The Worksheets Came Before Play

Why I enrolled my children in Kumon when neither of them was struggling

A medical representative told me about Kumon, and I enrolled my children that same week.

That is not usually how a parent arrives at it. Most come because something has gone wrong — a failing mark, a note from a teacher, a child who has started saying he hates numbers. Mine were not struggling. They were in grade school then, both of them doing well, and both of them, to my quiet surprise, in love with Math.

I enrolled them anyway. I was not trying to repair anything. I wanted them stretched.

What Kumon actually is

If you are picturing a tutorial center, adjust the picture. Kumon is the largest after-school Math and Reading program in the world, and almost none of what happens in it looks like teaching.

Nobody sits beside the child and explains the lesson first. The child is handed a worksheet and leave him to work it out.

That sounds like neglect until you look at the worksheets. They begin at a level that is comfortable — often easier than what the child is doing in school, which makes a child question himself and offends a certain kind of parent.  And then the difficulty climbs in increments, so small you can barely see them from one page to the next. Each page carries in it the method to the answer of the one that follows. The child is never told. The child learns by himself.

That is not a shortcut around the teaching. That is the whole process.

Small steps, and then one day it is not small

I immediately liked the process, and I liked it for the same reason I like anything that works.

Nothing about a single worksheet is impressive. A child does it in a few minutes. The next day, another one, only slightly harder. There is no leap anywhere, no evening when the material suddenly opens up and everyone is proud. And then a year passes and the child is doing work you would not have believed him ready for, having never once been asked to do anything difficult.

Small steady steps are what made the big achievements possible. Every page was building the floor the next page would stand on.

The order of the afternoon

Some of the worksheets were done at the center. The rest came home, to be finished and submitted on the next Kumon Day.

In our house the order never moved. School homework first. Then the Kumon worksheets. Then, and only then, play.

I was not soft about this, and I did not have to argue it for very long. That is the thing I would tell any mother who is starting: you defend the rule hard for a few weeks, and after that it stops being a rule. It becomes the shape of the afternoon. They did not ask me anymore whether they could go out first. They knew what came before.

What it was really teaching

The Math was almost the smaller thing.

I had already taught them how to study from the week they started school — read it, understand it, write it, and then do that again. Kumon gave the method something to practice on every single day, whether or not there was a test coming, whether or not anyone was watching.

What I watched it build was discipline. A child who sits down to a page he has not been taught, and stays there until he has worked it out, is learning something that has very little to do with arithmetic. He is learning that he can. He is also learning that the sitting down is not optional and does not require a mood.

Focus is not a gift a child either has or does not have. It lengthens with use, the way anything worked daily lengthens with use. Fifteen quiet minutes a day for years is not a small dose. It is only a small-looking one.

What I cannot prove

They are grown now. In Manila, working in big tech companies.

I cannot hand you the evidence that Kumon did that. There was no control group in my house. There were two children, a set of worksheets, and a mother who would not let anyone outside until the pages were done.

What I can tell you is what I saw. The study habits they carried into graduate school were the habits of that afternoon — sit down, start where you are, do the next small thing, finish. Nobody taught them those in graduate school. They arrived already carrying them, and I do not believe habits like that assemble themselves.

So when a mother asks me whether Kumon is worth it for a child who is already good at Math, I say yes, and I say it is not really about the Math. You are not buying an advantage in Grade Four. You are buying the fifteen minutes, repeated until it is no longer a decision.

The worksheets have been finished for years. The order of the afternoon is not.