Foreign Perspectives

John’s been wanting to have his own Kumon box for a while now so we signed him up for their maths programme this week.

Unlike James, he’s gotten into the UK school system at the right time so the Kumon with him isn’t a matter of catching up with work not done in France but rather of moving ahead of the class work. In fact, it’s starting to become that way with James too: for the first time his Kumon work is ahead of the work that he’s been given in school. That’s not to say that he’s ahead of where he should have been in school but at least the Kumon is starting to stretch him a little.

With John it’s quite a different matter and he’s finding the Kumon work very easy. That’s as it should be of course as the idea behind the programme is that the children shouldn’t find the work difficult therefore they will be more inclined to do it. Although each stage of the work is quite easy, it does build up over time and the theory is that after a year or two you start working above the level that you’d ordinarily be at in school at that time.

John’s also finding the school work far too easy so we’re expecting that he’ll race through a number of Kumon stages quite quickly to get to a level that’s interesting and useful for him. At the moment, it looks like he’ll be doing twenty of the Kumon pages a day rather than the usual 10 so he should get through the levels fairly quickly and may find himself doing P3 work before the summer break.

One thing the Kumon teacher keeps reminding us is that sometimes it causes “issues” with schools if the children in the programme are too far ahead of the rest of their class. I suspect that we’ll end up with that problem at some stage but I’d much rather be dealing with that than having the kids well behind the rest of their class. Certainly from our experience with James it seems a much better plan to aim to be at least slightly ahead of the class.