use Kumon and RSM too, only because what their school covers are pathetic. The content may be okay, but the teachers certainly didn't give good enough homework to help the kids deeply understand the math concepts and to get valuable problem-solving skills. That we rely on Kumon and RSM says a lot the abysmal state of the education quality in the US. Case in point, I would not need Kumon or RSM at all when I grew up, as my school covered way more and way deeper math. Note the US is still the best country for the top students and those who struggled with academics. It sucks only for the majority -- the students in the middle like me. They could've got trained hard, yet the school squandered the opportunity.
- QuarterReptile 2y ago>In many ways it skews the ratings of the schools because they can be lazy and not teach as well...but still show great school average scores, since so many kids are already enriching externally. If you didn't already know, SES is the rating (with relevant cultural differences that override wealth). Everything about the school is statistical noise by comparison.
- anon291 2y agoIt's not secret, it's just part of the culture. My immigrant parents made us read the text books before classes. It's just a cultural value, where the parents believe they are part of the educational process and that they should help the teacher. I went to a very diverse school (white[3], hispanic, east asian, and I'm south asian myself) and realistically, contrary to the popular online belief, this has frankly made me more 'bigoted' (in the sense that I have more preconceived notions of people based on their cultural background [1]). Sure, we're all humans, but I'm not at all shocked by the differential outcomes economically. Culture matters, and not all cultures produce the same outcomes. That's not a judgement on any culture. Each culture is extremely effective at acquiring that which they value [2]. [1] My wife who grew up in a mostly white area is realistically less bigoted than me; and in my view, this is because she had less exposure to people from different cultures and so just assumes everyone's like her. I honestly think mainly being in a homogeneous society makes you less bigoted. [2] This is not to say we should be close-minded. There are always exceptions, and the exceptions can be exemplary in their own right. But the exception does not make the rule [3] There are many subgroups of whites. The German-descended ones have very different views than your 'standard' American white