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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 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.

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> 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.

True 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.

My 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...

just glancing over this pdf it doesn't seem so bad. The first couple of problems are just integrations with some very obvious u-substitutions.

That's what parent said: "silly math tricks" that will never, ever be relevant in business after 1930, now that we have calculators.

That's... totally normal calculus curriculum, and is pretty elementary, not advanced.

It's true you won't do a symbolic integration ever again, but practice learning stuff like that will serve them well when they're learning intricate tax code rules and principles of managerial finance, cash flow, rates of return etc.

I mean, now that I say all that, they'd probably be best served by just jumping into the complex business and finance math and skipping symbolic integration, once they totally understand integration conceptually. But if they don't, they're still getting good practice out of it, especially if they find it challenging. That means they are learning problem solving techniques they didn't know, and need to know.

The only way you're right and it's a waste of time is if they find it easy.

Because mental math is useless as well now that we have calculators..

Education 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

Sure 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.

A 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.

Given his recent prominence, JD vance talks about this a lot in hillbilly elegy

And also said "We [Republicans] are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people"

My experience in middle class 90% white suburbs is the valuing of education is mostly surface level. It’s expected you’ll get a degree to get a career and it’s expected you try well enough to not get in trouble with your grades and such. But leisure and social life is much more valued. It’s never stated as such but it’s easy to observe. These families put on a facade and a lot of expectations of the school system, meanwhile their kids are likely on video games and social media much more than they read or study. Weekends are dominated by birthday parties, sports, and pool parties. Most kids aren’t being pushed like Asian cultures, there’s rarely any expectation of post-grad studies, etc. If you’re “good at math” in high school, you might go into Accounting because it pays well enough with a 4 year degree. Never mind the fact it’s just arithmetic with a set of rules and not really mathematical at all.

I agree; this is my experience too, I've known so many people just like you describe; it describes all the "best" neighborhoods in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And that is why we're in no hurry to buy into that kind of neighborhood and don't see it as any better than decent inner city neighborhood -- in fact, based on experience the education is better in some Philly public schools than some Nice White Rich Suburb schools (although the food and the A/C sure ain't, but that's not what school is for), and the values is why.

That said I spent part of my childhood in Princeton, NJ and that is one sort of "white suburb" that breaks that pattern and actually seriously emphasizes education. Unfortunately the truly nice places like that are truly expensive. Although, to your point... Princeton had a huge Asian and Indian population, and plenty of the white kids had parents who were Princeton professors and such -- not a very common or average job, even among other people of the same race, class, and income.

Perhaps I just need to find an affordable very Asian suburb, somewhere near an H-Mart or something?

I’m in Dallas and grew up in a small university town, although more of a state school but I get what you’re saying. In Dallas, the rich mostly white suburbs top the “best schools” list but from what I’ve heard many entire school districts are now on an Ivy League recruiting ban list because of high rates of cheating. I don’t think it matters much to the parents out there, they want their kids to go their university or somewhere that has a good football team.

The emphasis on sports in Texas is a big turn off for me. We opted to live inner city “bad school” area and just send our kid to a private school. They have sports but it’s basically for fun, exercise and team building life skills. We don’t care about how good or bad we are for the most part (of course we celebrate the wins… but hope you see what I’m saying).

Cost wise, it’s expensive. It wouldn’t be feasible for an average income family but we can swing it with one kid.

Nah. Colleges are collapsing. Not enough kids. Go check out Ohio state university’s situation. In about 4 years they won’t have enough kids to cover operating expenses. That’s straight from the Department of Higher Ed. They built and built and sucked up all the money they could and now millennials have aged out and most the next gen doesn’t want to go to school because of costs and even if they did, whoops! There’s not enough of them.

Boy, you’d think some of those college educated people would have, I don’t know, modeled some of this and analyzed it before they sold their parking for a billion bucks that they promptly and entirely spend on extra dorms they now can’t fill.

So no, you are using outdated data. The fact is demand around the country is plummeting for schools. This is straight from the department of higher ed in Ohio.

As for global demand, it’s not the eductions it’s the chance to get citizenship. Someone with analysis skills like you must have a degree.

I 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.

>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.

It'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

What is the preferred choice between Kumon and Russian School of Mathematics?

I 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))

That's the same as Kumon and regular school, but a faster pace than regular school. (Kumon is self-paced.)

As 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.

Could you give an example of how you see it everywhere?

It's not secret. It's out in the open and people who don't do it are looked at with scorn or dismissal.

>> 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.

All 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.

Western 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.

Well, 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.

I 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.

> 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.

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