Foreign Perspectives

Last year the Kumon class that the little guys go to began the year with they could turn up any time which was handy although in practical terms most people seemed to come at close to the same time all the time. Whilst that was fine for us, the growth in class numbers meant that some times were getting unmanageable with so many people. So, later in the year time slots were allocated and the numbers levelled out quite well.

This year there’s been what appears to be a massive jump in numbers attending the classes with a number of older kids turning up too. The effect of that was that today whereas there’s usually two or three at a table there were four or five at each table for pretty much the whole hours. Moreover, my little guys who normally complete their work in around 30 to 40 minutes were shepherded out before they’d had a chance to finish it “to let other people get a chance” after they’d been there for around an hour. Not only that but John’s English work has been cut in half seemingly only because there was no chance to complete the work in class; that’s work that he normally finishes in around 10-15 minutes at home.

The problem this time around is that there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of either increasing the number of time slots nor of increasing the number of tutors available (because there just ain’t the room to accommodate them). Which implies that it’ll just get worse as the recruitment drive seems to be continuing with even more new students starting on Tuesday.

So it’s looking like we’ll need to look elsewhere for our tutoring. At the moment Kip McGrath looks quite promising as it sets limits on the numbers per class compared to Kumon’s seemingly unlimited student numbers.