A recent article in The Cut that described the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses anxiety that the FX/Hulu series Fleishman is in Trouble is inducing in a certain milieu of upper-middle-class parents let drop the latest educational accessory that parents are clamoring to attain in the rat race to give their children every possible advantage on a road carefully designed to lead to Harvard or Princeton. According to an anonymous parent in the piece, über goal-oriented parents of means are enrolling their kids in Russian Math, which is “a trend now among preschool parents who’ve heard that the old Soviet method might give their children a leg up.”
From Kumon to Singapore Math to Beast Academy, there have long been math programs and curriculums that parents have added to their kids’ extracurricular load as a means of beefing up their geometry and algebra skills. Frightened by stories that if their child isn’t taking algebra by their freshman year of high school, all Ivy League options are automatically dashed, after-school math has become as popular as coding and chess when it comes to building the kind of exceptional human being who will sail through college admissions. Extra math is also often seen as a necessary addition to the basic levels of math being taught at many American schools.
Russian Math, however, is a newer entry to the mix, at least to American families, many of whom are only just now discovering it and discussing its merits at YSO soccer games and school fundraisers. According to Masha Gershman, director of outreach at the Russian School of Mathematics, which is based in Boston and operates 70 schools around the country, the program has been “an open secret” for years, at least to the majority of the school’s families who come from math-centric places like Eastern Europe, Asia, and South Asia. Most of these families, she says, speak a language besides English at home and “come to us because of the huge value they place on math education.
“Their story is usually that they send their kid to elementary school, the kid comes home—it doesn’t matter if it’s public or private school—with some kind of math work and the parent is usually kind of dismayed because it’s not what they believe an math education should be."
But what, exactly, is Russian Math?
Gershman describes it as more of a movement and belief system than anything else. “The simplest way to explain Russian Math is that we believe that the purpose of mathematics is that it is the best tool to shape how a child thinks.” To do this, the program focuses more on the “why” of math problems, as opposed to the “how.” And it is vigorously against any rote learning or drills—unlike Kumon, where “once you figure out how to do something they’ll give you 50 problems to practice that thing,” she says. In an RSM class, children are taught in a classroom where conversation and debate is encouraged—think of it as more of an English class setting than one where kids are hunkered down over their papers, scrawling away in silence.
Indeed, teachers operate more as scaffolders than instructors. “They kind of know the questions to ask to get the kids thinking,” Gershman says. “It’s very much a conversation. ‘What do you think about this? What if I did this?’ It’s really a collaborative process and the kids really feed off each other. We believe in a classroom environment because kids love to debate with each other and compete in a healthy way. The teacher is the expert guide, but the responsibility is on the kid to think. So the teacher will never say ‘You do it this way’ or ‘Remember this rule.’ They will never say that.”
Being a program developed in the Soviet Union when that nation was a super power devoted to out-innovating the rest of the world, particularly the U.S. during the 1950’s Space Race era, there is naturally a rigor to Russian Math. Students are always given problems that push them—algebra concepts are introduced as early as third grade. But Gershman says it’s always done in a fun and engaging way that puts thinking above getting quickly to the right answer.
For example, a third grader might be given this problem to solve: X - (X-4) = ?
Rather than instruct kids on how to solve it, the teacher will ask “What do you think?” and let the kids start reasoning it out. “We’re always building on something that the kids know,” Gershman says. “So the kids understand the concept of difference. Now they’re looking at the difference between unknowns. We instruct the parents to not tell them to open the parentheses or to remember that a minus and a minus make a plus. You never do that.
It’s all about them not knowing the rules. We want to put things just out of their comfort level.
“It’s all about them not knowing the rules. We want to put things just out of their comfort level. Because when things are just out of your comfort level, you have to think.”
Working though this kind of thought-led problem “gives them a very deep knowledge of math,” Gershman says. “It also builds out a talent for reasoning and abstract thinking and dealing with challenging problems. And the kids become super confident, which is really one of the best perks of it.
Russian Math’s emphasis on abstract problem solving also prepares kids better for middle school, where algebraic concepts are usually first introduced in American school curriculums. Gershman says that leap is often difficult for kids who have never seen algebra before. “But if you’ve spent five years in this playground we give them and that we’re building at our schools, they don’t really feel that jump.”
As for how the structure works, Russian Math is an actual school—as opposed to an enrichment class—that children enroll in for several years, often from kindergarten all the way through high school. At the elementary level they take between an hour and a half to four hours a week; in middle and high school it’s closer to four hours a week. At RSM schools, where the biggest hubs are in Boston and the Bay Area, tuition varies by region but averages about $2,000 to $3,000 a year, Gershman says.
She chuckles at the idea that parents are now seeing Russian Math as the route to Harvard. “We only get that from the media,” she says. “Most of our parents say I’m going to send my kid to RSM because I believe math should be taught a certain way. I want my kids to have a really deep foundation of math and I want my kids to be really strong thinkers. Obviously, one of the byproducts of being a really strong thinker and having a solid foundation in math is that you do have a lot more choices as you grow up. But that’s different from that being the motivation to bring them into the program.”
Nicole LaPorte
