I'm wrapping up the Anti-Kumon program I started 9 years ago. Although it's been a big success, I need to add one more element to the program.
I started the Anti-Kumon movement by listing the skills that I found by reverse engineering the COGAT, skills that determine academic success. These skills are reading complicated questions, holding multiple elements in working memory, organizing the work strategy, plodding through permutations, getting the wrong answer repeatedly, and checking the answer because you know you got it wrong. These skills require long complicated problems 2 years in advance. COGAT test prep and reading comprehension also work.
Kumon is a training program that is nearly the opposite of these skills: speed, memorization, one step problems, known material from last year. This approach targets academic work which is more of the same. No wonder or schools are failing at the University level. (Note - since I started the Anti-Kumon tirade, Kumon has added more advanced problems to their regimen, no thanks to me.)
The results were beyond my expectations, not just in math, not just on school work, not just in test scores. My children have attention spans from 4 to 9 hours on high school level AP work that they won't see for 4 years (depending on how boring the subject is). Projects tend to go overboard. Chores have escalated from 'clean your room' to 'clean the house' to 're-tar the roof'.
You become what you practice. I need a pithy way of saying that, like 'Fake It 'til You Make It' which is what it was in the early days when they got everything wrong and only did 1 or 2 problems a week from a book that expected 20 problems a day.
Here's my conclusion. When need to practice math facts the summer before eighth grade. Math facts are killing us.
My kids are so slow in math. This works great when we covered calculus one weekend in 6th grade. It stinks on a timed test for high school entrance or high school placement. It's not helping in math competition.
There are numerous reasons to avoid math facts at all costs. Whatever the kid does - counting on fingers, counting on paper with little dots (like my sister and I did on the SAT) or counting in the brain - this builds number sense and other skills necessary for graduate school. Math facts work sheets are like video games - it's no so much what you're doing but what you're not doing, like complicated number theory that needs trig. Having to do double digit anything without a crutch requires holding a 3 part problem in working memory as opposed to mindlessly letting the pencil do the work.
The oldest turned in blank home work assignments during pre-algebra. I lump pre-algebra in with math facts, so we skipped it. The youngest just shouts out from the basement 'What's 120 times 16?' and I shout out 'What's 120 times 10? What's 6 times 100? How many times to I have to shout this out?' I don't think he needs it but it's nice to be included in homework.
One parent pointed out that Kumon really helped his kid in the following way. Not getting stuck on arithmetic errors provided more time for problem solving and higher order thinking. My response is that we've been doing high order thinking since age 5 and they can take as much time as they want. We're not racing our way to an accounting clerk position that's already been outsourced to a computer. If my child brings home a D in math in 5th grade, but does 8th grade math at home, someone has a problem, but it's not me.
I've written about Anti-Kumon on this website in the past. My 8th grader kicked off Anti-Kumon by doing 2nd grade math during Kindergarten. He's going to be doing arithmetic worksheets this summer.
If you read my articles from a few years ago about the skill set mentioned at the top of this article, and you want to know how these skills mature as the kids get older, the next edition of my other blog is dedicated to competitive math. These problems are perfect examples of how impossible math paves the way to a well written English paper.
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