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My name is Nancy Andersen, and I live in Newtonville. My husband and I have a 10-year old son who attends Horace Mann elementary school, and is in his 2nd year at the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM).
Any parent who has ever had a child that is either over- or -under-challenged in an educational setting can relate to that awful sinking realization that your child’s passion for learning can quickly evaporate into a lack of interest, a dull detachment, if they aren’t being appropriately challenged. To our dismay, we saw this happening with Kenny and his math classes at public school.
Looking for alternatives, we enrolled Kenny in the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, where he took online math courses for two years. He successfully completed 2 courses, two levels beyond his public school grade, and received "A's", only to quickly forget what he had been taught, and lose his enthusiasm for the program. I knew that part of the problem was that the on-line courses could not provide the critical human element in learning – the ability to interact with students, peers and teachers, to raise questions and share discoveries.
But, frankly, it was not until we discovered RSM that in retrospect I realized what Johns Hopkins also lacked was what makes RSM such a success: Johns Hopkins’ grade-based curriculum was dependent on rote memorization of math facts and formulas, with little emphasis on how to figure out what the formula is, how to apply critical thinking and logical analysis to problem solving. From our son’s perspective, when there is little connection between one math topic and the next, what is the use of remembering last month’s topic?
This is the beauty of RSM: Its emphasis on algebra nourishes critical and analytic thinking. It teaches kids to think, to make connections between mathematical concepts, to utilize critical thinking and build upon previous concepts to solve new problems.
Kenny puts it in much simpler terms when asked what’s so unique about RSM: “It’s the way they teach – they make it easy to understand and fun. And I’m with kids who are discovering the same things I am”.
I am grateful to Inessa Rifkin and the teachers at RSM, for their willingness not only to allow Kenny to start mid-year, but also to work with us to identify the correct grade level, the correct grouping and the correct peers for Kenny to join. I also appreciate Inessa’s candor, when I asked her about moving Kenny on to the next course in summer school, perhaps in a misguided effort to “get ahead”: She said, “Why do you want to move him on? He is with a group of kids who have a wonderful dynamic between them. They challenge and motivate each other. It would be a shame to lose that”.
Inessa was right. Kenny is settled in to his second year this fall, and is absolutely thriving. To get a sense of the success of RSM’s instruction, one need only log onto their website and look at face after smiling face of students who scored an 800, a 750, a 790 on their SATs. Perhaps that’s what we will be focused on in four or five years. But for now, I think the greatest measure of the success of RSM’s programs – and its service to the Newton community – comes from the fact that I’ve got a kid who enthusiastically dives into his homework, who reminds me at breakfast on Tuesdays that “it’s RSM day”, and who positively beams on his way home with the joy of new discoveries and a love for learning.
