Re:Do you understand this first-grade child's homework?
by patio11 on Friday November 20, 2009 @03:08AM
(#952112)
My sister worked at Kumon for a while.
For those folks here who don't know, they're a Japanese juku (cram school) which expanded to America mostly to service the children of Japanese parents abroad. (A common fear is that a student who spends a few years in an American public school prior to returning to Japan will be academically crippled.)
I have only two things to say about mathematics education in Japan: it works very well for students in the academic track, and it isn't considered strange to have girls say they like it. So the next time you hear someone saying how we need to address gender balance, there is your answer: soul crushing drills!
Re:Do you understand this first-grade child's homework?
by silentOpen on Friday November 20, 2009 @05:10AM
(#952193)
I think culture might be a confounding variable...
I was good at math, but my mother ran a Kumon center as her small business, and I had to do Kumon so that she could use me as an example. I felt sorry for those kids. In the end, I think the repetition method helped a lot of the students. But the style is so different from the American educational system that, from the perspective of someone who did fine in public school, the Kumon method just felt.. dirty. Like corporal punishment.